social – Page 3 – Cubicgarden.com…

Busy social week ahead

Next week I’m involved in a lot of social events….

Sunday 25th March – Vivid lounge re-opens under new management as just Vivid for a private party (remember that blog post)
Monday 26th March – Vivid officially opens
Tuesday 27th March – Preston Social: A look at on-line dating…
Wednesday 28th March – Manchester Werewolf Chapter
Thursday 29th March – Geeky & Sexy: Social Etiquette and Politics of first time dating
Friday 30th March – TedXBradford: Life on-line (first time in Bradford)

Honestly trying not to over do things, but they’ve just creped up…

I’ll certainly make sure I take it easy on that weekend right before my Rollercoaster weekender (interested in coming give me a shout)

Also worth pointing out that Salford Cinema Club has started a Pledgebank to book the Odeon IMAX cinema (real IMAX) for the opening night of the Dark Knight Rises.

Pledge “darkknightimax”

“I will Hire the Odeon IMAX for The Dark Knight Rises on 20th July but only if 300 other dark knight film fans will commit to paying for a ticket (between £10 – £15).”

— Ian Forrester, Founder of the SalfordCinemaClub (contact)

Deadline to sign up by: 20^th May 2012

Is it possible to match people with science?

This has got to be one the eternal questions? Maths or science has solved so many of our questions but can it be used for working out compatibility of humans?

That was one of the things which really intrigued me about a year of making love. I assume you’ve seen how it turned in on its self since the production team totally screwed up the process and kept us all in the dark about it. And if you want further evidence do check out the tweets for #yearofmakinglove and #yoml…

However because of the total screwup most people are saying its a total failure (maybe very true) but also science or rather maths was never going to work… I can’t disagree specially after the experience we all had yesterday. However basing any judgments off the back of yesterdays experience would be a mistake.

So do I personally think maths/science can match humans? Maybe… (yes what a cope out) but to be honest no one knows for sure. And thats the point of the experiment.

At the very start of the day (ordeal) we were introduced to the professor who devised the test/questions and the matching algorithm. I remember tweeting this…

Just had it explained to us what’s going to happen and it seems there is some science behind #yrolove. Unique experience and experiment

— Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) February 18, 2012

As Michael replied a far…

@cubicgarden Have fun with it 🙂 Bear in mind being told there’s science behind something encourages you to believe they’re correct…

— Michael (@sparks_rd) February 18, 2012

And he’s right…

In my own experience to date, the matching algorithm over at OkCupid.com has been pretty darn good (not perfect!) (OKCupid’s OK Trends are legendary – check out the biggest lies people tell each other on dating sites and How race effects the messages you get). But I had to train it to be good. I’ve to date answered about 700+ questions and there not just questions. There detailed, so you have to answer it, then specify how important this is to you and what answer your ideal match would pick. This makes for much more dimensions in the answer criteria and ultimately the algorithm. Aka the algorithm is only as good as the dataset its working on.

You got to put in the data/time, if you want it to be good… Otherwise your going to get crappy results.

This makes the 50 questions answered for the year of making love look like a pop quiz (hotshot), to be honest.

So back to the original question slightly modified, can a algorithm match people in the interest of love? I think so to a certain extent. But its not the complete picture. Chemistry is a big deal which is very difficult to understand. Its not found by answering questions but watching the interaction between people. Its a different type of algorithm… Situation can cause chemistry, aka the reason why everyone came together on the coaches home (or to the wrong city as some of them seemed to do) is because there was a social situation which we could all share/talk about. (cue talk about social objects/places) Chemistry was in full effect?

I hope people don’t give up on science as a way to find their ideal partner just because of the terrible experience they had at The year of making love… is I guess what I’m saying…

Self Confidence: How to be interesting…

Simon Lumb and Aden Davies shared Russell Davis’s post about how to be interesting…

He makes two assumptions…

The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.

Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.

