My old flatmate and fellow CogSci student Mo has made his M.A. thesis (in Interaction Design) available via his blog. Go give it a read, it not only features stunning examples of his flash-skills, but also includes one of the most concise and readable accounts of what’s so different about our second version of the Interwebs.

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In 1999 Spike Jonze enabled the characters of his movie “Being John Malkovich” to…well, “be” the actor John Malkovich for 15 minutes whenever they entered a magic hole hidden in a strange office. Gotta love that movie.
While the magical technology showcased in this great movie hasn’t been invented quite yet, Seth Goldstein came up with something that resembles it to some degree for the internet: his latest startup atten.tv (”attentive” or “atten TV”, either pronounciation is cool for me, great domain) provides a downloadable app called the “Attentron” (the name’s probably inspired by Rosenbaum’s “Perceptron“) with which users can see the web through the eyes of others, who decided to record and share their clickstream, aka the chronological documentation of the URLs they paid and are paying attention to, using AttentionTrust’s AttentionExtension (written by AttentionVeteran Stan).

While there are already a lot of services that enable users to broadcast their attention to others, atten.tv is the first to take such an extremly generic and open approach to this emerging mental economy of the web. It’s different from last.fm with respect to its universality: e.g. last.fm only records my iTunes songstream - atten.tv records all visited URLs (if I enable the ATX). However, both share the realtime aspect of the recording/broadcast. Funny how this aspect makes last.fm the new “radio”, while atten.tv obviously…well.
It’s different to del.icio.us with respect to its implicit openness: del.icio.us doesn’t actually “record” anything, I much rather have to explicitly state which URLs I find to be interesting, while in a way the ATX (and as a function of this, atten.tv) get to see much more from me, since it potentially records *every* URL I visit.

The service is in “alpha”, and when they say “alpha”, they mean it. I actually haven’t been able to run the Attentron in a useful way and I seem to have some problems with connecting my AttentionTrust ATX identity with my atten.tv account.

Once these things work, you’ll be able “be Fabian Stelzer” using this link (and your Attentron). Until then you might want to see the world through Dave Henderson’s or Seth Goldstein’s eyes - maybe you’ll get an idea for your own great startup once you see where these guys get their inspiration from. (I actually wanted to link to their respective atten.tv profile, but this doesn’t seem to work yet. The links will just take you to their homepages).

The last few weeks I’ve been doing some thinking on the meaning of “privacy” in days like this. We might have to revise our conceptions here. I’ll share my thoughts on this with you in the next post.

: atten.tv, attention, goldstein, henderson, privacy, clickstream, last.fm, tv, radio

Techcrunch just featured a very interesting new search company, ChaCha.

Its basic idea is that your search query gets forwarded to a “Guide” who supposedly is an expert in what you’re looking for, or at the very least, knows which sources to use to provide you with relevant results. ChaCha provides a little chat window left to your typical search interface which lets you communicate with the “Guide” it determined for your query. Basically they’re crowdsourcing search, putting it onto something like the mechanical turk.
But how does ChaCha ensure expertise, or more precisely: Why should I trust their guides? From ChaCha’s About section:

The primary reason is that we pay them and their pay is directly related to their performance. At the end of every session, you can select between one and five stars to rate their performance. While we expect you to be honest when rating a Guide, ChaCha can also detect any needlessly malicious ratings.

Another reason is that everybody knows a lot about something - ChaCha is able to connect you with the somebody who knows the something you want to know. Not only can they point you in the right direction, we’ve often found that communicating with a Guide can expand your general knowledge on the subject or even turn you on to new or different information that’s even more relevant to what you’re searching for.

I agree that many people “know a lot about something” (I wouldn’t say everybody), yet the real question is whether someone who can be considered an expert really would earn her money with such a job. I’m not convinced.

