February 5, 2012
Significant and Silly at BuzzFeedBy DAVID CARR
When a Web site called BuzzFeed broke the news on the night of the Iowa caucuses that John McCain was endorsing Mitt Romney, more than a few readers scratched their heads and said, “What is a BuzzFeed?”
They’re about to find out.
BuzzFeed is the creation of Jonah Peretti, a graduate of the MIT Media Lab with an expertise in content that is likely to be “liked.” He took those skills to The Huffington Post, where he was the wizard in back of the curtain, brewing a bubbling cauldron of tatty celebrity news and goofy cat shots behind a front page of serious news and commentary. Using search optimization, he knew what people wanted almost before they did.
Mr. Peretti started BuzzFeed as a laboratory at first, making it less about what people were searching for and more about what they might share. He developed technologies that allowed BuzzFeed to determine very quickly what media content was being posted and shared — items that were contagious, the kind of thing that ends up on one person’s Facebook page and then suddenly, many other people’s. When The Huffington Post was sold to AOL last year, Mr. Peretti left and began working on BuzzFeed full-time.
With its mix of oddities, listicles and Web memes, BuzzFeed was at first something like The Huffington Post without the pretension of producing news and commentary. But in December, Mr. Peretti hired Ben Smith, the highly regarded blogger and columnist for Politico, to be his editor in chief. Right after he started in January, Mr. Smith broke the news of Mr. McCain’s endorsement of Mr. Romney for the New Hampshire primary. The message was clear: BuzzFeed was a player in news. (Mr. Smith still writes his weekly column for Politico.)
Soon afterward, BuzzFeed raised $15.5 million from Kenneth Lerer’s Lerer Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Hearst Interactive Media, Softbank and RRE Ventures. Mr. Smith immediately began hiring reporters, including Matt Buchanan from Gawker Media; John Herrman from Popular Mechanics; Rosie Gray from The Village Voice, and Doree Shafrir from RollingStone.com. BuzzFeed wasn’t just hiring brand names to serve as lustrous hood ornaments connoting credibility, the way Tina Brown and Arianna Huffington have. The hires at BuzzFeed were more like maypoles: young writers native to the Web who become pivot points for contents because they are bathed in both the ethos and practice of social media.
After a week in which Facebook announced an initial public offering that could end up in valuing it at $100 billion, it’s clear that the social Web — Facebook, Twitter and their ilk — will rival search — Google, Bing and their ilk — as a force for helping people find content. The average person’s Facebook feed, just like BuzzFeed, is a mix of the comical and the consequential, functioning as a kind of human-enabled RSS feed that belies the traditional architecture of media outlets.
In a sense, Mr. Peretti is reverse-engineering the HuffPo formula. At The Huffington Post, he used search optimization to create a gaudy funhouse behind a serious front page. At BuzzFeed, the funhouse was the point of it all. The main headers on the home page told the story: “LOL,” “cute,” “win,” “fail,” “omg,” “geeky,” “trashy” and “wtf?”
But with the addition of Mr. Smith and his new hires, BuzzFeed is growing some serious news muscles under a silly, frilly skin, and added the header “2012” for election coverage. (More traditional news verticals will be rolled out in the coming months.) It’s gone well so far, with comScore showing 10.8 million unique visitors in December, more than double that of the same month in 2010.
Its business model, in part, capitalizes on the mix of high and low content; instead of banner ads, BuzzFeed works with companies like Pillsbury to create content ideal for sharing, including “10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do With a Crescent Roll.”
If it is successful, BuzzFeed will generate the kind of traffic that will rival behemoths like, yes, The Huffington Post. Mr. Peretti says that BuzzFeed makes a profit some months, but given the level of investment and growth — there are now 78 people in its Flatiron offices — the burn rate on that new chunk of capital is significant. “It’s fun to watch them make all these hires,” said Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl site and a veteran of the New York Web scene. “But it’s important that they don’t overspend. Web ad rates are what they are and that isn’t going to change.”
Mr. Peretti says he is not, and won’t be, competing with The Huffington Post, in part because that would be awkward since he and Mr. Lerer were among the founders of that site. Sitting in the coffee area of BuzzFeed’s offices on West 21st Street in Manhattan, he pointed out that there is nothing more viral than news that no one else has, so it makes sense to create some. With Mr. Smith sharing the table, he said that BuzzFeed is a natural response to a changing ecosystem.
“As the world has realigned from being about portals and then search and now social, how do you build a media company for a social world?” he said. “And a big part of that is scoops and exclusives and original content, and it’s also about cute kittens in an entertaining cultural context.”
As the consumer Web has matured, readers have become minipublishers, using social media platforms to share information they think will entertain and enlighten their friends. No longer is it just about so-called sticky content that keeps readers around, or even clicky content that causes them to hit a link; it’s also about serving up content that is spreadable.
Hit the right note, and your readers become like bees, stopping by your site to grab links and heading back out on the Web to pollinate other platforms. That behavior has tapped into something visceral, a kind of game in which the person finding something delicious gains social capital for sharing it.
“I can remember when I first had lunch with Jonah, he talked a lot about the social Web,” Mr. Smith said. “I left thinking he had just filled my head with jargon, and then it gradually dawned on me that it is actually where I am just living.”
Before he went to BuzzFeed, Mr. Smith was a force on Twitter, with about 60,000 followers. He was known as a reporter who not only broke news on Twitter but also served as a signal tower, providing links for the news made by others.
Now he is overseeing an editorial world where there are still articles like “The Cutest Boys With Dogs” (not to be confused with “30 Cats Sitting Like Humans”) and “50 Things You Will Never See in Real Life,” which includes a picture of a Chihuahua wearing double cheeseburgers for shoes. That odd numerology is an update of the ancient dark arts in publishing. For some reason, putting a number on something makes it irresistible. For decades, women’s magazines have been telling you about “101 Sure-Fire Ways to Lose Weight” and “18 Secrets to Winning His Heart.”
But those numbers riffs now sit side by side with serious news about fraudulent mortgage foreclosures. “I am hiring people who don’t just want to waste their time reporting other people’s work,” he said. “No one is going to care if we come up with a story that is almost as good as someone else’s scoop four hours earlier.”
Mr. Peretti already had a team of editors who knew how to take commodity content and refashion it into something new, but he wanted more. News is the killer app, and does not depend on search optimization: The Web immediately points at your site when you have an actual scoop. That’s where Mr. Smith and his team of digitally enabled journalists come in.
So now Mr. Peretti has high and low, news and fun, all ready for sharing. “People are now used to having everything mixed together in a Facebook newsfeed,” Mr. Peretti said. “A story about the Arab Spring will be next to a picture of your sister’s new baby. Why not have a publishing site that embraces those colliding worlds?”
Showing posts with label Social Network. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Network. Show all posts
Sunday, February 05, 2012
Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’ By NICK BILTON
February 5, 2012, 11:00 am
Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’ By NICK BILTON
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg NewsMark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook, spoke at a Facebook conference in September.FacebookTwitterLinkedinShareShareCloseRedditTumblrDiggE-mail
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SAN FRANCISCO — By my calculation, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owes me about $50.
Without me, and the other 844,999,999 people poking, liking and sharing on the site, Facebook would look like a scene from the postapocalyptic movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: bleak, desolate and really quite sad. (Or MySpace, if that is easier to imagine.) Facebook surely would never be valued at anything close to $100 billion, which it very well could be in its coming initial public offering.
In the company’s S-1 filing, submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, Facebook boasts about its statistics: annually, people “like” one trillion things; 91 billion photos are uploaded; half a billion people use Facebook on mobile phones; and hundreds of millions are annoyingly “poked.”
So all this leaves me with a question: Where’s my cut? I helped build this thing, too. Facebook laid the foundation of the house and put in the plumbing, but we put up the walls, picked out the furniture, painted and hung photos, and invited everyone over for dinner parties.
So why am I asking for money from Facebook and not Google? Although there have been hundreds of technology-related I.P.O.’s over the last decade, Facebook is the first real social-media public offering, where the content on the site is entirely created by its users. (The closest, LinkedIn, had additional business models, including premium payment subscriptions.) “The idea that a business benefits from social interaction is not so strange or new. A lot of cafes and small restaurants will let people hang out because they attract other people,” said Yannis M. Ioannides, a professor of economics at Tufts University. “What is unusual and new is that Facebook takes access to information about these people to make its business more powerful.” He added: “The proprietor of a cafe doesn’t use personal information about me and my friends to make money.”
Mr. Ioannides suggests that Facebook and other social Web sites could create a two-way financial street. Facebook, for example, could pay the people who create content on the site. The company could then make money by matching the content with advertising, as it does now. As an alternative for more private individuals, people could pay to use Facebook if it promised not to sift through their personal information. This way, everyone wins.
I for one would feel more comfortable with Facebook looking through my phonebook, wallet and underwear drawer if I knew I was going to get paid for it.
Jaron Lanier, one of the deepest thinkers on the impacts of technology on society and an “innovator in residence” at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, worries about companies like Facebook and Twitter not paying their users while the people lucky enough to work for them become rich from free user-generated content. Mr. Lanier says that as more money flows to those who build these networks, society distorts and divides. Those without the skills needed in this new economy — other than to tweet and post pictures — can fall further behind economically.
“The value comes from the people; none of it is self-created,” Mr. Lanier said in an interview. He warns that if society doesn’t devise economic solutions to social networks, there could be “serious social blowback.”
Sure, $50 might not seem like a lot of money right now, but if Facebook continues to grow as it has in the past, its $4 billion in annual revenue could be in the tens of billions of dollars in a few years. If that happens, I should be expecting a dividend.
So, Mr. Zuckerberg, feel free to message me on Facebook, and I’ll give you my address so you can send me a check — unless, as I suspect, you already know where I live.
Disruptions: Facebook Users Ask, ‘Where’s Our Cut?’ By NICK BILTON
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg NewsMark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer and founder of Facebook, spoke at a Facebook conference in September.FacebookTwitterLinkedinShareShareCloseRedditTumblrDiggE-mail
SAN FRANCISCO — By my calculation, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owes me about $50.
Without me, and the other 844,999,999 people poking, liking and sharing on the site, Facebook would look like a scene from the postapocalyptic movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: bleak, desolate and really quite sad. (Or MySpace, if that is easier to imagine.) Facebook surely would never be valued at anything close to $100 billion, which it very well could be in its coming initial public offering.
In the company’s S-1 filing, submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, Facebook boasts about its statistics: annually, people “like” one trillion things; 91 billion photos are uploaded; half a billion people use Facebook on mobile phones; and hundreds of millions are annoyingly “poked.”
So all this leaves me with a question: Where’s my cut? I helped build this thing, too. Facebook laid the foundation of the house and put in the plumbing, but we put up the walls, picked out the furniture, painted and hung photos, and invited everyone over for dinner parties.
So why am I asking for money from Facebook and not Google? Although there have been hundreds of technology-related I.P.O.’s over the last decade, Facebook is the first real social-media public offering, where the content on the site is entirely created by its users. (The closest, LinkedIn, had additional business models, including premium payment subscriptions.) “The idea that a business benefits from social interaction is not so strange or new. A lot of cafes and small restaurants will let people hang out because they attract other people,” said Yannis M. Ioannides, a professor of economics at Tufts University. “What is unusual and new is that Facebook takes access to information about these people to make its business more powerful.” He added: “The proprietor of a cafe doesn’t use personal information about me and my friends to make money.”
Mr. Ioannides suggests that Facebook and other social Web sites could create a two-way financial street. Facebook, for example, could pay the people who create content on the site. The company could then make money by matching the content with advertising, as it does now. As an alternative for more private individuals, people could pay to use Facebook if it promised not to sift through their personal information. This way, everyone wins.
I for one would feel more comfortable with Facebook looking through my phonebook, wallet and underwear drawer if I knew I was going to get paid for it.
Jaron Lanier, one of the deepest thinkers on the impacts of technology on society and an “innovator in residence” at the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California, worries about companies like Facebook and Twitter not paying their users while the people lucky enough to work for them become rich from free user-generated content. Mr. Lanier says that as more money flows to those who build these networks, society distorts and divides. Those without the skills needed in this new economy — other than to tweet and post pictures — can fall further behind economically.
“The value comes from the people; none of it is self-created,” Mr. Lanier said in an interview. He warns that if society doesn’t devise economic solutions to social networks, there could be “serious social blowback.”
Sure, $50 might not seem like a lot of money right now, but if Facebook continues to grow as it has in the past, its $4 billion in annual revenue could be in the tens of billions of dollars in a few years. If that happens, I should be expecting a dividend.
So, Mr. Zuckerberg, feel free to message me on Facebook, and I’ll give you my address so you can send me a check — unless, as I suspect, you already know where I live.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds By Brandon Keim
Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds By Brandon Keim 
- May 16, 2011 |
- 6:30 pm |
- Categories: Brains and Behavior
When people can learn what others think, the wisdom of crowds may veer towards ignorance.
In a new study of crowd wisdom — the statistical phenomenon by which individual biases cancel each other out, distilling hundreds or thousands of individual guesses into uncannily accurate average answers — researchers told test participants about their peers’ guesses. As a result, their group insight went awry.
“Although groups are initially ‘wise,’ knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines” collective wisdom, wrote researchers led by mathematician Jan Lorenz and sociologist Heiko Rahut of Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 16. “Even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect.”
The effect — perhaps better described as the accuracy of crowds, since it best applies to questions involving quantifiable estimates — has been described for decades, beginning with Francis Galton’s 1907 account of fairgoers guessing an ox’s weight< It reached mainstream prominence with economist James Surowiecki's 2004 bestseller, The Wisdom of Crowds.
Study participants were asked how many murders occurred in Switzerland in 2006. At the end of each round of questioning, they were given small payments for coming close to the actual answer (signified by the gray bar). At left is the range of responses among participants who received no information about others.
Take those away, and crowd intelligence fails, as evidenced in some market bubbles. Computer modeling of crowd behavior also hints at dynamics underlying crowd breakdowns, with he balance between information flow and diverse opinions becoming skewed.
Lorenz and Rahut’s experiment fits between large-scale, real-world messiness and theoretical investigation. They recruited 144 students from ETH Zurich, sitting them in isolated cubicles and asking them to guess Switzerland’s population density, the length of its border with Italy, the number of new immigrants to Zurich and how many crimes were committed in 2006.
After answering, test subjects were given a small monetary reward based on their answer’s accuracy, then asked again. This proceeded for four more rounds; and while some students didn’t learn what their peers guessed, others were told.
As testing progressed, the average answers of independent test subjects became more accurate, in keeping with the wisdom-of-crowds phenomenon. Socially influenced test subjects, however, actually became less accurate.
The researchers attributed this to three effects. The first they called “social influence”: Opinions became less diverse. The second effect was “range reduction”: In mathematical terms, correct answers became clustered at the group’s edges. Exacerbating it all was the “confidence effect,” in which students became more certain about their guesses.
