All online contacts are not created equal--whether they're friends, connections or followers.

1. Segmentation. All contacts are not created equal–whether they’re friends, connections or followers. Relationships naturally form along these lines, as we make social distinctions among family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. Though Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have provided users options for organizing contacts, Google+ is the first social network to make audience segmentation a primary design feature. “Circles” are the best manifestation, to date, of what I think will become a defining characteristic of social media: tracking our online connections with the natural ways we form and segment relationships. My recent work with Bullhorn Reach has illuminated this issue for me, as users often share that Facebook friends consist of a motley mix of personal and professional relationships, making decisions about what content is appropriate to share increasingly difficult to manage (1).
2. Specialization. Like liberal arts students emerging into the working world from broadly-focused educations, social media are reaching a point of maturation where they are increasingly purposed for specific business goals. Whether for finding talent or identifying sales prospects, social media are being leveraged by professionals to a greater extent than ever before. LinkedIn paved the way for professional-centric social media, but limited user engagement is leaving the door open for others to displace it as the preferred professional social network. Google+, with Google’s dominance in cloud-based business applications, could ultimately become LinkedIn’s greatest rival. As of now, however, LinkedIn’s current pay offerings (that I know of) only serve two professional groups: salespeople/business developers and recruiters/hiring managers. Beyond LinkedIn, niche networks are emerging that serve specific professional groups, such as doctors and teachers.
3. Socialization. By ‘socialization‘, I mean “a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position” (in this case, appropriate to being a user of social media). More specifically, norms on how to behave on social networks are gradually being learned and adopted, as social media are used by an ever-broadening cross-section of the population. The shift is marked by the growing number of interactions and conversations via social media, as opposed to one-way broadcasts of content. With authenticity and relevance as table stakes for adherence to ‘social’ etiquette, social media are getting closer to fulfilling the promise of being channels for engagement, not just publishing.

Norms on how to behave on social networks are gradually being learned and adopted, as social media are used by an ever-broadening cross-section of the population.

Where do we go from here? Who really knows?

It’s one thing to identify trends; it’s another thing to predict them. The problem is that predicting actual use patterns is a crap shoot. Contrary to what Shoeless Joe Jackson might lead you to believe, if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. That is, even if innovators design tools with specific use cases in mind, the reality is that users’ expectations, thought processes and subsequent behaviors will vary as widely as there are personalities in the world. Take, for example, how people leverage Twitter’s search of tweets, versus LinkedIn’s search of updates. At Bullhorn Reach, we’ve found that the shelf-life of jobs posted via Twitter is considerably longer than those posted on either Facebook or LinkedIn because people are leveraging Twitter’s search function. In contrast, even though LinkedIn allows users to search updates, users continue to consume content as they do on Facebook (clicking on what they see in their newsfeeds), just to a lesser degree of engagement.

All that said, just because it’s hard to predict the future doesn’t mean I’m not going to try! After all, we’re living the in the future (2).

Footnote:

1. I believe that “localization” (think location-based social media services like Foursquare and SCVNGR, in addition to check-in features on Twitter and Facebook), which some may identify as it’s own trend, is just another form of segmentation–viz., “Some connections are geographically closer to me, requiring a different kind of treatment than those who are further away.”
2. You may notice that it’s been awhile since my last post on this blog. Apologies, dear readers. There have been a lot of major life changes in the last year, including a new job, a new love, and health issues in my family. Rest assured, however, that there will be more to come.
   

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People today are faced with the cumbersome task of dealing with disparate content on multiple screens, via multiple platforms, and through multiple profiles. The unification of experience is the great frontier for innovation in technology, user interface design, and computing. How we get there is up in the air.

The number of ‘digital’ screens we view every day and the sheer amount of diverse content we consume through those screens can feel overwhelming at times. How our experiences of those screens and the content we consume through them (more the latter, as screens may become antiquated) are brought together, consolidated and streamlined is the great frontier of innovation in technological development and user interface design, I believe.