While I nevertheless do believe that this model theoretically could provide some interesting results, I think the actual problem here is that it doesn’t scale financially. I gave it a try and asked my “Guide” about how much she ’s getting paid for each search - it’s $0.80. This potentially could be a good deal for the guide, yet I don’t see how it should work for ChaCha. Given that even Google is assumed to make (in this context) only $0.20 per search from ads, ChaCha obviously would need to start generate at least 4 times as much as Google from each search before they run out of funding (according to SearchEngineJournal around $6 million) - I’m all for optimism, but this is crazy.

: ChaCha, Search, Crowdsourcing, Google,

Just got the scoop via SPIEGEL (German).
Firstly - Congrats, Ehssan. I guess this kind of money soothes the pain caused by the recent bad press you got.

With the given userbase / acquisition price ratio, each profile got a valuation of 100 €.

Given that there are a lot of dead / fake accounts, the valuation of a real profile is probably even higher.

I’ll blog more about this in the next hours…

UPDATE: The initial rumours re: the acquisition price have not been confirmed by StudiVZ or Holtzbrinck. Seems like the deal went down for less.
Strikes me as funny that this doesn’t play any role in the anglo-saxon blogosphere - no mention on Techcrunch or any other major startup news source. Was it the same with OpenBC’s IPO?

: studivz, acquisition, holtzbrinck

I haven’t posted in a while, since I’m experiencing some annoying problems with Wordpress. It started a few weeks ago when I couldn’t reply to any comments (by posting my own) - yet it seems that other people could, at least for a while.
Since then the problem expanded to my dashboard where I’m getting the following error message (on top of the whole dashboard):

WordPress database error: [Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’ (errno: 144)]
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ‘0′

WordPress database error: [Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’ (errno: 144)]
SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ’spam’

Found some hints in the WP-forums and will try to dive into that during the Christmas break. If anyone knows this problem I’d be glad to learn about your experiences/solutions in the comment section via email to fabian(at)lijit(dot)com

I realized how important comments actually are for me, it’s no fun to post when you know that there is no chance for a (public) dialogue to emerge from it.

: wordpress

StudiVZ.net has been down for the last few days (and will be until tomorrow or so) to fix several severe security issues.

In the meantime users who hit the page get pointed to StudiVZ’s blog, which is now overflowing with comments on the latest scandals, news and server problems (I don’t think I have ever seen a blog post with so many comments).

I took some time to skim the comment section to get a rough idea of how the downtime has been accepted by the users and was pretty astonished to see one pattern of opinion over and over: While male users usually get very offensive (StudiVZ does not dare to censor comments anymore, even if they’re totally unacceptable, they’re only going for spam), 99 % of the comments from female users are in favor of StudiVZ’s team and express their anger about “the people who have nothing better to do than to come here to offend” it.

Clearly, StudiVZ has the whole german blogosphere against them (mostly males).

But how bad can the situation be if you got every third female student in Germany on your side?

: studivz

It’s been tough times for Ehssan, founder of StudiVZ - personally I’ve never seen anyone being put down so hard by the German blogosphere - it almost seems as if a bunch of bloggers decided to make this their primary topic.
And of course, the old media at some point just has to follow.

Anger got aggregated over a bunch of “ouches”, I won’t list them all, it’s way too many for a single blog post:

1- StudiVZ is a copy of Facebook.
This isn’t new, but the persistent denial of being a mere copycat on the part of the founders turned out to be the wrong move. They’d been better off telling the public right away - “Facebook is such a great site and all we did was to bring this to Europe.” Instead, they pretended to be the geniuses behind the popular “poking” function (which is one of Facebook’s killer features)

2- StudiVZ has significant scaling problems ever since they hit the 300.000 user mark (or so, nothing magical about this number). The general experience of using their site has been and still is pretty bad. (Yet they’re still growing with a healthy 10.000 users a day and just reached 1 Mio)
All I know about this topic is that it takes a bunch of very skilled engineers to scale a webservice for this kind of userbase (esp. when you’re growing so incredibly fast).
At Lijit we’re lucky to have Dan, who combines great skills with a lot of experience.
As far as I can see StudivZ was mostly relying on one of their co-founders, a computer science student, to get this job done. I do not know of any CS classes that teach you to scale a webservice for millions of users - maybe universities should start to offer these? If I’d be a computer science student these days, I would try to learn this as fast as possible.
Maybe StudiVZ should just stall their internationalization (they’re now expanding to other European countries), disable new sign ups and get some expert consultants to fix their back-end.

