As many people probably know, Facebook has been hammered recently by concerns over user information and privacy. It’s disconcerting stuff.

I’ve just logged in and changed pretty much all of my privacy settings to make sure my information doesn’t end up in the hands of some distance third party of a third party who accessed it because someone I hadn’t seen in 20 years was my friend on Facebook.

Not that that can happen now, but it seems like a reasonable extension of where Mr Zuckerberg and friends are taking their social behemoth.

I’m not against Facebook, not against using the platform or the services.  But I am against someone using my personal data in the context of my ’social graph’ for their own financial ends and disguising it as a business plan.

Facebook can’t make sufficient money for its user base because it’s fundamentally not a business. WPP’s chairman Martin Sorrell recently made a statement to this effect, that ‘Social Media is more a personal phenomenon than a business one’. Joseph Jaffe criticized Sorrell on his blog for saying this, but I think missed the core intent of the comment - there is no inherent value in being a medium for social connection.

I think Sorrell was making a statement about the viability of Facebook as a business more than he was commenting on the viability of using Facebook to run/market a business. These are two very different things. If I create a network of people using some fancy new technology, the value of those connections is held and realized by the individuals in the network and the savvy individuals/businesses that can utilize the network for their own means.

It’s not realized by the guy sitting on all the fancy technology used to connect the network in the first place.

Facebook is not worth some squared sum of the connections it facilitates. Up to now, it’s basically worth whatever advertisers want to pay to interrupt people writing daily updates on their virtual walls or playing with their virtual farms.

This being not enough, it now has its sights on using personal data to ‘augment the internet experience’. No thanks. I like your platform, like that it connects me to people I care about, but I can’t give you permission to use my personal information to build a business from. It’s not yours. It’s mine. I don’t care necessarily how private it is (it’s on the web after all, right?), but it’s not a way for you to make money.

This is the essence of the debate to me. It’s not about privacy, it’s about permission. The bargain was that you can bombard me with ads, services, third-party offers, it wasn’t that you could take my social data and use it to make money for yourself.

I can’t wait to see what 4 guys working night and day on only pizza and beer in NY can create!

I just sat down with my wife and took her through Google docs. She wasn’t too happy about it. I tried to find some old copy of Office I could plonk on her new computer, but when that search was fruitless, Google docs triumphed over forking out more cash for (yet another) copy of Office.

On the first introduction to Google docs, there was a lot of kicking and screaming - what do you mean it can’t do that? How do you do this? That’s just stupid, why doesn’t it work like Excel? I knew this pain was coming, but I persevered because I knew that everything she wanted to accomplish could be done in Google, for free, and live permanently online (which was a bonus as the day before she accidentally deleted her entire My Documents folder - yes, she works in tech).

Sure enough, after a few weeks of working through and learning the new software, she is very content with her move online.

It interesting seeing this process first-hand, especially if you develop UIs (as I do now and then). A function that accomplishes an existing task in a different (but more efficient) way is normally loathed by the user. Especially if the efficiencies are ‘under the user radar’ - by that I mean small enough to not be individually noticed, yet in aggregate, meaningful.

When this happens you are trying to break a habit. Which is hard. Habits drive a considerable amount of our behavior because they are short-cuts we don’t need to think about. When you are forced to change a habit, you weigh the effort in changing against the perceived usefulness of the new approach. If the effort seems too much, you see a lot of kicking and screaming.

This is why you have to be careful with user feedback. Users want everything familiar, not necessarily better - because they don’t want to have to change their habits.

Sometimes you need to push through this barrier to a better place. Sometimes. It’s a fine line between functionality that improves the experience but breaks a habit, and functionality that’s simply different and annoying to users.

Either way, I suggest you try not to test too much on your wife.

I recently took a readership survey on the Digg site and realized there were some fundamental flaws in the way we are trying to understand online behavior.  And this is by no means solely a problem at Digg, it speaks to a deep seated bias we have when trying to probe media behavior.

Some examples from the Digg survey:

Question: How often would you say you go online?  Many times a day, daily, weekly, etc.

Between my home computer that I never turn off, my work computer I turn off once a week, my cellphone and my Ipod Touch, I don’t think I am never NOT online.

At some point the distinction between online and offline blurred to such a degree that there is now no meaningful demarcation.   I can certainly ‘disconnect’ myself, and do.  But even then, I am conscious that my online presence still ‘exsits’ and perpetuates itself without my direct involvement.