The unification of experience is the term I’ll use to describe the unrealized ideal of a trend toward the coalescence of our experiences through those screens (though I’ll limit the discussion to ‘digital’ screens, as opposed to traditional ‘screens’ like book pages and canvases).

The screens I personally interact with regularly are: my  personal laptop, my netbook, my personal monitor, the other personal monitor/LCD my friend loaned me, my work laptop, my work monitor, various other screens I use at work (the LCDs I use on the walls of meeting rooms and the projector in the screening room), my smart phone, and the TV in my living room.

I admit, though — I probably interact with a lot more screens than the average person. Still, according to recent research by the Council for Research Excellence (recently cited by CBS), “The average American adult now spends 8-1/2 hours a day staring into screens.” That’s not an insignificant amount of time, and chances are that those interactions aren’t limited to a single screen.

The screens of our life and the content we consume through them take up varying proportions of our time, on average. An interesting infographic from Boston's AMP agency, released during MITX's first annual FutureM Conference.

As both the number of screened devices people use and the time they spend with those devices increases,  the unification of experience becomes an increasingly important idealization of a trend — and one that  the titans of media and technology are seeking to attain at an ever faster clip through varying strategies and tactics.

3 Approaches That Could Work

While there are a host of innovators aiming to attain the unification of experience  through myriad tacks, there are only a few avenues that I think are truly viable. Even these, though,  are harried by obstacles that lead me to believe it’s unlikely that any single one of these strategies will ever have the opportunity to fully succeed.

1. The Cloud, Ubiquitous Broadband & Inter-Operable Languages. Companies like VMWare, Cisco and IBM (among others) are laying the groundwork for a computing future in ‘the cloud’, while the FCC pushes policies to expand the scope and speed of broadband coverage in the United States. These trends, in tandem with development and dissemination of inter-operable computer languages, could be factors that facilitate the perfect storm of tech that would ultimately lead to (something like) the unification of experience naturally. Simply put, the cloud provides an external place where programs, content and even computing can live, while users are free to move from device to device and have similar experiences that are delivered via the internet.  Think Google Apps, but broader. The adoption of a singular inter-operable language (which is dominating certain niches of cross-platform communication — e.g., Flash vs HTML5), while less likely, would augment the cloud and broadband’s strides toward the unification of experience.
2. A Closed Ecosystem of Devices, Software & Experiences. Undoubtedly, the company most successful at executing this strategy is Apple. Their “walled apple grove” is both beautiful and verdant. Their hardware, software, virtual shopping experiences and developer community — while aggravating to many competitors and developers — has created an unparalleled attempt at taking on the unification of experience single-handed. The problem: there are competitors that are coming out with comparably awesome experiences. Their barrier for creating a similarly closed ecosystem? — They’re not as cool. Don’t count competition out, though. Companies like Samsung are going to give Apple a run for their (heaping pile of) money.
3. Cross-Platform programs that Bridge Devices and Share Content. While many of these types of programs (e.g., Google’s many online apps) reside in the cloud, there are a host of ‘hybrid’  programs (downloadable programs, online portals, mobile interfaces) that allow devices to communicate and share content among each other seamlessly and with little thought for users (other than using them). Among my favorites are Evernote and Dropbox; sadly, I have yet to see All Share (on my Samsung Epic 4G) work in action, though it seems to have a lot of potential. Less ambitious programs like Gmote are also tackling the unification of experience, though in much smaller bites.

Barriers to Unity

• Privacy, Security & Cultural Backlash: With data, content and operable capabilities flowing from device to device, it’s no wonder that attaining the unification of experience is fraught with security and privacy issues. User access, compliance with regulations and figuring out where data resides are among the many security challenges, for example, that cloud computing faces, according to Gartner Research. Google and Facebook are the most publicized villains in the ever-growing debate over online privacy. Truth be told, though, it’s a broader cultural question — with vast differences across nations — that pits one of the fastest growing areas of business (how companies wield data) against traditional cultural mores about privacy. How this will play out remains to be seen.
• A Competitive Market & Fragmented Innovation. The nature of a competitive market gives rise to the fragmentation of technological innovation (as a result of differing business models). Not every company can be Apple, but many will try their damnedest to break the efficacy of Apple’s business model and introduce disruptive innovations that prevent them and others like them from gaining too great an advantage in any one of the aforementioned strategic areas. The result is a ‘king of the hill’ approach toward playing in this space. But, if businesses can find mutual benefits from helping each other win (as many are already doing — e.g. Sony, Intel and Google with GoogleTV) we may be looking at a more unified future.

