Twitter Spam

Ross Mayfield today raises (via Clay Shirky) another issue that is, I believe, the inevitable outcome of what I mentioned in my previous post, about the end of Twitter:

But you may have noticed a rise in @reply spam. Real and fakester accounts are being set up and using @replies to get messages into the view of users who aren’t following them. Some marketeers have seemingly mastered the meeting, like the ShamWowDude (not to be confused with the ShamWowGuy).

Twitter already fights the good fight against phished Avatars, but the war is escalating and changes are inevitable. They have the advantage of being able to kick bad users according to their policy. And disadvantages given what Twitter is (its hard for me to imagine traditional spam filters applied to neartime communications at this scale).

The Twitter spambots have always been on the site, but as noted above, it is intensifying. This is the inevitable outcome of the mainstreaming of twitter.

Twitter’s a business; like any other, it needs to make a profit. But as it grows, and as the pressure to find ways to monetize increase, we will have much less space to talk, and debate, and converse, as our tweets are increasingly co-opted for corporate interests.

Newspapers, Too, Are Parasitic

The latest piece from Paul Starr in The New Republic is well worth the read. Titled “Goodbye to the Age of Newspapers (Hello to a New Era of Corruption),” Starr examines the “death of newspapers,” as the economic realities of both digital publishing (i.e., online journalism efforts such as HuffPost and TPM) and the reliance on a shrinking advertising revenue stream are putting newspapers out of business all over the country.

There’s one point made, though, that I think is worth examining a bit. Starr states that while markets generally “under-produce public goods because private incentives are insufficient” to fully pay for the benefit to everyone, because newspapers play the role of an intermediary, they “have been able to produce this particular public good–newsworthy information, necessary to hold government accountable–on a commercial basis.”

Today, this model has been uprooted completely, as blogs and wikis and other Web 2.0 platforms allow cheap publishing of information. Here, Starr discusses Benkler’s “The Wealth of Networks“:

The non-market collaborative networks on the Web celebrated by Benkler represent an alternative way of producing information as a public good. Before Wikipedia was created, hardly anyone supposed it would work as well as it has. But it has severe limitations as a source of knowledge. Its entries, including news items, are re-written from other sources, and it does not purport to offer original research or original reporting. The blogosphere and the news aggregators are also largely parasitic: they feed off the conventional news media. Citizen journalists contribute reports from the scene of far-flung events, but the reports may just be the propaganda of self-interested parties.

Emphasis mine.

So this is what needs to be unpacked, because the above statement completely ignores the extent to which all media are parasitic. This is a point I’ve made before:

If bloggers are parasitic, then so are the opinion pundits, talk radio hosts, and television broadcasters. The latter, in fact, is quite common, or at least seems so. For example, recently The New York Times front-paged an article that took on Obama’s charge that McCain would be a Bush third term. Later that day, on CNN, here’s Wolf Blitzer:

Democrats say, if you vote for John McCain, you will really be voting for a third Bush term. So, how true is that? Mary Snow is looking at the similarities between the candidate and the president.

Coincidence?

Any attribution to the NYT?

And newspapers aren’t exempt from this charge. Today, the Washington Post published a story about Obama’s not-SOTU last night — a story created by simply reproducing tweets from “media figures.”

No reporting. Just looking stuff up in Twitter and publishing it.

The Washington Post isn’t alone. When New York’s Governor Elliot Spitzer fell from grace, The New York Times wrote a piece solely comprised of comments from various blogs. The story is filled with attributions such as “the anonymous poster wrote…”

While it’s certainly true that much of the blogosphere is about linking, and commenting on previously-published articles from newspapers and other news media, there is original reporting that gets done. Jay Rosen’s 2007 L.A. Times op-ed has a decent list.

The point of all this is not to “prove” one form or medium or model is better than than the other. A free press is important to a democracy — the central point of Starr’s article — and when the State doesn’t have a check and balance in place, corruption ensues. Quite frankly, we need all the media we can get, and while there is certainly a tension that exists between new media and old, the users of these sources of information — the citizenry — are better off. (That said, people certainly need new literacy skills to take advantage of all this new media.)