“The truth becomes less central if social influence is allowed,” wrote Lorenz and Rahut, who think this problem could be intensified in markets and politics — systems that rely on collective assessment.
“Opinion polls and the mass media largely promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence of how we judge the facts,” they wrote. The wisdom of crowds is valuable, but used improperly it “creates overconfidence in possibly false beliefs.”
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Keeping Our Distance, the Facebook Way By DAMON DARLIN
October 9, 2010
Keeping Our Distance, the Facebook Way By DAMON DARLIN
FACEBOOK is the best distancing tool since the creation of the Christmas card.
Sending holiday greeting cards began in the 1850s in England and spread quickly as a way to stay in touch with far-flung friends and relatives. The cards, whether religious or not in theme, went to people you rarely wrote to and even more rarely spoke to, but for whom you still had a measure of affection — or curiosity. You wanted to know what was going on in their lives, and one exchange a year did the trick.
The cards kept the people in your social network at a distance, while maintaining ties to them. I recall my parents sending and receiving Christmas cards. I did it for a year after I married, but I stopped because it was just too much work.
Facebook, which tries to replicate our real-world relationships online, now helps me maintain those connections. But it does cards one better. It preserves the weak ties in my social network without creating obligations.
A problem I have with holiday cards is that receiving one creates an obligation to send one back. If you don’t, you can expect to be dropped from the friend’s mailing list. You have to send a card next year to re-establish the ties, fully expecting not to get a card in return because of the earlier faux pas. (I do still get four cards each December from non-obligation-seeking friends — and enjoy each one.)
There is no exact way to measure the decline of holiday cards. But the overall drop in the amount of December mail might serve as an approximate indicator. The United States Postal Service reports that the December volume of first-class mail — no catalogs, packages or junk mail — fell 18 percent from a peak in 2002.
Facebook, meanwhile, has grown to 500 million users worldwide and continues to find new users. And Facebook says it finds it hard to think that anyone would want to use their service to keep people away. And yet, last week, it introduced a new service that allows people to divvy up their friends into cliques, a tacit acknowledgment that we hold most of our Facebook friends at a distance.
But it is the lack of obligations that makes Facebook better than other forms of communication. It’s socially efficient and even appears to make staying in touch a whole lot less work. You can read about friends taking their children to soccer games, but your lack of response doesn’t mean that you will stop hearing about their birthday parties, swim lessons, prom nights and graduations.
You can even hide a friend’s messages and they are none the wiser. Facebook also lets people create hierarchies of friends so that information can be shared selectively. No one but you sees the cliques you assign people to. It shouldn’t be too surprising that Facebook has this effect. After all, technology has a grand tradition of distancing people from one another for the sake of efficiency.
The automated gas pump ensures that you no longer interact with a station attendant unless you have a hankering for a slushie and a Slim Jim. The bank A.T.M. has stopped us from exchanging pleasantries with the teller as we collect our $20 bills. And supermarkets are constantly experimenting with self-checkout technology that will remove the line-slowing interaction with a human clerk from the process.
Talking on the phone replaced face-to-face meetings. Now texting is taking the place of many phone conversations. But those calls may not be missed any more than we now miss talking to bank tellers, as they often require small talk and can be awkward to break off. For the recipients, they are an interruption.
(Of course, Apple is advertising face-to-face video phone calls with the same kind of emotion that AT&T used in its old “reach out and touch someone” campaigns. But I suspect that calls are a lost cause.)
Despite its ability to conveniently hold friends at a distance, Facebook can also bestow benefits to those users who make a little effort to keep track of what their friends are saying there. Cameron Marlow, a research scientist who has been described as Facebook’s in-house sociologist, says it relates to social capital: Your friends on Facebook have resources — a guest room or a job, for instance. You may want to know that information, but finding it depends in no small amount on serendipity and your ability to pay attention to their posts. But you also have to be willing to ask for those resources.
Mr. Marlow says that more in-bound communication increases one’s social capital. “The more they have communication with me, the lower the cost of me reaching out to them,” he said.
And a little reciprocity increases the amount of information we receive. The new feature, Facebook groups, allows like-minded friends to more easily share information.
EVEN people who aren’t very sociable on Facebook can benefit from the knowledge they gain about their friends. “You look them up; you see what they do,” Mr. Marlow says. “Six months later you could reach out. There is no social norm against reaching out.”
There was a day, he said, when “birthday or Christmas cards were the only way to reach out and say I care about you,” said Mr. Marlow. But now, whether you hold friends close or not, you gain timely and useful information as it trickles out, and not in a once-a-year data dump.
Keeping Our Distance, the Facebook Way By DAMON DARLIN
FACEBOOK is the best distancing tool since the creation of the Christmas card.
Sending holiday greeting cards began in the 1850s in England and spread quickly as a way to stay in touch with far-flung friends and relatives. The cards, whether religious or not in theme, went to people you rarely wrote to and even more rarely spoke to, but for whom you still had a measure of affection — or curiosity. You wanted to know what was going on in their lives, and one exchange a year did the trick.
The cards kept the people in your social network at a distance, while maintaining ties to them. I recall my parents sending and receiving Christmas cards. I did it for a year after I married, but I stopped because it was just too much work.
Facebook, which tries to replicate our real-world relationships online, now helps me maintain those connections. But it does cards one better. It preserves the weak ties in my social network without creating obligations.
A problem I have with holiday cards is that receiving one creates an obligation to send one back. If you don’t, you can expect to be dropped from the friend’s mailing list. You have to send a card next year to re-establish the ties, fully expecting not to get a card in return because of the earlier faux pas. (I do still get four cards each December from non-obligation-seeking friends — and enjoy each one.)
There is no exact way to measure the decline of holiday cards. But the overall drop in the amount of December mail might serve as an approximate indicator. The United States Postal Service reports that the December volume of first-class mail — no catalogs, packages or junk mail — fell 18 percent from a peak in 2002.
Facebook, meanwhile, has grown to 500 million users worldwide and continues to find new users. And Facebook says it finds it hard to think that anyone would want to use their service to keep people away. And yet, last week, it introduced a new service that allows people to divvy up their friends into cliques, a tacit acknowledgment that we hold most of our Facebook friends at a distance.
But it is the lack of obligations that makes Facebook better than other forms of communication. It’s socially efficient and even appears to make staying in touch a whole lot less work. You can read about friends taking their children to soccer games, but your lack of response doesn’t mean that you will stop hearing about their birthday parties, swim lessons, prom nights and graduations.
You can even hide a friend’s messages and they are none the wiser. Facebook also lets people create hierarchies of friends so that information can be shared selectively. No one but you sees the cliques you assign people to. It shouldn’t be too surprising that Facebook has this effect. After all, technology has a grand tradition of distancing people from one another for the sake of efficiency.
The automated gas pump ensures that you no longer interact with a station attendant unless you have a hankering for a slushie and a Slim Jim. The bank A.T.M. has stopped us from exchanging pleasantries with the teller as we collect our $20 bills. And supermarkets are constantly experimenting with self-checkout technology that will remove the line-slowing interaction with a human clerk from the process.
Talking on the phone replaced face-to-face meetings. Now texting is taking the place of many phone conversations. But those calls may not be missed any more than we now miss talking to bank tellers, as they often require small talk and can be awkward to break off. For the recipients, they are an interruption.
(Of course, Apple is advertising face-to-face video phone calls with the same kind of emotion that AT&T used in its old “reach out and touch someone” campaigns. But I suspect that calls are a lost cause.)
Despite its ability to conveniently hold friends at a distance, Facebook can also bestow benefits to those users who make a little effort to keep track of what their friends are saying there. Cameron Marlow, a research scientist who has been described as Facebook’s in-house sociologist, says it relates to social capital: Your friends on Facebook have resources — a guest room or a job, for instance. You may want to know that information, but finding it depends in no small amount on serendipity and your ability to pay attention to their posts. But you also have to be willing to ask for those resources.
Mr. Marlow says that more in-bound communication increases one’s social capital. “The more they have communication with me, the lower the cost of me reaching out to them,” he said.
And a little reciprocity increases the amount of information we receive. The new feature, Facebook groups, allows like-minded friends to more easily share information.
EVEN people who aren’t very sociable on Facebook can benefit from the knowledge they gain about their friends. “You look them up; you see what they do,” Mr. Marlow says. “Six months later you could reach out. There is no social norm against reaching out.”
There was a day, he said, when “birthday or Christmas cards were the only way to reach out and say I care about you,” said Mr. Marlow. But now, whether you hold friends close or not, you gain timely and useful information as it trickles out, and not in a once-a-year data dump.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Texts Without Context By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
March 21, 2010
Texts Without Context By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.
“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.
THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.
At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.
Even some outspoken cheerleaders of Internet technology have begun to grapple with some of its more vexing side effects. Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
WORRYING ABOUT the public’s growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload, of course, is hardly new. It’s been 25 years since Neil Postman warned in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that trivia and the entertainment values promoted by television were creating distractions that threatened to subvert public discourse, and more than a decade since writers like James Gleick (“Faster”) and David Shenk (“Data Smog”) described a culture addicted to speed, drowning in data and overstimulated to the point where only sensationalism and willful hyperbole grab people’s attention.
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
“Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” the scholar Susan Jacoby writes in “The Age of American Unreason.” “What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”
TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY has bestowed miracles of access and convenience upon millions of people, and it’s also proven to be a vital new means of communication. Twitter has been used by Iranian dissidents; text messaging and social networking Web sites have been used to help coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti; YouTube has been used by professors to teach math and chemistry. But technology is also turning us into a global water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via e-mail, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors and the sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break. And in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse — often at the expense of hard news. “I have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,” the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. “I think it’s driven by people who are” slacking off at work and “surfing the Internet.” He added, “It’s like a country run by ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”
MSNBC’s new program “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which usually focuses on business and politics, has a “While you were working ...” segment in which viewers are asked to send in “some of the strangest and outrageous stories you’ve found on the Internet,” and the most e-mailed lists on popular news sites tend to feature articles about pets, food, celebrities and self-improvement. For instance, at one point on March 11, the top story on The Washington Post’s Web site was “Maintaining a Sex Life,” while the top story on Reddit.com, a user-generated news link site, was “(Funny) Sexy Girl? Do Not Trust Profile Pictures!”
Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.
Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.
Digital culture, he writes in “You Are Not a Gadget,” “is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia,” with rooms of “M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.”
AT THE SAME time the Internet’s nurturing of niche cultures is contributing to what Cass Sunstein calls “cyberbalkanization.” Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.”
“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, he writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities.” He adds that studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.
One result of this nicheification of the world is that consensus and common ground grow ever smaller, civic discourse gets a lot less civil, and pluralism — what Isaiah Berlin called the idea that “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light” from “worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own” — comes to feel increasingly elusive.
As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” Politicians and voters on the right and left not only hold different opinions from one another, but often can’t even agree over a shared set of facts, as clashes over climate change, health care and the Iraq war attest.
THE WEB’S amplification of subjectivity applies to culture as well as politics, fueling a phenomenon that has been gaining hold over America for several decades, with pundits squeezing out reporters on cable news, with authors writing biographies animated by personal and ideological agendas, with tell-all memoirs, talk-show confessionals, self-dramatizing blogs and carefully tended Facebook and MySpace pages becoming almost de rigeur.
As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.
As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”
Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups. Should the writers of television shows listen to fan feedback or a network’s audience testing? Does the desire to get an article on a “most e-mailed” list consciously or unconsciously influence how reporters and editors go about their assignments and approaches to stories? Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?
As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”
For that matter, the very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world. In a recent Newsweek cover story pegged to the Tiger Woods scandal, Neal Gabler, the author of “Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” absurdly asserts that celebrity is “the great new art form of the 21st century.”
Celebrity, Mr. Gabler argues, “competes with — and often supersedes — more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays and TV shows,” and it performs, he says, “in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community.”
However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television, and memoir writing has become a rite of passage for actors, politicians and celebrities of every ilk. At the same time our cultural landscape is brimming over with parodies, homages, variations, pastiches, collages and others forms of “appropriation art” — much of it facilitated by new technology that makes remixing, and cutting-and-pasting easy enough for a child.
It’s no longer just hip-hop sampling that rules in youth culture, but also jukebox musicals like “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” and works like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which features characters drawn from a host of classic adventures. Fan fiction and fan edits are thriving, as are karaoke contests, video games like Guitar Hero, and YouTube mash-ups of music and movie, television and visual images. These recyclings and post-modern experiments run the gamut in quality. Some, like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” are beautifully rendered works of art in their own right. Some, like J. J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” film and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen’s “Emma”) are inspired reinventions of classics. Some fan-made videos are extremely clever and inventive, and some, like a 3-D video version of Picasso’s “Guernica” posted on YouTube, are intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation.
All too often, however, the recycling and cut-and-paste esthetic has resulted in tired imitations; cheap, lazy re-dos; or works of “appropriation” designed to generate controversy like Mr. Shields’s “Reality Hunger.” Lady Gaga is third-generation Madonna; many jukebox or tribute musicals like “Good Vibrations” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” do an embarrassing disservice to the artists who inspired them; and the rote remaking of old television shows into films (from “The Brady Bunch” to “Charlie’s Angels” to “Get Smart”), not to mention the recycling of video games into movies (like “Tomb Raider” and “Resident Evil”) often seem as pointless as they are now predictable.
Writing in a 2005 Wired article that “new technologies redefine us,” William Gibson hailed audience participation and argued that “an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product.” Indeed, he said, “audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.”
To Mr. Lanier, however, the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
March 21, 2010
FURTHER READING
Words, Version 2.0
A bookshelf for further reading:
REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO
By David Shields
219 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET:
A Manifesto
By Jaron Lanier
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS
By Nicholas Carr
288 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95. (Scheduled for release in June.)
TRUE ENOUGH: LEARNING TO LIVE IN A POST-FACT SOCIETY
By Farhad Manjoo
250 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $25.95.
THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
357 pages. Vintage Books. $15.95.
INFOTOPIA: HOW MANY MINDS PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE
By Cass R. Sunstein
273 pages. Oxford University Press. $15.95.
GOING TO EXTREMES: HOW LIKE MINDS UNITE AND DIVIDE
By Cass R. Sunstein
199 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.95.
THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
By Andrew Keen
256 pages. Doubleday. $14.00.
Texts Without Context By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers like Philip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow — quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.
“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.
Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.
THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.
At the same time it’s clear that technology and the mechanisms of the Web have been accelerating certain trends already percolating through our culture — including the blurring of news and entertainment, a growing polarization in national politics, a deconstructionist view of literature (which emphasizes a critic’s or reader’s interpretation of a text, rather than the text’s actual content), the prominence of postmodernism in the form of mash-ups and bricolage, and a growing cultural relativism that has been advanced on the left by multiculturalists and radical feminists, who argue that history is an adjunct of identity politics, and on the right by creationists and climate-change denialists, who suggest that science is an instrument of leftist ideologues.
