A national study commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that children ages 8-18 have increased their recreational media use even though television watching declined. Driving the increase were mobile media use and games. Average recreational use is a jaw-dropping 7 hours 38 minutes per day. If multitasking is counted, it’s the equivalent of 10 hours and 45 minutes. Note that non-recreational use of media, such as research for a homework assignment, is not included, so totals could be even higher.
The study is a survey of 2,002 children ages 8 – 18 in a national probability sample.
In our hectic, public social lives, there’s always Facebook, a gated community where you can let it all hang out with your friends. What you say or show on Facebook is safe from those outside forces that might otherwise ruin the experience: your parents, your students, your ex, and yes, search engines.
But Facebook is rapidly becoming more public. It’s important that you understand how public your data on Facebook has become under new privacy settings. One of these days, your Facebook session will be interrupted with a request to update to the new privacy settings.
I recommend you don’t take the default, more public options. For now, keep your data more private. In the next few days, think about what Facebook says about who you are. Go through some photo albums and some old posts. Upon reflection, you may be fine with the new settings. But remember: at the end of the public road lies Google.
Your Facebook posts are ephemeral, like bubbles. You blow them, they float beautifully, then they pop and are gone. But as public data, they’re more like a tattoo. Do you want Google to permanantly attach them to your public persona?
So what’s hot in social media today? Location, location, location! That’s right, location-based services appear to be gaining critical mass. This trend is driven by the proliferation of handsets with built-in GPS receivers, including the iPhone, Android devices such as the Droid, and the BlackBerry, as well as the proliferation of social networks.
I often marvel that my iPhone is smarter than my computer. This is because the phone knows where it is. On the iPhone, a Google search turns up local options at the top of the list. The iPhone knows which buses go by this street, and when they arrive. When I’m traveling, I can pull off at exit 275, and the phone knows which hotels are nearby, making it easy to find the best deal for the night.
Marketers are licking their chops over this. It’s one thing to have a thousand friends on Facebook. But businesses want customers. They want to drive transactions. Location-based services close the gap between relationships online and IRL (“in real life”).
Any discussion of location-based services must include Twitter, even though Twitter is not directly a player in the location-based services marketplace. What Twitter does bring to the party is the largest mobile social network, real-time data and the open API that breeds third-party invention and reinvention. Most location-based services seamlessly integrate with Twitter.
Twitter has added geolocation to its database (to turn it on, log in to your account, and go to settings > account). While Twitter does not post your location, third-party applications can now access it. Twitter is essential for the growth of location-based services because it is by far the largest mobile social network as well as the also the largest real-time network.
Today, the hottest location-based service is Foursquare, which Mashable’s Pete Cashmore has called “Next Year’s Twitter.”
Foursquare links to your Twitter account, and broadcasts your location and comments to people in your network. As you visit places, you “check in” and in the process unlock badges. The highest badge, Mayor, entitles you to discounts and other offers. Foursquare was developed by some of the team from Dodgeball, an earlier company that was acquired by Google. While Google has a location-based service (Latitude), the company doesn’t appear to have done much with Dodgeball.
Foursquare functions as a “Saturday night leaderboard,” for friends across the city. It helps answer the question, “Where is the fun tonight?” Soccer moms use Foursquare to arrange play dates.
While this sounds fun (and also trivial), it’s important to think about this important characteristic: on Facebook, we talk, but getting together is an abstract concept. Foursquare drives interaction in real life. Think about your last visit to a coffee shop, with all those autonomous individuals in their own little bubbles, typing away on their netbooks. Foursquare has the potential to link those people together. Definitely a good thing.
Foursquare has just published its API, which means that programmers will be taking the code, mashing it up and creating new applications. This is exactly the same sort of innovation that has driven the success of Twitter, so give it some time and pay attention to how the service changes. The next killer app could be in here somewhere.
Foursquare and Latitude are but two of many emerging services that wrap up social features with real-time data and geolocation. Also in the mix are Loopt, Gowalla, Layar, Whrrl, Brightkite and Buzzd. Can you say shakeout?