3- StudiVZ grabbed their competition’s other European domain names and offered them to buy these back for generous 5000 €.

Hell, yea! Why should you only “do evil”, if you can “do very stupid AND evil” at the same time? If they really need that money so bad, they shouldn’t be shy and bring it up at the next board meeting.

4- The team apparently kept deleting criticism on StudiVZ’s Wikipedia entry.

It sucks to get a bad review of your Startup on a blog. I can see how it sucks even more if people are ranting about you on Wikipedia, but well, at least you can go there and just change it. I’m not sure how daring their changes to this criticism have been, so I won’t comment. The current version of the article seems fair to me.

5- Privacy, Stalking: I guess this is the only issue they really expected to see when they launched the site. Of course all the other problems now act like a magnifying glass when it comes to the expectable, natural stuff.

6- A lot of personal stuff about Ehssan, the founder. It’s mostly about his failed attempts to do Nazi-Satire (which is something that shouldn’t fail if you’re in Germany, even if it’s clear that you aren’t and never have been a Nazi), a strange habit of digicam-filming reluctant girls in Berlin and putting those self-compromising videos up on YouTube.

I have some opinions about good or bad jokes, just as I have some opinions about how one should or shouldn’t flirt with girls, yet I’m reluctant to comment on this directly as many other’s have done. This ranges from mere rants to open letters to the investors, demanding them to fire the founders.
I won’t join this party, because (1) I don’t care about the founder’s private life and (2) I think that this stuff distracts from points where decent criticism about StudiVZ would really make sense. Frankly, many of the posts on this topic seem to be fueled by envy.

Just this: Ehssan has never been a shy person and he consciously decided to use his personality to promote StudiVZ, which can be a good move as seen with Kevin Rose and Marc Zuckerberg.
Yet aggregated attention by itself is neither good nor bad - it simply can mean that at some point people are watching every step you make, so you better watch it, too.

He didn’t do so and apparently the board has told him to refrain from any external communication (e.g. the official blog) - these things are now taken care of by professional PR folks.
I can’t help to feel sorry for him - are all these bloggers aware that they are about to destroy this person?

Criticizing privacy and stalking issues on StudiVZ is one thing, but if you’re ranting about the founder’s private life, you’re operating pretty much in the same dirty space.

Why not use our power in a meaningful way, e.g. by improving the service on our terms?

Give Ehssan a break.

UPDATE: SPIEGEL ONLINE, Germany’s no. 1 source for online news, published an article that criticized StudiVZ’s stalking and privacy issues. What strikes me as bizarre is that they include a screenshot (that exemplifies the look of StudiVZ’s group feature) on which readers can clearly identify the names of the group members (which usually would only be accesible to members of StudiVZ). I made a screenshot of this, but naturally won’t post it here.

: StudiVZ, Ehssan, Spiegel, Privacy, Facebook, Dariani

The other day Stan and I had a chat with a guy at Boulder’s tuesday night “French Table” (at L’Absinthe). We talked a while about generic internet startup business stuff when all of a sudden the guy asked the seemingly naive question:

How many users are there? In general?

The moment I was about to answer with the counterquestion regarding which particular service his question was referring to, I understood that he actually meant all users and that his question was spot-on, while my misunderstanding just reveiled how my concept of users was outdated and flawed.

It is no longer that a service can actually refer to people as their users, simply because these users are also users of search engine X, social networking platform Y and blogging tool Z.

People are uploading their videos to YouTube and embed them on MySpace, which then get indexed by Google so that others can find them via Wink. People are using Bloglines to see which stories from the Del.icio.us hotlist their friends have submitted to Digg.

RSS and APIs have freed users from being forced to stick with one service for everything: Think of these two as acronyms for the drugs of a promiscuous age of the web.

