Facebook Comments Plugin: Sanity Now?

Network, Social Media No Responses »
Mar 032011

Facebook has announced major improvements and export agreements for its comment plugin and overall conversation tracking mechanisms.  This may spell very bad news for software providers specializing in reviews and comment threads, such as Bazaarvoice, Disqus, or Pluck.  However, it may actually be beneficial for the mainstream content providers such as newspapers, magazines, and other “wide audience” publications.  If you’ve ever tried to sort through the comments on something like Newsweek or Time or (FSM help you) USAToday or CNN, you’ll realize why: the current comment thread mechanisms aren’t worth a damn thing.

As I’ve discussed previously, when a topic is “too broad” or “too common”, the comment threads or other discussion mechanisms quickly break down into partisan hackery and senseless name-calling flamewars.  Godwin’s Law is in full effect here, but is preceded with an endless stream of poor grammar, juvenile goofs, and spambots.  This is especially true where any subjective topic is in play (which covers most news topics, and anything close to the entertainment industry).

So how might Facebook’s comment regime change things?  Well, for the simple fact that these people’s comments will (should or must, IMHO) be viewed by all of their friends on Facebook.  Would you write that screed against the [republicans/democrats/two party system] if you knew that all your friends would read your poorly worded rantings?  Would you still use all those cuss words?  For most of us, I hope not.  Sure, for some of the giftedly-miscreant juveniles, the ability to post a rant against shoegazers on MTV.com and Facebook simultaneously will only encourage such poor commenting behaviour, but we already know where those places are, and they get what they deserve.

I sincerely hope that more mainstream content sites will adopt the Facebook comment plugin, but only if they absolutely enforce the rule that all comments MUST also appear on the contributor’s facebook wall.  Let the peer-shaming begin!  (After all, tomorrow is National Grammar Day; so sharpen your knives and gerund phrases.)

Posted by Dave at 12:31 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

Online Community: Individual-centric vs Catalog-centric

Network, Social Media, ecommerce No Responses »
Aug 022010

from the rightcliq website. What's up with the toolbelts?

Ever since Steve Jobs and Woz unveiled their little pet project to bring computing to the masses, we’ve had a debate about where the application should live: server-side or client-side.  IBM always argued that server-side is faster, cleaner, and generally more profitable for them.  Bill Gates made his billions bringing apps to the client-side.  Cloud Computing is really this argument wrapped in shiny new clothing– and has been blargged about ad nauseum everywhere else, so I won’t bother with that.

I mention that debate simply to bring up what might be a parallel argument that is forming now that many sites are becomming socially-aware.  Here’s the topic: is a social network invidivual-centric (client-side) or catalog-centric (server-side)? This isn’t a debate about where the actual software app resides, that’s pretty much invisible now.  For a social network, the core function is the graph– but where is that centered?  Is it centered around the individual (like facebook), or around the catalog (like amazon.com)?

An individual-centric graph has the person at the center, and she is free to add her friends, likes, dislikes, and catalog choices to her graph.  In this model, she will always want to log in with her personal network ID, and then interact or share with a given website.  Facebook is this way.  Pluck offers this kind of model.

A Catalog-centric graph has the products or new topics acting as the currency of the graph, and individuals may come and interact with them as they please.  The individuals may even use their Facebook ID for logging in, but the graph stays with the catalog and is structured in a way to build out the graph between those products, regardless of who or which individuals contributed any given part.  Bazaarvoice is a catalog-centric model

At first blush, it would seem that the individual-centric graph has run the table, but this may change. Faceboook offers a ‘like’ button just about anywhere (any major website) now, and people are certainly participating.  But those same individuals are starting to push back on the flood of information coming into their facebook feed.  Everyone is hungry for peer-driven invormation about products, but very few are willing to contribute content if it pollutes their friend feed.

Can a catalog-centric graph solve this concern for users?  Would you be willing to review more products or “like” more things if it could be somewhat anonymous?  What would you need in return?  Will you want to segment off your personal contacts (all your high-school drinking buddies) away from your shopping guru mentors?  Visa has announced Right Cliq, an individual addon that serves as the bridge between the individual graph and catalog graph.  Sure, we need another social network like another holein the head, but this may actually have some legs: consolidate your shopping peer-driven information with your purchase history, while segmenting it away from your personal contacts.

It becomes a catalog-centric social graph, but it belongs to Visa, not to the vendor.

p.s. if you like this article, please click the ‘like’ button in the upper right. :-P

Posted by Dave at 12:13 pm Tagged with: , , , , , ,

Everyone’s an expert (part 1)

Network, United States, ecommerce, wiki 2 Responses »
Jun 172010

truer than you think

Times was, I used to be able to spout off any random factiod I thought I knew, and the Internet took it as read truth.  The Wikipedia used to be great for this.  Now, my rants are pretty much limited to the blarg you’re reading right now– we’re probably all better off for it.  Most university professors scowl very deeply if a student references the Wikipedia in a footnote, which is fair, but not for the reasons most people think: Wikipedia is a bad reference source because it’s a derivative work, not because it may be inaccurate:  The student should be citing the original work, not someone’s summarized boilerplate.  Wikipedia has largely squashed the ‘inaccurate’ label through a zealous use and requirement of all statements must have footnotes.

But that raises a conundrum for many of us: where is truth?  Where is the expert?  Is the expert the one with the most experience?  Is the expert the one with the most money?  The most devotees?  Is truth simply the mob’s consensus?  Graduate school told me that truth is the logical sum of a tested thesis.  I spent 15 years being smug that I knew what that meant, only now to really see that when the Internet gave everyone a soapbox from which to preach, now social networks are giving everyone a Hyde’s Park corner complete with audiences.  Companies like bazaarvoice and pluck are setting up these cacophonies wherever possible (good for them).  These systems invariably include meta-rating systems to rate the reviews and the reviewers, in the hopes of crowdsourcing the good information from the bad.  In general, it usually works.  It is still, however, all based on a Kuhn-model of mob truth.

The NYT recently published an article on a new computer named “Watson” designed by IBM to play Jeopardy.  Another possible use they summized might be to find counter-factual statements to anyone’s gtiven declaration on the Internet.  In short: a bullshit detector.  I can imagine they will be able to monetize this thing into millions of dollars: every social network and review thread can now come with a robot that can read plain speech, offer immediate counter-responses to erroneous information, and perhaps even show us a numerical score for ‘trustability’ or ‘truthiness‘ (all the footnotes in that link– irony!). The downside here, of course, is that most reviews for most products will be reduced to little more than the barren subjectivism of American Bandstand: “It’s got a good beat, I can dance to it.”

There is still salvation for quality content in quality reviews: hard numerical data, solid logic, and qualitative feature polarization.  I’ll explain myself on those in some upcoming posts.

Posted by Dave at 10:33 am Tagged with: , , , , , , ,
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