While these emerging services may seem like silly uses of such powerful technology, I urge you to try one or two, and think about how they might evolve given the right mix of people, hardware and imagination.
We’ll revisit location-based services and discuss some of the players in future posts.
Wiffiti is a tool for capturing a feed and displaying it in a dynamic screen, which can be published in a variety of places.
The National Communication Association is currently meeting in Chicago. Attendees are using the Twitter hashtag #NCA09. A screen based on this tag could be pushed to flat panels throughout the venue as a way to publish distributed intelligence about the event.
Here’s a sample Wiffiti screen made using the #NCA09 hashtag:
The Russian comic Yakov Smirnoff famously said, “In Soviet
Russia, TV watches you.” Today, he might say, “on Internet, Google watches
you.”
Indeed, Google is like Santa Claus: it sees you when you’re
sleeping. It knows when you’re awake. It knows if you’ve been bad or good, so
be good for goodness’ sake.
But you don’t have to be bad in order to want to protect
your privacy. Plenty of good people mistrust Google. An entire culture has grown up around being skeptical of Google’s
informal motto, “Don’t be evil.” To catch a glimpse of that culture, check out
the paranoia – and hilarious cartoons – at Google Watch.
This context is helpful in understanding Google’s latest
privacy product, Google Dashboard.
In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and
control over their own data, we’ve built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be
simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use
(when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your
personal settings.
The Dashboard covers more than 20 Google products, including
Reader, Gmail, web history, YouTube and Blogger. Over time, Google will add
other products, such as Analytics, that are not yet included.
But a close look shows no new features, no new control for
the end user. Dashboard just puts all of Google’s existing privacy settings in
one place. A convenience, yes, but not a breakthrough.
What could Google have done? Plenty, according to critics:
If Google really wanted to give users control over their
privacy it would give consumers the ability to be anonymous from the company
and its advertisers in crucial areas such as search data and online behavior,”
said John M. Simpson, consumer advocate with Consumer Watchdog. “The Dashboard
gives the appearance of control without the actual ability to prevent Google
from tracking you and delivering you to its marketers.
“What the Dashboard does is list all the information linked
directly to your name, but what it doesn’t do is let you know and control the
data directly tied to your computer’s IP address, which is Google’s black box
and data mine,” said Simpson “Google isn’t truly protecting privacy until it
lets you control that information.”
… and though much of the concern about Google’s data storage
revolves around precisely how and what the company does to analyze and profit
from user information, the Dashboard offers little insight into those domains.
It does not specify which services keep user data, or for how
long. Neither does it alert users that, for instance, their Web search
histories and e-mails are constantly scanned for the purposes of selling
products to them and others.
While you’re waiting for a more open approach to privacy,
there are some easy things you can do:
Don’t rely exclusively on Google products. Today, you often
have a choice; you can use WordPress instead of Blogger, for example. A healthy
diet includes a variety of foods; use this pluralistic approach when choosing
internet services;
Log out of your Google account when you’re not using Google
services;
Reset your browser occasionally; this wipes cookies and
browsing history. Or use “private browsing” settings.
You can further manage your privacy, but it will require
some effort. Here are two articles that provide specific tips.
Last week, the FTC issued a ruling that will have the effect of cracking down on bloggers who write about free products without disclosing that they were, in fact, “compensated” for the post.
Disclosing payment is one of those “things you should have learned in kindergarten.” It’s common sense. It’s a basic component of the PRSA Code of Ethics, for example. Who would be against that? For example, here is how an article on Mashable framed the issue:
Certainly, it seems like this is an update that’s time has come. While most well-run social media programs already include appropriate disclosure, there’s still no shortage of unscrupulous marketers using deceptive practices to sell products. Now, with the threat of serious fines, those who look to push the boundaries of ethical blogging will be doing so at their own risk.
Specifically, he notes that swag is a part of life at even the most high-toned newspapers and magazines: “Jumbo are the shrimp and deep are the highballs at most media events,” he writes. No newspaper is going to pay for a book reviewed in the Sunday section. No food writer is going to pay for the unsolicited cookbooks that arrive daily, hoping for some ink. And no sports writer is going to pay for that great seat in the media deck at the ballpark. Yet a blogger writing about an unsolicited book could be fined for failure to disclose.