Even some outspoken cheerleaders of Internet technology have begun to grapple with some of its more vexing side effects. Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”
Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
WORRYING ABOUT the public’s growing attention deficit disorder and susceptibility to information overload, of course, is hardly new. It’s been 25 years since Neil Postman warned in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that trivia and the entertainment values promoted by television were creating distractions that threatened to subvert public discourse, and more than a decade since writers like James Gleick (“Faster”) and David Shenk (“Data Smog”) described a culture addicted to speed, drowning in data and overstimulated to the point where only sensationalism and willful hyperbole grab people’s attention.
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Recent books by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (“Outliers”), Susan Faludi (“The Terror Dream”) and Jane Jacobs (“Dark Age Ahead”) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes — instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the books that first established their reputations. And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
“Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” the scholar Susan Jacoby writes in “The Age of American Unreason.” “What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”
TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY has bestowed miracles of access and convenience upon millions of people, and it’s also proven to be a vital new means of communication. Twitter has been used by Iranian dissidents; text messaging and social networking Web sites have been used to help coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti; YouTube has been used by professors to teach math and chemistry. But technology is also turning us into a global water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via e-mail, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors and the sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break. And in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse — often at the expense of hard news. “I have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,” the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. “I think it’s driven by people who are” slacking off at work and “surfing the Internet.” He added, “It’s like a country run by ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos.’ ”
MSNBC’s new program “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” which usually focuses on business and politics, has a “While you were working ...” segment in which viewers are asked to send in “some of the strangest and outrageous stories you’ve found on the Internet,” and the most e-mailed lists on popular news sites tend to feature articles about pets, food, celebrities and self-improvement. For instance, at one point on March 11, the top story on The Washington Post’s Web site was “Maintaining a Sex Life,” while the top story on Reddit.com, a user-generated news link site, was “(Funny) Sexy Girl? Do Not Trust Profile Pictures!”
Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.
Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
For his part Mr. Lanier says that because the Internet is a kind of “pseudoworld” without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, he argues, it can also devolve into a “Lord of the Flies”-like nastiness, with lots of “bullying, voracious irritability and selfishness” — qualities enhanced, he says, by the anonymity, peer pressure and mob rule that thrive online.
Digital culture, he writes in “You Are Not a Gadget,” “is comprised of wave after wave of juvenilia,” with rooms of “M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks.”
AT THE SAME time the Internet’s nurturing of niche cultures is contributing to what Cass Sunstein calls “cyberbalkanization.” Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite Web sites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier, as Mr. Sunstein observes in his 2009 book “Going to Extremes,” for people “to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions.”
“Serendipitous encounters” with persons and ideas different from one’s own, he writes, tend to grow less frequent, while “views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, can be found in large numbers on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible or bizarre in most communities.” He adds that studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.
One result of this nicheification of the world is that consensus and common ground grow ever smaller, civic discourse gets a lot less civil, and pluralism — what Isaiah Berlin called the idea that “there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and sympathizing and deriving light” from “worlds, outlooks, very remote from our own” — comes to feel increasingly elusive.
As Mr. Manjoo observes in “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society” (2008), the way in which “information now moves through society — on currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality” — has fostered deception and propaganda and also created what he calls a “Rashomon world” where “the very idea of objective reality is under attack.” Politicians and voters on the right and left not only hold different opinions from one another, but often can’t even agree over a shared set of facts, as clashes over climate change, health care and the Iraq war attest.
THE WEB’S amplification of subjectivity applies to culture as well as politics, fueling a phenomenon that has been gaining hold over America for several decades, with pundits squeezing out reporters on cable news, with authors writing biographies animated by personal and ideological agendas, with tell-all memoirs, talk-show confessionals, self-dramatizing blogs and carefully tended Facebook and MySpace pages becoming almost de rigeur.
As for the textual analysis known as deconstruction, which became fashionable in American academia in the 1980s, it enshrined individual readers’ subjective responses to a text over the text itself, thereby suggesting that the very idea of the author (and any sense of original intent) was dead. In doing so, deconstruction uncannily presaged arguments advanced by digerati like Kevin Kelly, who in a 2006 article for The New York Times Magazine looked forward to the day when books would cease to be individual works but would be scanned and digitized into one great, big continuous text that could be “unraveled into single pages” or “reduced further, into snippets of a page,” which readers — like David Shields, presumably — could then appropriate and remix, like bits of music, into new works of their own.
As John Updike pointed out, Mr. Kelly’s vision would in effect mean “the end of authorship” — hobbling writers’ ability to earn a living from their published works, while at the same time removing a sense of both recognition and accountability from their creations. In a Web world where copies of books (and articles and music and other content) are cheap or free, Mr. Kelly has suggested, authors and artists could make money by selling “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information” and other aspects of their work that cannot be copied. But while such schemes may work for artists who happen to be entrepreneurial, self-promoting and charismatic, Mr. Lanier says he fears that for “the vast majority of journalists, musicians, artists and filmmakers” it simply means “career oblivion.”
Other challenges to the autonomy of the artist come from new interactive media and from constant polls on television and the Web, which ask audience members for feedback on television shows, movies and music; and from fan bulletin boards, which often function like giant focus groups. Should the writers of television shows listen to fan feedback or a network’s audience testing? Does the desire to get an article on a “most e-mailed” list consciously or unconsciously influence how reporters and editors go about their assignments and approaches to stories? Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?
As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,” Mr. Carr writes in “The Shallows,” authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.”
For that matter, the very value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is increasingly being questioned in our copy-mad, postmodern digital world. In a recent Newsweek cover story pegged to the Tiger Woods scandal, Neal Gabler, the author of “Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” absurdly asserts that celebrity is “the great new art form of the 21st century.”
Celebrity, Mr. Gabler argues, “competes with — and often supersedes — more traditional entertainments like movies, books, plays and TV shows,” and it performs, he says, “in its own roundabout way, many of the functions those old media performed in their heyday: among them, distracting us, sensitizing us to the human condition, and creating a fund of common experience around which we can form a national community.”
However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television, and memoir writing has become a rite of passage for actors, politicians and celebrities of every ilk. At the same time our cultural landscape is brimming over with parodies, homages, variations, pastiches, collages and others forms of “appropriation art” — much of it facilitated by new technology that makes remixing, and cutting-and-pasting easy enough for a child.
It’s no longer just hip-hop sampling that rules in youth culture, but also jukebox musicals like “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” and works like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which features characters drawn from a host of classic adventures. Fan fiction and fan edits are thriving, as are karaoke contests, video games like Guitar Hero, and YouTube mash-ups of music and movie, television and visual images. These recyclings and post-modern experiments run the gamut in quality. Some, like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” are beautifully rendered works of art in their own right. Some, like J. J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” film and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen’s “Emma”) are inspired reinventions of classics. Some fan-made videos are extremely clever and inventive, and some, like a 3-D video version of Picasso’s “Guernica” posted on YouTube, are intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation.
All too often, however, the recycling and cut-and-paste esthetic has resulted in tired imitations; cheap, lazy re-dos; or works of “appropriation” designed to generate controversy like Mr. Shields’s “Reality Hunger.” Lady Gaga is third-generation Madonna; many jukebox or tribute musicals like “Good Vibrations” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” do an embarrassing disservice to the artists who inspired them; and the rote remaking of old television shows into films (from “The Brady Bunch” to “Charlie’s Angels” to “Get Smart”), not to mention the recycling of video games into movies (like “Tomb Raider” and “Resident Evil”) often seem as pointless as they are now predictable.
Writing in a 2005 Wired article that “new technologies redefine us,” William Gibson hailed audience participation and argued that “an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product.” Indeed, he said, “audience is as antique a term as record, the one archaically passive, the other archaically physical. The record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital.”
To Mr. Lanier, however, the prevalence of mash-ups in today’s culture is a sign of “nostalgic malaise.” “Online culture,” he writes, “is dominated by trivial mash-ups of the culture that existed before the onset of mash-ups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.”
He points out that much of the chatter online today is actually “driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media,” which many digerati mock as old-fashioned and passé, and which is now being destroyed by the Internet. “Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn,” Mr. Lanier writes. “There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the Web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.”
March 21, 2010
FURTHER READING
Words, Version 2.0
A bookshelf for further reading:
REALITY HUNGER: A MANIFESTO
By David Shields
219 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET:
A Manifesto
By Jaron Lanier
209 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.
THE SHALLOWS: WHAT THE INTERNET IS DOING TO OUR BRAINS
By Nicholas Carr
288 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95. (Scheduled for release in June.)
TRUE ENOUGH: LEARNING TO LIVE IN A POST-FACT SOCIETY
By Farhad Manjoo
250 pages. John Wiley & Sons. $25.95.
THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON
By Susan Jacoby
357 pages. Vintage Books. $15.95.
INFOTOPIA: HOW MANY MINDS PRODUCE KNOWLEDGE
By Cass R. Sunstein
273 pages. Oxford University Press. $15.95.
GOING TO EXTREMES: HOW LIKE MINDS UNITE AND DIVIDE
By Cass R. Sunstein
199 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.95.
THE CULT OF THE AMATEUR
By Andrew Keen
256 pages. Doubleday. $14.00.
Sunday, January 03, 2010
Why Twitter Will Endure by David Carr
January 1, 2010
By DAVID CARR
I can remember when I first thought seriously about Twitter. Last March, I was at the SXSW conference, a conclave in Austin, Tex., where technology, media and music are mashed up and re-imagined, and, not so coincidentally, where Twitter first rolled out in 2007. As someone who was oversubscribed on Facebook, overwhelmed by the computer-generated RSS feeds of news that came flying at me, and swamped by incoming e-mail messages, the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion into my life.
And then there was the name. Twitter.
In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting, the verb, “to tweet” is even more embarrassing.
Beyond the dippy lingo, the idea that something intelligent, something worthy of mindshare, might occur in the space of 140 characters — Twitter’s parameters were set by what would fit in a text message on a phone — seems unlikely.
But it was clear that at the conference, the primary news platform was Twitter, with real-time annotation of the panels on stage and critical updates about what was happening elsewhere at a very hectic convention. At 52, I succumbed, partly out of professional necessity.
And now, nearly a year later, has Twitter turned my brain to mush? No, I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible, and instead of spending a half-hour surfing in search of illumination, I get a sense of the day’s news and how people are reacting to it in the time that it takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks. Yes, I worry about my ability to think long thoughts — where was I, anyway? — but the tradeoff has been worth it.
Some time soon, the company won’t say when, the 100-millionth person will have signed on to Twitter to follow and be followed by friends and strangers. That may sound like a MySpace waiting to happen — remember MySpace? — but I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay.
And I’m not alone.
“The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool Web sites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” said Steven Johnson, the author and technology observer who wrote a seminal piece about Twitter for Time last June. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”
Really? What could anyone possibly find useful in this cacophony of short-burst communication?
Well, that depends on whom you ask, but more importantly whom you follow. On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.
The most frequent objection to Twitter is a predictable one: “I don’t need to know someone is eating a donut right now.” But if that someone is a serious user of Twitter, she or he might actually be eating the curmudgeon’s lunch, racing ahead with a clear, up-to-the-second picture of an increasingly connected, busy world. The service has obvious utility for a journalist, but no matter what business you are in, imagine knowing what the thought leaders in your industry were reading and considering. And beyond following specific individuals, Twitter hash tags allow you to go deep into interests and obsession: #rollerderby, #physics, #puppets and #Avatar, to name just a few of many thousands.
The act of publishing on Twitter is so friction-free — a few keystrokes and hit send — that you can forget that others are out there listening. I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)
Like many newbies on Twitter, I vastly overestimated the importance of broadcasting on Twitter and after a while, I realized that I was not Moses and neither Twitter nor its users were wondering what I thought. Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.
Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to.
At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.
The expressive limits of a kind of narrative developed from text messages, with less space to digress or explain than this sentence, has significant upsides. The best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element — links, hash tags and comments — freighted with meaning. Professional acquaintances whom I find insufferable on every other platform suddenly become interesting within the confines of Twitter.
Twitter is incredibly customizable, with little of the social expectations that go with Facebook. Depending on whom you follow, Twitter can reveal a nation riveted by the last episode of “Jersey Shore” or a short-form conclave of brilliance. There is plenty of nonsense — #Tiger had quite a run — but there are rich threads on the day’s news and bravura solo performances from learned autodidacts. And the ethos of Twitter, which is based on self-defining groups, is far more well-mannered than many parts of the Web — more Toastmasters than mosh pit. On Twitter, you are your avatar and your avatar is you, so best not to act like a lout and when people want to flame you for something you said, they are responding to their own followers, not yours, so trolls quickly lose interest.
“Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it; Twitter has more raw capability for users than anything since e-mail,” said Clay Shirky, who wrote “Here Comes Everybody,” a book about social media. “It will be hard to wait out Twitter because it is lightweight, endlessly useful and gets better as more people use it. Brands are using it, institutions are using it, and it is becoming a place where a lot of important conversations are being held.”
Twitter helps define what is important by what Mr. Shirky has called “algorithmic authority,” meaning that if all kinds of people are pointing at the same thing at the same instant, it must be a pretty big deal.
Beyond the throbbing networked intelligence, there is the possibility of practical magic. Twitter can tell you what kind of netbook you should buy for your wife for Christmas — thanks Twitter! — or call you out when you complain about the long lines it took to buy it, as a tweeter on behalf of the electronics store B & H did when I shared the experience on my Blackberry while in line. I have found transcendent tacos at a car wash in San Antonio, rediscovered a brand of reporter’s notepad I adore, uncovered sources for stories, all just by typing a query into Twitter.
All those riches do not come at zero cost: If you think e-mail and surfing can make time disappear, wait until you get ahold of Twitter, or more likely, it gets ahold of you. There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.
But in the right circumstance, Twitter can flex some big muscles. Think of last weekend, a heavy travel period marked by a terrorist incident on Friday. As news outlets were scrambling to understand the implications for travelers on Saturday morning, Twitter began lighting up with reports of new security initiatives, including one from @CharleneLi, a consultant who tweeted from the Montreal airport at about 7:30 a.m.: “New security rules for int’l flights into US. 1 bag, no electronics the ENTIRE flight, no getting up last hour of flight.”
It was far from the whole story and getting ahead of the news by some hours would seem like no big deal, but imagine you or someone you loved was flying later that same day: Twitter might seem very useful.
Twitter’s growing informational hegemony is not assured. There have been serious outages in recent weeks, leading many business and government users to wonder about the stability of the platform. And this being the Web, many smart folks are plotting ways to turn Twitter into so much pixilated mist. But I don’t think so. I can go anywhere I want on the Web, but there is no guarantee that my Twitter gang will come with me. I may have quite a few followers, but that doesn’t make me Moses.
