Technology
Entries related to technology.
The Orkut Virus and Scripts
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/19/2007 - 10:24Last night, I received five scrapbook entries on Orkut saying, “2008 vem ai... que ele comece mto bem para vc”. I’m not sure what that means, if anything, and it surely isn’t something my five friends would have sent me, especially not all at the same time. So I did a little digging.
It appears as if a script hit Orkut last night. The details are a bit sketchy, but apparently if you bring up the scrapbook page with one of these viral scraps in it, it would send that message to all of your friends and join you to a group, ‘Infectados pelo Vírus do Orkut’. Last night, that had 396,849 members. This morning, it is at 690,513 members. The problem is that you cannot unjoin this group.
Google appears to be deleting these scraps as fast as they could and the five scraps were deleted from my scrapbook as well as the one that the virus sent to my wife.
A way to protect against this is to turn off Javascript in its entirety, or to add a tool that partially turn off scripts. I chose the later option, using a Firefox addon called NoScript. It allows you to chose which domains can run scripts and which ones can’t.
Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/08/2007 - 19:53Who can think of a more exciting way to spend a Saturday in December than sitting around Yale Law School listening to a bunch of legal gurus talk about issues of reputation in Cyberspace?
True, Fiona thought it would be more interesting to spend the day with her Papa and Nanna. Kim felt obliged to travel to New Hampshire to go door-to-door canvassing for John Edwards. However, I’m sure they recognized the importance of the symposium I was at.
I must admit, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when I showed up, and I’m not sure that I can do justice to the symposium with this little blog post which I’m trying to quickly write during the Gallery Opening in Second Life before Fiona gets home.
There are many issues about reputations as they exist in cyberspace, and there were frequent references to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Trademark law, Intellectual Property, various torts, specific cases, such as ABDUL JABBAR v GENERAL MOTORS and so on. A quick summary just isn’t possible. As I get time, I’ll write up more thoughts about that, as well as about some of the very interesting side discussions that took place.
So, can I come up with a quick summary? Well, we talked about establishing a cyber-reputation, and the role of privacy in protecting that reputation. We looked at assessing the quality of a reputation, and who ones what portions of a reputation. Discussions ranged from Dog Poop Girl and Star Wars Kid to *30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night*. I do wonder if Star Wars Kid can rid the world of drunken girls putting too much information up on Facebook or other girls that allow their dogs to leave too much behind on the subway.
Perhaps the most interesting observation was the idea that Facebook and related systems for managing reputations online are this Millennium’s equivalent of the Doomsday Book.
At the end of the symposium, Eddan Katz stopped short of saying, “See you next year.” I should have digested much of the information from this years symposium, so if I get a vote, it would be for Information Society Project to run another symposium on reputation economies in cyberspace next year.
OpenID and other stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/05/2007 - 12:45As I visit various blogs as part of Wordless Wednesday, I find some of them are highlighting that the draft version of blogger now supports OpenID. That is very cool. I’m a big supporter of OpenID. People with OpenIDs can login and comment on my blog using OpenID. A lot of people have OpenID already without even knowing it.
If you use AOL, your OpenID is http://openid.aol.com/screenname If you use Vox, your OpenID is http://username.vox.com If you use Livejournal, your OpenID is http://username.livejournal.com If you use hosted WordPress, your OpenID is http://username.wordpress.com If you use Yahoo! you can use http://idproxy.net to have it authenticate with your Yahoo! id. You can also set up your own OpenIDs at http://myopenid.com and http://claimid.com
One of the things that is great about http://claimid.com is that if you have many OpenID enabled accounts, like I do, you can link them all together with ClaimID. So, if you have an account that supports OpenID, sign in and say hello. If is also worth noting that you can set up your own blog to support OpenID by adding a few lines to your blog template, so I regularly use Orient Lodge as my OpenID.
In other technology related stuff, as I listened to the NPR Presidential Debate streaming yesterday online, I got the blow-by-blow recapping of the debate by Andy Carvin on Twitter. I even pointed people having problems with the stream to Andy’s Twitters. It was also through Twitter that I learned of Marc Orchant’s Massive Coronary. Our prayers go out to Marc and I keep my eye on Twitter for updates. On a happier note, it is great to participate, even peripherally, in the celebration on Hanukkah via people’s post on Twitter and their blogs. In many ways, it feels like we only have enough oil to keep for another day, but just as the oil lasted for eight days, I hold on to my faith that the Lord will provide and all of us will make it through our various trials. Happy Hanukkah everyone.