In the United States, we don’t license journalists. There’s no corral that safely keeps journalists in and bloggers out. In fact, while the business model for newspapers slowly dies, we’re seeing interesting hybrids, publications like the Huffington Post, Politico, and hyperlocals like the Chi-town Daily News and the Beachwood Reporter. Who’s a journalist? Who can say? And the FTC rules also cover other, unspecified “word-of-mouth” marketers, whatever they are.
I agree with Felten: this regulation has a potential chilling effect on speech, while failing to show a serious harm that the ruling might protect us from. Dear FTC, give us some credit for being able to assess the veracity of what we read.
Here’s a final question raised by the ruling. I serve as a professor at Loyola University Chicago. Let’s say a prospective student arrives at my office and I provide a tour of our facilities, pointing out good things about our program. Do I have to disclose my salary to the student? Have I provided an “endorsement” for which I am paid? Am I a “word-of-mouth marketer?”
Does the FTC really want to look that closely into, well, everything?
photo credit: ashe-villain, licensed under Creative Commons
This week Netflix announced a winner in its contest to improve its movie rating software. A team of seven computer engineers, statisticians and machine learning experts, Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos, won $1 million for creating an algorithm that improves the current software by more than 10 percent.
Some context: Netflix wants happy customers who see the value from its movies-by-subscription service. If its customers love their movies more, they’re likely to remain customers longer, tell their friends to sign up, or spend more on the service.
There are two key takeaways here. First, by crowdsourcing the contest, Netflix gained access to the intelligence of a large community of experts. The prize is cheaper than the cost of developing the software in-house. Multiple teams from across the world participated, including a team of 20 that created the same result but demonstrated it just minutes after Bellkor’s Pragmatic Chaos. Darn that coffee break! Darn that crosstown commute!
Second, the teams all worked from the same data – the API, or application programming interface, was provided by Netflix. An API generally consists of a ball of data, coupled with rules about how to access and process it. This trend is increasing. A large part of Twitter’s growth is linked to its open API and the constant reinvention that accompanies it. For example, Twitscoop uses the same data as Twitter Search, but delivers a graphic interface, tag clouds and other enhancements.
Kudos to these newspapers. Inside the API lies all the goodness of traditional journalism, which is desperately trying to establish a sustainable business model. Opening the API makes possible the kind of reinvention that we’ve seen with Google and Twitter.
Who will save newspapers? Perhaps it’s time to look past the usual suspects like journalists, investors and foundations. Let’s see what the programmers can do.
Sprint Nextel President and CEO Daniel Hesse has his share of problems bringing his company out of the doldrums, but he has a nice asset in the Palm Pre. The Pre, which runs on the Sprint Nextel network, has received solid reviews. CNET gives it 3.5 stars out of five, applauding its multitasking, notification system, web browsing, and – gasp – phone call quality. That’s right, people actually make and receive phone calls on smart phones.
For comparison, CNET gives the iPhone 3GS four stars. Consumers on CNET actually rate the Pre higher than the iPhone, giving it 3.5 stars to the iPhone’s three.
Q: Is the Palm Pre making a dent into the iPhone market? A: Aaah… It’s-it’s doing well, but you can almost put the iPhone, to be fair, in a separate category. The Apple brand and that device have done so well, it’s almost not… it’s like comparing someone to Michael Jordan.
This man needs some coaching. Who would buy the Sam Bowie phone when they could get the Michael Jordan phone?
The iPhone has lots of limitations, and any owner will tell you what they don’t like about the device. No real keyboard. Terrible network. Lousy for texting. Promised features (MMS, tethering) not delivered on time (or at all). Terrible network (OK, now you know what I don’t like).
Hesse should have access to intelligence about what people like about the Pre, and he should be quick to share it. The Pre is good enough to stand on its own in this kind of one-on-one confab. He should go on offense and tell his story. Rose is not going to grill him about the paucity of apps available for the Pre.
If you were counseling Hesse, what would you tell him?
