by Jim McGee
March 27, 2008 at 9:59 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking
Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker has some interesting points to add to Bruce Schneier’s piece on “Security Mindset” that I posted about yesterday. Felten focuses on the notion of “harmless failures.” It provides still more reason to approach all systems design problems with an eye firmly fixed on the social context in which your technology will operate.
The Security Mindset and “Harmless Failures”
…Not all “harmless failures” lead to big trouble, but it’s surprising how often a clever adversary can pile up a stack of seemingly harmless failures into a dangerous tower of trouble. Harmless failures are bad hygiene. We try to stamp them out when we can.
To see why, consider the donotreply.com email story that hit the press recently. When companies send out commercial email (e.g., an airline notifying a passenger of a flight delay) and they don’t want the recipient to reply to the email, they often put in a bogus From address like donotreply@donotreply.com. A clever guy registered the domain donotreply.com, thereby receiving all email addressed to donotreply.com. This included “bounce” replies to misaddressed emails, some of which contained copies of the original email, with information such as bank account statements, site information about military bases in Iraq, and so on. Misdirected ants might not be too dangerous, but misdirected email can cause no end of trouble.
The people who put donotreply.com email addresses into their outgoing email must have known that they didn’t control the donotreply.com domain, so they must have thought of any reply messages directed there as harmless failures. Having gotten that far, there are two ways to avoid trouble. The first way is to think carefully about the traffic that might go to donotreply.com, and realize that some of it is actually dangerous. The second way is to think, “This looks like a harmless failure, but we should avoid it anyway. No good can come of this.” The first way protects you if you’re clever; the second way always protects you.
Which illustrates yet another part of the security mindset: Don’t rely too much on your own cleverness, because somebody out there is surely more clever and more motivated than you are.
by Rob Paterson
March 27, 2008 at 6:04 am · Filed under
Analytics, Brian Hurlburt, Google, Measurement, Social Media, Video, YouTube
Today Google announce that content providers on YouTube will get real time analytics form those who watch the video. In TV terms – real time personal ratings!(NYT)
In a move to provide better data to its users, YouTube formally announced late Wednesday that it had added a free feature that will show video creators when and where viewers are watching their videos. With this, the company hopes to turn YouTube from an online video site into a place where marketers can test their messages, Tracy Chan, YouTube product manager, said.
This program, called YouTube Insight, provides a detailed view of a video’s popularity, both over time and geographically, broken down by state. (Internationally, YouTube Insight is not as insightful, providing only popularity by country.)
YouTube has provided basic analytical information to creators of videos since its introduction, including the number of views, the viewers’ ratings of the video, and the number of comments left. Advertisers received a slightly more sophisticated summary.
With the Insight information, video creators can dig into the specifics of a video’s performance and find, for example, that it peaks on Fridays in winter months, or it has taken several weeks to get traction — information that can help better promote their work. The information, presented as a color-coded map and a graph of a video’s popularity, is accessible through a link from a video creator’s account page on YouTube. The company will update the data once a day.
What does this mean? How will this accelerate the shift from traditional to social media?
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Next week I will be publishing an interview with Brian Hurlburt who is doing a Sam Walton in local news/publishing in Yarmouth Nova Scotia. Brian has become the most important source of what is going on in a small town. One of the most important tools in Brian’s kit bag is measurement. He can show the local B & B, the church group, the activist group, the tourism folks what kind of traction they are getting on the web. They know exactly who is looking at them and how and why. Of course traditional advertising cannot do this.
Brian’s story I think is at the heart of the shift to come and the YouTube announcement fits into this context.
Brian’s experience is telling him that the money will leave the traditional media once there is only an initial base of people online. They will go to the new, even when the pool is not that large because what is there is so clearly measurable.
For isn’t mass media is really a lottery? Even when you win, you may not know enough about what happened. But with highly measurable new media, you can refine and refine until you get exactly what you want.
Now a small business in a small town can have TV ads. Access to the media itself is cheap. Making the video is cheap. With measurement you can tailor the offering to suit you best. Now even large businesses can have video ads that are fully measurable.
Why would you pay a regular TV station or a local newspaper for an offering that costs so much more and where you have no idea what will happen?
I think that we are going to see a major move here. I think that, just as Craigslist gutted Personals, so measurable web-based media will gut the rest of mass advertising. As the money flows so will the attention and the shift to online will accelerate.
The money will move because of measurement and it will move before the masses move to online. There is less time to respond that conventional TV, Radio and Print think.