In this sense, the more important measure is how integrated my ‘online’ and ‘offline’ lives are, not how often I switch between the two.

Question:  Which of the following do you visit at least once a month?  <list of websites>

What exactly is a ‘visit’?  I have a iGoogle home page that streams 10 different RSS feeds, am I ‘visiting’ each of those sites every time I read the feed?  Do I have to click through to them for it to count?  What about my RSS reader where I look at the BBC news, is each article a visit?  What about the CNN Breaking News emails I get?  Are those ‘visits’?  If I never turn off Twhirl, how many visits is that a day to Twitter feeds?

Again, ‘visit’ is a remnant of an earlier online experience and one with roots in TV and radio - where the only way to get to the information was to physically change the channel.

We need to think about ‘consumption’ not ‘visitation’ when thinking about online media.

Question: Rank these reasons for spending time online - entertain, research, manage my life, etc.

Why do I go online?  What’s most important?  This question loses all meaning when you think of your online life as an extension of your offline one.  ’Online’ is not a destination with a cause and reason to visit, it’s a fluid extension of real needs/wants/desires.

‘Needs’ is the real issue here - what needs does your online life fulfill?

The survey continued in the same vein with subsequent questions.  Websites were treated as destinations and ‘visits’ and the online experience had reason and purpose.

I think it’s time to rethink a lot of how we measure ‘online behavior’.  Rather than assuming individuals online are ‘destination’ seekers, we need to think about how individuals aggregate and move between the nodes of the network they create.  It doesn’t mean destination seekers don’t exist, it just doesn’t adequately explain the complexity of their online world.

Bottom line, why measure online behavior like we used to measure offline behavior?  A mouse isn’t simply a different way to navigate, it’s a paradigm shift in your relationship to information.

I thought Digg, of all companies, would have understood that.

I’ve been working with a client for a while to instigate a customer panel they can use to gather feedback.  When the old VP of Marketing dreamed the idea up a few years ago, it seemed like on of those too-good-to-be-true ideas.  Almost instant feedback from customers via short surveys to panelists with a 24 hour turn around.

Well, it took about 3 years to finally come to fruition, but I’m happy to say this client is using their new panel in exactly this way.  And it changes the nature of customer feedback.

VP’s are literally turning to the panel two to three days before important meetings/decisions and getting a pulse on an issue.  It’s usually only a few questions to gauge knowledge of an issue, get some feedback on an idea, etc.  We’re using some sophisticated text analysis tools to mine some of the mroe detailed responses as well.

In this day and age of Social Media and Customer Feedback Loops made possible by new technologies, many people will be asking why this is a big deal?  Well, lots of companies (particularly large ones) weren’t built with these types of feedback loops as part of their DNA.  They need to be manufactured and incorporated into the decision making process.

Manufacturing/creating them is the easy part, getting senior management to take them seriously as trusted sources of customer feedback is difficult.

You can have all the fancy analysis and visualizations you like (and believe me I’ve tried a few), but until you get people trusting the data, none of it will ever work.  Trust is built by time and exposure.  You just have to keep at it and prove consistently that the information is useful and relevant.

It’s great to see it all come together though.

I caught an interesting post over on the Juice Analytics blog regarding Dashboards. They were arguing against the common wisdom of defining a Dashboard as a ’single page of information’.

I’d have to say I agree. It seems an entirely arbitrary rule for the display of information. I’ve seen very usable and insightful dashboards that are multiple pages long. They also note that the idea of a space restriction is only one of several ways to enforce constraining information to what is valuable and useful - another way is simply restricting the number of measures. If only people would do that!

While the whole discussion on what is or isn’t a Dashboard is interesting, it’s less interesting in my book than understanding information typologies that are used in decision making. Dashboards are an end point in this process, not (as they are typically made out to be) a jump-off point.

Information types for businesses fall into two major categories:

1. Actionable - information where the root cause of a change in state is known. On a car Dashboard this would be the fuel gauge - you know exactly what to do when it hits empty.

2. Derivative - information that you know is important to understand and track, but the measure itself is derived from multiple areas and therefore state changes could reflect a multitude of underlying issues. In the car example, this is the ‘fix engine’ light - very useful to know, impossible to understand.

If you think of Dashboards as displaying either one or both of these types of information, the design you employ is driven by the information typology, not any particular arbitrary layout rule.