By DAVID CARR
I can remember when I first thought seriously about Twitter. Last March, I was at the SXSW conference, a conclave in Austin, Tex., where technology, media and music are mashed up and re-imagined, and, not so coincidentally, where Twitter first rolled out in 2007. As someone who was oversubscribed on Facebook, overwhelmed by the computer-generated RSS feeds of news that came flying at me, and swamped by incoming e-mail messages, the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion into my life.
And then there was the name. Twitter.
In the pantheon of digital nomenclature — brands within a sector of the economy that grew so fast that all the sensible names were quickly taken — it would be hard to come up with a noun more trite than Twitter. It impugns itself, promising something slight and inconsequential, yet another way to make hours disappear and have nothing to show for it. And just in case the noun is not sufficiently indicting, the verb, “to tweet” is even more embarrassing.
Beyond the dippy lingo, the idea that something intelligent, something worthy of mindshare, might occur in the space of 140 characters — Twitter’s parameters were set by what would fit in a text message on a phone — seems unlikely.
But it was clear that at the conference, the primary news platform was Twitter, with real-time annotation of the panels on stage and critical updates about what was happening elsewhere at a very hectic convention. At 52, I succumbed, partly out of professional necessity.
And now, nearly a year later, has Twitter turned my brain to mush? No, I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible, and instead of spending a half-hour surfing in search of illumination, I get a sense of the day’s news and how people are reacting to it in the time that it takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks. Yes, I worry about my ability to think long thoughts — where was I, anyway? — but the tradeoff has been worth it.
Some time soon, the company won’t say when, the 100-millionth person will have signed on to Twitter to follow and be followed by friends and strangers. That may sound like a MySpace waiting to happen — remember MySpace? — but I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay.
And I’m not alone.
“The history of the Internet suggests that there have been cool Web sites that go in and out of fashion and then there have been open standards that become plumbing,” said Steven Johnson, the author and technology observer who wrote a seminal piece about Twitter for Time last June. “Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”
Really? What could anyone possibly find useful in this cacophony of short-burst communication?
Well, that depends on whom you ask, but more importantly whom you follow. On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.
The most frequent objection to Twitter is a predictable one: “I don’t need to know someone is eating a donut right now.” But if that someone is a serious user of Twitter, she or he might actually be eating the curmudgeon’s lunch, racing ahead with a clear, up-to-the-second picture of an increasingly connected, busy world. The service has obvious utility for a journalist, but no matter what business you are in, imagine knowing what the thought leaders in your industry were reading and considering. And beyond following specific individuals, Twitter hash tags allow you to go deep into interests and obsession: #rollerderby, #physics, #puppets and #Avatar, to name just a few of many thousands.
The act of publishing on Twitter is so friction-free — a few keystrokes and hit send — that you can forget that others are out there listening. I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)
Like many newbies on Twitter, I vastly overestimated the importance of broadcasting on Twitter and after a while, I realized that I was not Moses and neither Twitter nor its users were wondering what I thought. Nearly a year in, I’ve come to understand that the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.
Not that long ago, I was at a conference at Yale and looked at the sea of open laptops in the seats in front of me. So why wasn’t my laptop open? Because I follow people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies, each of them tweeting links that I could examine and read on a Blackberry. Regardless of where I am, I surf far less than I used to.
At first, Twitter can be overwhelming, but think of it as a river of data rushing past that I dip a cup into every once in a while. Much of what I need to know is in that cup: if it looks like Apple is going to demo its new tablet, or Amazon sold more Kindles than actual books at Christmas, or the final vote in the Senate gets locked in on health care, I almost always learn about it first on Twitter.
The expressive limits of a kind of narrative developed from text messages, with less space to digress or explain than this sentence, has significant upsides. The best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element — links, hash tags and comments — freighted with meaning. Professional acquaintances whom I find insufferable on every other platform suddenly become interesting within the confines of Twitter.
Twitter is incredibly customizable, with little of the social expectations that go with Facebook. Depending on whom you follow, Twitter can reveal a nation riveted by the last episode of “Jersey Shore” or a short-form conclave of brilliance. There is plenty of nonsense — #Tiger had quite a run — but there are rich threads on the day’s news and bravura solo performances from learned autodidacts. And the ethos of Twitter, which is based on self-defining groups, is far more well-mannered than many parts of the Web — more Toastmasters than mosh pit. On Twitter, you are your avatar and your avatar is you, so best not to act like a lout and when people want to flame you for something you said, they are responding to their own followers, not yours, so trolls quickly lose interest.
“Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it; Twitter has more raw capability for users than anything since e-mail,” said Clay Shirky, who wrote “Here Comes Everybody,” a book about social media. “It will be hard to wait out Twitter because it is lightweight, endlessly useful and gets better as more people use it. Brands are using it, institutions are using it, and it is becoming a place where a lot of important conversations are being held.”
Twitter helps define what is important by what Mr. Shirky has called “algorithmic authority,” meaning that if all kinds of people are pointing at the same thing at the same instant, it must be a pretty big deal.
Beyond the throbbing networked intelligence, there is the possibility of practical magic. Twitter can tell you what kind of netbook you should buy for your wife for Christmas — thanks Twitter! — or call you out when you complain about the long lines it took to buy it, as a tweeter on behalf of the electronics store B & H did when I shared the experience on my Blackberry while in line. I have found transcendent tacos at a car wash in San Antonio, rediscovered a brand of reporter’s notepad I adore, uncovered sources for stories, all just by typing a query into Twitter.
All those riches do not come at zero cost: If you think e-mail and surfing can make time disappear, wait until you get ahold of Twitter, or more likely, it gets ahold of you. There is always something more interesting on Twitter than whatever you happen to be working on.
But in the right circumstance, Twitter can flex some big muscles. Think of last weekend, a heavy travel period marked by a terrorist incident on Friday. As news outlets were scrambling to understand the implications for travelers on Saturday morning, Twitter began lighting up with reports of new security initiatives, including one from @CharleneLi, a consultant who tweeted from the Montreal airport at about 7:30 a.m.: “New security rules for int’l flights into US. 1 bag, no electronics the ENTIRE flight, no getting up last hour of flight.”
It was far from the whole story and getting ahead of the news by some hours would seem like no big deal, but imagine you or someone you loved was flying later that same day: Twitter might seem very useful.
Twitter’s growing informational hegemony is not assured. There have been serious outages in recent weeks, leading many business and government users to wonder about the stability of the platform. And this being the Web, many smart folks are plotting ways to turn Twitter into so much pixilated mist. But I don’t think so. I can go anywhere I want on the Web, but there is no guarantee that my Twitter gang will come with me. I may have quite a few followers, but that doesn’t make me Moses.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Wired's 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009
* By Brian X. Chen Email Author
* December 28, 2009 |
* 12:00 am |
* Categories: Phones
*
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2009 was the "year of the app," especially for the iPhone, whose App Store is overflowing with more than 100,000 offerings. While it's easy to make fun of the more ridiculous apps, some truly stellar wares stood out from that massive pile, and we're taking the time to honor them.
We recently published Wired readers' favorite iPhone apps of 2009, as well as Apple's top picks. Now it's our turn. The Wired staff has chosen its 20 favorite apps, broken into separate categories: productivity, games, hobbies, and travel and outdoors. These are apps we deemed exceptional either for their innovation, elegant design, usefulness or a combination of all these qualities.
Ready for this? Drum roll, please.
Productivity
beejive2BeeJiveIM
We've been using instant messaging for years, but BeeJiveIM is the most feature-rich, well-designed app we've seen that crams this communication method into our pockets. The app supports several IM services (such as Google chat, AIM and Yahoo! Messenger), as well as chat-room functionality and the ability to upload videos and photos. Plus, it's got push support, so IMs can pop up on your iPhone, just like text messages, the instant you receive them. It's a fancy app worth the $10 (on sale for $7 until Jan. 1, 2010). Download BeeJiveIM.
Dropbox
Who doesn't like Dropbox? The service allows you to store and share your computer's files online through a "dropbox" folder, and this new iPhone app allows you to access your Dropbox anywhere you go. On the iPhone, Dropbox really comes in handy for listening to your friends' shared music or viewing their videos and photos. The Dropbox service is free for 2 GB of storage per month. It costs $10 per month for 50 GB and $20 per month for 100 GB. The iPhone app is free. Download Dropbox.
Instapaper
We're gaga for Instapaper here at Wired. The app is perfect for tech-savvy newshounds constantly on the run — i.e., us. After downloading the app, you add a "Read Later" button to your web browser toolbar. Whenever you see a webpage with contents you want to save to read on your iPhone, you click the Read Later button. Launch Instapaper et voila — it's there. Very useful not just for saving web articles, but also recipes, map directions, airplane itineraries and so on. The app is $5; there's also a light version you can get for free. Download Instapaper.
Tweetie 2
We've been raving about this app for months, and with good reason: Tweetie 2 is probably the most loved app in the App Store. Its beautiful interface and rich feature set make using Twitter a blast. It's a must-have for any Twitter user with an iPhone. Tweetie 2 is $3. Download Tweetie 2.
Games
Canabalt
canabalt
Canabalt is braindead simple, and that's what makes it such a great game. It's a retro-style, side-scrolling adventure with one objective: Survive. Avoid running into obstacles or falling into pits; tap the screen to jump. The music is awesome, too. A fully playable Flash version of the game is available at Canabalt.com. It costs $3 to have it on your iPhone. Download Canabalt.
Doodle Jump
Another game that falls in the "charmingly simple" category is Doodle Jump. You take on the role of an adorable alien who bounces from platform to platform, with a goal of getting as high as possible. Trampolines, jetpacks and other goodies help you along the way. It costs just a buck in the App Store. Download Doodle Jump.
Flight Control
At this point in the year many of us have played Flight Control so many times we've grown sick of it. But that doesn't disqualify it from being one of the best iPhone games of the year. Who knew that using your finger to land planes could be so much fun? Somehow, this game pulled that off. It only costs a dollar. Download Flight Control.
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor
spider2
You get to be a spider who swings around with his web while jumping extraordinary distances. And you don't even have to wear a lame red suit. For $3. Need we say more? Download Spider.
TowerMadness
There are plenty of tower-defense strategy games out there, but TowerMadness brings the genre to a new level. The game's objective is to set up missile turrets and laser cannons to defend your flock of sheep from aliens and giant insects. What's so great about the game? Web 2.0-savviness: TowerMadness regularly hosts contests for players to compete for the most points to get prizes; the game also issues free upgrades with new levels. High replay value, smooth 3-D graphics and an awesome web experience: a true winner in our book, and it costs a dollar. Download TowerMadness.
Words With Friends
Wired readers adored Words With Friends — a Scrabble knockoff that you can play online — and it was a favorite among our staff, too. No surprise there: The social integration of the game is excellent. You can play with multiple friends simultaneously, and you can even taunt each other with an in-game chat tool. It's got a beautiful interface, too. The ad-free version of the game costs $3; there's also a free version with ad support. Download Words With Friends.
Travel and Outdoors
convert1Convert
Whoever thought unit conversions could be fun? Convert is a gorgeous unit converter and calculator that makes conversions for everything from money and time to air pressure and energy. It's a lot more useful than you'd think. When cooking, for instance, if you're trying to triple a recipe and need to convert tablespoons into cups, you can simply punch some numbers into this app. Or if you're traveling to Japan and need to convert dollars into Yen, this should come in handy, too. Convert is a buck in the App Store. Download Travel and Outdoors.
Postman
Sending postcards can be a real drag, especially when you're trying to take it easy on vacation. Forget about wasting money on a generic-looking postcard from the museum and just download Postman. With the app you can create your own postcard using photos taken during your trip and then send it off instantly. That spares you the trouble of blowing money on postage, too. Download Postman.
Red Laser
Everyone's familiar with this scenario: You're browsing a brick-and-mortar retail store, and you spot something you'd like to buy. But we all know you can probably find a better deal online, without paying tax, too. Red Laser's a great app to help you check. It's a barcode scanner that brings up online deals super fast. Beats the heck out of standing there and manually searching shopping sites with the iPhone's web browser. The app costs $2. Download Red Laser.
RunKeeper
Not all gadgets turn us into lazy couch potatoes. The iPhone proves that with the help of RunKeeper. It's a nifty app for tracking your progress for runs, bike rides, hikes, skiing and more. The app tells you total distance, time and current pace, and when you're done it uploads your data to your account on RunKeeper's website. The $10 version, RunKeeper Pro, has audio cues; the free version is cueless. Download RunKeeper.
Taxi Magic
Cabs can be as hard to get as a high-paying position in the journalism industry, but TaxiMagic pulls off the miracle of getting you a cab late at night in San Francisco. The app automatically loads with nearby cab services, and you can even use Taxi Magic to calculate a fare estimate for your destination and pay for the ride when you get there. Good news: It's free. Download Taxi Magic.
KCRW
We lurve public radio, and the KCRW app streams all three KCRW channels: On Air, Music and News. It accompanies the streams with clean art, and there's also an Events button displaying music, news and arts happenings around time. Totally sweet for just a buck. Download KCRW.
Hobbies
Best Camera
The best camera is the one you have with you. And unfortunately the first- and second-generation iPhones' built-in camera mostly sucks, but this app can still make shots look awesome. Best Camera grabs pictures from your iPhone camera roll, lets you process them and then share them via Twitter, Facebook and e-mail. A slick interface makes the process easy: A rolling strip of icons at the bottom of the screen contains your editing tools. The app is $3. Download Best Camera.
Bloom
Electronic musician Brian Eno turned the iPhone's touchscreen into a dreamscape of wonderful ambient sounds in his app Bloom. Tapping the screen in different places emits a different note; they change colors to create soothing visual animations as well. Bloom costs $4. Download Bloom.
CameraBag
Another sweet image-editing app, CameraBag is for photographers who want to keep things short and sweet. The app automatically applies effects filters to your photos by simply swiping from left to right. Effects include black and white, instant Polaroid, Cinema and more. CameraBag costs $2. Download CameraBag.
Eucalyptus
There's gold in them public book archives. Project Gutenberg has about 30,000 public domain e-books to date, including classics such as Gulliver's Travels, Oliver Twist and Tales of the Jazz Age. Eucalyptus is the best app we've seen providing for accessing and reading Project Gutenberg books on your iPhone. It costs $10 in the App Store, and it's worth it. Download Eucalyptus.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com, Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com
Wired’s 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com (28 December 2009)
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/wired-favorite-iphone-apps/all/1
http://snipurl.com/tw38z
* By Brian X. Chen Email Author
* December 28, 2009 |
* 12:00 am |
* Categories: Phones
*
_mg_10441
2009 was the "year of the app," especially for the iPhone, whose App Store is overflowing with more than 100,000 offerings. While it's easy to make fun of the more ridiculous apps, some truly stellar wares stood out from that massive pile, and we're taking the time to honor them.
