Up close and personal

There is a megatrend on the Web today, and it’s called personalization. I didn’t say a “new” trend: Amazon, after all, has provided you with remarkably accurate personalized product recommendations for years. But it’s a bigger trend today now that more crunching power is cheaply available, more and more of our preferences and behaviors become susceptible to reasonable approximations by algorithm, and more smart entrepreneurs move to take advantage of it.

My quick scan of the TechCrunch headlines today provided, at a glance, three examples of hyper-personalization (links point to the TC articles, by three different writers – what a story if an editor had thought about weaving them together!):

• My6Sense, an RSS content filtering tool that resulted in an “a-ha moment” for the reviewer when absolutely relevant posts floated to the top of his iPhone screen, without the user having had to do anything else (no ratings, no preferences) than using the app as a reader for a couple of days.
• BeeTV, a personal TV recommendation system from the brains of Gavin Potter, of Netflix Prize competition fame;
• Covet.com, a clothing and accessories recommendations engine tailored to your style.

This trend will brilliantly simplify our lives if it helps us save time that we waste today. If you don’t like browsing through clothes, surfing through channels, scanning your RSS feed reader, flipping through bookshelves, reading movie reviews, turning the pages in a recipe book, choosing a toy for your nephew, researching holiday destinations and so on, then recommendation algorithms will solve the problem for you: voilà, you don’t know it yet but this will become your favorite TV show. If you don’t like dating and want to be in a serious relationship from day one, there are matching algorithms that will find you a compatible partner for life. And personalized medicine holds – of course – huge promise.

But we also need mechanisms for serendipitous discovery; for stretching one’s boundaries; for challenging one’s opinions; and for getting out of our comfort zone. (If schooling were organized by personalized preferences, how many people would ever get any basic algebra?) The personalized universe freezes us in time. It narrows our horizons. If not executed with a fondness for adjacencies and the odd curveball, it will let us dig ourselves  into a deep tunnel of 1970s progressive rock, if that’s where we start from, and never even discover 1990s grunge. It will keep suggesting backpacker hostels when we can afford four-star hotels, or four-star hotels when we can only afford backpacker hostels. It will make us into Burgundy experts, while we don’t know we might enjoy Bordeauxs better. It will reinforce us in our particular religious and political bias. It will perpetuate our teenage Ayn Rand infatuation.

Social media may come to a partial rescue of the algorithm: you can follow a friend’s recommendation for Industrial music if all you know is Alternative. But you must still have become friends with that person – or “social media friends”, if you’ve never met in person – on the basis of some shared worldview. A social media recommendation mechanism to open up our horizons would refer back to Granovetter’s “strength of weak ties” and perhaps upweigh the tastes and preferences of our weaker connections, so that we may discover and learn something new.

Personalized recommendations are undoubtedly efficient. If you want your life to become more efficient, you will use hyper-personalization to minimize the drudgery and get to a good enough solution quickly. But if at times you enjoy discovery, you like being challenged, you want to try something different – you will step out of your personalized universe and explore someone else’s, or create one that does not exist.

85Broads and the final nail in the coffin

You might recall a social network for professional women, 85Broads, which I critiqued a while ago. The good news first: the ugly green-and-orange color scheme has finally gone, in favor of a less garish burgundy livery. (I still have reservations about the typograhic design and the mishmash of fonts on the site, but let’s consider that minor for now).

The more important news, however, is that the network has ditched free membership in favor of a paid model, as I discovered today – not because I visited the site, but because I read their email. And I would probably even sign up if, in the years I’ve been a member of the free site, I had had an inkling of a sense that there could be something in it for me. There may be a wonderful community of people in the real-life-based 85Broads network – I just never felt that, whatever that was, any of it was spilling over into the site. If a user has hardly ever had any use for your site in the last two or three years, to the point that your address has ended up in the cemetery of unused browser bookmarks, trying to upgrade that user from a free to a paid membership probably isn’t going to get you an enthusiastically paying user.

So, I’m OK with being booted out. Maybe there are tons of elite or niche communities that are traying to charge for even basic access, and some are even – who knows? – pulling it off. But for a Web community, or a Web extension of a real-life community, putting monetization before engagement, or trying to get people to pay fees before they have experienced anything of value or meaning to them, seems to me like the final nail in the coffin.