A Dashboard that is heavy in Actionable information needs to measure the point of action. It’s no good having the ability to drill down to region when you need to know ‘at a glance’ if all your regions are ‘full on fuel’. This could arguable dictate a high degree of detail in a single layout.

A Dashboard that has Derivative information on it needs more interaction. If something at an aggregated level is trending down, you need to be able to drill into the reasons why. Hopefully the business case for putting together a heavily Derivative Dashboard would have included a ‘causation pathway’ for you to investigate.

There are probably other information typologies you could add to the list. There are certainly subsets of the two I mentioned here (Derivative measures could have underlying quantitative and/or qualitative issues). but by and large, it seems a better starting point for figuring out (and even defining) the essence of ‘Dashboarding’ than whether or not information should be on a single page.

An while we are on the subject, why hasn’t anyone come up with a better solution to the ‘check engine’ light indicator? In this day and age, you would expect some of these fancy cars to know what the actual problem is!

UPDATE: Just saw a recent post over on Tim Ferris blog that covers some of this from guest blogger Eric Ries, co-founder and CTO of IMVU.

There is a site called the KPI Library that lists Key Performance Indicators for a range of business areas. It’s a community site of sorts so the KPI suggestions largely emanate from users (as far as I can tell)

It is somewhat of a strange concept - a whole bunch of unrelated business areas submitting performance management goals - yet seems to work. Although the ‘community’ aspect has a way to go as I can’t seem to find a lot of discussion about the KPIs on the site.

Which is a shame, as some of them merit more of a debate.

One that caught me eye was Customer Recency, defined as:

The definition is a little wonky, but it gets to an important aspect of customer engagement - how often they interact with you.

To use it properly, you need to normalize it by expected interaction time - so your goal as a food retail outlet is different to your goal as a vacation resort. Yet in both cases more recency is generally better.

And as the definition points out, you can use the KPI for anything from a purchase, to a visit to a web site, to a phone call, etc. Any point of contact.

In fact, throwing all these contact points into a segmentation model and defining behavioral groups based on recency for certain activities is a powerful way to think about loyalty. This type of analysis give you a window on your customer’s ‘expected relationship’.

An ‘expected relationship’ is the relationship your customer thinks they have with you. They are calling you weekly, buying weekly, using your website daily - they really like you! Do you know who they are and do you reciprocate in like? If not, you run this risk of making them feel like the dork in school who chased the prom queen and got embarrassingly rejected.

On the flip side, does someone log into your website once and give you an email address only for you to start treating them like a long lost friend - sending multiple emails with multiple offers etc. An equally embarrassing situation and definitely not cool.

Managing the ‘expected relationship’ through interaction recency (and type) is a powerful way to connect with your customer base. Or at the very least, managing it so the above embarrassing situations are less likely to happen.

In the absence of asking customers what type of relationship they want - which is always awkward and not something you do to strangers so why do it to customers - measuring ‘recency’ is a core component of a Permission Marketing plan.

I came across a site called intrade on my general web surfing the other day. Intrade is a prediction market. You register for the site and can actually ‘bet’ money on the outcome of certain events.

There is a long history of prediction markets for all sorts of things from sports to Hollywood movies - ‘long’ in the Internet sense of the word, which is ’short’ in historical terms. Wikipedia has a page giving some good background details. I navigated my way to intrade as it was mentioned on a political news site.

On intrade, McCain is currently siting at about a 40% chance to win the White House while Obama is in the low 60% range. This was interesting as poll after poll puts them in a dead heat. I looked into the intrade system a bit and it looks fine (I am no expert here but at least I understand it - there are probably some pretty smart people behind it). You buy and sell ‘contracts’ with other traders and the price of a contract varies between $0 and $10. Each ‘contract’ has an unambiguous binary outcome and is ultimately worth (at the conclusion of the event) either $0 for it not happening or $10 for it happening. So if you buy Obama contracts at $6.10 and he wins the election, you get a payout of $10 - $6.10 = $3.90 (minus a commission - finally a Web 2.0 site with a business model!). If he loses the election you lose all your money as your contracts are worth $0. This is the Obama chart on intrade:

So why does Obama look like a shoe-in on intrade but a lame duck in the polls? Is Obama mania getting into the heads of intrade traders? Do they long for change? Need hope? Feel higher taxes on the rich is the solution to their poor lot in life as traders?