We recently published Wired readers' favorite iPhone apps of 2009, as well as Apple's top picks. Now it's our turn. The Wired staff has chosen its 20 favorite apps, broken into separate categories: productivity, games, hobbies, and travel and outdoors. These are apps we deemed exceptional either for their innovation, elegant design, usefulness or a combination of all these qualities.
Ready for this? Drum roll, please.
Productivity
beejive2BeeJiveIM
We've been using instant messaging for years, but BeeJiveIM is the most feature-rich, well-designed app we've seen that crams this communication method into our pockets. The app supports several IM services (such as Google chat, AIM and Yahoo! Messenger), as well as chat-room functionality and the ability to upload videos and photos. Plus, it's got push support, so IMs can pop up on your iPhone, just like text messages, the instant you receive them. It's a fancy app worth the $10 (on sale for $7 until Jan. 1, 2010). Download BeeJiveIM.
Dropbox
Who doesn't like Dropbox? The service allows you to store and share your computer's files online through a "dropbox" folder, and this new iPhone app allows you to access your Dropbox anywhere you go. On the iPhone, Dropbox really comes in handy for listening to your friends' shared music or viewing their videos and photos. The Dropbox service is free for 2 GB of storage per month. It costs $10 per month for 50 GB and $20 per month for 100 GB. The iPhone app is free. Download Dropbox.
Instapaper
We're gaga for Instapaper here at Wired. The app is perfect for tech-savvy newshounds constantly on the run — i.e., us. After downloading the app, you add a "Read Later" button to your web browser toolbar. Whenever you see a webpage with contents you want to save to read on your iPhone, you click the Read Later button. Launch Instapaper et voila — it's there. Very useful not just for saving web articles, but also recipes, map directions, airplane itineraries and so on. The app is $5; there's also a light version you can get for free. Download Instapaper.
Tweetie 2
We've been raving about this app for months, and with good reason: Tweetie 2 is probably the most loved app in the App Store. Its beautiful interface and rich feature set make using Twitter a blast. It's a must-have for any Twitter user with an iPhone. Tweetie 2 is $3. Download Tweetie 2.
Games
Canabalt
canabalt
Canabalt is braindead simple, and that's what makes it such a great game. It's a retro-style, side-scrolling adventure with one objective: Survive. Avoid running into obstacles or falling into pits; tap the screen to jump. The music is awesome, too. A fully playable Flash version of the game is available at Canabalt.com. It costs $3 to have it on your iPhone. Download Canabalt.
Doodle Jump
Another game that falls in the "charmingly simple" category is Doodle Jump. You take on the role of an adorable alien who bounces from platform to platform, with a goal of getting as high as possible. Trampolines, jetpacks and other goodies help you along the way. It costs just a buck in the App Store. Download Doodle Jump.
Flight Control
At this point in the year many of us have played Flight Control so many times we've grown sick of it. But that doesn't disqualify it from being one of the best iPhone games of the year. Who knew that using your finger to land planes could be so much fun? Somehow, this game pulled that off. It only costs a dollar. Download Flight Control.
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor
spider2
You get to be a spider who swings around with his web while jumping extraordinary distances. And you don't even have to wear a lame red suit. For $3. Need we say more? Download Spider.
TowerMadness
There are plenty of tower-defense strategy games out there, but TowerMadness brings the genre to a new level. The game's objective is to set up missile turrets and laser cannons to defend your flock of sheep from aliens and giant insects. What's so great about the game? Web 2.0-savviness: TowerMadness regularly hosts contests for players to compete for the most points to get prizes; the game also issues free upgrades with new levels. High replay value, smooth 3-D graphics and an awesome web experience: a true winner in our book, and it costs a dollar. Download TowerMadness.
Words With Friends
Wired readers adored Words With Friends — a Scrabble knockoff that you can play online — and it was a favorite among our staff, too. No surprise there: The social integration of the game is excellent. You can play with multiple friends simultaneously, and you can even taunt each other with an in-game chat tool. It's got a beautiful interface, too. The ad-free version of the game costs $3; there's also a free version with ad support. Download Words With Friends.
Travel and Outdoors
convert1Convert
Whoever thought unit conversions could be fun? Convert is a gorgeous unit converter and calculator that makes conversions for everything from money and time to air pressure and energy. It's a lot more useful than you'd think. When cooking, for instance, if you're trying to triple a recipe and need to convert tablespoons into cups, you can simply punch some numbers into this app. Or if you're traveling to Japan and need to convert dollars into Yen, this should come in handy, too. Convert is a buck in the App Store. Download Travel and Outdoors.
Postman
Sending postcards can be a real drag, especially when you're trying to take it easy on vacation. Forget about wasting money on a generic-looking postcard from the museum and just download Postman. With the app you can create your own postcard using photos taken during your trip and then send it off instantly. That spares you the trouble of blowing money on postage, too. Download Postman.
Red Laser
Everyone's familiar with this scenario: You're browsing a brick-and-mortar retail store, and you spot something you'd like to buy. But we all know you can probably find a better deal online, without paying tax, too. Red Laser's a great app to help you check. It's a barcode scanner that brings up online deals super fast. Beats the heck out of standing there and manually searching shopping sites with the iPhone's web browser. The app costs $2. Download Red Laser.
RunKeeper
Not all gadgets turn us into lazy couch potatoes. The iPhone proves that with the help of RunKeeper. It's a nifty app for tracking your progress for runs, bike rides, hikes, skiing and more. The app tells you total distance, time and current pace, and when you're done it uploads your data to your account on RunKeeper's website. The $10 version, RunKeeper Pro, has audio cues; the free version is cueless. Download RunKeeper.
Taxi Magic
Cabs can be as hard to get as a high-paying position in the journalism industry, but TaxiMagic pulls off the miracle of getting you a cab late at night in San Francisco. The app automatically loads with nearby cab services, and you can even use Taxi Magic to calculate a fare estimate for your destination and pay for the ride when you get there. Good news: It's free. Download Taxi Magic.
KCRW
We lurve public radio, and the KCRW app streams all three KCRW channels: On Air, Music and News. It accompanies the streams with clean art, and there's also an Events button displaying music, news and arts happenings around time. Totally sweet for just a buck. Download KCRW.
Hobbies
Best Camera
The best camera is the one you have with you. And unfortunately the first- and second-generation iPhones' built-in camera mostly sucks, but this app can still make shots look awesome. Best Camera grabs pictures from your iPhone camera roll, lets you process them and then share them via Twitter, Facebook and e-mail. A slick interface makes the process easy: A rolling strip of icons at the bottom of the screen contains your editing tools. The app is $3. Download Best Camera.
Bloom
Electronic musician Brian Eno turned the iPhone's touchscreen into a dreamscape of wonderful ambient sounds in his app Bloom. Tapping the screen in different places emits a different note; they change colors to create soothing visual animations as well. Bloom costs $4. Download Bloom.
CameraBag
Another sweet image-editing app, CameraBag is for photographers who want to keep things short and sweet. The app automatically applies effects filters to your photos by simply swiping from left to right. Effects include black and white, instant Polaroid, Cinema and more. CameraBag costs $2. Download CameraBag.
Eucalyptus
There's gold in them public book archives. Project Gutenberg has about 30,000 public domain e-books to date, including classics such as Gulliver's Travels, Oliver Twist and Tales of the Jazz Age. Eucalyptus is the best app we've seen providing for accessing and reading Project Gutenberg books on your iPhone. It costs $10 in the App Store, and it's worth it. Download Eucalyptus.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com, Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com
Wired’s 20 Favorite iPhone Apps of 2009 | Gadget Lab | Wired.com (28 December 2009)
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/wired-favorite-iphone-apps/all/1
http://snipurl.com/tw38z
Top 7 Disruptions of the Year
Top 7 Disruptions of the Year
* By Epicenter Staff Email Author
* December 28, 2009 |
* 12:00 am |
* Categories: Crowdsourcing, Future Shock, Media, Miscellaneous, People, Search, Social Media
*
yelp iphone app augmented reality
Technology is like a dog; each year of it seems like the equivalent of seven human years — at least when you get to the end of it and realize it's only been 12 months since that now indispensable service first launched.
We spent 2009 documenting technology's disruption of how we live, entertain ourselves and do business. Looking back on the year from the comfortable perch of December, here are the seven most disruptive developments of 2009.
Google Stack
It's been a running joke for the last few years that Google knows everything you do online, but 2009 might be the year that Google became a full-scale technology platform — with technologies that layer on top of one another to create the "Google Stack." From your smartphone through to your enterprise's document-creation software, Google now has you covered, with promises of more to come. That means the list of companies whose revenues Google plans to undermine continues to grow (We're thinking about you, AT&T, Skype and Microsoft.)
2009 saw Google start to land in users' pockets, thanks to the the Android OS showing up on the coolest phones from three of the four dominant U.S. carriers. In July, Google announced the Google Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system that runs web services like Gmail and Google Calendar with a speed comparable to pesky installable software. Your Chrome browser will need to know how to get Google Apps, so it will use Google DNS (new for '09 too, just like Chrome for Mac).
When your friends want to reach you, they'll call your Google Voice number or they'll add a message to the right Google Wave. Or they'll visit your website hosted on Google Sites, click on the Google AdSense ads, which will fund the dinner you just added to you Google Calendar and will write about on your Google Blogger blog. And almost all of that is free so you won't need Google Checkout to pay for their services. And if there's a service missing from that stack (say photo sharing via Picasa), you can always use a search engine called Google to find it.
Mobile App Stores
Before Apple disrupted the mobile-phone market by granting thousands of software developers access to the iPhone through the App Store, cell carriers used to allow only a handful of companies to make stuff for their phones. Consumers and developers put up with it because we had no choice, but the App Store changed that.
Apple still exerts some control over which apps are sold in its store, but had approved over 100,000 apps as of November — an astonishing number no matter how you slice it. Google's Android app store now includes over 20,000 apps, and the concept is spreading to other platforms. Carriers now view third-party-designed apps as a way to augment their offerings and sell bigger data plans, rather than viewing them as an unconscionable loss of control. The app store phenomenon made the cellphone more like the personal computer, and we're all the better for it.
But as disruptive as the app stores are, they may not exist in five years, thanks to the next item on our list.
HTML5
Web protocols aren't as sexy as the iPhone, but they could soon replace the app store as mobile web browsers improve to run Javascript and HTML5, allowing developers to create what they make as apps today as mobile web pages tomorrow. Rather than developing a different app for every type of phone, they'll be able to write the code once and have it run everywhere.
Apps are everywhere right now — whatever you're looking for, there's an app for that, as the commercial says. But as the president of Mozilla's mobile division said, "Over time, the web will win, because it always does." Gmail's Mobile website already leans hard on HTML5 and is nearly as snappy as a native app. Still doubt that HTML5 can make Apple's apps obsolete? The same thing happened with applications that run on computers (see Google Stack), much to Microsoft's chagrin.
A New FCC
The FCC, under the leadership of Obama's law school classmate Julius Genachowski, is taking its job as the guardian of the nation's airwaves seriously again. The agency is talking about the politically controversial step of taking back spectrum from over-the-air TV broadcasters and making it available for wireless users.
Then this summer, the agency stuck their noses into Apple's app store to see why the Google Voice application was rejected — forcing AT&T to declare it would let VoIP applications on all their phones. They are setting formal 'net neutrality' rules and in the face of strong opposition from the wireless industry, plan to apply them to wireless, satellite, cable and DSL providers alike. It's trying to break the cable company's monopoly on set-top boxes, so you can buy one that actually does cool stuff.
And all the while, it's been hard at work composing the country's first-ever national broadband plan, which is due in February (though all signals are the plan will be pragmatic, rather than revolutionary). That's a far cry from the Bush era, where the agency took two years and a public roadshow before it ordered Comcast to stop blocking peer-to-peer file sharing.
journeyStreaming Music
This was the year streaming really took off, and Pandora and YouTube were the big winners in the music space — YouTube's video service allows it to stream on-demand music that music-only services can't afford.
Google's searches now link directly to on-demand music streaming services (see screenshot), which puts the phenomenon squarely in the mainstream. And more of us are listening to cloud-based music than ever before, through websites, MP3 blogs, MP3 blog aggregators, streaming software and mobile apps.
We're finishing the year with less diversity in the music space than we started with; Apple acquired Lala, and MySpace bought iLike and imeem. But these acquisitions are a sign that the big players recognize that the future belongs not to iTunes and iPods, but to web-based services and connected devices.
The Real-Time Web
Twitter is mostly just a protocol for publishing short little messages to the web, but in 2009, the little startup continued its shakeup of the net's landscape, and is on track to become what its leaked internal documents show it hopes to be: the "pulse of the planet." It's not quite that yet, despite becoming a player in the battle over Iran's future. But it has launched the notion of a real-time web, where netizens are constantly and instantaneously updated — even if it's just about the funny billboard your friend just walked by.
Add to that location services like foursquare and loopt — which report where you are — and the unproven concept of reporting to everyone what you bought via Blippy.com, and you've come up with a recipe for a net that values headlines over nut graphs, narcissism over thoughtfulness, and speed over deliberation.
But the notion was powerful enough to send Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all racing to add Twitter and Facebook posts to their search results, regardless of the utility. And Facebook got envious, re-doing its entire approach to social networking by pushing all of its users to post publicly in an attempt to become the net's vanity press. The upshot of it all: Add "get a prescription to Provigil" to your list of New Year's resolutions if you hope to keep up.
Augmented Reality
This year the world got its first real taste of mobile augmented-reality apps, which overlay digital information on top of analog reality. The idea is to let you see restaurant ratings floating over restaurants, peoples' tweets appear over their heads, what song they're listening to and so on.
Augmented reality is still a work-in-progress as developers iron out kinks such as the floating tag problem, and as consumers get used to the idea. But in a sense, it's already here — from geotagged photos to phones with compasses and maps in them, the internet already intersects with the world at specific locations, letting us access data where it's most relevant.
What did we miss?
Photo: Yelp's augmented-reality iPhone app shows you a restaurant's rating simply by pointing a phone's camera in the right direction.
Top 7 Disruptions of the Year | Epicenter | Wired.com (28 December 2009)
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/top-7-disruptions-of-the-year?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
http://snipurl.com/tw37w
* By Epicenter Staff Email Author
* December 28, 2009 |
* 12:00 am |
* Categories: Crowdsourcing, Future Shock, Media, Miscellaneous, People, Search, Social Media
*
yelp iphone app augmented reality
Technology is like a dog; each year of it seems like the equivalent of seven human years — at least when you get to the end of it and realize it's only been 12 months since that now indispensable service first launched.
We spent 2009 documenting technology's disruption of how we live, entertain ourselves and do business. Looking back on the year from the comfortable perch of December, here are the seven most disruptive developments of 2009.
