The Pebble and the Avalanche

But If It Really Is Happening, Is It Yelp?

The Wall Street Journal blogs that somone filed a lawsuit against Yelp alleging extortion. The lawsuit alleges that Yelp will take down negative reviews in return for money; others allege that Yelp will take down positive reviews if you do not purchase an advertising package.

Let's say that someone is collecting money for removing negative reviews from Yelp. Is it really Yelp?

I expect it's easy enough for a criminal ring to target business owners. They crooks put up several negative reviews; instead of waiting for the business to complain to Yelp, the crooks contact the business directly and offer their "package." The business owner, convinced that he's doing business with Yelp, pays up; the negative reviews disappear; maybe the crooks are smart even smart enough to pay some of the ill-gotten gains for promised advertising.

When I want to prove I own a web page, the person I'm doing business with will ask me to put a comment into the web page's source code, a token that only the web page editor can insert. That's a level of sophisticated identity authentication that I expect most business owners do not have.

Now I admit I'm curious... even if this lawsuit does not involve crooks, does a ring such as the one I describe exist on Yelp or elsewhere?

P.S. The most damage to Yelp would not be to their reputation, or even the proceeds from the lawsuit. I will guess that the most damage would be to their loss of Section 230 safe harbor protection — a smart lawyer could easily (and very profitably) argue that Yelp loses that protection if they manipulate positive and negative reviews to force businesses to subscribe to their services.

Topics:  · business · internet

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Of Quail Eggs and Twitter

Does everyone in the world need to know that I had quail eggs for lunch on Monday? I think so, so I'll broadcast that on Twitter in a few minutes. But sometimes the most surprising people read Twitter.

Early Tuesday morning I mentioned on Twitter that I was not going to vote in the Illinois primary election. Although I almost always vote in the primaries (and I never miss a general election), this year I was too thoroughly disgusted with the choices on tap and decided to protest by staying at home.

And then I got a telephone call from a reporter at The Chicago Tribune, who interviewed me about the reasons for my refusal to vote. The reporter had noticed my comment on Twitter and was curious enough to ask me.

I do admit that I'm curious about what tool he uses to scan Twitter so effectively, but that's not the point. The point is that the most innocuous short remark can provide information to someone, perhaps not very efficiently but in real time. Twitter has accomplished something profound and I think we don't quite understand the implications just yet.

Topics:  · internet · social+media

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The Next Blog Iteration: Can I Have My Data, Please?

Comments are turned off on this blog because I had trouble with the software that runs this blog; the base software is rather old and quirky. I hope to have time this week to repair it.

I am giving due consideration to new software, but there's a spot of bother. A modern blog is really a database: the web page you see is constructed from a lot of data in a database. In fact many web sites are buil that way &mdsah; they're really databases and the web pages you see are constructed from that database. (Trust me: Amazon doesn't create a new web page from scratch for each of the millions of books it has on file, it creates web pages automatically from a database of all its books.) That's actually quite nice in lots of ways, but not so nice in another, namely that if you don't understand how to extract your files from the database you're at the mercy of the web site software. Migrating to a new database system is no easy task.

My current web site is fairly straightforward and stores all its input in ordinary files, and the blog software simply does formatting for me. I don't feel at the mercy of the software and my inforamtion is always available. But I'm afraid it's time to overcome my fears and place all the data into a real database — and make certain I can pull the data out one day by using an open-source version of the software.

Topics:  · internet

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"Is this still you?"

A friend just sent an email message to my email address to ask "Is this still you?" I added in a few more details about how to find me:

• A microblogging service
• Two different IM networks
• Two social networking sites (the ones I use most often)
• Three of my blogs (again, the ones I update most often)

The question "is this you?" is more complicated than ever before.

Topics:  · internet · social+media · society

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A Sense of Humor at Citi Bank

A few weeks back I signed up for a monthly reminder of my payment due date from Citi Bank — but not for "special offers" three times a week. (You have to wonder if the water coolers at certain companies are filled with vodka when they come up with ideas like that one.

After I had trouble with their "security" system I gave in and called Citi Bank to ask them to please stop sending me a barrage of email. Today I received — you guessed it — email asking me about my customer service experience. Who says corporations don't have a sense of humor?

Topics:  · business · internet

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Does This Count as Twitter Abuse?

Most technical conferences use a "back-channel" for attendees to message each other during the conference. If the speaker makes a reference to a company, someone will post the URL; if an attendee doesn't like one of the speaker's arguments he can say so. I expect some people find this disconcerting, but smart conference organizers monitor the back-channel to see what's been said to take the pulse of the audience.