Closing Thoughts

I initially wanted to include a piece about ‘pervasive computing,’ which is, in many ways, of the same ilk of idealized trends as the unification of experience. But, for the sake of brevity (yes, I realize this post is long), I’ll leave you with a salient quote from IBM’s W.S. Ark and T. Selker:

“Part of the beauty of pervasive computing is that we will not even realize that it is here, once it has become a necessary part of our lives. In the future it will often be invisible, and the user interface will be intuitive. The other important part of the story is that it will all be networked. Data, once entered, will never have to be entered again, but will be readily available whenever and wherever needed.”

Regardless of whether unification of experience or pervasive computing is attainable, is it a reality we want? Do we really want to be that ‘jacked in’?  I leave you with this video, which one of my colleagues sent me with the note: “If this is the future, shoot me now.”

I’d love to read what you think in the comments section.

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Last week’s security lapse that exposed personal Facebook chats was embarrassing for both the social media giant and its users, materializing  many’s most salient concerns about sharing private information over the social Web.

Personal lives are broadcasted across online social networks. Are young people more apt to act with indiscretion? Conventional wisdom says 'yes'; recent studies say 'no'.

The New York Times’ Laura M. Holson recently reports, however, that the tell-all generation (those between 18 and 29-years-old) is learning to keep things offline. Holson writes: 

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

Young adults in their 20s, in fact, more frequently delete unwanted posts and more actively limit profile information, according to a soon-to-be released report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. This fact, the report suggests, is indicative of heightened diligence among young adults in exerting control over their digital reputations.

Says Mary Madden, lead researcher on the forthcoming Pew report:

“Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you. Now you are responsible for everything.”

Recent academic research by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology attest to young adults’ online vigilance. In the UC Berkeley study, which explores how young adults differ from their elders when it comes to information privacy attitudes and policies, the sentiments are especially clear:

• 88 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds believe laws should require websites to delete their stored information;
• and 62 percent say they think laws should require that people have access to what websites know about them.

Interestingly, as Holson highlighted, this runs counter to conventional wisdom about young adults’ online behavior on social media. The Berkeley study succinctly describes the misconception, which is fueled by frequent media coverage of the risks of social networking:

“Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people “are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.”

According to the study, however, the apparent license with which the young behave online stems from a gap in privacy knowledge. In general, it seems, young people know very little about privacy issues:

• 42 percent of young Americans answered all five online privacy questions in the study’s survey  incorrectly;
• 88 percent answered only two or fewer correctly;
• and the problem is even more pronounced when presented with offline privacy issues – post hoc analysis showed that young Americans were more likely to answer no questions correctly than any other age group.

While many sites offer tips for maintaining one’s general online privacy, substantial guides for navigating social media privacy concerns are limited, largely due to the ever-changing privacy policies of our favorite social media giants.

As the future of privacy online is necessarily unclear, whether the ‘tell-all generation’ remains ‘jacked in’ or ‘checks out’ is now a more relevant question than ever.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to read your thoughts, comments and concerns on social media privacy in the comments section below. I’ll leave you with this relevant cartoon by The Joy of Tech by Nitrozac and Snaggy.

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The Dawn of the Mobile Internet Era

Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker — the ‘Queen of the Internet‘ behind both Netscape‘s and Google‘s initial public offerings — recently provided research and insights into the upward trend of the mobile web and social networking.

Among her more startling predictions was that, within the next five years,

“…more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.”

This trend, Meeker posits, marks the beginning of the fifth era of modern-day technology’s historical progression, roughly approximated below.

