Test, Repeat

Data-driven Personalisation

david — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 15:22:08 +0000

Good article from Liz Gannes at AllThingsD about the use of data online to target, sell, harvest, refine, etc. Once again pitting personal privacy against the value of sharing our data for good. Particularly liked the summary at the end calling out 6 ways personalisation is valuable – if the service respects it is still our data and uses it well! (paraphrased, my inserts in [ ]):

”

Syncing experiences across multiple contexts so we can pick up where we dropped off;

Anticipating our preferences so we don’t have to enter them again;

Answering questions we didn’t [think to] ask by aggregating other people’s experiences and matching them to ours;

Learning from our own past interactions to show us what we’re most likely to be interested in;

Analyzing our habits so we can know more about ourselves and learn [adapt and improve];

Targeting advertising so it’s not sucky and irrelevant.

I ran some of these thoughts by the persuasive author Seth Godin as I was working on this piece, and he had a really nice way of wrapping it all together. As Godin put it, it’s increasingly hard to function in our society without being on the grid. So let’s support use of data as a feature, not a tax.”

The post Data-driven Personalisation appeared first on Test, Repeat.

Differentiation is about Service, not Data

david — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 17:47:56 +0000

“A long, long time ago, at least in Internet years, I wrote a piece called It’s Time For Services on The Web to Compete On More Than Data . This was almost five years ago – January of 2008. I was contemplating the rise of Facebook and the social graph, and Google’s nascent response. In the post I argued that Facebook should let us all take our social graph wherever we want, because the company will win not on locking us in, but in servicing us better than anyone else.

Oh, how utopian that all sounds. Now, pretty much every major Internet player is scrambling to lock us into a cloud commit conundrum . Even Twitter, in certain ways – it wants content viewed on its platform, not others’.

Again, imagine a world where coming and going as a consumer was a given, a right. Imagine that when I left Apple’s iPhone for Google’s Nexus 4, all my iTunes purchases followed me (and yes, I mean apps too). Is that too much to ask for? Really? Then you must not be an entrepreneur, because this kind of lock-in is ripe for disruption.

Five years ago, I predicted that Facebook would fail if it insisted on locking our social graph into its service: With one move, Facebook can change the face (sorry) of this debate by making it falling-down easy to export your social graph. And I predict that it will. Why? Because I think in the end, Facebook will win based on the services it provides for that data. Set the data free, and it will come back to roost wherever it’s best used. And if Facebook doesn’t win that race, well, it’ll lose over time anyway.

Time is ticking. It won’t be this year, it won’t be next. But the day will come when differentiation is based on service, not data lock in.”

From a blog post from John Battelle from earlier in December.

The post Differentiation is about Service, not Data appeared first on Test, Repeat.

Phone Book

david — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 15:10:09 +0000

A visual deconstruction and visualization of a phone book, via Behance.

The post Phone Book appeared first on Test, Repeat.

Lightbulbs

david — Sat, 22 Dec 2012 14:37:12 +0000

“Lightbulbs and electric light went from a scientific curiosity to a cheap, accessible ubiquity in the late 19th and early 20th century.What if lightbulbs were still $700?We’d carry one around carefully in a case and screw it in when/where we needed light. They are not, so we leave them screwed in wherever we want, and just flip the switch when we need light. Connected computers with eyes cost $500, and so we carry them around in our pockets.But – what if we had lots of cheap computer vision, processing, connectivity and display all around our environments – like light bulbs?”

via Lamps: a design research collaboration with Google Creative Labs, 2011 – Blog – BERG.

The post Lightbulbs appeared first on Test, Repeat.

The Open Web is our duty

david — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 15:13:54 +0000

“When you use an app, or a platform like a mobile phone, or a social network, or a web service — whether it’s from Google or Apple or Amazon or Facebook — do you think about the extent to which it is open or closed? Or do you just think about how it looks, or what it lets you do, or whether your friends are using it? Most of us probably fall into the latter category, but as veteran blogger Anil Dash and others have pointed out recently, there are some good reasons why we should care about the future of the open web, and be concerned about a trend towards more closed networks. As natural as that trend might be from a commercial point of view, it is the antithesis of what made the internet so powerful.”

via It’s our duty — all of us — to fight for the open web — Tech News and Analysis.

The post The Open Web is our duty appeared first on Test, Repeat.

Nothing is quite as important

david — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 11:29:52 +0000

Nothing is quite as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it. So the mere act of thinking about something makes it more important than it’s going to be. - Daniel Kahneman

The post Nothing is quite as important appeared first on Test, Repeat.

Facebook – Quality or Quantity?

david — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 12:48:11 +0000

I’m not a fan of Facebook. I lost interest a while ago and stopped using it. I’m still, however, feeling the network effect as some disciples don’t respond to email anymore and instead prefer to be engaged on Facebook. I had reason to message some family members recently, so I bit the bullet and found my login.

There was a very blatant, right-column reminder about Facebook’s exploitative business model as I navigated the Site. Take a look at the range of ads and sponsored-whatevers I was served. Untargeted. Irrelevant. Horrible.

They’ve connected a billion people on the planet and this is the world they want us using?