But this point about the blogosphere being parasitic really sticks at me, and is an unfair charge.

Putting newspapers in a privileged position of “original” while blogs and wikipedia are “parasitic” can only be done by ignoring the realities of the news business today.

The End Of Twitter

Twitter’s popularity has exploded, which can only mean one thing: The End of Twitter.

First, I should state explicitly: Twitter is great. I love the fact that I can hear from (and even talk to…) well-known people like Jamie Oliver and Mark Bittman and Howard Rheingold, and that I can have lots of fun conversations with the people I’ve met on Twitter. (Mostly, we talk about bacon.)

It’s actually not a bad thing that so many people have found out how great twitter is. The problem here is not that the celebs have invaded (Britney? Really?), or how the journalists can’t stop livetweeting from pressers. Though that is part of it. As I’ve said before, Twitter kind of feels now like someone invited all our parents in…it’s no longer a thing that makes people think I’m weird when I’m talking about it.

The real problem is that when Twitter appears in The New York Times on a weekly basis — as it now does — or when NBC’s David Gregory is teaching people on the air how to use twitter — which he did — or when MC Hammer is on Good Morning America talking about his tweets — which he was, these kinds of cultural events mark the fact that Twitter is officially mainstream, and because of that, there will be even more pressure for the people who run Twitter to monetize our tweets. That’s the problem.

This is the same pressure Facebook is under, which is why you saw the second major take-your-users-for-granted privacy outrage committed by Facebook this past week, as they attempted to use their Terms of Service to claim ownership of everything you ever do or say or post on their site. Forever.

Because how else are social networking sites going to make money? Clearly advertising isn’t going to pay the bills — from a recent CNN/Money piece on Facebook:

Online advertising growth is expected to decelerate in 2009 from 17.5% last year to just 8.9%. And historically most of those ad dollars have flowed to portals and other online destinations, not experimental sites and social networks like Facebook…attempts to sell traditional online ads on Facebook and other social-networking sites have failed miserably: Banner ads can sell for as little as 15 cents per 1,000 clicks (compared with, say, $8 per 1,000 clicks for an ad on a targeted news portal such as Yahoo Auto) because marketers know that members ignore them.

So what’s the alternative? We probably don’t know yet, but certainly copyright claims like Facebook’s are going to be part of any corporation’s market plan.

And, even though it’s not a money-maker, we’re still going to see more advertising. The folks who run Twitter have admitted they have no idea how to make money off it (or have implied that…), and are toying with ideas such as charging companies who use Twitter for marketing and customer service. But I find it hard to believe that we’re not going to eventually end up seeing ads as part of the twitter stream that comes through. (Third-parties like Twitterific already do this — why would TwitterCorp just give that away?)

The exploding popularity of Twitter isn’t really a problem from a day-to-day usage perspective — with Twitter, you’re not forced to listen to anyone, and you can tune the list of people you follow to hear from only people who interest you. In fact, Howard Rheingold recently remarked that “Twitter feels like the early days of the Well — sense of community, reciprocal knowledge exchange, group formation.” And I would agree — it’s a great place to connect with people, to share ideas, to debate politics. (And to tweet about food!)

But from a business perspective, there will be more pressure on the company to turn a profit, which will likely lead to the same kind of take-your-users-for-granted decision-making that we saw in Facebook last week.

So I think at some point, we’re going to need to find the next big thing. Hopefully it will be something that incorporates the notion of FOSS. Or FLOSS.

Or whatever you call it.

Text Still Rules

Despite the fact that I’ve been complaining lately about how much Twitter has already jumped the shark — with the influx of journalists and celebrities that are giving the site the feel of having your parents chaperone your party — the success of Twitter is making plain that text still rules as a media platform.