Am I, Though, Really?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 11/10/2007 - 14:10That was the response that a social networking guru friend of mine at Yahoo! wrote in response to my inviting him to join the group “i'm making a difference”.
On Friday, I received an email from the Sierra Club which said,
I'm writing because, with your help, we can get Microsoft to donate an additional $50,000 to the Sierra Club. Here's the challenge: If more than 50,000 people join their "i'm Making a Difference" Facebook group *through* today, Nov. 9 (until midnight EST), they'll give $50,000 to whichever organization gets the most votes.
This sounds an awful lot like the urban legend kicking around the Internet for ages that Internet users can receive a cash reward for forwarding messages to test a Microsoft/AOL e-mail tracking system.
If it hadn’t of come from the Sierra Club, pointed to a Facebook page, and been something I heard folks from Microsoft talking about as a successful marketing strategy at ad:tech, I probably wouldn’t have believed it.
However, this one isn’t a hoax. The Instant Messaging space is pretty calcified. Everyone has their favorite IM client by now and people aren’t changing clients much. There just isn’t that much difference. It is sort of like Coke and Pepsi.
Recognizing this, folks involved with marketing for Microsoft decided to try and use social media and people’s philanthropic interests to get people to pay attention to the latest release of their Instant Messaging program. I haven’t seen any studies on changes in market share of instant messaging programs recently, but folks involved with the effort are touting this as a great success.
The ‘i'm making a difference’ group now has over 50,000 people in it. I suspect that $50,000 is a pretty small price for a marketing campaign like this, but can be a significant help to various non-profits.
So, yes, I believe that my joining the Facebook group, ‘i’m making a difference.’ A chunk of money will go to non-profits as a result. Marketing people will see that using social media and appealing to people’s philanthropic interests can be an effective marketing strategy. Both of these are ways that I hope my social networking guru at Yahoo! is also hoping to make a difference. The third difference may be an increase in people using Microsoft Live Messenger instead of Yahoo! Messenger, which might be a difference that my friend doesn’t want to make.
Now that the 50,000 people have joined the Facebook group, Microsoft is keeping things alive with this:
The i’m™ Initiative from Windows Live Messenger™ makes helping your favorite cause as easy as sending an instant message. Every time you start a conversation using i’m, we share a portion of our advertising revenue with some of the world's most effective social cause organizations. Each of our partners will get a minimum of $100,000. As for the maximum? There is none. The sky's the limit.
Let’s hope this puts pressure on more organizations to share a portion of their revenue with effective social cause organizations.
Technology Adoption Curves and the Twitter Lifecycle
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/09/2007 - 16:08In a previous post about ad:tech, I mentioned how I learned about NY Times' Facebook page from a twitter by Steve Rubel. I commented about this in the press room, and one of the reporters was surprised to hear that twitter was still around and active. I reflected back on hearing speakers at OMMA predict the demise of Twitter, Facebook and Second Life and it struck me that the standard technology adoption curve that we all hear so much about, may have a lot of interesting nuances.
One nuance that gets talked about a lot is the chasm that Geoffrey Moore talks about between the early adopters and the early majority. Perhaps Twitter is currently hiding in that chasm. Perhaps that chasm is tied to what happened at OMMA and other shows. Here is my proposed narrative for understanding a little of this.
As the innovators go out and try to convince people of a really cool new technology, and the early adopters start piling on, the laggards hear about this and try to convince everyone else that there isn’t really any value to the cool new technology. The innovators and the early adopters happily keep using the cool new technology. It keeps getting better and better, and then crosses a threshold where it becomes easy enough for the early majority to start using it and discover that the technology really is interesting.
This fits nicely with Twitter. Yes, us innovators and early adopters continue to play with it. Today, I received an email on the Second Life Educators mailing list, another gathering place for innovators and early adopters, talking about Twitter. Several twiterholics, myself included, came forward and talked about our experiences and the neat new tools that have come along to make twitter easier and more useful. Will it be enough to get Twitter to cross the chasm? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, I’m following some new friends on Twitter, and even found a version of the the Twitter Life Cycle