This is surely why Google are working so hard on Analytics.
by Joe McKendrick
March 26, 2008 at 10:25 pm · Filed under
Donut, Enterprise 2.0, Mashups, Messy World, SOA, Web 2.0
Is Web 2.0 a potential peril to productivity? Is there a risk of employees spending their time on the company dime engaged in superfluous online activities, like trashing ex-girlfriends/boyfriends or watching music videos on YouTube?
Both Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe have publicly stated that they are seeking examples of serious productivity issues resulting from Web 2.0 deployments. So far, Dion reports, “no one has come forward with a significant story around productivity loss, or misuse of these tools in the enterprise. “We have been unable to hear even one. So far, the evidence is looking favorable.”
Dion had recently joined Beth Gold-Bernstein, my colleague from ebizQ, who hosted a fascinating online panel discussion on the growing convergence between SOA and Web 2.0. Beth and Dion were joined by ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer, and Doug Wilson, CTO of portals and collaboration products at IBM.
For those managers who fear the ramifications of productivity loss as a result of unleashing Web 2.0 into their enterprises, think back to the first Macs and Windows-based PCs 20 years ago, said Doug Wilson. “When we introduced GUIs 20 years ago, there was the same question. Weren’t we going to waste a lot of time, people moving the mouse around?”
Of course, PCs and Macs had a very different kind of an impact on productivity.
An even more delicious example is employee orientation at a candy factory, Doug added:
“Candy makers indoctrinate people by telling them to eat as much candy as they want off the line for the first day, or anytime else for that matter. After 20 minutes, people will have had their fill.”
Likewise, when a new technology or technique is introduced, it’s only natural for people to try and learn and teach themselves. That’s how human beings learn — they experiment and play.”
Dion also provided this example of how Web 2.0 sweeps through the enterprise:
“AOL rolled out…a very heavyweight content management platform. But users gravitated to a new media wiki platform, the same platform that powers Wikipedia. Within a couple of months, because the tool was so much easier to use, and had been proven on a very large scale, with all the adoption kinks worked out of it in that very large laboratory called the Web… it was successful to the point where 95% of their content management now occurs in those platforms.”
This is a fairly common story, Dion added — analogous to the way the PC came into the back door of organizations 20 years ago.
by Jevon MacDonald
March 26, 2008 at 9:06 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0
One of the things I keep hearing from customers (buyers of enterprise software) here at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit is that as they start to make the leap and begin purchasing social platforms and tools from vendors, they are getting left out in the cold when it comes to roll out. Often broken deployments, poor documentation, ever changing interfaces with lagging documentation, half-baked features, the list went on.
These conversations are just reinforcing something for me that I have believed for a long time: When you sell collaboration tools, you are taking on a level of responsibility that software vendors have not assumed in the past.
One of the big offenders appears to be IBM. The chief complaint being that their new platforms such as Quickr are so poorly documented and there is so little use case and other guidance that IT departments that are installing it aren’t able to properly train users. There were also several mentions of incomplete and downright broken features being put in to the software at critical social junctions. The response from IBM, according to was that those particular features were still in testing. You hear this less about Sharepoint, but the reliance on integrators would explain most of that. I have also heard the same thing about smaller vendors, but the level of satisfaction seems to be higher.
I did not experience this first hand — I am not a customer and have only demoed these tools — so take it with a grain of salt — this is all anecdotal of course, but it is making a clear point: Vendors need to understand the implications of social software and guide their clients in both achieving the maximum impact from social tools but they must also help mitigate the initial pain.
This is a new depth of the customer-vendor relationship, but for the short-term at least, it is going to be a prerequisite for successful deployments.
What we have right now are traditional vendors, IBM, Novell, Microsoft and BEA in particular, who understand that Social Software can open up a huge new market for them, but they are not at all ready yet themselves to properly address the market needs. They are showing a level of immaturity and irresponsibility that is unsettling. Instead of looking to outside thinkers and experienced practitioners for guidance, they are putting their customers at a huge risks post-deployment while promising too much up front.
Organizations with an internal locus of self control will gravitate toward smaller vendors and vendors who provide toolkits that the organization can customize and deploy in their own way. Longer term, customer are going to start buying social tools that fit specific needs in their value chain and workflow, and we are finally starting to see vendors popping up to provide these tools.
Much of this runs counter to my recent position that the incumbents are going to sweep up the majority of the new market and the space within the existing markets. I still think that is true, but I think the long term outlook is much fuzzier.