And it’s not only Twitter. Recently, The New York Times ran a piece on the art of the Facebook status:

Status updates are part of a Twitter-like feature that induces­ members to publish their answers to the question “What are you doing right now?” Responses, which are confined to 160 characters, then show up on the Facebook home pages of the updater’s friends.

…People point out that there’s a significant sleight-of-hand in every status update, because the real answer to “What are you doing right now?” is always just “Updating my status.” But the current friendliness of handheld devices to Facebook (and Twitter and MySpace) has made it more likely that when a pal — the Jägermeister-besotted Sean, say — writes that he’s stumbling home, he is stumbling home, right then, and simultaneously apprising his friends via his mobile.

Personally, I don’t care for Facebook, at all, but I do enjoy reading status updates (from what few friends I have on there!). And as the Times piece suggests, Twitter is like the Facebook status feature, minus all the rest of Facebook’s crap (which is why I like Twitter).

The point of all this is to say that text, perhaps the most “boring” of all media interfaces, is actually experiencing a huge surge in attention and popularity these days. One would think, in our Internet-crazed, multimedia world, it might not be the case, and, indeed, last year, there was a lot of buzz about how video comments were making their way onto blogs, and how this would change the way people interacted in the blogosphere. As far as I can tell, though, they haven’t really taken off. At the time, I noted just how clumsy video comments are, and how much more fluid a text-based comment system is:

Part of the experience of participating in a blog’s community is this flow, a rhythm that develops as you read through the comments: you scroll past some, you read through the one’s from people you know, you find key words that catch your eye. Reading through text comments, frankly, is much quicker and “smoother” than clicking on video comments. The fact that it all happens inside your head has everything to do with why reading isn’t as jarring as the videos…

Obviously, a counter-argument can be made here by noting the preeminence of television viewership numbers, or the huge success of YouTube, but I do think that the text-based interface of Twitter cannot be ignored — it’s interesting just how compelling the simplicity of 140-character chunks of thought can be, and just how much real conversation and debate can take place in what may, at face value, seem like such a “limiting” media environment.

Why is this so? I’ll leave speculation on this for another post…but some quick thoughts would certainly have to include both the textual “art” of twitter (that is, it’s actually quite a challenge to come up with 140-character chunks of thought), as well as the kind of bodily, sensorial experience (an experience that Clive Thompson calls a “sixth sense“) that is created through Twitter’s media platform.

How To Tell You’re A Neo-Con

If you’ve been accused of being a neo-con, here is a simple test to determine if it’s true:

- If you think spreading freedom across the Middle East is a great idea — and easy to do — you’re a neo-con

- If you’ve ever smelled freedom fries, you’re a neo-con

- If you often use the phrase “history is going to have to judge” when discussing your foreign policy views, you’re a neo-con

- If you’ve often referred to Donald Rumsfeld as “clear-thinking” or “correct,” you’re a neo-con

- If you believe Higher Education can be fixed by ending tenure, you’re a neo-con

Yep. It’s a pretty straighforward test.

Hulu and Boxee Split

In a previous post, I discussed Boxee, a terrific new home media app. Today, Boxee announced that they would no longer provide access to content from Hulu, per Hulu’s request:

two weeks ago Hulu called and told us their content partners were asking them to remove Hulu from boxee. we tried (many times) to plead the case for keeping Hulu on boxee, but on Friday of this week, in good faith, we will be removing it. you can see their blog post about the issues they are facing.

Hulu has more:

Later this week, Hulu’s content will no longer be available through Boxee. While we never had a formal relationship with Boxee, we are under no illusions about the likely Boxee user response from this move. This has weighed heavily on the Hulu team, and we know it will weigh even more so on Boxee users.

Our content providers requested that we turn off access to our content via the Boxee product, and we are respecting their wishes. While we stubbornly believe in this brave new world of media convergence — bumps and all — we are also steadfast in our belief that the best way to achieve our ambitious, never-ending mission of making media easier for users is to work hand in hand with content owners. Without their content, none of what Hulu does would be possible, including providing you content via Hulu.com and our many distribution partner websites.