Likely none of these. On the surface it’s tempting to equate the prediction market to polling, but it’s really very different. The intrade numbers aren’t saying Obama is going to win in a landslide 60%/40%, all they are saying is he is most likely to beat McCain - margin unspecified (although you would think there would be a correlation between the strength of the prediction and the ultimate margin - we just don’t know what that is). So intrade traders think, given the current polls and events, Obama is still more likely to pull it off.

However, if you look at the Republican v Democrat leanings (a vote that indicates preference for a party rather than an individual), support for a ‘generic Democrat’ is strong. Or in other words, McCain is neck-and-neck with Obama despite strong support for a Democratic ticket, an unpopular president from the same party, an unpopular war and an economic downturn. You would think a logical trader trading in presidential picks would give McCain better odds considering what he as overcome to be even at this late stage. Of course balancing this is Obama’s huge war chest - money for political advertising - that will be unleashed in the coming weeks. Obama media saturation here we come.

Although even with that war chest, I don’t think I would give Obama much over a 50% chance. He still seems over priced. Ultimately though, no one really knows who is going to win.

Prediction markets for political outcomes are just a stab in the dark as there is no set of logical sequences or historical precedents that point to one outcome or another. There is just a whole lot of future uncertainty. It’s like trying to predict the price of oil. Demand and supply can be forecast somewhat accurately, but Israel bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities with no UN backing can not.

I’d like to see the political prediction markets on intrade react when Obama reveals he is the illegitimate child of a certain elderly Arizona senator. It could be true…

Posting has been light over the last few weeks as we are still gearing up for our move to the West Coast. It’s amazing how many things you have to do to shift 2 people, an apartment and a cat (the cat being the most difficult!).

I just came across this cool widget from a new site called youcalc. It’s an Olympic medal count you can sort by total, per capita or per some GDP figure.




(if it’s not working for you, you can look at it here)

When you look at total medals won by population (per captia), the list changes drastically - New Zealand is in the top 10!.

It’s tempting to say the per captia list reflects the real success as medal total ‘normalized’ by population puts both large and small countries on an equal footing. It’s hard to compete on absolute basis when China has 1.5 billion people to pull from! It’s tempting, but also wrong.

Population size is a factor only if you have the investment to make it one. India won almost nothing yet is the second most populous country in the world. They invest almost zero in Olympic sports, and it shows. Many of the small countries on top of the list (Jamaica for instance) have also benefited from athletes attending American schools where investment in track and field is strong. Their success reflects this investment.

I’d love to see a list adjusted for both population and investment in Olympic sports. That would equalize countries a lot more. Although I have a hunch a fully ‘normalized’ medal table based on per capita Olympic spend in USDs adjusted for athletes that train outside of their country of origin probably won’t catch on. Not much of a ring to it.

I wrote a post a while back about using visualizations as metaphors. Seth Godin recently posted about how useful he found pie-charts when compared to your average bar chart. He got a lot of flak for this as most visualization experts will tell you the opposite - that bar charts are a far superior visualization tool.

I believe Seth’s point was similar to the one I was making in my first post - that sometimes a purposely overt graphic (such as a single pie with one large piece sticking out) is the best way to make a point. You could structure it as a metaphor, or it could be a simple exaggeration. Some political ‘data spin’ maybe?

The reason Seth thinks like this is because he is a Marketer. Marketers spend their lives (inside and outside their company) trying to convince people of things. To a marketer, a presentation that presents just the facts is pointless. Facts without an argument that in some way enhances the Marketer’s agenda is a waste of time.

This is a good thing. You’re paying your Marketing people to have a point of view.

To many data visualization experts though (and scientists), facts are these pure things that need to be wrapped in cotton wool and protected from opinion and false hypothesizing. Hence their dismay at the misleading pie-chart segment size error in displaying quantitative information.

The gulf here, between Marketing and most data visualization experts and BI (Business Intelligence) people, is about the size of Texas.

But you need both points of view. Marketers who get paralyzed by facts tend to do a poor job. I know too some people that will sound strange, but we’re not talking about denying the existence of gravity, we’re talking about challenging or changing perceived norms. If you get too caught up in why x number of people don’t do y, you are never going to try and figure out how to make y work.

Likewise, show me a company run by data visualization experts. No more commentary necessary.

What you really need is a mix of both mentalities. You need enough understanding of numbers and graphs to know when to break the rules. And enough respect to know when not to.

I think Seth has a pretty good balance.