I’m trying hard not to bash Facebook from my middle-classed platform of privilege. But when I compare their efforts to engage with relevant information, entertainment and ads with, say, Google and Amazon: I see no signs of improvement and can only feel they are failing. They publicly state higher moral aims to connect the world and this puts them firmly in the path of my criticism.

Yes, I’m worried about the signals I receive about loss of privacy on Facebook Exchange, their plans for mobile domination, their plans for capitalising on eCommerce opportunities, their inaccessible walled garden of content. And most of all, I’m worried as a parent about the huge pressure on young people to open themselves up to sharing more than they should online. Just because something is made easy doesn’t make it a good life-affirming habit.

But mostly I’m disappointed.

I’ve never – in the history of this massively successful service – been motivated to adopt a cause, fix a problem, help someone out. A billion users. A billion users completely unmoved. A billion users with the capacity to make wonders but only the motivation to share a cat photo or a food photo.

Sorry if this sounds like I’m lecturing. I just wish – very openly – that the staff and management at Facebook strive everyday to rise above the clamour for more advertising dollars and instead focus on improving the content of users’ Facebook experiences. Give us the tools to find engaging, relevant and inspiring stuff. Ignore the length of a site visit and instead get people to read something, learn something, bridge cultural divides. There is no long term value in feeding small isolated groups low-grade distractions just to peddle advertising. There is no pride in a slightly improved email and media sharing business.

The warning signs are there. It’s not difficult to imagine a world without Facebook as it currently exists. No tears will be shed; disciples will change their clothes and move on to the next distraction. The real value sits in the true network that underpins the internet, where individually addressable bits of content transcend timelines and reach the far corners of the world. Whatever window dressing sits on top to make that accessible and enticing will always be subject to whim and fashion.

If you’re a Facebook fan, next time you sit down for some quality Facebook time, please head over here and give them your ideas on how to radically transform a billion people into a connected, energised, positive force (I had to use Google to find that link!). If you can’t think of any, head over here and learn something.

The post Facebook – Quality or Quantity? appeared first on Test, Repeat.

That’s not how I like my coffee

david — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 10:17:15 +0000

“Starbucks is cutting paid lunch breaks, sick leave and maternity benefits for thousands of British workers, sparking fresh anger over its business practices.
On the day the House of Commons’ public accounts committee branded the US coffee chain’s tax avoidance practices “immoral”, baristas arriving for work were told to sign revised employment terms, which include the removal of paid 30-minute lunch breaks and paid sick leave for the first day of illness. Some will also see pay increases frozen.
The changes affecting about 7,000 coffee shop staff emerged as the company tried to quell public and political outrage at its use of secretive company structures that has seen it pay just £8.6m in UK tax over the past 13 years on sales of £3.1bn.

via Starbucks to slash paid lunch breaks and sick leave | Business | guardian.co.uk.

Over the last month, I’ve been intrigued at how public opinion was having an impact on our corporate tax regime. Imagine, in abstract, a well-informed, financially-literate customer base deciding how much tax a company should pay! Sounds like fun and a lot cheaper to operate than our current shambles. Might be hard for HMRC to enforce but would certainly connect profitability, customer service, employee well-being and value to society in an efficient, market-driven framework for how much tax you owe. I like that.

So while I’m getting all excited about social forces playing their part on tax policy, I read from the Guardian that Starbucks are looking to make some cost savings by trimming employee perks.

Either their timing is really bad or there is some relationship between the issue of paying more tax and this employee benefits squeeze. Ouch. I get the need to remain profitable in a low margin environment. But £2.75 for a Cappucino is not a low margin business.

I now believe Starbuck’s financial management to be a lot sharper than their HR and PR department. Costa and Nero: you’re missing an opportunity here.

The post That’s not how I like my coffee appeared first on Test, Repeat.

20121205:0941-harpenden

david — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 09:39:31 +0000

Oh yes, the Useless Web does make you laugh, but only early in the morning or late at night. Try this one
Loads more here.

The post 20121205:0941-harpenden appeared first on Test, Repeat.

Twitter, Facebook and Those Ugly IBM Statistics

david — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 15:40:00 +0000

Last week, IBM looked at the effect of social networks at online retailers on Black Friday and found … nothing.Or almost next-to-nothing: IBM said social sites generated a mere .34 percent of all online sales. Referral traffic to retailers from social sites was also just about zero: IBM said Facebook only accounted for .68 percent of visits to retail sites, while Twitter had a giant goose egg.Can’t be, right? Those are huge platforms. Surely IBM got its numbers wrong, via some sort of technical or statistical oversight?If so, you’d think that Facebook or Twitter might want to publicly dispute those stats, since they poke a hole in their “buy our ads, use our services, and sell more stuff” pitch.But so far neither company has said anything in public about IBM’s Black Friday numbers. Just to be sure, I checked with PR reps for both companies this week: Nada.

via Twitter, Facebook and Those Ugly IBM Statistics – Peter Kafka – Commerce – AllThingsD.

The post Twitter, Facebook and Those Ugly IBM Statistics appeared first on Test, Repeat.