1. 1950′s-1960′s: the mainframe era
2. 1970′s: the mini-computer era
3. 1980′s: the desktop era
4. 1990′s-2000′s: the internet era
5. 2010′s-: the mobile internet era

And, compared to the uptake of desktop internet usage, mobile internet usage is growing at a considerably faster rate. This rate, Meeker and her team suggest, is evidenced by the disparity between contemporary adoption rates of iPhone/iPod touch versus AOL/Netscape in the early 1990′s — a staggering 11x difference. This trend, Meeker et al. add, is enhanced by the rise of 3G technology, which is available to nearly 21 percent of the world’s cellular users. Japan leads 3g penetration levels with a breath-taking 96 percent.

Data Usage and a Shafting Landscape for Carrier Networks

Carrier networks, however, will face the challenge of dealing with increasingly cumbersome data loads, as mobile internet usage continues to rise. At present, Meeker’s research notes, average cell phone users’ usage patterns consist in roughly 70 percent voice. In contrast, iPhone users’ voice usage only comprises 45 percent of bandwidth usage. Carrier network NTT DoCoMo of Japan, which Meeker (and others) assume to provide the model for the mobile internet’s future, reports a significantly different pattern: data usage comprises 90 percent of network traffic.

By 2014, Meeker et al. predict, data traffic will increase by roughly 4,000 percent, with the expectation that each year the annual growth rate will exceed 100 percent. Some U.S. networks — namely, AT&T — are already encountering problems in highly populated areas (e.g., New York and San Francisco) due to increased data loads. The data logjam on their network, AT&T claims, is due primarily to iPhone users. Comprising only three percent of the AT&T’s customer base, iPhone users reportedly consume approximately 40 percent of the network’s capacity. And data loads look as though they’re only getting heavier. The next wave of smartphones look more hungry for data than ever.

The Next Wave of Smart Phones (in the Foreseeable Future)

• HTC’s new phone, EVO 4G, comes video chat-ready. Apple’s new iPhone promises to offer similar functionality (through iChat) in its latest iteration, though one wonders when Apple will bring video chat to the iPad.
• Rumors that Facebook will produce its own phone are preceded by Microsoft’s unveiling of its Kin, a social media-focused smart phone with otherwise lightweight hardware.
  

  While interesting, Mircrosoft's Kin only syncs within its "loop" of status updates and messages every 15 minutes -- a time delay that many criticize as being too slow for the social media generation.

• Google’s Nexus One and Motorola’s Droid have subsumed the ‘traditional’ role of mobile GPS navigation devices, and look to enlarge their stake in the navigation market, unfortunately for Garmin and TomTom.
• HP’s recent purchase of Palm promises the advent of a whole new slough of business-ready smart phones that will compete with Blackberry’s newest line of preferred devices for the suits & ties.

What It Means for the Future of Content Production

• Advertising: The most important platform for reaching a captive audience will not be TV, e-mail or the (desktop) internet. Rather, it will be through mobile phones — and companies are catching on. Apple’s iAd will provide developers and agencies opportunities to deliver in-app advertisements. Google is hot on its tails with its attempted purchase of AdMob, but has encountered snags along the way.
• Publishing: It’s  obvious that big publishers are well on their way to taking their content live on the mobile internet. In the near future, do-it-yourself mobile content publishing programs like Maxdox and full-service companies like PressMart will provide publishers — both small and mid-sized — the tools they need to bring their content into the mobile internet era. This point doesn’t take into account the imminent increase in usage of various online publishing platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
• Virtual Goods: With nearly $600m in revenue and $1 per average user engagement, FarmVille’s continued success has proven that virtual goods are no longer a trend relegated to the Far East. And both Foursquare‘s and Gowalla‘s location-based apps center their models on rewarding users with virtual honors like ‘badges’ and other rewards, sometimes in exchange for real rewards. With the rise of upstarts like Booyah and an ever-growing potential base of users, virtual goods are becoming an unforeseen form of content that is certainly a force to be reckoned with, given it’s significant revenue generation and popularity.