I don’t see any reason for this, other than Hulu’s content providers — television networks like NBC and Fox — don’t at all get what new media is all about. I think these groups see Boxee as a replacement for “television,” something that allows people to drop their cable companies and grab content off the web.

Of course, Boxee is that. Exactly that.

But that’s an argument for television networks to remove their content from the web, and not from one particular front-end that provides access. Why is a browser OK, but Boxee not OK?

Doesn’t make sense, other than the people making these decisions just don’t get it.

My So-Called Pseudonymous Life

[Note: I may come back and revisit this post...it's a bit scattered, maybe not as clear as I'd like it to be. Hope it's not too bad, and I welcome any comments and critique that might help me focus this a bit more. :-)]

Many critiques of “the Internet,” or “the blogosphere,” or Wikipedia, involve the question of anonymity. The argument usually goes something like this: “The Internet would be so much better if only people were forced to speak under their real names. This way, they would be accountable for what they say and do.”

Leaving aside the huge question of how we might ever “prove” who is who online, the binary opposition between anonymous and “real” generally misses a third identity space, an incredibly crucial one — that of pseudonymity.

In a previous online life, I spent several years participating within a lively blog community. I blogged under a pseudonym, and got to experience firsthand both the best (genuine deliberation and debate, building of community) and the worst (troll-fighting, in-fighting) of online forums. I used a pseudonym at the time I started blogging because, well, that’s what most people seemed to do. Looking back, though, it’s apparent why this practice is not only important, it’s actually crucial to the health of the “public sphere” (more on that term in a bit).

I think most people who choose to participate in this manner do so for several reasons, especially within the political blogosphere (which is where my experience is…). None of these reasons are based on anything empirical; they are just my anecdotal observations based on discussing this with other bloggers in the past.

The most obvious is that people may not want their political views connected to their names. Given that what goes online stays online, that the things we do and say and post persist in databases for a very long time, people may have jobs, or relatives, or friends in real life that they may keep separate from their political beliefs. That said, given the traceability and surveillance that’s built within the very infrastructure of the net, this separation between your “real” identity and what you say online is tenuous, at best. While the separation can be maintained for most users, someone who wants to find out who you are probably can, because of the traces one leaves around the net. Still, this idea of pseudonymity is probably “good enough” to make users feel comfortable enough to speak their minds online.

People may also feel safer. Given the politically charged and polarized atmosphere of the last eight years, you never know when battles with trolls on a blog might seep over into real life. Those who tend to be vocal in online communities, by down-rating inappropriate comments and calling out troublemakers in the community, tend to make enemies — it just kind of goes with the territory. Who knows how far people might take things? Even outside of the blogosphere, the transparency of data in a Web 2.0 may have unforseen consequences — for example, the home addresses of California’s Prop 8 donors are now published on a google map.

A final reason for creating a pseudonym, for many, is way to shorthand one’s identity, a way to give a first impression, to share part of their identity right up front. (“FreedomFighter” or “LegalEagle,” for example…)

So why is a pseudonym different from being anonymous? In both cases, you’re still not using your real name. The answer lies in the notion of reputation.

The point was explained well by the blogger Marcy Wheeler, known online as emptywheel:

You know what? Someone who mistakes pseudonymity for anonymity is missing just a few critical things about blogging that go right to the core of its importance. Pseudonymity is the maintenance of a consistent identity, one to which credibility–or lack thereof–attaches just like it does to the name Bob Cox or Marcy Wheeler. Anonymity is something different, one that doesn’t exist in any fully formed blog.

A blogger’s reputation rest solely on the persistence of his or her identity. Bloggers “get to know” each other within a blog’s community, the same users come back, day in and day out, to argue and debate and share the news of the day. Within this type of virtual community, it hardly matters if I’m called “Carlo” or “cscan” — what’s important is the consistency of my online identity. Anonymity, on the other hand, is fleeting. A member of a blog community cannot be anonymous, by definition — if no one “knows” the blogger, then he or she is not part of the community.