Book marketing via Twitter (or, Being Paola)

I am being followed by a Twitter user whose bio says “I am the author of The Adventures of Prince Nicholas. It will soon be in a bookstore near you.“

I am being followed, I believe, because my name is Paola. Paola is getting to be a rather old-fashioned name, so no surprise that it has been chosen for a retro kind of character. Here are a few recent tweets that – I can only assume – are excerpts from the forthcoming book.

What can I say? Not my kind of writing.

But, nice try.

Too social

Social advertising.
Social bookmarking.
Social calendaring.
Social marketplaces.
Social media.
Social music.
Social networking.
Social reviewing.
Social search.
Social shopping.
Social tagging.
Social travel.

I am not an antisocial person, but sometimes I feel the world has gotten rather too social for my taste, and I enjoy the occasional asocial weekend.

Italy tries to outlaw anonymity on the Internet

The latest bill introduced by Representative Gabriella Carlucci would ban uploading any type of content on the Internet anonymously (text, video, sound, etc.) and enabling such use.

More info in Quintarelli’s blog (sorry, for now in Italian only).

Italian law turns increasingly illiberal. For bloggers too

The Italian Senate has passed a law-and-order bill that, pandering to fears about immigration-related crime, would severely restrict human and civil rights for immigrants, for the homeless, and possibly for Internet users. (The bill, sponsored by the Northern League,  now goes to the House).

If the bill becomes law in its current form:

• Doctors will be allowed to breach professional secrecy and may report to the authorities any foreigners who seek treatment and do not appear to be legally in the country. Both doctor’s groups and the Catholic church have spoken out against the measure.
• Vigilante groups will be allowed to start street patrols to monitor and report “events that can cause harm to public security, or situations of environmental distress”.
• Foreigners who marry an Italian citizen will have to wait two years before obtaining Italian citizenship.
• Homeless people will have to be registered as such in a database to be maintained by the Interior Ministry.

Finally, in a move that caused much outcry in the Internet community, the Christian Democrats’ UDC centrist party introduced an amendment that shows how little our politicians understand the Internet – not merely how online social dynamics work, but even what is technically feasible and what isn’t. If the bill becomes law, any time someone is suspected of instigating criminal behavior via the Internet, the Interior Ministry may request ISPs to put in place “filtering tools” so that the offending content is blocked from public view; ISPs who do not comply within 24 hours would be fined by €50-250,000. The amendment has apparently been introduced in response to the senseless noise created by some Facebook groups celebrating rapists and the Mafia. Yet, internet experts point out that there is no way to block a single offending piece of content: Italy’s government would then require ISPs to block entire domains. Star blogger Beppe Grillo has called for civil disobedience.

For-profit activism: is Virgance showing the way?

Serial entrepreneur Steve Newcomb didn’t quite sit back and enjoy Martinis after selling Powerset to Microsoft. Barely six months after compelting that deal, he is back in the limelight as a co-founder at Virgance, a company that means to find and develop small, positive activism campaigns and scale them into global movements.

“I started looking at activism as a potential start-up industry,” he says [...] Mr Newcomb says being a for-profit company enables it to grow faster and achieve more social impact than a non-profit, because it can afford to pay its employees competitive salaries and can raise capital from investors, rather than relying on donations.

Full Economist article here.

Reloading the page will probably not help

As a matter of fact, it doesn’t.

Public service post: how to have your Facebook profile NOT appear in search engine results

So, I realized today that even seasoned bloggers appear shocked at the invasion of privacy represented by the fact that anyone with a search engine can find everything you and your friends have put on your Facebook profile.

Your privacy is yours to defend. Start from this:

Facebook -> Settings -> Privacy Settings -> Public Search Listings -> deselect “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing” -> save.

Tag cloud, 1972

A curiously contemporary work from 1972 in the Italics exhibition curated by Francesco Bonami at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. It seems that designers of good-looking tag clouds such as Wordle haven’t really invented anything aesthetically new. The work, “Sì alla violenza operaia” (“Yes to workers’ violence”), is by artist Nanni Balestrini, 1972.