And assuming the above… here’s his recommendations (obviously there quite computer related but they don’t have to be)…

Take at least one picture everyday. Post it to flickr
Start a blog. Write at least one sentence every week
Keep a scrapbook
Every week, read a magazine you’ve never read before
Once a month interview someone for 20 minutes, work out how to make them interesting. Podcast it
Collect something
Once a week sit in a coffee-shop or cafe for an hour and listen to other people’s conversations. Take notes. Blog about it. (Carefully)
Every month write 50 words about one piece of visual art, one piece of writing, one piece of music and one piece of film or TV. Do other art forms if you can. Blog about it
Make something
Read

I like the list quite a lot and it really got me thinking, what would I put in this kind of a list?

So I wrote my own… (please note this is all in my own opinion, you may disagree but that’s what comments are for…)

Tweet at least everyday and make sure its public
Tweet, microblog, blog, what ever… Being open and public will improve your confidence, interface you with other peoples opinions and ultimately make you a better or more rounded person
Start a blog and update it regularly!
blogging or sharing your thoughts are still very important and really helps when referring to points in arguments. Its still what I recommend to many people who ask me where to start. Like above, the interchange of ideas with other peoples thoughts will make you a more interesting person. Also make sure its regular, otherwise you will loose the momentum or build it up too big in your mind.
Keep a note of conversations, ideas and dreams in a scrapbook, notebook or just somewhere shareable
I personally use Evernote to document everything I find interesting. I can later on share it with people and thats been very handy for communicating a idea or whats going on in my brain.
Follow and read articles/retweets from people you follow on twitter
I only tend to follow people who say interesting things, and every once in a while I just scroll through links and retweets from people I follow. Generally I’ve found them very useful and they usually end up in my readitlater or instapaper. Once again, although not directly
Start or be on a podcast/videocast
I hate the sound of my voice but forcing myself to do a podcast, has got me use to the sound and how I sound to others. How this helps with being more interesting, I’m not quite sure but its certainly something you can talk about and share with others
Talk to someone new at least every week
What have you got to loose? Someone new may unlock a whole new lifestyle choice, a new found friend or be your next partner… You just need to hold a conversation for at least 2mins. Generally if your exploiting number 9, this will be very easy…
Once in a week sit in a great tea/coffee shop and just listen without your headphones
Nothing better than to over hear human concerns. Yes most of them will be mindless stuff to you but it doesn’t matter, listen to the metadata. Passion, tone, etc… They all give a different aspect to the human voice… I already mentioned before about how I tend not to use my lift with headphones on for a similar reason.
Every month, tweet an observation about human life
I loved Seinfeld because of its observation of human life, and in actual fact someone pointed out to me. That most comedy is a observation of life. Theres two ways you can take this…
1. Being funny is always great
2. Having a detailed understanding of life means you can later hack it 🙂
And don’t just sit on that knowledge, share it!
Take advantage of your understanding of social objects
Talking of hacking life… If you don’t understand the concept of social objects and how they enrich our lives, nows the time to learn… I would start Hugh Macleod’s 101 thoughts on Social objects then check out Jyri Enstrom’s post, then more links from Hugh Macleod including Jyri’s video at London Geekdinners a while back. Don’t quite understand this relates to being more interested? A shared experience is a powerful key to being interesting to other people. For example, on the train as I am now, I could turn around the lady across the table and say “nice drawing, how did you learn to draw like that?” The social object would be the drawing… Hugh has better examples…
Learn
Life long learning, what more is there to say? Always be learning…

The general theme is about openness, human contact, sharing and self improvement… Being more interesting isn’t a thing you just throw on, actually its about being confident in your own abilities and the way to do that is to be comfitable in your own skin. The rest will come naturally… As Nic ferrier said “get our of your comfort zone once a week…” Which I think is right but actually its more involved than just once a week, its about a change in the way you look at life.

Social steganography with Securebook?

Rob Best wrote to me after seeing my post on Social Steganography.