That’s it for now, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on what the rise of the mobile internet means for other aspects of life — technology, media, culture, life or otherwise. Please provide comments below!

See this post re-blogged on Wall St. Cheat Sheet, Jack: a Blog about Experience Brands (Jack Morton Worldwide’s blog), and Point About.

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Gizmodo scooped a rare, public in-person meeting between Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt.

Last week, I was shocked to read Gizmodo’s scoop that Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were spotted in person at a café in Palo Alto. As arguably two of the most ‘jacked in’ people in the world, I was intrigued that they would prefer to meet face-to-face for a conversation that could very well take place over GoogleTalk or iChat.

A couple days ago, I attended a Boston Ad Club event with foursquare‘s Dennis Crowley, during which Xconomy‘s Wade Roush interviewed him on the start-up’s meteoric growth and the rise of location-based social networking. Again, I was somewhat surprised that this type of interview — of a tech CEO by a tech writer — was conducted primarily, if not solely, in person.

Foursquare's Dennis Crowley is interviewed by Xconomy's Wade Roush on the rise of location-based social networking at a recent Boston Ad Club event (photo taken on my Blackberry).

As someone who currently works in the brand experience space, I’ve heard both my colleagues and others report that, with budget cuts and public scrutiny, many companies are committing their events budgets to the virtual world.

For some reason, though, there seems to be an intuitive, primitive inclination to have our most important meetings in-person — to see who we’re speaking to face-to-face. Why is that?

The Scientific Point-of-View on Face-to-Face Interaction

Of the innate desire for face-to-face social interactions, The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande notes the ground-breaking research of Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, with baby rhesus monkeys.

In the mid-1950s, Harlow began breeding his own monkeys to save money on experimental research. Raised in nurseries under conditions similar to human infants in contemporary hospitals, Harlow gave the monkeys food, warm blankets and toys, but isolated them from others to prevent the spread of infection. While physically healthy and, in fact, larger than their counterparts in the wild, the lab-bred monkeys were more than a bit off-kilter. They were prone to staring blankly ahead, rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively and mutilating themselves.

Wondering what was off with the rhesus (not to be mistaken with Reese’s) monkeys, Harlow and his graduate students tinkered with variables like diet, light exposure, and antibiotics. Then, one of Harlow’s researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to their blankets, and Harlow contemplated whether the strange behavior was due to isolation from their mothers. So, he tried giving them artificial ones, and — long story, short — the baby monkeys became deeply attached to the most life-like of the fake mamma monkeys, though remained psychologically abnormal.

Harlow’s later studies that examined the effect of total isolation from birth found that released test monkeys

“…usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by… autistic self-clutching and rocking…One of six monkeys isolated for three months refused to eat after release and died five days later…Twelve months of isolation almost obliterated the animals socially.”

Such monkeys were permanently withdrawn, social outcasts in monkey society,  and were victims of regular attack by wild monkeys.

Gawande further notes studies among neglected and orphaned children who sustained similarly deep and sustained damage. Results among adults — particularly, prison inmates and long-distance solo sailors — also seem to indicate a predisposition to long for in-person social interaction. It is no wonder, then, that astronauts are screened for their tolerance of long periods of isolation, though they have radio and video communication for social contact.

The Business Rationale of Face-to-Face Meetings

In his white paper “Why Face-to-Face Business Meetings Matter”, Prof. Richard Arvey of the National University of Singapore Business School describes why ‘computer-mediated processes’ simply don’t cut it for some types of communications:

“Group processes and outcomes that require coordination, consensus, timing, persuasion of others, etc. are less effectively accomplished using computer mediated communication modalities. Indeed, according to Straus and McGrath, the type of communication medium is likely to affect outcomes “when there is a need for the expression of emotions, when tasks require coordination and timing among members’ activities, when one is attempting to persuade others, or with task require consensus on issues that are affected by attitudes or values of the group members.” (Straus and McGrath, p. 163).”