The difference may be a bit nuanced, and I hope I’m explaining it sufficiently.

A new paper in First Monday helps draw out this point a bit further, in the context of Wikipedia. Wikipedians, as they are called, share the same qualities of pseudonymity as bloggers, and in the end, it is what they bring to the wiki in terms of contributions that not only defines who they are, but builds their reputation within the community. In short, the Wikipedia community works because the wikipedians can work together:

The Wikipedia community makes the project work, not its collection of individual contributors, and not its technology — though it helps. Whereas the wiki technology allows for mass archiving of activity, it is the people who value infinite transparency and utilize the archives accordingly. Whereas the technology allows anybody to easily edit, it is the community that has produced a comprehensive set of processes through which quality articles can be formed. Whereas the Wikimedia Foundation allows individuals to access its content for free, it is the community that embraces the cause and labors towards shared goal.

…There is a small element of credit that comes with good contributions, though. Each editor has a “user page,” with which she can basically do as she pleases as long as it’s loosely related to Wikipedia. Accompanying the user page is a “talk page,” as is the case with every article on Wikipedia. Whereas article talk pages serve as a place to deliberate about the content (what needs to be done, what should be removed, what should be moved, structure, organization, and so on), one of the most common uses for a user talk page is a forum in which members of the community reward hard work via words of praise and awards (usually in the form of a “barnstar” image). According to one editor, “[i]n some ways you get recognized, you get some respect, recognition from your [peers] … here’s somebody who knows his stuff, who writes good articles and so on and so forth, and you feel happy when one of them puts a posting on your talk page.” (Forte and Bruckman, 2005)

In a world where original research is disallowed in the name of neutral point of view, people are recognized not for ideas, but for diligence, organization, and hard work performed to further a common goal.

Wikipedia would not work without the reputational factors that allow users to “size up” others (e.g., review their Talk page); there is a healthy respect not for “who you are” but for “what you have done.” If users on Wikipedia were “anonymous,” there would be no history of past efforts to which one could refer.

The deliberation and discussion and reputation-building that goes on within Wikipedia is in many ways analogous to what happens on a comunity-based blog, and in both cases, they raise a point about the viability of free speech on the net — if people feel intimidated, for whatever reason, they will not speak out, they will not post. Returning to this issue with respect to the blogosphere, Marcy Wheeler, in the previously cited blog post, goes on to say:

…pseudonymity is one of the most important aspects to retaining the vitality of the blogosphere. Pseudonymity guarantees that citizens whose jobs or other life circumstances would not permit them to speak politically, to do so, using a consistent identity, but one that does not endanger their livelihood. This country was built on the importance of citizen speech–built by a bunch of guys writing as Publius. In this day and age, that critical aspect of our democracy is getting harder and harder to sustain. Blogging has brought it back, to a degree. And I, for one, don’t want to belong to any organization that discards such an important tool of democratic speech without even understanding the difference between pseudonymity and anonymity.

Pseudonymity helps engender this type of free speech, and helps push these spaces of dialog and debate (which take many forms, including blogs and Wikipedia, but would also include sites like Twitter) towards the idea of a “public sphere.” Without getting into the media theory behind it — if interested, Howard Rheingold has an excellent video primer here, and this First Monday article is excellent — the basic premise is that, for democracy to flourish, there needs to be public discussion and debate. Habermas, who wrote about this idea in his text, “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,” argues the public sphere has been diminished, through the commodification and consumerization of the news media (you know, the group that had that whole First Amendment thing written for them…).

It’s an easy connection, then, between this idea of the public sphere, and the blogosphere — a space for individuals to come together to debate the issues, and share knowledge. While the political blogosphere is certainly not a perfect implementation of the “public sphere,” it is clear that without pseudonymity, if people were inhibited to speak their minds because of fear of retribution, blogs would not be making their mark on politics, as they are today.

NYT Article Skimmer

The NYT announced today a new interface for their website:

Here at The Times, we often hear a common story of usage from our customers: Reading the Sunday Times, spreading out the paper on a table. Think of this application as an attempt to provide that experience anytime. It is empowering to see so much information at once, so we display as many stories as we can fit into the space of your screen.

