Facebook’s recent launch of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” — in which apps from services like Spotify and publishers like The Washington Post  can post a user’s activity to their wall, without asking for permission for every item — has caused a lot of controversy over whether the feature is a worthwhile addition or a massive invasion of privacy. Consumer advocacy groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center are arguing the latter, and have even asked the government to step in, while some users have deleted their Facebook accounts in protest. But there’s an argument to be made that Facebook isn’t forcing anyone to share; it’s simply adapting to the increasingly social way that we are living our lives online.

EPIC and the American Civil Liberties Union seem to be making the case that even if users get the choice to share a continuous stream of their activity through one of Facebook’s new “social apps,” they will either forget that they have done this or not understand the consequences of their choice, and therefore will wind up sharing more than they should — sharing that the advocacy groups argue benefits only Facebook, since it gets more personal data. Said EPIC director Mark Rotenberg:

The main point is that Facebook is encouraging users to ‘share’ information in ways that they do not truly control because it is Facebook that ultimately determines who will have access to the information users provided

To some, “frictionless sharing” has more than a few echoes of Facebook’s ill-fated “Beacon” project from 2007, which posted a user’s activity at third-party websites and services to their Facebook wall, but was eventually shut down after criticism over the privacy implications. According to former New York Times  developer Michael Donohoe, the newspaper initially worked with Facebook on a social app similar to the one launched by the Washington Post and The Guardian, but decided the “frictionless sharing” concept seemed like an invasion of users’ privacy, even though users would get full control over whether they chose to share their activity through the app.

The inevitable privacy backlash

Gizmodo writer Mat Honan and others are protesting by either deleting their Facebook accounts or saying they will never use any service that requires Facebook Connect, and longtime web-programming guru Dave Winer says he is also scared by what Facebook is proposing. Spotify, meanwhile, has had to roll out a private-listening option after an outcry over its new frictionless-sharing features, and the fact that users can’t join the service unless they have a Facebook account. I’ve even noticed an uptick in people trying out would-be Facebook competitor Diaspora as well, although it has had little traction since it launched last year.

While it’s tempting to see frictionless sharing as just another cynical attempt by Facebook to get more personalized data that it can use to target advertising (based on the principle that if you aren’t paying for the service, then you are the product that is being sold), there are some clear benefits for users from this kind of sharing. Has Facebook moved too quickly, or overstepped what some feel are the boundaries of privacy? Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean it is going in the wrong direction.

As with many other features of the network, seeing what Facebook calls “lightweight” activity in the Ticker, such as friends listening to songs or reading articles or watching movies, is a way of staying in touch — however briefly — with those friends and connections. It may be noisy, and much of it may be uninteresting, but it also exposes you to serendipitous experiences. I’ve already found music and video clips I’m interested in just by watching that activity. It also fits right in with the concept that underlies Facebook and most social networking, which is what user-interface designer Leisa Reichelt has called “ambient intimacy”: the idea that there’s something to be gained by having transient and lightweight connections to people in your life.

The news feed was controversial too

That concept was also behind another Facebook feature that caused a huge outcry of criticism and led to people quitting the network in droves — namely, the news feed. It seems so obvious and commonplace now that it’s hard to remember when the news feed didn’t exist, but there was a lot of backlash to the feature when it first launched in 2006. Many users seemed uncomfortable with the idea that their activity on the site — whose status they “liked,” whose photos they commented on, etc. — would be broadcast to other Facebook users all the time.

In a lot of ways, that was Facebook’s first experiment in “frictionless sharing,” and it proved to be hugely popular and successful. The news feed is the core of what makes Facebook so virally popular with many users — and what makes them spend longer on the network than virtually every other social website combined, according to a recent survey from Nielsen about our online social behavior.

That kind of success, along with Facebook’s rollout of other features that also push the sharing envelope, has undoubtedly convinced Zuckerberg that his “law of social sharing” — that the amount of data people share doubles every year — is a good predictor of what people will do, regardless of what they say they will do, or how much they criticize features like frictionless sharing from social apps. And soon, the idea that apps are sharing a continuous stream of our activity will seem just as commonplace and uncontroversial as the original news feed.

So is frictionless sharing good or bad? The answer, as with most things that involve Facebook, is a little of both. Some people will probably never accept that the network is pushing them to share more, and will always be suspicious of what might happen to that data, and there will no doubt be incidents when the data is used improperly or leads to something embarrassing. But social sharing online isn’t going away any time soon; it’s not just the core of Facebook, but the organizing principle of the modern web — Facebook is just a symptom of that change, not the cause.

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Not too long ago, Om Malik blogged
“the social Web mimics the way we are in the real world … in this new kind of social web, the defining characteristic is us.”

A great observation, but how true is it?

What do the following have in common?