I read your article on social steganography and I have also become interested in it even if it is old news by now. So intrigued I decided to write my first Android app (Securebook) with the sole purpose of letting you hide secret messages in seemingly normal Facebook status updates. Hope you’ll check it out: https://market.android.com/search?q=securebook&so=1&c=apps

I wrote back to Rob and said, I’ll check it out and I did. I got the Free ad-supported version…

Securebook required my facebook login which was done via a web login, so it shouldn’t worried too much. Once in the application was pretty simplistic. You can look at your wall or post something. When you post, you get the option to write something publicly and something hidden.

So I thought i’d test it and posted something on my facebook wall.

testing securebook lite the first social steganography app

Can’t read the message in the message? Download Securebook to see what you’re missing.

395AF95D1586A6C9A4258B2BCC6091CE19A3074721106FD591C7A366F135FD12E874725056814E63F1AF60E49681197C

Before long I received some interesting comments from friends (Combination of Micheal, Tim, Marcus, Maria, Paul) who were less that impressed… Of course you can’t see my wall (one of the problems with Facebook), so I finally did a summary and posted it to Rob Best as a email.

Having had a look about, it looks like securebook don’t understand what stenography means because they’re the ones adding lots of that text saying “Hey look, it’s encrypted”. Also, how would securebook know they’re the first social stenography app? There could be loads, and by definition you shouldn’t know if someone was using it! 🙂

Securebook isn’t doing stenography. Simple as that. Shoving the ciphertext in the exif comment data of a JPEG, and then posting the JPEG on a website, and linking to that from a facebook post (for example) would be stenography (after a fashion), because the message would not be visible. Simply adding the ciphertext clearly visible in the body of a status update is not stenography. If the person writing this app doesn’t understand that basic difference, stay away from the app, since they simply do not understand stenography.

Rob wrote back to me in this reply…

The paid version removes the “Can’t see the message …” text. And if you use the link functionality as your carrier, the only “give away” is that Facebook will show that the message was posted using Securebook (I may change this though).

And in reply to the rest of the comment…

Again, the cyphertext is not visible when a link is used as the carrier.

I actually had this in my first draft version. Actually, I first was encoding the message in the lower 4 bits of the photo and uploading it to Facebook. Problem is I couldn’t nail down Facebook’s compression so the message was lost. I then thought to put it in the exif data but Facebook strips that too! I then was forced to decide if I wanted to pursue this path or do something else.

I found that I could put the message in a Facebook link (replacing the actual URL) and since only the caption is displayed the message remained hidden, but of course the link was broken. I think this still constituted steganography though.

Lastly I looked into encoding the message using whitespace and also using the letter of each word in the message to do a dictionary lookup and find a word starting with that letter. The posts were of course non-nonsensical at that point so I scrapped that idea.

Going back to your comments, perhaps in version 2.0 I’ll add the ability to upload a photo to a site where I can manage the compression therefore saving the message encoded in the last 4 bits (or exif data) and link to it from Facebook.

So I think its a noble attempt and hopefully the feedback is helping Rob. Its a really great and useful first application, I’ll certainly keep it on my android device and look forward to the updates of Securebook. Good work Rob, interesting application and I’m sure once you get it cracked, people will flock to download it…

Hiding in plain sight: Social Steganography

I know its quite old (all of a year) but I’m really intriguing…

Privacy in a public age

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She’s hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren’t in the know and read differently by those who are. She’s communicating to different audiences simultaneously, relying on specific cultural awareness to provide the right interpretive lens. While she’s focused primarily on separating her mother from her friends, her message is also meaningless to broader audiences who have no idea that she had just broken up with her boyfriend. As far as they’re concerned, Carmen just posted an interesting lyric.

Social steganography is one privacy tactic teens take when engaging in semi-public forums like Facebook. While adults have worked diligently to exclude people through privacy settings, many teenagers have been unable to exclude certain classes of adults – namely their parents – for quite some time. For this reason, they’ve had to develop new techniques to speak to their friends fully aware that their parents are overhearing. Social steganography is one of the most common techniques that teens employ. They do this because they care about privacy, they care about misinterpretation, they care about segmented communications strategies. And they know that technical tools for restricting access don’t trump parental demands to gain access. So they find new ways of getting around limitations. And, in doing so, reconstruct age-old practices.