: rss, api, wink, google, delicious, myspace, bloglines, digg, users, unionofusers

Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Abe Lincoln

Google to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.
CNN

What would YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and any other user generated content based web services be without their users - the ones who produce and consume all that content? At the same time users are exposing their gestures to a growing audience of marketers, while inevitably investing their most valuable resource, attention, to an ever increasing number of ads.

And what gets bought when Google acquires Youtube? When Yahoo buys Del.icio.us? When Murdoch buys MySpace? It’s not the technology. It’s the users (along with their connections, their gestures and their attention) + their content, the fruit of their daily work.

Greg got it right back when Yahoo bought Del.icio.us:

Assume 300,000 people make use of del.icio.us in a meaningful, regular way (a wild-ass guess, but for the sake of argument) and assume the purchase price is around $30 million. That means my personal bookmarks just got sold for a hundred bucks.

A few months ago Jason Calacanis came up with an interesting idea:

I have an offer to the top 50 users on any of the major social news/bookmarking sites:

We will pay you $1,000 a month for your “social bookmarking” rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we’ll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that–a baseline).

A few weeks ago Stan and I had an interesting discussion that was based on both the ideas expressed in the blog posts above and the user’s revolt on Facebook, whose unwillingness to accept a new Facebook feature led to the formation of a movement that forced Facebook founder Marc Zuckerberg to beg for forgiveness. We came to the following conclusions:

Users are unpaid, content generating workers, who not only do the work that eventually results in enourmous company valuations and buy outs, but also are constantly exposed to a whole meta-attention industry that aims to monetize their gestures and their attention. At the same time, the Facebook example shows how much power the users have if they organize themselves in groups of common interest.
However, they currently do not harness the power they could have over the services that they use and work for.The workers of the 19th century eventually organized themselves in unions to ensure fair payments, working conditions and the possibility to influence corporate decisions.
Now the way how most UGC-based social services work allows users to form such groups and unions in a much more efficient manner than it was possible for the workers.

“The Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
Karl Marx

That’s why Stan, Greg and I started three related projects, all under the umbrella of the idea that it’s time for users to organize in unions.
Stan has created the MySpace Union Group:

Greg steps forward with his (not yet public, but very interesting) Union of Users.

And I am happy to announce the world’s first user union, which is a group in Germany’s Facebook clone StudiVZ (you need a StudiVZ account to visit this page - the official blog is coming soon):

All of this is work in progress and I’ll keep you posted.

UPDATE: Andreas (german blogger acquaintance) got the scoop.

: studivz, facebook, users, usersunion, unionofusers, marx, youtube

Irony 2.0 applies to web 2.0 services that are doomed to fail once they become successful.
The more successful they become, the more attractive they are for spammers, marketers, or vandals to infiltrate them.
I always had the intuition that web 2.0 poster child Digg would be the first service that is going to be affected by this. And well, it seems like someone figured out a very clever way to game Digg’s system.

This is how SpikeTheVote works:

We collectively vote each other’s stories to the front page.
I act as the middle man, verifying votes and keeping everyone in line. If someone stops digging, they won’t earn enough points to get their own stories dugg.

Spike the Vote works on a point system. Each day I give you a mission with several stories to Digg. 20% of your mission involves digging stories submitted by users in this community, while 80% of of your mission is completely random. This is to eliminate footprints and keep things anonymous.

You earn 1 point for each story Dugg. Once you earn enough points, you can trade them in for Diggs on your own stories.

This is not going to be the only service to try something like this - the fact that SpikeTheVote made it on Techcrunch will encourage a lot of other people to come up with their own gaming system. These are going to be tough times for Digg, Reddit and similar services.

I don’t think this is evil. I neither think it’s particularly noble. At the end of the day Digg always worked best for users who collaborated in digging each other’s stories - in a strange way the users of SpikeTheVote will just enjoy a higher level of transparency.
But it’s clear that we are in need of alternative approaches that can’t be gamed so easily.
Using trusted social networks to help us manage the tons of available information seems to be the most natural way. But of course I’m biased

Other ideas, anyone?