At the recent Emerging Communications Conference (eComm), for example, a stream of comments in the back-channel prompted the conference organizer to stand up and demand that the attendees who disagreed with the speaker give the speaker a chance to respond by asking their questions publically.

The most common tool for a back-channel used to be IRC: simple and cheap, with some bells and whistles for advanced users — IRC is in fact designed for discussions. Instead, eComm asked us to use Twitter, and we did, with the "#eComm" tag (you can still find the entire conference and post-conference discussion if you like). This meant our back-channel was public; no great worry. It also meant that eComm rapidly became one of the most ten popular topics on Twitter during the span of the conference.

But it also meant that we carried on a two-way conversation via a micro-blogging service that's meant for short broadcasts to the world. Twitter simply doesn't support that very well, and at least one of my subscribers temporarily unsubscribed from my feed because of the number of tweets I made. One fellow attendee solved this "flooding" problem by creating a temporary Twitter account just for duration of the conference.

My conclusion: eComm certainly received decent publicity for the conference; as for myself, I found a number of new people to follow on Twitter and they found me. The public at large learned some interesting facts. But in practice Twitter isn't really meant for conversations, and the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. We need to figure out how to combine IRC's conversational nature with Twitter's public presence.

Topics:  · internet · social+media

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Facebook and Nokia Enter Battle for Address Books

As I've stated elsewhere and especially in my book, one interesting battle in the digital age is the fight for your address book. Everyone wants to own it: the company that manufactures your PDA want you to keep the information there; your telephone company want it online in a speed-dial list; your cell phone manufacturer wants the information inside their handset; your "contact relationship management" software has it's own specialized database of your contacts; Google, Plaxo, and a dozen others want you to keep the information in their online services. And if you use some or all of these various devices, web sites, and telecom services, you know that it can very difficult to keep them all in synchronization.

I hadn't noticed that what I think of as the more "casual" social networking web sites had entered the battle. Facebook and Nokia have discussed how to integrate Facebook into Nokia cell phones, and in particular how to move address book information between the two companies. I'll be interested in how these new partners settle their differences and enter the address book battlefield — and which new fronts open up in this long war.

Topics:  · internet · telecommunications

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Smaller Files Mean Easier Security

One of the fun parts of writing a book is when someone "gets it" and learns to apply the ideas.

I've just received an interesting missive from Tracy Snell, who has just left his post as CTO of Interactions:

I've used MobileMe for years and one thing I loved was the OSX keychain syncing. It's worked pretty well, but to have my keychains synced across all the Macs I use I was welded to MobileMe.  Kept hearing good things about 1passwd. So I installed it recently and it is nice.
Former versions were just a nice front end on the OSX keychain, but now it uses its own keychain format. Suddenly I lost sync across machines! So I go digging and find out that their new format is not one monolithic file storing all the keys but instead each key gets its own file. [This] makes syncing and merging a trivial issue. Just store your 1passwd keychain on DropBox or iDisk and you're done. You don't risk a corrupted keychain if you have a failure in the middle of a sync. Dawned on my last night it was a great example of disaggregation.

In other words, the location of the password keychain is no longer tied to the Mac, and the keychain entries are more robust and easier to synchronize.

And I guess I congratulate the makers of 1passwd as well, at least in theory, but don't forget to read some reviews before you try this product.

Topics:  · internet · security

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A Waste of Time Becomes a Good Deed

If you've signed up to use a web site lately, you may have been required to solve a "captcha" puzzle — for example, if you try to leave a comment on this web site you have to solve a math problem. The most common captcha puzzle is to read a distorted image of text.

Captchas are annoying but in the meantime they're a necessary evil. Of course, a lot of effort goes into solving captchas:

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.

The authors of that thought implemented a brilliant solution:

What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

I'm using reCAPTCHA's service on a different blog, Kosher Wine Review, to screen attempts to register. As you solve the captcha puzzle, you help resolve an ambiguous scan of words from a book — after your solution is matched with solutions by other people around the world the solution enters the database. Word by word, the book's scan become cleaner and cleaner and the sum total of human knowledge increases. The entire idea and implementation constitute a brilliant use of the distributed nature of the Internet along with the disaggregation of the problem of unclear book scans into multiple, iterative steps.

Topics:  · internet

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Those Technology Problems

I guess I just don't understand marketing. Those rude folks at CarRentals.com were sending two messages a week, unsolicited, about deals. Do they sincerely think that any normal person needs to hear from them twice a week? Doesn't anyone there realize that if you annoy your customers, they'll never return?

Fortunately, I've disabled the email address they've been using, and all future email from them will be processed by a "known spam" filter that helps defend others from receiving spam.

Topics:  · business · internet

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