I would also add the suggestion that deep down they also know that technical methods are seriously no good for privacy. So they deploy there own privacy by adding steganography to there imprint on the web. Its also not just teenagers…

My lifestreaming dating idea realised for anyone to take on

People ask me why would I choose to open my ideas to the world, for anyone to take and make money on. For example mydreamscape.org.

But the way I see it is, I’m very unlikely to dedicate 10 years of my life to one idea, grow it and nurture it through all the stages of making it successful. I actually put this to Richard St John a while ago at TedXSheffield, because I was really interested in what he thought of those like myself who don’t necessarily want to be successful (as such). He cleverly turned the question around and said actually what i’m actually after is success in the idea or the meme. Ideally I would have a team of people and certain people would make there job to take an idea forward for the sake of the team.

But back to the point…

I’ve been sitting on the same principle idea for a long time to do with online dating. It was actually the wider part of what I presentation at Ignite Leeds.

I’ve stated before that some of the largest benefits we will see from creating and maintaining our Lifestreams will be the services created on the backbone of that data. We are starting to see the first big service phenomenon from that coming in the way of content readers that are built specifically for us based on the data shared by our social graph.

Early on when I first started writing about Lifestreaming I gave thought to services that could be built off of the data and one of the first that came to mind was a dating site. In fact I had multiple interviews at a top dating site a few years ago that was very interested in my knowledge and thoughts around Lifestreaming data. I didn’t get the job, but I still felt that Lifestreaming data would at some point help power the matchmaking process. Well apparently a new dating service called Wings feels the same way.

Wings has taken a unique and interesting approach when it comes to dating. They figured that instead of creating a site from scratch that people need to join, they’d just tap into the 500+ Million Facebook users and build a dating app within their eco-system. The innovation doesn’t stop there as when you join there is no super long, multi-page questionnaire. After joining the service will analyze your Facebook data and let you also connect your Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, Twitter, and Foursquare accounts to help paint a picture of who you are. I feel this is a much better way to build a profile for someone. Instead of a static survey filled out and frozen in time, your profile is dynamic based on the data collected on a daily basis.

This is the crux of my idea.

One of the most frustrating things about online dating is the lack of portability but also having to fill in those bloody profile statements or questions. So if you could leverage your lifestream instead to teach the system about who you really are. Then you might actually get better results. This would/could also cut down on Spam and more interestingly the lies people tell in online dating.

I thought about using the same principle as in APML to mark up whats important in peoples lives. Now what I realize is this can be better done with a “like” button or “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” So if you don’t want your drunken pictures from last night on your dating profile, you can vote it down or bury it all together.

When you interfere with the stream, the engine would mark the item up in a way to say it was interfered with. So it discourages you from simply removing all the bad crap from your stream and painting a perfect picture of yourself. The more you do it, the more it indicates the changes.

So why did I not post this on my blog earlier?

Well I thought the notion of a lifestream was still a very alpha geek thing (still do) and most people only have a couple of services they sign up to (and therefore can make use of). Remember if you don’t use the services then theres no way of the engine being able to work out what you like.

I’m also unsure if revealing your impact across the web will certainly generate better matches. Someone (wish I could remember who) said the thing about the profile is its your best foot forward (the best bits of you). Letting people know about you straight away is a massive risk that lots of people wouldn’t want to take.

However, I’ve noticed more and more, people linking to different parts of there impact across the web. For example in my okcupid profile I have a link to my blog, my last fm profile, my flickr and my twitter stream. And i’m not the only one, quite a few people have links to there last fm or/and flickr. Some even go as far as to link to there facebook (rather them that me).

OkCupid does a interesting thing when your replying to someone, it pulls out things you both like, so for example…

I think you both like cooking, films, poker, fight club, and donnie darko.