• People in an on-line multiuser game with millions of players from around the world.
• Townspeople trying to help out teenagers who have been ripped off by a local barber.
• Teens that participate in an online community whose users have, in the words of the Washington Post,
  “managed to pull off some of the highest-profile collective actions in the history of the Internet.”

Not-too-surprisingly the answer is “we don’t know” – yet…

Why we need to know

A lot rides on the answer.

• Web giants like Google and Facebook are betting their existence on being able to guess what motivates people to join one network or another.
• Startups are vying with one another to figure out how social processes can be used to get people to team up and buy more stuff.
• Governments like those in the U.S. and UK are trying to figure out how to motivate online communities to help create innovative “crowd-sourced” solutions to empower citizens.
• Governments in other parts of the world are still trying to figure out what hit them.

Online communities are like those in the real world

A number of researchers from around the world have been studying the networks of who-knows-who in social networks. A lot of that work has studied network mathematics with an eye towards better algorithms for friend recommenders, social recommendation sites, etc. But some of the best of this work has looked at what we know about people in the physical world and whether online networks look the same.

One of my favorite pieces of work along those lines was the work by Noshir Contractor at Northwestern University who studied the teams of players in the Everquest II online game. Analyzing the results, he basically showed that people were more likely to team with people who lived near them in the real world and who were more like themselves.

In essence, Noshir demonstrated that in this unreal fantasy world, where people form teams of adventurers and go on quests fighting monsters, their communities seemed a lot like the ones that they form in the real world.

Online communities are not like those in the real world

Contrast this with some of my work, where I joined with colleague Fei-Yue Wang and a team of Chinese researchers in exploring what has come to be known as the
“Human Flesh Search Engine.” This is phenomenon, observed mainly in China and other Asian countries, where people online team up to help people solve problems that occur in the offline world.

The “outrageously priced haircut” is a good example. The community of Zhengzhou City in Henan Province was outraged when they read on the Web about two teens being charged more than 200 times the typical price for a haircut. The barber was getting away with it due to political connections. Within a few days, over 1,100 people joined in the action, working both on and offline to identify the culprits and to expose their government connections.

In studying this and hundreds of other examples of HFSE communities we found very different patterns than those found in games. In these networks we see that people are working together with people they wouldn’t know in the real world.

So where communities in the fantasy world of games resembled those offline, in this case of people solving real-world problems, the communities differ far more.

More similar than you would think

The third group is the primarily U.S.-based 4chan community. This is an online community that the Guardian calls
“lunatic, juvenile… brilliant, ridiculous and alarming.” This online community prides itself on

• Anonymity for users,
• Expertise in annoying the powers that be, and
• Using online team energy, without explicit organization, for offline effect

Surprisingly, these are also features that can describe the Human Flesh Search participants in China.

In the real world, it’s hard to imagine two groups more dissimilar than the mischievous US cyber-savvy 4chan’ers and the Chinese HFSers. Yet new evidence is starting to show that their online communities have many similar features. It seems properties like those above have a lot to do with how online communities look.

Confused?

As we explore these communities online, it becomes increasingly clear that the mathematics of the networks doesn’t really explain a lot of the interesting stuff. To understand the Web, we need to understand who the people are that form these communities and what motivates how they spend their time online.

So was Om right when he said the online world mimics our own?

The best research to date says “maybe,” and we have to do better than that.

James Hendler is Tetherless World Constellation Chair & Asst Dean of IT and Web Science at the Computer and Cognitive Science Depts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Tory, NY.

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In a recent piece for Forbes magazine, Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti looks at the challenges that mainstream media of all kinds are facing — falling circulation, the gap between traditional print advertising and the smaller revenues from online advertising, and the difficulties of trying to be digital while still running a legacy business. So what are his solutions for what he calls the “broken business model of quality journalism?” Narisetti doesn’t really have any, which isn’t surprising: as the recent report from the FCC on the future of media showed, it’s a lot easier to describe the problems facing the media industry than it is to come up with answers. But one thing is becoming clear: incremental changes are not enough.

Narisetti says in his piece that while many media companies such as the Washington Post are growing their online audiences, that doesn’t even come close to making up for the loss of print subscribers, because one generates revenue and the other doesn’t:

The print subscribers we lose are typically loyal readers who spent 40-plus minutes with The Post each day and have done so for years. The majority of online readers — both new and old — are promiscuous, read tiny morsels in under five minutes per visit and think the same Post content that others pay for in print is not worth paying for online.