More interestingly, Arvey explicates the advantages of face-to-face meetings:

“Face-to-face meetings allow members to engage in and observe verbal and non-verbal behavioral styles not captured in most computer mediated communication devises. There are nuances associated with hand gestures, voice quality and volume, facial expressions, and so forth that are simply not captured in email discussion, chat rooms, and the like. Even videoconferencing does not capture all of the dynamics of group members (e.g. the expression of others while one member is talking, etc.).”

Interestingly, Gizmodo applied analyses of these type of behavioral attributes to Jobs’ and Schmidt’s recent meeting (provided by Janine Driver, who has taught CIA and Scotland Yard members how to read body language).

Beyond body language, face-to-face meetings are important, Arvey avers, because

“…business meetings allow participants opportunities to develop important exchange relationships among themselves. These exchanges can be in the form of business negotiations, personal favors, promises, understandings, etc. that cannot often be achieved via other forms of communication because of their personal and informal nature. One psychological theory that emphasizes this notion is “social exchange theory” where human relations are viewed as an exchange of rewards
among individuals or achieving equity between “what you put in” compared to “what you get out” of relationships.”

Most salespersons will agree: face-to-face sales meetings, while costly and time-intensive, typically have the best results.

…..

To end, I’ll provide this brief excerpt from Atul Gawande’s beautifully written article in The New Yorker:

“Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.”

I would love to hear your thoughts on this issue. Please feel free to leave your questions, comments and concerns below!

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Facebook and Google are increasingly going head to head -- for users, functionalities and the advertising dollars that sustain either site.

Facebook’s first triumph comes at no fault of Google’s, whose traffic increased by 9% over the same period last year. Facebook’s traffic, in contrast, nearly tripled, joining fellow social media giant MySpace as one of two sites who have ousted Google from the position of most trafficked site for a full week (last done in September 2007).

Of the Facebook’s second triumph over Google, Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins writes,

“Hitwise data indicate that visitors from Facebook.com are more loyal to News and Media websites than are visitors from News.Google.com. In particular, among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook.com users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News. The figures are almost identical for Broadcast Media, with a 77% returning rate for Facebook.com compared to 64% for Google News.”

Returning visitors prefer news provided through Facebook over Google. For example, 81% of visits to CNN.com in the week to March 6, 2010 were returning visitors while 84% of visitors to CNN.com that came from Facebook.com were returning visitors and 72% from Google News were returning visitors.

Though this may seem surprising at first glance, a closer look at a couple different aspects of either site, I think, reveals why this outcome is natural, if not obvious.

2 Characteristics to Consider: Facebook versus Google News

1. Fan Pages & News Feeds: Facebook fan pages are the perfect way for media outlets to consistently reach a targeted, interested audience with their content. Not only is membership opt-in, but new content posted to a given page is streamed into fans’ News Feeds. The only similar offering that Google provides is Buzz, which is a comparatively cluttered, less user-friendly experience in its current form.
2. The Variety of Google News: What makes Google News so appealing to me (and other news junkies, I assume) is that it provides myriad, varied sources that cover the same topic. In other words, there are always a lot of choices on Google News. It’s no wonder, then, that readers are choosing major media outlets less frequently through Google News. In fact, I think it’s a testament to the strength of major media outlets’ brands that they attract so many loyal followers through Google News, despite the available choices.

Beyond structural characteristics, I think it’s also fair to say that context matters. In an online environment surrounded by friends, users are more susceptible to make choices that are consistent with ‘loyal’ behavior. While this may seem like a stretch, considerable research in advertising reveals that cognitive priming of context does, indeed, affect how messages are received.

On that note, I’ll end this post with a funny but relevant cartoon about social media that I came across. Enjoy, and please feel free to share your thoughts!

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A graphic provided to convey differing opinions on privacy by the The New York Times in its 'Week in Review' Section on February26, 2010.

Contrary to most contemporary intuitions about media treatment of stars like Tiger Woods, the court ruled, as related in an article by MSNBC‘s Bob Sullivan, that:

“…posing for the photographs did not mean Dumas and Menken had surrendered their rights to privacy and dignity, even if they consented to do just that during a heady romantic moment. These rights trumped any commercial property rights the photographer might have claimed, the court said.”