You can pretty much look at my blog, my delicious, my last.fm, etc to determine the similar things. So ultimately its about gathering the data with the permission of the user to build up a profile of that person, which they can use to tell others about themselves. Its quite a long shot but I thought it was too early. It would only work with certain public people like for example Tara Hunt (I actually did try and send her a email explain the idea a while ago)

Its all about dataportability

Up till I saw Wings and the blog post about it, the closest thing I’d seen to my idea was a weird site called Gelato which went half way but not the whole way. Gelato allowed you to put in parts of your lifestream but it doesn’t build a profile around it. Instead it supports openid, facebookconnect and a few other authentication methods.

I’m still looking forward to joining a site where the email system isn’t some propriety crap and the instant messaging system is even worst. I get the whole anonymity thing, but this can be solved by passing messages back and forth to a 3rd party (aka the company who is running the site). Using this method almost anything could be used including Twitter, Xmpp, etc. Wings is a facebook app which I guess is a interesting solution, although being a facebook app winds me up no end and the fact its only for an American audience also winds me up no end.

So is the idea dead? Not exactly, Wings is still a poor dating experience and doesn’t rely enough on the data which it has. You have to confirm a lot of things and to be frank, it really needs to be as enjoyable as Okcupid for me to really be interested. (In actual fact while were letting the cat out of the bag), I was going to build a dating site off the back of Storytlr before they stopped it and went open source. Everyone would be able to put in there streams and you would be able to identify people who were matches via a mechanism like dr foxxy.

What I’m saying is the concept is still sound (I think) but the actual implementation is terrible and I don’t think putting it inside of facebook actually works or does it any favors. So I look forward to seeing more sites based on our lifestreams…

Werewolf: Extra Materials

To be fair to Wired magazine, they did a good piece about Werewolf in the most recent UK wired. I never expected so many pages dedicated to the game which some call the modern social crack. There’s also a huge sum of the variations of werewolf on the Wired site too.

Here’s a couple of the ones not even I’ve heard about…

The Fool: The player who gets this card immediately reveals himself to all the other players as “the village fool/idiot”. He does not speak again for the rest of the game and can’t focus enough to join any debates or lead any suspicions. He watches mutely, helplessly. At the beginning of each new day, while he is alive, he may reassign his vote to another villager by pointing – that newly entrusted voter might be an innocent villager or a werewolf in disguise. If the Fool or the Moderator should forget to reassign his vote, his vote remains with the prior assignee. (So if a prior assignee is a werewolf, it is to the werewolf’s advantage NOT to remind the Fool or Moderator to reassign the vote.) In his confusion, the Fool wears a ring of garlic around his neck, thinking it will repel the werewolves – when in fact, garlic is used to repel vampires. (If the vampire character is in play, of course, this garlic will protect him.) As a variation, in an attempt to control an unruly villager that speaks out too much or speaks when dead, the Moderator may instantly assign that unruly villager to be the village fool, either immediately during that game or in the next game if that player is already dead.

Not so sure about this one, but we’ve had newbies act the fool before, shouting out or making it too damm obvious what player they are.

The Coroner: Often, there is confusion in the village as to a cause of death or what just happened the night before. With certain character combinations the actual happenings just can’t be deduced – with certainty. As long as the Coroner is alive, the Moderator explains the causes of death and the nighttime happenings. The Coroner, however, does not actually play an active part in the game. Once the Coroner is out of the game, the remaining villagers must deduce everything themselves without any help from the Moderator.

This might be useful for some games instead of relying on the moderator, whos actually not meant to say anything in this issue

The Grave-Robbing Thief (created by Viki Kind, Ed You and our “Uber” Werewolf players): In this variation the Thief is still offered two other villager cards on the first night. If both cards are werewolf cards, he must chose one and become a werewolf. Otherwise, he may refuse both identities and wait till another night in the game to steal the identity of a newly dead villager on the first night following that villager’s death. In this variation the Moderator will ask every night if the Grave-Robbing Thief wants to steal someone else’s identity, fully reactivating that stolen identity and character. Example: if the dead Witch’s identity were stolen and reactivated, both of the Witch’s potions would be renewed as well. A dead werewolf identity may also be stolen and reactivated. The Moderator will have to again announce any activities of the newly stolen and reactivated identity and character.