Paywalls and apps aren’t the answer

The WaPo editor also notes that while many mainstream media companies have gotten good at cutting costs, they have “consistently failed to imagine and then incubate a Craigslist, a Groupon [or] a Monster.com… nor are they any closer today than they were last year in fixing the broken business model of quality journalism.” And while charging readers may seem like the right solution, whether via paywalls or iPad apps, Narisetti argues (correctly, I think) that there are some serious issues with those answers as well, including:

• A metered model makes your business susceptible to the will of a few readers — those who consume the most articles/pages. Often, less than 5% of these kinds of visitors account for nearly 50% of your page views. And they have very little barriers to exit.

(and)

• Aggregators like Huffington Post will still find ways to deliver your content for free and often with more engaging technologies since they don’t have to invest much in content creation.

Narisetti also makes a point that I think many newspaper and magazine publishers miss, which is that media companies are trying to charge readers for what amounts to a traditional website-reading experience (or an even more crippled one, given the “walled garden” nature of many iPad apps) at the same time that new display and distribution models such as Flipboard and Zite and TweetMag are offering something much more appealing, and free.

Scrolling on Web sites has always been a poor experience for consuming news. Now, just as new devices and digital experiences — none invented by major news brands — create richer engagement outside our sites, we are talking about charging readers for sub-optimal Web site consumption.

When it comes to solutions, Narisetti suggests a couple of potential answers, including some kind of licensing scheme that would take advantage of the aggregation of mainstream media content by outlets such as The Huffington Post. But he admits that there’s no guarantee any of these will work — which is good, because trying to license content to web aggregators seems like a losing proposition to me, or at least not the kind of business that is going to produce a huge amount of income for traditional publishers.

An imagination deficit

In terms of what media companies can do, I think the Washington Post editor is right when he says that the biggest challenge facing the industry is what he calls “an imagination deficit.” Instead of just trying to charge for existing content, he says more organizations need to take risks with their business model.

The problem is that most mainstream media entities are not designed for experimentation, and in many cases the way they function hasn’t changed noticeably in decades. Few have taken as dramatic a step as the Journal-Register Co., where CEO John Paton has reversed the traditional structure of a paper and put digital staff in charge of the entire operation. And only a few have set up the kind of “skunk works” labs or spinoff units that can experiment freely or come up with things like News.me, as Anil Dash of Activate Media recommends in a presentation I wrote about recently.

It’s true that some media companies are making small efforts to change the way they do things, or trying new tools or ways of reaching users — the way that Brian Stelter is with Tumblr at the New York Times, or the way that his colleague Nick Kristof does with his use of Facebook (ironically, Narisetti himself caused a minor firestorm on Twitter in 2009 when he made some critical comments about the Washington Post‘s new social-media policy, and later briefly cancelled his account).

But these kinds of experiments, however worthwhile, are largely incremental changes. And as Narisetti correctly points out in his piece, during times of significant disruptive change, “there isn’t time or room for incrementalism.” Does that mean the Washington Post is planning some ambitious online moves? Let’s hope so — someone has to.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user David Reece

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Sony and Library of Congress launch streaming National Jukebox, ready to DJ at your local speakeasy originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 May 2011 06:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If traditional media was all about broadcasting — distributing a one-size-fits-all message to a wide audience, usually via a platform controlled by the media — new media is more about personalization and customization. In other words, the quest for a “Daily Me.” But it’s still unclear how exactly we’re going to get there. Are Facebook and Twitter the new gatekeepers? Will it happen in an app, or on the web? Will algorithms do it, or human beings, or some combination of both? Two new entrants — a service called Trove and an iPad app called News.me — have joined the horde of players who are trying to answer that question, and they have taken very different approaches.

Both have a traditional media pedigree to some extent, although in a sense they are also startups. Trove — which came out of beta on Wednesday — is owned by the Washington Post. It’s based on a startup the publishing company bought called iCurrent, which was working on semantic filtering and recommendation systems. Trove is essentially a website that uses your Facebook login and profile to build a newspaper-style offering customized to your “likes” (in both the Facebook sense and the regular sense). It then learns from your reading and usage, according to a note Post CEO Don Graham wrote and published on Facebook.

In my somewhat-limited use of the beta site, however, I haven’t found the selection process to be that effective, at least not for my purposes. I much prefer to use an interface like that in the Zite app, which I’ve written about before.

Although the Trove site is based on algorithms and your social graph, it still has some traditional media elements to it as well — including an editorial team that filters through content from the more than 10,000 sources the site aggregates and chooses the “big news” stories that also populate the site. While it’s launching as a web service, the company says apps for the iPhone and iPad are coming soon (there is an Android and a BlackBerry version already). Perhaps to counter its big-media pedigree, Trove also took an irreverent tone with its launch by releasing a video clip that pays homage to those ubiquitous news animation videos:

News.me, meanwhile, is expected to launch in the Apple app store on Thursday, according to Betaworks CEO John Borthwick, after being in beta testing for the past several months. Although the project got its start inside the New York Times, Borthwick’s New York-based startup incubator — which has given birth to such popular web tools as Chartbeat and Bitly — effectively took over development of the app by bringing the two NYT developers who came up with it in-house and refining the concept (although the Times has a stake in the company and in Betaworks).

