Men and Near-Men of the Year

Wow... nothing posted since May 27. It would seem that my life got super-exciting since then and took me away from the keyboard. In fact, all that happened was that I was quite busy with consulting work from August to early November, and that we got a puppy in July. Other that that, it's the usual reason: procrastination. And perhaps a lack of something really exciting or infuriating to write about.

I received the TIME Magazine "Person of the Year" edition (and yes, I wrote "Men" in this post's title because I'm only going to talk about men here) and I was thinking of the meaning of some of the choices.

I've already heard the Luddites say that it was preposterous to bestow such a high honor on Mark Zuckerberg, but I think the point is that regardless of his actual personal qualities or limitations (disclosure: I have not seen The Social Network) the phenomenon that he and his company created is of great importance. I consult and write professionally about the importance of social media in the enterprise, and about the fact that companies that try to create an internal social network fail to realize that their employees want to be connected to a mix of colleagues and non-colleagues. Since Facebook and LinkedIn are the primary places that meet this need, they will not become faithful to an internal-only site. My latest paper on this, "If You Build It, They Won't Come" will be published by the Cutter Consortium after the turn of the year.

Now don't take me wrong: I'm interested in this enough that next time I walk by Antonio's Nut House, which is a couple of blocks from where I lived in Palo Alto in 1985-88 and 1993-2000, I may drop in to see if Mr. Zuckerberg is there (he may have to change his unofficial headquarters now that TIME has disclosed this habit), because I would absolutely not mind an autograph. It would be a change from my usual ballet dancers and violinists... OK, violinist. But Facebook (and LinkedIn) are now much bigger phenomena than any boy genius, and will probably not depend on their respective founders to continue (the usual counter-example to this is Stevc Jobs, of course).

The Chilean miners, los trenta y tres, almost made it. Some of them were truly heroic, others were well inspired to follow their leaders' advice. They are important not so much as 33 individual men, but because it showed how a country and the victims could take charge of a rescue operation that some thought was doomed from the start. The "Heckuva job, Brownie" exclamation was a gross sign of incompetence at all levels in the U.S. in 2005. Next time there is a Katrina-like catastrophe in this country, I hope we ask some of these miners, and perhaps the President of Chile and his cabinet, to come here and coordinate the rescue, since they know a thing or two about actually succeeding at a rescue.

And now, the man whose near-designation may be controversial, but who deserves some discussion: Julian Assange. Once again, here is a person who seems to have some deep flaws, and who is alleged to be a repeat sex offender; but regardless of his personality, he is the visible face of a movement to expose diplomatic secrets. I am quite perturbed, frankly, by the attitude of governments and banks toward the Wikileaks organization and even toward Assange himself. First, it has not been proven that Wikileaks participants procured any information illegally. The people who gave them the information may have violated their terms of employment by various governments, so go after them if you have legal standing, but don't blame the messenger.

Secondly, I find the diplomatic niceties tiresome. We all know that foreign dignitaries, be it Karzai, Merkel, or Sarkozy, are not angels. I find it refreshing to hear about the incompetence of the first, the imperiousness of the second, and the vanity of the third. Instead of suing someone for revealing this, the U.S. diplomats should say "oops" and move on, and the big shots who have been described in unflattering terms should look at what they can do to govern more competently or more humbly.

Thirdly, and the TIME article on Assange points it clearly, the financial institutions clearly acquiesced to apply punitive measures to Wikileaks as soon as Ms. Clinton's organization cleared its powerful throat. Paypal suspended processing payments because of "illegal activity" even though it is an allegation that has not been proven. Visa and Mastercard stopped too, even though they still let the Ku Klux Klan have accounts with them. And a Swiss bank has frozen Mr. Assange's account because he is not a permanent resident of Switzerland -- a rule they constantly overlook in other cases. This is just spineless capitulation and, until and unless an actual illegal action has been proven, a sad day for freedom of speech.

Even the fact that he was arrested in London just after the outcry from the U.S. government seems rather suspicious. I can imagine the debates at Scotland Yard: "if we arrest him now, we'll be called lackeys of the U.S. If we don't arrest him, we may be derelict in our duty. Oh, what to do, what to do? Here's an idea: let's arrest him and then free him up on bail. Let's see how this plays out."