I had a idea like this a while ago but never really played it out, oh well. I think its good but makes the game quite complex for newbies. You’d only want to play this with pros.

Theres lots more characters but to be fair a lot of them cause the moderator a lot of headache, make the game too complex or too random to get a balanced result to either side. I tried doing the probability maths a while back and got very confused, but I bet if you could do the maths behind it, you will find a lot the extra characters screw up the game for the werewolves or villagers. The standard pack of villagers, seer, healer and werewolves seems to be about right.

Its Ladies night

Always interesting to read Miss Geeky’s thoughts on woman in technology. She’s been thinking about a Ladies night at a Comic Store in Nova Scotia. Generally she says in the post, I wish we didn’t need things like Ladies Night to make it *not* intimidating for woman. But its the examples which I find really interesting…

Since moving to London, I’ve visited the Forbidden Planet tons of times. I love the place, it’s filled with wonderful geeky delights, and if I could I’d buy everything that caught my eye. And yet… almost every single time I go there by myself I get hit on. Okay, I kind of get that (geek store, geeky girl, chances of possible perfect match increases). But half of the time they open with something along the lines of whether I ”needed help in finding a present” or something else that completely neglects the fact that I might be there for myself. The thing is it almost always happens when I’m browsing the comics. If I’m at any other part of the store (like the fantasy/scifi books section or the manga section) that type of stuff doesn’t happen. It’s as if most geeks have accepted that girls are into geeky things, like fantasy and manga, but comics… then it’s suddenly “you don’t belong here”.

Seriously, guys? Why assume straightaway that a girl doesn’t belong there? I thought that by now it should be obvious for guy geeks that the geek girl does exist, but it’s moments like I’ve described above that some guys are completely oblivious to that fact. And it’s those guys that are making it difficult for new geeky girls to feel comfortable with being a geek and going to places like comic stores. I know there are tons of guys out there who do understand and don’t make stupid remarks like those above to girls, but it’s that small oblivious group that do that mess it up for everyone.

Its always the subtle stuff which does the damage I find. I’m not pointing fingers but I wonder if media like the Big Bang Theory and IT Crowd are doing much to counter this problem?

Manipulation of women or just a upper hand in the game?

Rules Of The Game – Episode 1: Be A D–khead

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I'm sorry but as far as I'm concerned its manipulation and I really don't like it. What am I talking about? Well shows like the one above (cheers Dave for the link). The weird thing is its not exactly the show aspect which is the problem, its the pure social engineering aspect of it to trick women into giving out there numbers, going on a date or getting them into bed.

Yes I know its a bloody complex issue because you could say well we all use manipulation to a certain extent but this is something else and the reasoning behind it is for pure personal gain which in my book is not cool. What I don't get is what do these guys think will happen in the future? Are they expecting to keep up the act, show or persona forever? Maybe?

So yes I've opened a huge box of topics in this very short post. And I keep rewriting rants about social engineering, confiedence, social control and ultimatly Neuro-linguistic programming. We should be teaching this stuff in schools so everyone can protect themselves from con artists and social hackers like some people I know. I made reference to the real hustle in a previous blog post educating the masses about these such topics but we kind of need a show to talk about protecting yourself from the opposite sex (or same sex if you prefer). Don't get me wrong I'm not a player-hater as such but I don't feel it fair someone holds an advantage over someone else, specially when it comes to the painful world of mating or dating.

Technorati Tags: dating, thegame, mating, nlp, socialengineering, social, manipulation, women, men, sex, love, con

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London Geekdinner Facebook group

After some minor issues with Facebook networks, I have finally sorted out a global geekdinner group on facebook. You can sign up here or search for geek dinner to find the girl geekdinner group along side the geekdinner group.

As you may have noticed in some of the blog comments else where (Regular Jen) not everyone could sign up to the previous group because I left the default network of London instead of setting it to Global. This was stupid because I even after I knew the problem I couldn't change it. So please makes ure you're signed up to the correct group (the one with the geekdinner logo not the red x).