For most Americans, this ruling, along with the recent ruling against three Google executives in Italy for passively allowing ‘privacy-infringing’ videos to be posted on YoutTube, is troubling.

Beyond the need to fine-tune Google’s passive distribution policies for offensive content, this case highlights a deeper ideological divide, which Dumas’ case also exemplified. As The New York Times‘ Adam Liptak writes,

“… it called attention to the profound European commitment to privacy, one that threatens the American conception of free expression and could restrict the flow of information on the Internet to everyone.”

In the  abstract (no, I didn’t read the entire paper) of Yale law professor James Whitman’s paper ‘The Two Western Cultures of Privacy: Dignity versus Liberty,’ Whitman (or, more likely, some editor of the Yale Law Journal) clearly describes the issues and implications at stake:

Privacy advocates often like to claim that all modern societies feel the same intuitive need to protect privacy. Yet it is clear that intuitive sensibilities about privacy differ from society to society, even as between the closely kindred societies of the United States and continental Europe. Some of the differences involve questions of everyday behavior, such as whether or not one may appear nude in public. But many involve the law. In fact, we are in the midst of major legal conflicts between the countries on either side of the Atlantic–conflicts over questions like the protection of consumer data, the use of discovery in civil procedure, the public exposure of criminal offenders, and more. Clearly the idea that there are universal human sensibilities about privacy, which ought to serve as the basis of a universal law of privacy, cannot be right.

The article (achem…abstract) later argues:

European privacy norms are founded on French and German ideas of “personal honor.” Continental “privacy,” like continental sexual harassment law, prison law, and many other bodies of law, aims to protect the “personal honor” of ordinary French and German folk. American law takes a very different approach, protecting primarily a liberty interest. The Article traces the roots of French and German attitudes over the last couple of centuries, highlighting the French experience of sexual license in the nineteenth century and the German experience of Nazism…

Throughout, the Article argues, American law shows a far greater sensitivity to intrusions on the part of the state, while continental law shows a far greater sensitivity to the protection of one’s public face. These are not differences that we can understand unless we abandon the approach taken by most privacy advocates, since such differences have little to do with the supposedly universal intuitive needs of “personhood.” Instead, they are differences that reflect the contrasting political and social ideals of American and continental law. Indeed, we should broadly reject intuitionism in our legal scholarship, focusing instead on social and political ideals.

For those of you still reading the post after reading through that quote (it might be a bit dry for some), I tend to disagree with Whitman’s rejection of the notion of some universal concept of ‘personhood’, though I also (unsurprisingly) lean toward sympathizing with American ideological and, hence, policy decisions.

The differing opinion lies in what I believe to be a false dichotomy that Whitman presents: between ‘dignity’ and ‘liberty.’ The value of ‘liberty,’ I think, draws its compellent force, like ‘privacy,’ from an intuitive notion of ‘personhood’ or ‘human dignity.’ And so, the dichotomy instead lies between ‘liberty’ and ‘privacy.’

Like most talk of ‘rights,’ however, these discussions are muddled by differing foundational concepts, not to mention differing laws (premised on those differing concepts) across national boundaries.

Nevertheless, in my opinion, we must weigh the value of ‘liberty’ against ‘privacy,’ knowing that that the results will vary by situation. I wouldn’t, for example, value a voyeur’s autonomous choice to spy on someone through a window over the watched person’s desire not to be watched while changing. More broadly, it’s understandable, too, that there should a sliding scale for the threshold of what constitutes tolerable infringements of either value across different cultures and national boundaries.

University of Michigan Internet law professor Susan Crawford also cautions against cagetorical thinking in the aforementioned NYTimes article:

Privacy is a broad enough concept, and Europe and America are varied enough, that it is easy to find counterexamples. Britain, for one, is only slowly moving toward the Continental model.

Something tells me, however, that the ideological divide will continue and deepen as online media continues to proliferate. I wonder how French courts would feel about the sale of copies of of Dumas’ and Mencken’s photos on this NY state-based site.