Unlike Trove, which looks at your Facebook likes and your social graph to come up with recommendations, News.me takes a very different approach. It effectively gives you a window into what others are reading — not just your friends or those you follow, but also prominent web users such as Mitch Kapor and NYT writer Nick Bilton — by showing you their Twitter feeds. As Borthwick described it to me when I met him at Betaworks’ offices in New York, it’s like “looking over someone’s shoulder while they are surfing Twitter” and being able to read the articles being shared in their streams.

Thanks to the association with Betaworks, News.me also uses Bitly and its ranking algorithms to come up with news that lots of people are sharing — since it can see what the most-shared URLs are at any given time. The app (which I have been testing for several weeks) is still rough around the edges, and it needs to draw from a broader group of users than it currently includes, but the idea of looking at what other people are reading makes a lot of sense. In a way, it’s an implicit form of recommendation rather than one that requires someone to click a “like” button or actively distribute something.

There’s another difference to News.me as well: The company is charging 99 cents per week for the app, and wants to work out partnerships with publishers (it’s already working with the New York Times and several others) to share advertising and other revenue with them. This makes it more like Flipboard — which has also been working with publishers to license their content — and less like Zite, the Vancouver, British Columbia-based startup that has been handed a cease-and-desist order by a number of media entities.

Whoever wins this particular race, whether it’s Flipboard or Zite or News.me — or something we haven’t seen yet that comes directly from Google or Facebook or Twitter — the future of media consumption is going to look a lot more like a smorgasbord of sources and content, personalized and recommended by friends and our social graph, and a lot less like that megaphone traditional media outlets used to have and control. In a sense, Trove and News.me both came from attempts by publishers to try to figure out how to get out in front of that trend, and that’s a good thing.

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In an entirely too-predictable development, a group of media outlets has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the creators of Zite, a magazine-style aggregator for the iPad. The publishers allege that by pulling in their content and displaying it in a more readable way — that is, without a lot of the extraneous website elements, including ads — Zite is guilty of copyright infringement. While this may be true in a legal sense, it ignores the bigger picture, which is that readers are looking for better ways of consuming content, and they aren’t getting it from traditional publishers. Why not learn from Zite and others like it instead of threatening to sue them?

The letter to Zite from the group, which includes the Washington Post and the Associated Press (the full letter is embedded below or you can read it here), uses the standard legal language about “damaging our businesses by misappropriating our intellectual property” etc., and says the company puts publishers at risk by “reformatting, republishing and redistributing our original content on a mass commercial scale.” Much of this is legal grandstanding, of course, since Zite is a tiny startup based in Vancouver, B.C. whose iPad app is probably used by a tiny handful of information junkies (including me).

But Zite isn’t doing anything that differently from plenty of other apps and services which are pulling in content from sites like the Washington Post and others named in the letter. Many apps that are essentially RSS-feed readers do this — including Pulse, which got slammed by the New York Times within hours of its public launch (although that dispute appears to have been resolved).

Readability is a web plugin that strips out advertising and other site features, leaving just text, and is so popular Apple built it into the company’s Safari browser as a viewing option. Why hasn’t anyone sent Apple a threatening letter about copyright infringement? Designer Marco Arment’s Instapaper does fundamentally the same thing — although he and Readability are also trying to use their services to generate income for sites through a kind of tip-jar model.

Some iPad apps provide a “web view” that effectively shows the entire originating news site in a browser window, but others such as Flipboard pull the RSS feed or scrape the site for content. Flipboard got in some hot water after it first launched as well, because it reformats and displays published content without ads or other website features, but it appears to have evaded the kind of legal threats that Zite has been hit with (Flipboard says it respects publishers’ wishes, and will remove or truncate feeds if a site asks, and Zite has said since receiving the letter that it will provide a full web view if publishers request it — CEO Ali Davar has posted a response here).

The bigger issue here isn’t whether such apps and services are breaking the letter of the copyright law by reformatting content — it’s whether any media outlets are learning anything from what apps like Zite and Flipboard are doing, apart from how to file legal threats. Amanda Natividad notes at PaidContent that as a content producer, she doesn’t like the implications of what Zite and others are doing, but as a reader she enjoys it because it is so much nicer to look at.

That’s the point the Washington Post and others are missing: As the way we consume media changes and evolves, a growing subset of their readers are looking for other ways to consume content through aggregators like Zite and Flipboard. Since no traditional media entity was smart enough to come up with those ideas first, why not figure out how to work with them or learn from them instead of just hitting them with C&D letters?

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