I do make the joke that everyone is on Facebook but I won't be using Facebook as the official way to tell people about events and news. As Regular Jen points out.

The catch, as I see it, is that you still have to be a member of Facebook to view it. That is not what I would call open… it is open to members of Facebook only. That’s fine and fair and there is no reason to hold back from creating such a group, however, it absolutely divides the followers of London Geek Dinners (and London Girl Geek Dinners). You now have a group within Facebook and ‘the rest of us’

Total agreement and I expect to be using some sort of aggregation to allow good communication between the different spaces. This isn't the first time I've had this problem. It would be very easy for me to stop using our tradional geekdinner blog and setup some group on upcoming and urge people to use that instead but I don't. Instead I prefer the older comment system on the geekdinner blog and then allow sign up on upcoming.org. Ideally I would aggregate the upcoming results via there API back on the geekdinner site but this will all make sense hopefully in the near future.

I want to address something Jen talked about in the same post.

Making something very clear: this isn’t about London Geek Dinners, but the recent LGD Facebook group creation solidified a feeling I already had forming in my subconscious about Facebook dividing people. I posted about Facebook last week. I caved to social pressures and joined the service. I wish I hadn’t. I have only me to blame for that (well, and Facebook. Bastards. .
What I hope I’ve brought forward more than anything is that every time a link is posted to a page within Facebook to the world outside of Facebook, that link (and its poster) excludes people. The ‘welcome’ page non-members get is a stark, uninviting login screen with no other content— it’s the equivalent of a giant, muscly body guard outside an exclusive club’s door. You aren’t welcome to the content within the Facebook walls unless you give up something in return, and in this case, it’s your data. Forever. I have never felt so unwelcome on a site. Even without the information brought to light by the video I linked to in another post, I felt this way.

This is not the way to start or nurture relationships. It’s high-level data mining wearing a social network cloak and at the same time subtly creates social outcasts out of the ones who want nothing to do with it.

I joined it and now I can never truly leave. Sounds dramatic, but Rachel called Facebook a new Hotel California. She’s right you know

I hate social networks for the sake of social networking, this includes Facebook. Facebook is the new roach motel as one of the gilmor gang use to say. I like Jen resisted till the bitter end but once they included a developer API and I started to see some applications being built I signed up.

I heard rumors that the facebook guys didn't sell to Yahoo because they are working on a operating system or something. Well currently you can certainly see how once your in facebook it would be easy to ignore most of the net if your thinking that way already. Its like the portals of the late 90's but with social networking layed through-out it. This may be all good for most people and at this very moment just about bearable for me too. I still can't find a way to put my blog rss into my facebook profile for example and I'm a sucker for owning my own data.

I think Facebook is almost unstoppable without some radical game changing from someone else. I'm hoping that other thing is open and decentralised (the first person to make the concept of FOAF work or the concept of FOAF work will bite a huge chunk out of Facebook) and puts a end to facebook but till then i'm forced to use it because thats where the attention and people are right now. Sad but true.

Please note I haven't mentioned Plaxo 3.0 or Plaxo Pulse which I'm sure will come up when I decide to do a post about lifestreams.

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ShareTV just needs a social network and a client

ShareTV.org is my hot tip for the future of TV online.

For a long time I've been wishing that Tioti.com (Tape it off the internet) would get its act together, but it never so I gave up on it about 6 months ago. Since then I've noticed ShareTV and TV nanny move closer into the area which Tioti occupied. TV Nanny I don't kow enough about because I don't really like installing clients on my desktop machine and its only windows based.

ShareTV features

Anyway, back to ShareTV. This bit torrent site focuses on yes you guessed it Television programmes. Its clean cut and lacks a style. This makes it super easy to navigate around its pages and discover new areas without feeling lost. Right from the start they included RSS feeds with direct links to the torrent files. Not only a global one but per programme and the last 30 shows feed. Both of these make it really simple to setup a TVRSS setup using Azureus, UTorrent Democracy or something else. Another key feature of ShareTV is it only selects one torrent of each episode of the programme. Aka you don't have to choose which version of the programme you want to download. This might sound like a disadvantage for those who really like downloading those 1gig 720p HD versions of Heroes but for the rest of us its fine. I'm sure in the near future they will build feeds with all HD episodes which can be used.