Google Stack
It's been a running joke for the last few years that Google knows everything you do online, but 2009 might be the year that Google became a full-scale technology platform — with technologies that layer on top of one another to create the "Google Stack." From your smartphone through to your enterprise's document-creation software, Google now has you covered, with promises of more to come. That means the list of companies whose revenues Google plans to undermine continues to grow (We're thinking about you, AT&T, Skype and Microsoft.)
2009 saw Google start to land in users' pockets, thanks to the the Android OS showing up on the coolest phones from three of the four dominant U.S. carriers. In July, Google announced the Google Chrome OS, a lightweight operating system that runs web services like Gmail and Google Calendar with a speed comparable to pesky installable software. Your Chrome browser will need to know how to get Google Apps, so it will use Google DNS (new for '09 too, just like Chrome for Mac).
When your friends want to reach you, they'll call your Google Voice number or they'll add a message to the right Google Wave. Or they'll visit your website hosted on Google Sites, click on the Google AdSense ads, which will fund the dinner you just added to you Google Calendar and will write about on your Google Blogger blog. And almost all of that is free so you won't need Google Checkout to pay for their services. And if there's a service missing from that stack (say photo sharing via Picasa), you can always use a search engine called Google to find it.
Mobile App Stores
Before Apple disrupted the mobile-phone market by granting thousands of software developers access to the iPhone through the App Store, cell carriers used to allow only a handful of companies to make stuff for their phones. Consumers and developers put up with it because we had no choice, but the App Store changed that.
Apple still exerts some control over which apps are sold in its store, but had approved over 100,000 apps as of November — an astonishing number no matter how you slice it. Google's Android app store now includes over 20,000 apps, and the concept is spreading to other platforms. Carriers now view third-party-designed apps as a way to augment their offerings and sell bigger data plans, rather than viewing them as an unconscionable loss of control. The app store phenomenon made the cellphone more like the personal computer, and we're all the better for it.
But as disruptive as the app stores are, they may not exist in five years, thanks to the next item on our list.
HTML5
Web protocols aren't as sexy as the iPhone, but they could soon replace the app store as mobile web browsers improve to run Javascript and HTML5, allowing developers to create what they make as apps today as mobile web pages tomorrow. Rather than developing a different app for every type of phone, they'll be able to write the code once and have it run everywhere.
Apps are everywhere right now — whatever you're looking for, there's an app for that, as the commercial says. But as the president of Mozilla's mobile division said, "Over time, the web will win, because it always does." Gmail's Mobile website already leans hard on HTML5 and is nearly as snappy as a native app. Still doubt that HTML5 can make Apple's apps obsolete? The same thing happened with applications that run on computers (see Google Stack), much to Microsoft's chagrin.
A New FCC
The FCC, under the leadership of Obama's law school classmate Julius Genachowski, is taking its job as the guardian of the nation's airwaves seriously again. The agency is talking about the politically controversial step of taking back spectrum from over-the-air TV broadcasters and making it available for wireless users.
Then this summer, the agency stuck their noses into Apple's app store to see why the Google Voice application was rejected — forcing AT&T to declare it would let VoIP applications on all their phones. They are setting formal 'net neutrality' rules and in the face of strong opposition from the wireless industry, plan to apply them to wireless, satellite, cable and DSL providers alike. It's trying to break the cable company's monopoly on set-top boxes, so you can buy one that actually does cool stuff.
And all the while, it's been hard at work composing the country's first-ever national broadband plan, which is due in February (though all signals are the plan will be pragmatic, rather than revolutionary). That's a far cry from the Bush era, where the agency took two years and a public roadshow before it ordered Comcast to stop blocking peer-to-peer file sharing.
journeyStreaming Music
This was the year streaming really took off, and Pandora and YouTube were the big winners in the music space — YouTube's video service allows it to stream on-demand music that music-only services can't afford.
Google's searches now link directly to on-demand music streaming services (see screenshot), which puts the phenomenon squarely in the mainstream. And more of us are listening to cloud-based music than ever before, through websites, MP3 blogs, MP3 blog aggregators, streaming software and mobile apps.
We're finishing the year with less diversity in the music space than we started with; Apple acquired Lala, and MySpace bought iLike and imeem. But these acquisitions are a sign that the big players recognize that the future belongs not to iTunes and iPods, but to web-based services and connected devices.
The Real-Time Web
Twitter is mostly just a protocol for publishing short little messages to the web, but in 2009, the little startup continued its shakeup of the net's landscape, and is on track to become what its leaked internal documents show it hopes to be: the "pulse of the planet." It's not quite that yet, despite becoming a player in the battle over Iran's future. But it has launched the notion of a real-time web, where netizens are constantly and instantaneously updated — even if it's just about the funny billboard your friend just walked by.
Add to that location services like foursquare and loopt — which report where you are — and the unproven concept of reporting to everyone what you bought via Blippy.com, and you've come up with a recipe for a net that values headlines over nut graphs, narcissism over thoughtfulness, and speed over deliberation.
But the notion was powerful enough to send Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all racing to add Twitter and Facebook posts to their search results, regardless of the utility. And Facebook got envious, re-doing its entire approach to social networking by pushing all of its users to post publicly in an attempt to become the net's vanity press. The upshot of it all: Add "get a prescription to Provigil" to your list of New Year's resolutions if you hope to keep up.
Augmented Reality
This year the world got its first real taste of mobile augmented-reality apps, which overlay digital information on top of analog reality. The idea is to let you see restaurant ratings floating over restaurants, peoples' tweets appear over their heads, what song they're listening to and so on.
Augmented reality is still a work-in-progress as developers iron out kinks such as the floating tag problem, and as consumers get used to the idea. But in a sense, it's already here — from geotagged photos to phones with compasses and maps in them, the internet already intersects with the world at specific locations, letting us access data where it's most relevant.
What did we miss?
Photo: Yelp's augmented-reality iPhone app shows you a restaurant's rating simply by pointing a phone's camera in the right direction.
Top 7 Disruptions of the Year | Epicenter | Wired.com (28 December 2009)
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/top-7-disruptions-of-the-year?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
http://snipurl.com/tw37w
Monday, November 09, 2009
Refining the Twitter Explosion By NOAM COHEN
Link by Link
Refining the Twitter Explosion By NOAM COHEN
DOES Twitter have a T.M.I. problem?
And, no, I don't just mean the Twitter users who share too much information about their lives, social, medical or otherwise.
Simply put, there is way too much information on Twitter — lately, it defies navigation. In January, there were 2.4 million tweets a day, according to Alessio Signorini, a researcher at the University of Iowa. By October, he reports, there were 26 million tweets a day.
Why should we care about information overload at Twitter? Isn't Twitter about the individual experiences — a Tweeter and her followers — not the totality of millions of Tweeters around the world?
Perhaps this is true for most users. But the promise of Twitter — the reason Google and Microsoft have paid to be able to search millions of Tweets — is that it gives the best approximation of the pulse of the world: How popular is the new iPhone? Did Kanye West make a spectacle of himself at an awards show? Or, more ominously, what is it like when there is a shooter loose on an Army post?
•
Until lately, the main way to make sense of an urgent outpouring of tweets on a particular subject was to use text searches: look for the phrase "Fort Hood," for example, or maybe an agreed-upon label, "#fthood," within tweets. Yet during events like the shootings on Thursday at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead, this method is useless. Hundreds of "relevant" tweets pop up every minute, most repeating the same news reports over and over again or expressing concern from far away.
Which is why a new feature that Twitter says it could unveil in the next few weeks — "geolocation" — holds such potential to make the Twitter rapids navigable.
The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cellphones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their searches to tweets from a particular location.
"Proximity can be this proxy for relevance," said Ryan Sarver, the director of the Twitter platform, who led a "fairly small team" of programmers who after a few months are close to completing the geolocation project. "We are about delivering the right information to the right people."
Even now, before the geolocation feature has been released to developers, visitors to Twitter.com have been able to limit searches by location based on the profiles that Twitter users provide when they sign up.
That simple filter made a huge difference in what a visitor to Twitter's search engine discovered about the Fort Hood shootings. After limiting searches to those from within 15 miles of Killeen, Tex., a town near the Army post, you easily find messages sent by soldiers describing what it is like to be on lockdown or worrying about their children at school on the post.
The tweets from one, RicoRossi, can suddenly leap to the top, even while Fort Hood remains locked down — "a soldier i treated here said he was waiting in line @ SRP when another soldier stood up and started shooting," one early tweet read, using an acronym for the Soldiers Readiness Program, where the attacks occurred.
In response to questions from his Twitter followers, he quickly replied with "idont want 2 b 2 graphic so ill stop there, he was there ... it was like something out of a movie he said im paraphrasing of course."
Another Twitter user, JKsTinkerbell76, described the scene at Scott and White Hospital in nearby Temple, Tex., during her lunch break (around midnight late Thursday): "Still on Lockdown. Police and Security everywhere."
And DaTriggerMan, Killeen, Tex, tweeted Thursday afternoon, "We just got cell phone services back here on ft hood! And I am good thanks for all the concern!!!" And then, four minutes later, "what happen cuz I aint been in front of a tv? We had some shooters on post we good now tho!"
•
Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online. Mr. Sarver imagines features like "local trending topics," a list of subjects popular in a particular area; or searches for happy hour in a neighborhood of Dallas that will intelligently link tweets about happy hours to the place they were sent from.
Because GPS will provide the ability to become very "granular" with locations, you could mimic through Twitter the banter at the local diner or a barbershop, by limiting a search of tweets to a two-block radius.
There is also the fear of loss of privacy and loss of security as once-local chats become globally public. That is why Mr. Sarver said Twitter would require two "opt in" decisions — at the profile level and again through the application.
For the technological optimists, the cures for information overload, in essence, are better filters and greater context. The more you know about a message — who sent it and why — the better you understand it.
The open-source project Ushahidi, which takes its name from the Swahili word for "testimony," was quick to understand this. The software allows text messages to be mapped by time and location. It was developed to track reports of ethnic violence in Kenya in 2008. Suddenly mere words can create a moving picture of where violence started and where it intensified.
More recently, through a program called stopstockouts.org, the Ushahidi software tracks a range of medicines for shortages across Africa.
Creating navigation tools for digital information is the next big challenge, said Erik Hersman, a co-founder of Ushahidi who has been in contact with Mr. Sarver's team at Twitter.
"We have more update-type of information," he said. "The stream is getting wider and wider."
Link by Link - Refining the Twitter Explosion With GPS - NYTimes.com (19 November 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/09link.html?sq=Refining%20Twitter%20Explosion&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/tbdqj
Refining the Twitter Explosion By NOAM COHEN
DOES Twitter have a T.M.I. problem?
And, no, I don't just mean the Twitter users who share too much information about their lives, social, medical or otherwise.
Simply put, there is way too much information on Twitter — lately, it defies navigation. In January, there were 2.4 million tweets a day, according to Alessio Signorini, a researcher at the University of Iowa. By October, he reports, there were 26 million tweets a day.
Why should we care about information overload at Twitter? Isn't Twitter about the individual experiences — a Tweeter and her followers — not the totality of millions of Tweeters around the world?
Perhaps this is true for most users. But the promise of Twitter — the reason Google and Microsoft have paid to be able to search millions of Tweets — is that it gives the best approximation of the pulse of the world: How popular is the new iPhone? Did Kanye West make a spectacle of himself at an awards show? Or, more ominously, what is it like when there is a shooter loose on an Army post?
•
Until lately, the main way to make sense of an urgent outpouring of tweets on a particular subject was to use text searches: look for the phrase "Fort Hood," for example, or maybe an agreed-upon label, "#fthood," within tweets. Yet during events like the shootings on Thursday at Fort Hood that left 13 people dead, this method is useless. Hundreds of "relevant" tweets pop up every minute, most repeating the same news reports over and over again or expressing concern from far away.
Which is why a new feature that Twitter says it could unveil in the next few weeks — "geolocation" — holds such potential to make the Twitter rapids navigable.
The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cellphones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their searches to tweets from a particular location.
"Proximity can be this proxy for relevance," said Ryan Sarver, the director of the Twitter platform, who led a "fairly small team" of programmers who after a few months are close to completing the geolocation project. "We are about delivering the right information to the right people."
Even now, before the geolocation feature has been released to developers, visitors to Twitter.com have been able to limit searches by location based on the profiles that Twitter users provide when they sign up.
That simple filter made a huge difference in what a visitor to Twitter's search engine discovered about the Fort Hood shootings. After limiting searches to those from within 15 miles of Killeen, Tex., a town near the Army post, you easily find messages sent by soldiers describing what it is like to be on lockdown or worrying about their children at school on the post.
The tweets from one, RicoRossi, can suddenly leap to the top, even while Fort Hood remains locked down — "a soldier i treated here said he was waiting in line @ SRP when another soldier stood up and started shooting," one early tweet read, using an acronym for the Soldiers Readiness Program, where the attacks occurred.
In response to questions from his Twitter followers, he quickly replied with "idont want 2 b 2 graphic so ill stop there, he was there ... it was like something out of a movie he said im paraphrasing of course."
Another Twitter user, JKsTinkerbell76, described the scene at Scott and White Hospital in nearby Temple, Tex., during her lunch break (around midnight late Thursday): "Still on Lockdown. Police and Security everywhere."
And DaTriggerMan, Killeen, Tex, tweeted Thursday afternoon, "We just got cell phone services back here on ft hood! And I am good thanks for all the concern!!!" And then, four minutes later, "what happen cuz I aint been in front of a tv? We had some shooters on post we good now tho!"
•
Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online. Mr. Sarver imagines features like "local trending topics," a list of subjects popular in a particular area; or searches for happy hour in a neighborhood of Dallas that will intelligently link tweets about happy hours to the place they were sent from.
Because GPS will provide the ability to become very "granular" with locations, you could mimic through Twitter the banter at the local diner or a barbershop, by limiting a search of tweets to a two-block radius.
There is also the fear of loss of privacy and loss of security as once-local chats become globally public. That is why Mr. Sarver said Twitter would require two "opt in" decisions — at the profile level and again through the application.
For the technological optimists, the cures for information overload, in essence, are better filters and greater context. The more you know about a message — who sent it and why — the better you understand it.
The open-source project Ushahidi, which takes its name from the Swahili word for "testimony," was quick to understand this. The software allows text messages to be mapped by time and location. It was developed to track reports of ethnic violence in Kenya in 2008. Suddenly mere words can create a moving picture of where violence started and where it intensified.
More recently, through a program called stopstockouts.org, the Ushahidi software tracks a range of medicines for shortages across Africa.
Creating navigation tools for digital information is the next big challenge, said Erik Hersman, a co-founder of Ushahidi who has been in contact with Mr. Sarver's team at Twitter.
"We have more update-type of information," he said. "The stream is getting wider and wider."