So this Person of the Year issue is more interesting than the usual crop. I was especially glad that the designation didn't go to some Tea Party politician, because I doubt that we will remember them much in a few years, and it would have been another U.S.-centric story. Instead, in all the cases I mentioned (Zuckerberg, the miners, and Assange) we have people whose actions have inspired or disturbed the entire world, and who evoke in us some fundamental values that are not only American: connectedness, the love of life, and the right to know what our governments would like to hide.

Facebook, College Degrees, Money, and Persuasion

(I posted this before on an internal blog at Schlumberger, and I just realized that if I removed one or two comments, it could be made public.

There is no moral to this story — I think it's just interesting that Facebook is the object of a college course, that it allowed some students to make money, and that a key issue is how people persuade their friends to install a new application. OK, now please excuse me while I go and reject one more invitation to be a "vampire" or to play "Texas Hold'em Poker.")

On December 12, while I was in California for a meeting of the SOA Consortium, Prof. BJ Fogg hosted the final presentations by the students in his Stanford Computer Science course CS377 entitled "Creating Engaging Facebook Applications."

As the name indicates, the focus was not on the technicalities of using the Facebook "platform" to create an app, but on how you make people (a) come back, (b) invite their friends. In other words, what influences virality? This is consistent with the fact that Fogg is an experimental psychologist by training, not a computer scientist. But regardless, I am fascinated by the topic, given the recent uptake of social networking in professional environments, including Schlumberger, which has about 4,000 employees on Facebook right now.

Prof. Fogg had asked me to be a judge (we happen to indirectly know each other), which gave me an obligation and a chance to look at the apps in more detail than I might otherwise have done.

He gave an introductory talk on "Persuasive Applications and Metrics: the Stanford Experience with Facebook." He said that he came to Stanford in 1993 as a psychologist, and since then he has been looking into how computers involve and persuade users. "Facebook is the #1 persuasive technology of 2007." It demonstrates "mass interpersonal persuasion." Could this principle then be used to entice people to solve larger problems? I noticed that he avoided the question of whether the same phenomenon might be used negatively.

The process followed by sucessul applications goes through these steps:

• Acquisition: get an address to which to send an invitation
• Activation: the target visits the site and registers
• Retention: the user keeps coming back
• Referral: the user invites friends to use the same application or site
• Revenue: some mechanism is used so that these visits generate money

At each step, you lose some people. The key to success is to maximize the conversion percentage from each stage to the next.

When Fogg announced the course, about 100 students showed up at the first session. After they understood the focus of the course, 73 remained, and they teamed up to create almost 30 apps. Those apps were, altogether, downloaded 10 million times within 10 weeks. 5 of the apps achieved more than one million users each, and were placed in the "Facebook 100" top downloads. 10 applications had more than 100,000 users, and 20 more than 5,000 users. At the end of the course, there were 925,000 daily users of one or more of the applications. Students tended to spend 20 hours per week on this course, even though it is only a 3- or 4-unit course that should occupy much less time.

Some students included a way to monetize their application (probably by placing sponsor ads) and made real money. Rumors has it that one team essentially got enough money to pay for this year's tuition, but this may be exaggerated.

Here are some remarks about the applications that struck me as... being worth remarking on. I'm passing on a lot of applications that are just variants on the "Poke" widget or the "SuperWall" widget in Facebook, which are redundant ways to say hello or send a photo.

• PhotoGraph: there are 4.1 billion photos on Facebook, so how can you search for anything? The app builds a collaborative filtering mechanism, where people who browse photos can select which of 3 proposed photos they want to see next. The app captures these links to "thread" the photos together and propose this sequence to others, so that navigation becomes more relevant.


• Polls: this allows people to poll their friends about any chosen topic. Usage was modest until they made the polls focused on rating your friends. In the end, this app was installed 61,000 times.


• SuperStatus: elevates the posting of status to a sort of "microblogging" by allowing the comments to be longer, and allowing crosstalk.


• SocialBuzz: this allows people to use their friends as sources of information and recommendations, but also to enter feedback on a recommendation. As a result, the app keeps a record of how much you trust each source in each area (you may trust someone'a advice about computers, but not about restaurants, or vice versa), and this affects the recommendations you see the next time. This seems very relevant to Knowledge Management in an enterprise, and I talked to the creators of this application after the presentation.


• OneVoice: allows people to "video jockey" YouTube videos.

An interesting remark by some students was that "Facebook is the most convenient and respectable way to stay connected with other people." This confirms to me the way Facebook has differentiated itself from MySpace over the last couple of years, with MySpace trending "down-market" while Facebook, true to its Harvard origin, took on a definite "college-educated" flavor.