ShareTV also indexes currently about 100+ shows including UK shows like Jekyll and Doctor Who (which I'm currently missing due to be in Toronto). They rip the details for each show from TV.com so you can get the full details about a show before downloading it. Recently they have included previews so you can get a idea about a show using a streaming flash player in the page. This is being extended by it would seem them watching links in del.icio.us and Youtube pointing to episodes, so you can actually watch the whole show there in your browser if you choose to. I don't know how successful this will be but thats not the most interesting part.

Recently if you log into ShareTV you can do a whole bunch of new stuff. Voting for a show is new and interesting because you are able to gage per show what people thought of the show. You can vote either a thumbs up or thumbs down. Less interesting is the fact you can add comments to each episode. Tv.com has the same thing, so the duplication isn't that welcomed. Now its possible to add your favorite shows to a personal list and keep a track of just those. I didn't notice a RSS feed for them yet but I'm sure thats coming soon. Another nice thing ShareTV does is a calendar view of TV shows like a 9 day TV listings, But it looks possible that this can be applied the shows you favorite too. Meaning you get a personalised TV listing guide.

Getting Social

So most of this is exactly what Tioti does but Tioti was a mess.for things like picking torrents. Whats missing from ShareTV is the social aspect. Now I have my personal schedule or TV listing of my shows. I want to share this with other ShareTV friends or buddies. I also want to share my schedule with the world. You know stick it in my blog or even in my facebook profile. Once you ShareTV allows RSS, this will be easier but I still want some simple to share widget too.

Something which bugged me about Tioti was the show tracker, it required you to say I've seen this episode, I've seen that episode. But it was a pain. I suggest ShareTV use that voting feature to assume people have also seen that episode at the same time. Ideally ShareTV would have a public API behind it but personalised RSS would be a start, so the feed would have up to date metadata about if you watched the episode or not. I was at one point thinking about using a iCal feed with the free/busy status switched if you've seen it or not but it seems over kill.

Points system

I forgot to add this to my first post. ShareTV now have a points system for your account. This level of participation is both playful and community building. Some of the core elements I would say for making the site more social.

You get points by participating in the site. The more points you have the higher priority you get when downloading off our tracker or streaming videos.

Action Points Given

Create Account +10 points

Rate Show +1 point per

Place Comment +2 point per

Upload new Torrent +3 points per**

Submit new video clip +4 points per**

** You also get plus/minus points for each vote on the torrent or video you submit, so make sure you submit stuff other members would like

Ideally it would still be great if your bit torrent client or mediaplayer device could say if you've seen the episode – You could imagine something like Last.FM for TV (last broadcast) with plugins for the Xbox Media Centre, Windows Media Centre, Apple TV, Democracy, BBC iPlayer etc. But thats a long way off and seems the demand won't be there till we get over the whole downloading TV shows thing. I actually think shareTV would be a great place to try such a service but even if ShareTV could consume someone elses service that would be great.

I mean it would only take ShareTV a while to add some kind of distributed Digg like system through peoples personal desktop widget engines. Or they could create some simple application using Xul or Air (formally known as Adobe Apollo). Geez if there was a API again, I would try writing the other part myself.

These are the things Tioti promised but never quite delivered (or at least got over complex on). I don't want to be harsh to Tioti and Paul Pod (who I hope to meet in Edinburgh) but the illustrations of the features of Tioti were amazing and the result has been a big let down. ShareTV is closer to the vision of Tioti that it may actually know and it would be a shame if it went in a different direction now.

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Web 2.0 …

Great Video, I found via Backstage forum and Delicious. Well worth watching and sharing with others. Maybe the best display of what makes the next generation of the web.

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Action	Points Given
Create Account	+10 points
Rate Show	+1 point per
Place Comment	+2 point per
Upload new Torrent	+3 points per**
Submit new video clip	+4 points per**