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Beyond Status Messages: Google's push into social sharing of updates, photos, videos & more.

Leaked yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, Google announced the deployment of Google Buzz, its exciting foray into providing its own real-time social media platform.

Other Google Social Media Endeavors

To say, however, Buzz is Google’s first social media venture is not quite right. In 2004, Google launched Orkut, its proprietary social network, to little fanfare and minimal Stateside impact to this day. According to demographic reports, over 50 percent of users hail from Brazil, roughly 20 percent from India, and a measly 17 percent from the US.

Interestingly, Google’s nascent real-time social media search has received considerably less media coverage (largely obscured by its release of Google Goggles on the same day and the existence of rivals like Collecta and Bing Twitter), although its ultimate impact on the largely untamed social media landscape, I think, could be tremendous. Echoing Michael Arrington’s sentiment, social media now feels like search did a decade ago. Perhaps Google can be the transformative force in real-time media, as it was in taming the vastness of the internet. Arrington writes:

A decade ago most of us were using AltaVista or something similar for search. No one was really complaining very much about the huge amount of spam and other noise that cluttered the results because we didn’t know there was a better way. Then Google came along with Page Rank, and had a profound effect on the quality of Internet search. Suddenly (and it really was that sudden), we couldn’t imagine going back to AltaVista and searching pages of results for the thing that Google gave us immediately.

…

The online social landscape today sort of feels to me like search did in 1999. It’s a mess, but we don’t complain much about it because we don’t know there’s a better way.

Google Buzz

Google Buzz may very well be the piece of social media that “unites the clans,” so to speak. While Gmail has allowed its 146 monthly million users (as of July 2009) to update Gchat statuses, this functionality lacked the timeline-view that allows one to view her friends’ update history, akin to viewing friends’ feeds on Facebook and Twitter. While Buzz links to external sites like YouTube and Picasa (which it owns), it also links to Twitter but doesn’t link to Facebook.  After a brief look at some of its other features and factors like competing ID systems, it becomes clear, I think, that Google is taking a big swing at Facebook with Google Buzz.

Multimedia sharing and viewing interface. A demonstration of Google Buzz’s multimedia viewing and sharing tools (see the video posted below) reveals moderately superior tools to Facebook’s. With roughly 15 billion photos (and adding 100 million/mo.) Facebook is quickly becoming the front-runner of user-generated online photo repositories (second only to ImageShack, which is growing at a much slower rate). It’s Facebook’s game to lose, and integration of Picasa into Buzz, which will ride Gmail’s coattails, will breathe new life into Google’s picture-posting positioning (say that three times fast).

Sharing privately and publicly & integration into Gmail. Unlike Facebook or Twitter (I think), Buzz will allow users to share updates with specific users (and only them, if the user so chooses), and will send responses immediately into one’s e-mail inbox. Beyond the benefit of automatically signing up users for Buzz, utilizing its integration into Gmail places Buzz updates in a much more interesting space than a mere update — part broadcast, part e-mail, part private message, all multimedia. A Google buzz communication may altogether become a new medium for communicating content-rich  messages to one or many users.

And further, the demographic ubiquity of Gmail versus the relatively older crowd of Tweeters may make it the preferred broadcasting medium over Twitter, placing it in direct competition with Facebook.

Mashable’s Adam Ostrow, however, makes an interesting point:

… Gmail has historically added people to your contacts based on e-mail interactions. Hence, this contact list often varies significantly from your friends on social sites where relationships need to be made explicitly.

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

True story, Adam — but neither Facebook nor Twitter allows updates to reach a specific group of people (as I said, I could be wrong; it seems that the closest thing is Facebook’s multi-user messages). Separately, it’s oftentimes the case that Facebook users don’t want all of their Facebook friends (which include, in many cases, family members, co-workers and others who you’d prefer not to see the “less professional” side of you) to see their updates, and so end up not posting their updates altogether.

That’s my two cents on Google Buzz thus far. Please feel free to send/share thoughts and other articles as the subject gains more media traction. Until then, bask in the glow of Buzz’s demo video below.

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