A great design for news junkies. Sort of combines the old text-based-web with RSS, but much nicer. And, of course, edited by the Times. (That’s why you read the NYT, right? To get the news as edited by them…)

Interesting to see where they go with this. Ideally, the Times (and every newspaper) should offer “skin-able” interfaces, so that their site can accommodate text-heavy, or video-heavy users, or anything in between.

Don’t Click!

Yesterday, an interesting worm spread its way through Twitter. Thousands of people started tweeting “Don’t Click:” with a link attached. Click on that link, and it posted a tweet from your account to all your friends, with the same message.

Sunlight Labs did the initial analysis:

Huzzah! the first twitter social virus!

It seems mostly harmless, just perpetuating itself and breeding. You can check out the graph of its use here:

Here’s how it works:

You can actually link to twitter and auto-fill a message box quite easily. All you have to do is write a link like this:
“http://twitter.com/home?status=Sunlight Labs post on Don’t Click:http://bit.ly/kj1z9″. What this “virus” does is, it creates an iframe of the page, hides it, and when you click that button and you’re logged into Twitter, it makes you post that message (even though you don’t see it). There’s not a bit of javascript involved. The only javascript on the page is their Google Analytics code.

So, this “social virus” simply created an invisible page that overlaid the page you *thought* you were clicking, and it essentially forces your browser to push out a link.

That fact that no scripting was involved, and your password wasn’t at all needed for this little trick means it was basically harmless, from a security and privacy perspective.

Many people on twitter remarked how the way this “virus” spread demonstrated the “power of social networking.” But that’s not true — just the opposite.

It demonstrated the frailty of social networking. It has exposed what is always the weakest link in any system — the human factor.

The spread of this “social virus” relied on the trust we all place on our online friends. When someone you know and trust says “Don’t Click,” you assume it’s a joke they are playing (like you going to get rickrolled), and so you go ahead and click on it. The fact that many of your friends started posting the “don’t click” message on Twitter simply meant that everyone else was in on the joke, and you had to find out what it was all about.

Social networking sites and programs rely on the fact that we all trust each other. This same trust we place in each other is also the way social networking site and programs can be exploited.

Initial Thoughts on Conficker

I’ve been following the news on Downadup/Conficker, the largest botnet ever created/perpetuated to date. If you’re not familiar with it, Conficker is a computer “worm” that has infected an estimated 9 million Windows computers to date. It is essentially a large computer network, at the direction of *someone*, and no one knows at this point who that someone is, and what he or she (or them) may want to do with it. This botnet may end up being nothing; it may be the largest spam headache we’ve ever experience; it may be worse.

You can chart developments on sites like Symantec, or follow the SANS Internet Storm Center. The latest news on this botnet is a number of IT companies have decide to put up a stronger front in the fight:

Firms, including Microsoft Corp., Symantec Corp. and VeriSign Inc., have joined ICANN, the nonprofit group that manages the Internet Domain Name System, to preemptively register and remove from circulation the Internet addresses that the worm’s controllers use to maintain their hold on infected machines, said Gerry Egan, director of product management in Symantec’s security response group.

Separately, Microsoft has offered a $250,000 reward for information that results in the arrest and conviction of the hackers who created and launched the worm.

In any case, I’ve been trying to think of how to correlate this into something related to media theory. I’m not there yet, but certainly Galloway and Thacker’s The Exploit is an obvious starting point. Their thesis is essentially “the network” has become the dominant cultural paradigm, and we seen this in both positive and negative ways. So that the same mechanisms and forces that make, for example, music file-sharing or Facebook or online politics so powerful are the same forces that can perpetuate terror networks or things like the Conficker botnet.

The fact is that Conficker is endemic to our cyber-lives; it, and the no doubt larger, more pervasive, and more dangerous botnets that will eventually come along in the future, are a by-product of the connectedness we share, both online and off.