Link by Link - Refining the Twitter Explosion With GPS - NYTimes.com (19 November 2009)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/09link.html?sq=Refining%20Twitter%20Explosion&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print
http://snipurl.com/tbdqj
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
August 26, 2009
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.
Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.
Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.
Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.
“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”
Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”
The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.
Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.
Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.
Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.
Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.
Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.
Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.
“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”
Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”
The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.
Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.
Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Lost in the Cloud By JONATHAN ZITTRAIN
July 20, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Lost in the Cloud By JONATHAN ZITTRAIN
Cambridge, Mass.
EARLIER this month Google announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing our information on our own PCs toward doing everything online — also known as in “the cloud” — using whatever device is at hand.
Many people consider this development to be as sensible and inevitable as the move from answering machines to voicemail. With your stuff in the cloud, it’s not a catastrophe to lose your laptop, any more than losing your glasses would permanently destroy your vision. In addition, as more and more of our information is gathered from and shared with others — through Facebook, MySpace or Twitter — having it all online can make a lot of sense.
The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.
Some are in plain view. If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you. For example, if your favorite music is rented or authorized from an online subscription service rather than freely in your custody as a compact disc or an MP3 file on your hard drive, you can lose your music if you fall behind on your payments — or if the vendor goes bankrupt or loses interest in the service. Last week Amazon apparently conveyed a publisher’s change-of-heart to owners of its Kindle e-book reader: some purchasers of Orwell’s “1984” found it removed from their devices, with nothing to show for their purchase other than a refund. (Orwell would be amused.)
Worse, data stored online has less privacy protection both in practice and under the law. A hacker recently guessed the password to the personal e-mail account of a Twitter employee, and was thus able to extract the employee’s Google password. That in turn compromised a trove of Twitter’s corporate documents stored too conveniently in the cloud. Before, the bad guys usually needed to get their hands on people’s computers to see their secrets; in today’s cloud all you need is a password.
Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers — and not to tell you about it. There have been thousands of such requests lodged since the law was passed, and the F.B.I.’s own audits have shown that there can be plenty of overreach — perhaps wholly inadvertent — in requests like these.
The cloud can be even more dangerous abroad, as it makes it much easier for authoritarian regimes to spy on their citizens. The Chinese government has used the Chinese version of Skype instant messaging software to monitor text conversations and block undesirable words and phrases. It and other authoritarian regimes routinely monitor all Internet traffic — which, except for e-commerce and banking transactions, is rarely encrypted against prying eyes.
With a little effort and political will, we could solve these problems. Companies could be required under fair practices law to allow your data to be released back to you with just a click so that you can erase your digital footprints or simply take your business (and data) elsewhere. They could also be held to the promises they make about content sold through the cloud: If they sell you an e-book, they can’t take it back or make it less functional later. To increase security, companies that keep their data in the cloud could adopt safer Internet communications and password practices, including the use of biometrics like fingerprints to validate identity.
And some governments can be persuaded — or perhaps required by their independent judiciaries — to treat data entrusted to the cloud with the same level of privacy protection as data held personally. The Supreme Court declared in 1961 that a police search of a rented house for a whiskey still was a violation of the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of the tenant, even though the landlord had given permission for the search. Information stored in the cloud deserves similar safeguards.
But the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice orFirefox.
Promoting competition is only the tip of the iceberg — there are also the thousands of applications so novel that they don’t yet compete with anything. These tend to be produced by tinkerers and hackers. Instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing and the Web itself all exist thanks to people out in left field, often writing for fun rather than money, who are able to tempt the rest of us to try out what they’ve done.
This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software. Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don’t like. The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.
The market is churning through these issues. Amazon is offering a generic cloud-computing infrastructure so anyone can set up new software on a new Web site without gatekeeping by the likes of Facebook. Google’s Android platform is being used in a new generation of mobile phones with fewer restrictions on outside code. But the dynamics here are complicated. When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.
If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents.
We’ve only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That’s not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.
Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard, is the author of “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.”
Op-Ed Contributor
Lost in the Cloud By JONATHAN ZITTRAIN
Cambridge, Mass.
EARLIER this month Google announced a new operating system called Chrome. It’s meant to transform personal computers and handheld devices into single-purpose windows to the Web. This is part of a larger trend: Chrome moves us further away from running code and storing our information on our own PCs toward doing everything online — also known as in “the cloud” — using whatever device is at hand.
Many people consider this development to be as sensible and inevitable as the move from answering machines to voicemail. With your stuff in the cloud, it’s not a catastrophe to lose your laptop, any more than losing your glasses would permanently destroy your vision. In addition, as more and more of our information is gathered from and shared with others — through Facebook, MySpace or Twitter — having it all online can make a lot of sense.
The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.
Some are in plain view. If you entrust your data to others, they can let you down or outright betray you. For example, if your favorite music is rented or authorized from an online subscription service rather than freely in your custody as a compact disc or an MP3 file on your hard drive, you can lose your music if you fall behind on your payments — or if the vendor goes bankrupt or loses interest in the service. Last week Amazon apparently conveyed a publisher’s change-of-heart to owners of its Kindle e-book reader: some purchasers of Orwell’s “1984” found it removed from their devices, with nothing to show for their purchase other than a refund. (Orwell would be amused.)
Worse, data stored online has less privacy protection both in practice and under the law. A hacker recently guessed the password to the personal e-mail account of a Twitter employee, and was thus able to extract the employee’s Google password. That in turn compromised a trove of Twitter’s corporate documents stored too conveniently in the cloud. Before, the bad guys usually needed to get their hands on people’s computers to see their secrets; in today’s cloud all you need is a password.
Thanks in part to the Patriot Act, the federal government has been able to demand some details of your online activities from service providers — and not to tell you about it. There have been thousands of such requests lodged since the law was passed, and the F.B.I.’s own audits have shown that there can be plenty of overreach — perhaps wholly inadvertent — in requests like these.
The cloud can be even more dangerous abroad, as it makes it much easier for authoritarian regimes to spy on their citizens. The Chinese government has used the Chinese version of Skype instant messaging software to monitor text conversations and block undesirable words and phrases. It and other authoritarian regimes routinely monitor all Internet traffic — which, except for e-commerce and banking transactions, is rarely encrypted against prying eyes.
With a little effort and political will, we could solve these problems. Companies could be required under fair practices law to allow your data to be released back to you with just a click so that you can erase your digital footprints or simply take your business (and data) elsewhere. They could also be held to the promises they make about content sold through the cloud: If they sell you an e-book, they can’t take it back or make it less functional later. To increase security, companies that keep their data in the cloud could adopt safer Internet communications and password practices, including the use of biometrics like fingerprints to validate identity.
And some governments can be persuaded — or perhaps required by their independent judiciaries — to treat data entrusted to the cloud with the same level of privacy protection as data held personally. The Supreme Court declared in 1961 that a police search of a rented house for a whiskey still was a violation of the Fourth Amendment privacy rights of the tenant, even though the landlord had given permission for the search. Information stored in the cloud deserves similar safeguards.
But the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice orFirefox.
Promoting competition is only the tip of the iceberg — there are also the thousands of applications so novel that they don’t yet compete with anything. These tend to be produced by tinkerers and hackers. Instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing and the Web itself all exist thanks to people out in left field, often writing for fun rather than money, who are able to tempt the rest of us to try out what they’ve done.
This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software. Facebook allows outsiders to add functionality to the site but reserves the right to change that policy at any time, to charge a fee for applications, or to de-emphasize or eliminate apps that court controversy or that they simply don’t like. The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.
The market is churning through these issues. Amazon is offering a generic cloud-computing infrastructure so anyone can set up new software on a new Web site without gatekeeping by the likes of Facebook. Google’s Android platform is being used in a new generation of mobile phones with fewer restrictions on outside code. But the dynamics here are complicated. When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.
If the market settles into a handful of gated cloud communities whose proprietors control the availability of new code, the time may come to ensure that their platforms do not discriminate. Such a demand could take many forms, from an outright regulatory requirement to a more subtle set of incentives — tax breaks or liability relief — that nudge companies to maintain the kind of openness that earlier allowed them a level playing field on which they could lure users from competing, mighty incumbents.
We’ve only just begun to measure this problem, even as we fly directly into the cloud. That’s not a reason to turn around. But we must make sure the cloud does not hinder the creation of revolutionary software that, like the Web itself, can seem esoteric at first but utterly necessary later.
Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard, is the author of “The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It.”
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Eat and Tell By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
November 5, 2008
Eat and Tell By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
YOU too can be a restaurant critic. And not just an anonymous Zagateer, dutifully filling in forms. You can have fans. You can get the glory of personal thanks from chefs you’ve deified, or the smug satisfaction of hate mail from those you’ve savaged. You can hobnob with sous-chefs at food events. If your soul is for sale, you can cadge free drinks or meals.
As a bonus, you might even get a sex life — and if so inclined, you can discuss it in detail, online, with fellow foodies.
Where, oh where, you ask, is this magic matchbook cover? How do I apply for this once-in-a-lifetime offer?
It’s simple. Just sign up at Yelp.com and review away.
O.K., so maybe you’re not in the most erudite company — a lot of the reviews are of the “OMG, it was total choco-gasm!” variety. Not every chef appreciates diners who yank out pocket cameras when the amuse-bouches arrive and leave “You’ve been yelped” cards with the check. And Thomas Keller, maestro of Per Se in New York and the French Laundry in California, swears he has never heard of Yelpers.
But with 4 million reviews written and 15 million visitors a month, Yelp is a growing force in the food-obsessed corners of the Web, where life is all profiteroles and beer. According to Web traffic counters like Alexa, Nielsen Online and Google Analytics, Yelp is growing much faster than its closest rival, Citysearch, and has either surpassed it in page views or is on the verge of doing so. Both have many times more visitors than Insider Pages, Zagat, OpenTable, Chowhound or other restaurant sites.
“It’s an exciting new channel for us to harvest,” said Liz Johannesen, marketing director for Kimpton, a national chain of boutique hotels and restaurants. “We went from disbelief to suspicion to fully embracing it.”
Some restaurateurs still dismiss Yelpers as a fork-waving mob of know-nothings. Paul Kahan, the chef and an owner of Blackbird, Avec and the Publican in Chicago, became known there for complaining that sites like Yelp were “a forum for people who don’t necessarily know what they’re talking about.”
But, he conceded in an interview, the sheer volume of amateur opinion is useful. Any reader who struggled through 20 to 30 Yelp reviews of one of his restaurants, he said, “would get a fair impression of it.”
The critical masses are open to anyone. You don’t have to eat in the fanciest restaurants. You don’t need a Culinary Institute of America degree to prove your kitchen cred. You needn’t be a dismissive snob. You don’t even have to have a terribly discerning palate.
But it does help to have a winning personality, some appealing personal snapshots and a flair for writing. Fellow Yelpers vote for their favorite critics and the coveted Review of the Day.
Or, in Yelp-speak: “Kudos on your ROTD, dude! Want to go DYL tonight?” (That would be “destroy your liver,” an invitation to imbibe.)
Within Yelp dwell the Yelp Elite, who write often enough and cleverly enough to tickle the algorithms at headquarters into singling them out for promotion.
For example, Megan Cress — known online as Megan C. of New York — has been Yelp Elite for three years running. She has written more than 300 restaurant reviews (95 of them “firsts,” posted before anyone else). She has 957 friends and 151 fans on the site.
(By contrast, a New York Times restaurant critic might take six years to amass 300 reviews. The critic visits a restaurant several times, strives for anonymity and tries to sample every dish on the menu. Whether he or she has any friends is not recorded.)
Ms. Cress “networks for a living,” she said, introducing people and companies for a finder’s fee. Yelping helps; people who like her reviews often send her e-mail messages, and she decides whether answering them would be useful or fun.
There’s a sexy wink to many of her write-ups, which include her own “date rating” and “pickup scale.” She recently reviewed the Navy mess in the White House, as the guest of a friend who works in the West Wing, she said. She pronounced it “deeeelish” and tried a quick flirt with the Secret Service.
Yelp does not disclose exactly how one attains Elite status, but it’s clearly not all about seriousness of purpose.
A year ago, after meeting him at a bar, Ms. Cress introduced Stephen Crocker, executive sous-chef at the Peninsula New York hotel, to Yelping. Stephen C., by contrast, has not attained Elite status: because he wants to be taken seriously, he writes fewer but longer reviews, concentrating on presentation and price.
“It’s a great place to catalog and share your thoughts,” he said.
Although its initial focus was on restaurants, Yelp now accepts reviews on virtually anything with an address: doctors, shoe stores, doggie salons, even Broadway shows. Ms. Cress gained early Yelp notoriety by reviewing the plastic surgeon who enlarged her breasts and posting a picture of her torso in a bikini. “He told me he made thousands in referrals from that,” she said.
Because the company started in San Francisco, it is not uncommon for a restaurant there to have 300 reviews. In New York most have fewer. Le Bernardin, for example, had just over 100 reviews as of this writing. And the L train — yes, the subway line — had 39, which is probably an indication of how many Yelpers are young and live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Nationally, the company says, 81 percent of Yelpers are under age 40, which may help explain why every pizzeria in town gets notices and why reviewers of the priciest restaurants often explain how they afforded them. Caroline W. went to Per Se because her friend had a new boyfriend who wanted to impress them both. (He was “criminally wrong for her” but they loved the food.) Elton L. thanked his corporate expense account. Manda Bear B. said, wistfully, that she was taken by her ex (“a keeper and a bachelor in NYC :-) Sigh”) to celebrate six years since they met.
Others review expensive restaurants by the tidbit method. Jeffrey Chin, a 33-year-old bank computer consultant known as Jeff C., goes to charity tasting events at which many restaurants offer mini-versions of signature dishes. He has a bite of each and thus reviews up to 25 restaurants a night. That builds his numbers and helps him decide whether he wants to spring for a full meal.
Yelp doesn’t mind. Some of its “firsts” are by grabby members who pass a restaurant that is about to open and write something like “Can’t wait to go here.”
More than one Elite member described Yelping as addictive.
“You get so much positive reinforcement,” said Rebecca Shansky, who has a doctorate in neurobiology and works in a Mount Sinai Hospital lab but whose online persona, Becca S., is a babe who hangs out in cocktail lounges. “People tell you you’re cool, you’re funny, you’re a good writer.”
“It’s kind of like a cult, except instead of Kool-Aid we drink alcohol,” said Su Kim, of Laurel, Md., who is known as the Washington area’s “Primemeatiser” because he holds carnivore-only events.
He started a talk thread with the words, “You know you’re addicted to Yelp when ... ” The answers included: “ ... when you go to a restaurant for the sole purpose of adding to your review count, not because you’re hungry,” “ ... when you hate going abroad because you can’t Yelp about all your wonderful finds” and “... when you’re dining with non-Yelper friends and they ask, ‘Are you Yelping this in your head?’ ”
For some, the allure is in meeting people. Yelp sponsors monthly Elite-only events at which restaurants, distillers and vintners offer free samples to build a reputation. (Joncarl Lachman, a Chicago chef and restaurateur, called Yelp “word of mouth on steroids.”)
Independently, Yelpers agree online to meet at restaurants, go on DYLing pub crawls and so on.
Lauren Smith, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said she arrived in New York two years ago from Hayward, Calif., knowing almost no one. A friend introduced her to Yelp, she wrote 11 reviews in one night, got instant praise, liked it, and saw an open invitation to meet others at a bar that afternoon to play party games. Now all of her local friends are Yelpers, she said.
Yelp does care about identity. Elite members must use their real first name, last initial and photo. Some go further, piling on the poses, and adding shots of pets, lovers and favorite dishes.
As a reviewer, it makes you real; as a networker, it’s a come-on. Anyone can e-mail you without learning your real address.
“If you don’t have pictures and a few reviews, people don’t trust you,” said Nina Cheung, 30, who has been Elite for three years. “You have to be there to review, not just to hook up.”
The downside is that semianonymity can be breached. When Ms. Smith returned to Artichoke Basille’s Pizza the day after reviewing it, the counterman she had described as “my Italian cutie with a flirtatious smile” shouted: “You write for Yelp, don’t you? You’re Lauren S.!”
“If I was white,” Ms. Smith, who is black, wrote in her review update, “I think I would have turned as red as the sauce from embarrassment.”
And when Kathleen B. Reynolds, another Elite, returned to her hair salon after mentioning that some of its stylists disappeared midcut, her stylist looked her over and said, “I guess I can’t take any cigarette breaks when I’m with you, hmm?”
As critics, Yelpers have different aspirations. The incredibly prolific Ed Uyeshima, 49, of San Francisco, had 976 Yelp reviews (accompanied by 2,197 photos), and another 1,483 on Amazon .com. That led The San Francisco Examiner to make him its freelance reviewer of events for tourists. His thoughtful reviews are written on nights and weekends because his days are spent marketing financial services.
“And I do have time to do other things, I swear,” he said.
Ms. Cheung — Nina C. — works as a secretary. Because she was one of New York’s first Yelpers, she has 119 “firsts,” but no desire to turn pro.
“I think my writing style’s kind of juvenile,” she admitted.
Mr. Uyeshima said he found Yelp a friendly milieu. On Amazon, he said, he is attacked by readers who dislike his book reviews, particularly if they disagree politically. On Yelp, you can’t vote a review “not helpful” but you can click “send a compliment.”
“That’s an interesting nuance,” he said. “You can breed a lot of hostility on a site, but Yelp doesn’t encourage negativity.”
People in the wider food business are deeply divided about Yelpers.
Sites with higher gastronomic pretensions like Eater, Grub Street or Serious Eats tend to be dismissive. A particular complaint is that, unlike anonymous posters, Yelpers can be e-mailed after a review and offered free food or drink. Several Elites said they or friends had had such offers, but argued that it was rare and, in any case, they would not change what they wrote.
Another fear is fake reviews posted by a chef’s friends or enemies.
But Ms. Johannesen, of the Kimpton chain, said she thought those were easy to spot: any author with a sketchy profile and few posts was suspect.
Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s founder, said a business could also flag a suspect negative review and ask the company to look at it. When Yelp caught a circle of San Francisco businesses writing five-star reviews for one another this summer, “we purged them from the system,” he said.
Another criticism is that Yelp solicits restaurant “sponsorships.” For a fee, a restaurant can keep one favorable review, marked “sponsor,” at the top of the list. Mr. Stoppelman emphatically denied that unfavorable reviews were reordered or removed for sponsors, unless they were clearly fakes.
The Fifth Floor restaurant in San Francisco, which has one Michelin star, pays Yelp $300 a month for such a sponsorship, said Todd Stillman, its general manager. On the day he said that, Fifth Floor’s top two Yelp reviews, including the sponsored one, were raves. But three others in the top 10 were pans.
Mr. Stillman shrugged it off and said he had used bad reviews to correct staff or kitchen problems, or had e-mailed the reviewer with an explanation. “Feedback is good when you’re in the customer satisfaction business,” he said. “If you don’t evolve in this marketplace, you go extinct.”
Eat and Tell By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
YOU too can be a restaurant critic. And not just an anonymous Zagateer, dutifully filling in forms. You can have fans. You can get the glory of personal thanks from chefs you’ve deified, or the smug satisfaction of hate mail from those you’ve savaged. You can hobnob with sous-chefs at food events. If your soul is for sale, you can cadge free drinks or meals.
As a bonus, you might even get a sex life — and if so inclined, you can discuss it in detail, online, with fellow foodies.
Where, oh where, you ask, is this magic matchbook cover? How do I apply for this once-in-a-lifetime offer?
It’s simple. Just sign up at Yelp.com and review away.
O.K., so maybe you’re not in the most erudite company — a lot of the reviews are of the “OMG, it was total choco-gasm!” variety. Not every chef appreciates diners who yank out pocket cameras when the amuse-bouches arrive and leave “You’ve been yelped” cards with the check. And Thomas Keller, maestro of Per Se in New York and the French Laundry in California, swears he has never heard of Yelpers.
But with 4 million reviews written and 15 million visitors a month, Yelp is a growing force in the food-obsessed corners of the Web, where life is all profiteroles and beer. According to Web traffic counters like Alexa, Nielsen Online and Google Analytics, Yelp is growing much faster than its closest rival, Citysearch, and has either surpassed it in page views or is on the verge of doing so. Both have many times more visitors than Insider Pages, Zagat, OpenTable, Chowhound or other restaurant sites.
“It’s an exciting new channel for us to harvest,” said Liz Johannesen, marketing director for Kimpton, a national chain of boutique hotels and restaurants. “We went from disbelief to suspicion to fully embracing it.”
Some restaurateurs still dismiss Yelpers as a fork-waving mob of know-nothings. Paul Kahan, the chef and an owner of Blackbird, Avec and the Publican in Chicago, became known there for complaining that sites like Yelp were “a forum for people who don’t necessarily know what they’re talking about.”
But, he conceded in an interview, the sheer volume of amateur opinion is useful. Any reader who struggled through 20 to 30 Yelp reviews of one of his restaurants, he said, “would get a fair impression of it.”
The critical masses are open to anyone. You don’t have to eat in the fanciest restaurants. You don’t need a Culinary Institute of America degree to prove your kitchen cred. You needn’t be a dismissive snob. You don’t even have to have a terribly discerning palate.
But it does help to have a winning personality, some appealing personal snapshots and a flair for writing. Fellow Yelpers vote for their favorite critics and the coveted Review of the Day.
Or, in Yelp-speak: “Kudos on your ROTD, dude! Want to go DYL tonight?” (That would be “destroy your liver,” an invitation to imbibe.)
Within Yelp dwell the Yelp Elite, who write often enough and cleverly enough to tickle the algorithms at headquarters into singling them out for promotion.
For example, Megan Cress — known online as Megan C. of New York — has been Yelp Elite for three years running. She has written more than 300 restaurant reviews (95 of them “firsts,” posted before anyone else). She has 957 friends and 151 fans on the site.
(By contrast, a New York Times restaurant critic might take six years to amass 300 reviews. The critic visits a restaurant several times, strives for anonymity and tries to sample every dish on the menu. Whether he or she has any friends is not recorded.)
Ms. Cress “networks for a living,” she said, introducing people and companies for a finder’s fee. Yelping helps; people who like her reviews often send her e-mail messages, and she decides whether answering them would be useful or fun.
There’s a sexy wink to many of her write-ups, which include her own “date rating” and “pickup scale.” She recently reviewed the Navy mess in the White House, as the guest of a friend who works in the West Wing, she said. She pronounced it “deeeelish” and tried a quick flirt with the Secret Service.
Yelp does not disclose exactly how one attains Elite status, but it’s clearly not all about seriousness of purpose.
A year ago, after meeting him at a bar, Ms. Cress introduced Stephen Crocker, executive sous-chef at the Peninsula New York hotel, to Yelping. Stephen C., by contrast, has not attained Elite status: because he wants to be taken seriously, he writes fewer but longer reviews, concentrating on presentation and price.
“It’s a great place to catalog and share your thoughts,” he said.
Although its initial focus was on restaurants, Yelp now accepts reviews on virtually anything with an address: doctors, shoe stores, doggie salons, even Broadway shows. Ms. Cress gained early Yelp notoriety by reviewing the plastic surgeon who enlarged her breasts and posting a picture of her torso in a bikini. “He told me he made thousands in referrals from that,” she said.
Because the company started in San Francisco, it is not uncommon for a restaurant there to have 300 reviews. In New York most have fewer. Le Bernardin, for example, had just over 100 reviews as of this writing. And the L train — yes, the subway line — had 39, which is probably an indication of how many Yelpers are young and live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Nationally, the company says, 81 percent of Yelpers are under age 40, which may help explain why every pizzeria in town gets notices and why reviewers of the priciest restaurants often explain how they afforded them. Caroline W. went to Per Se because her friend had a new boyfriend who wanted to impress them both. (He was “criminally wrong for her” but they loved the food.) Elton L. thanked his corporate expense account. Manda Bear B. said, wistfully, that she was taken by her ex (“a keeper and a bachelor in NYC :-) Sigh”) to celebrate six years since they met.
Others review expensive restaurants by the tidbit method. Jeffrey Chin, a 33-year-old bank computer consultant known as Jeff C., goes to charity tasting events at which many restaurants offer mini-versions of signature dishes. He has a bite of each and thus reviews up to 25 restaurants a night. That builds his numbers and helps him decide whether he wants to spring for a full meal.
Yelp doesn’t mind. Some of its “firsts” are by grabby members who pass a restaurant that is about to open and write something like “Can’t wait to go here.”
More than one Elite member described Yelping as addictive.
“You get so much positive reinforcement,” said Rebecca Shansky, who has a doctorate in neurobiology and works in a Mount Sinai Hospital lab but whose online persona, Becca S., is a babe who hangs out in cocktail lounges. “People tell you you’re cool, you’re funny, you’re a good writer.”
“It’s kind of like a cult, except instead of Kool-Aid we drink alcohol,” said Su Kim, of Laurel, Md., who is known as the Washington area’s “Primemeatiser” because he holds carnivore-only events.
He started a talk thread with the words, “You know you’re addicted to Yelp when ... ” The answers included: “ ... when you go to a restaurant for the sole purpose of adding to your review count, not because you’re hungry,” “ ... when you hate going abroad because you can’t Yelp about all your wonderful finds” and “... when you’re dining with non-Yelper friends and they ask, ‘Are you Yelping this in your head?’ ”
For some, the allure is in meeting people. Yelp sponsors monthly Elite-only events at which restaurants, distillers and vintners offer free samples to build a reputation. (Joncarl Lachman, a Chicago chef and restaurateur, called Yelp “word of mouth on steroids.”)
Independently, Yelpers agree online to meet at restaurants, go on DYLing pub crawls and so on.
Lauren Smith, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology, said she arrived in New York two years ago from Hayward, Calif., knowing almost no one. A friend introduced her to Yelp, she wrote 11 reviews in one night, got instant praise, liked it, and saw an open invitation to meet others at a bar that afternoon to play party games. Now all of her local friends are Yelpers, she said.
Yelp does care about identity. Elite members must use their real first name, last initial and photo. Some go further, piling on the poses, and adding shots of pets, lovers and favorite dishes.
As a reviewer, it makes you real; as a networker, it’s a come-on. Anyone can e-mail you without learning your real address.
“If you don’t have pictures and a few reviews, people don’t trust you,” said Nina Cheung, 30, who has been Elite for three years. “You have to be there to review, not just to hook up.”
The downside is that semianonymity can be breached. When Ms. Smith returned to Artichoke Basille’s Pizza the day after reviewing it, the counterman she had described as “my Italian cutie with a flirtatious smile” shouted: “You write for Yelp, don’t you? You’re Lauren S.!”
“If I was white,” Ms. Smith, who is black, wrote in her review update, “I think I would have turned as red as the sauce from embarrassment.”
And when Kathleen B. Reynolds, another Elite, returned to her hair salon after mentioning that some of its stylists disappeared midcut, her stylist looked her over and said, “I guess I can’t take any cigarette breaks when I’m with you, hmm?”
As critics, Yelpers have different aspirations. The incredibly prolific Ed Uyeshima, 49, of San Francisco, had 976 Yelp reviews (accompanied by 2,197 photos), and another 1,483 on Amazon .com. That led The San Francisco Examiner to make him its freelance reviewer of events for tourists. His thoughtful reviews are written on nights and weekends because his days are spent marketing financial services.
“And I do have time to do other things, I swear,” he said.
Ms. Cheung — Nina C. — works as a secretary. Because she was one of New York’s first Yelpers, she has 119 “firsts,” but no desire to turn pro.
“I think my writing style’s kind of juvenile,” she admitted.
Mr. Uyeshima said he found Yelp a friendly milieu. On Amazon, he said, he is attacked by readers who dislike his book reviews, particularly if they disagree politically. On Yelp, you can’t vote a review “not helpful” but you can click “send a compliment.”
“That’s an interesting nuance,” he said. “You can breed a lot of hostility on a site, but Yelp doesn’t encourage negativity.”
People in the wider food business are deeply divided about Yelpers.
Sites with higher gastronomic pretensions like Eater, Grub Street or Serious Eats tend to be dismissive. A particular complaint is that, unlike anonymous posters, Yelpers can be e-mailed after a review and offered free food or drink. Several Elites said they or friends had had such offers, but argued that it was rare and, in any case, they would not change what they wrote.
Another fear is fake reviews posted by a chef’s friends or enemies.
But Ms. Johannesen, of the Kimpton chain, said she thought those were easy to spot: any author with a sketchy profile and few posts was suspect.
Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s founder, said a business could also flag a suspect negative review and ask the company to look at it. When Yelp caught a circle of San Francisco businesses writing five-star reviews for one another this summer, “we purged them from the system,” he said.
Another criticism is that Yelp solicits restaurant “sponsorships.” For a fee, a restaurant can keep one favorable review, marked “sponsor,” at the top of the list. Mr. Stoppelman emphatically denied that unfavorable reviews were reordered or removed for sponsors, unless they were clearly fakes.
The Fifth Floor restaurant in San Francisco, which has one Michelin star, pays Yelp $300 a month for such a sponsorship, said Todd Stillman, its general manager. On the day he said that, Fifth Floor’s top two Yelp reviews, including the sponsored one, were raves. But three others in the top 10 were pans.
Mr. Stillman shrugged it off and said he had used bad reviews to correct staff or kitchen problems, or had e-mailed the reviewer with an explanation. “Feedback is good when you’re in the customer satisfaction business,” he said. “If you don’t evolve in this marketplace, you go extinct.”
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