Time To Criminalize The Password Anti-pattern
Update: Twitter made another commitment today to adopting OAuth which is great! However they acknowledge that it won’t solve all problems (like we argue) - nevertheless these are positive steps to us eradicating the password anti-pattern
In case you’ve never heard of it, Twitter is a micro-blogging service that is doing to communications what search did to information. It has exploded in popularity, and whether they find a revenue model or not - their impact is permanent and is leading the way for a new era of communications. I am one of their biggest fans and want to help them succeed. But I feel with their growth, propelled by loyal users like myself, we ought to let them know there are things that concern us.
The biggest issue is that whilst they enable data portability, they are doing it in an insecure way. As Chris Messina said, lets make 2009 the year we see the end to the password anti-pattern. In this post, I will explain what that anti-pattern is and a way we can fix it. The biggest reason why Twitter is continuiing with this anti-pattern (from my eyes), is because it’s a usability issue. But as you will see me prove below through screenshots, it isn’t. Just think of having a PIN code on your bank card: that’s a usability issue as well, but y’know, one of those good usability issues.
Twitter and Security: all we’ve heard in 2009 so far
Twitter is used to constant free PR, but this year two separate events occurred that could have been non-events (if they do what we ask).
The first was a third-party that provided a feature people wanted. As Twitter has an Application Programming Interface (API), third-party’s can create mashups and therefore provide this functionality to Twitter users. However because Twitter does not support delegated authentication, you need to enter your username and password. There are hundreds of third-party applications like this, and most are safe (we hope), but this particular site within 24 hours had put itself up for sale! And people couldn’t turn off the service - they had to change their password to do so.
The second incident to occur this last week, was an attempted phishing. Apparently, some users were being sent private messages telling them to visit a certain site which compromised their security. It’s ironic that Twitter tells you to not “share your private info” but for you to get value out of their API for mash-ups and third-party tools, that’s exactly what you need to do - and it makes situations like slightly more risky.
Fortunately, there are things that can be done to minimize the risk of your accounts getting hacked, and for you to never have to give up information about you that will compromise your security.
Delegated authorization
There is a solution to this situation. It’s free to support it, simple to use, and in fact - Twitter’s team inspired its creation the other year. It’s through the use of an Open Standard called OAuth. There is plenty of material you can read on the web about this and a good start is Eran Hammer-Lahav’s explanation of oAuth followed by his three-part series for beginners if you want to dig a little deeper.
The basic concept is that it allows you to delegate authorization for use of an API. Huh?
I’ll illustrate this with an example. Let’s say you come across a Cool Product that allows you to do something unique with your Twitter account (say, being able to stream your Tweets through your e-mail client rather you having to visit the Twitter website). As this Cool Product has no formal links to Twitter, for you to use it, it needs to pretend to be you. Therefore, it asks for your user name and password. It knocks on Twitter’s API door, pretending to be you, and the Cool Product then gets access to your account to do the stuff you want to do with this third-party application. The problem with this approach, however, is that they can knock on Twitter’s door anytime pretending to be you - even when you don’t want them to.
With OAuth, it would be very different. Instead of you needing to provide your username and password, this Cool Product will say “Hey dude, I need to get some permissions - click this link to give it to me”. Then a request will be sent to Twitter’s API and Twitter will send you to a screen saying “hey dude, these third party dudes want access to your account - you cool with that?”. Then, with a simple click of the button, you can approve or deny access. Once approved, the Cool Product can then function - and you didn’t have to give up any private information like your password.
Here are some screen shots between another innovative start-up called FriendFeed and Google (who supports OAuth).
In this scenario, I want to add some more friends on my FriendFeed account. So I click on the option to invite them
When I click on “import from Gmail”, instead of having to type in my username and password to access my contacts, I simply get redirected to a screen. And because I’m permanently logged into my Gmail account, I don’t need to do anything else other than read and click “grant access” (otherwise, I would need to enter my Google credentials).
.
Easy! Compare this to Facebook, another company that needs to think more proactively about its users security. If I want to add friends to my Facebook account, instead of redirecting me to the Google servers where I can grant access, it asks for my password.
Next steps
As people on the web using web services, we’ve been forced to give up confidential information to get the value out of a service. We’ve forced ourselves to be okay with it with the sites we trust, but there are plenty of brands out there we don’t know to trust. But the thing is, this isn’t something we need to trust anyone with. With our health records and financial records accessible online, this isn’t just a matter of reputation risk but one of genuine identity risk.
There is a solution to this problem, and now that you recognize it, demand web services to give you data portability in a secure way. Let’s make 2009 the year that we kill the password anti-pattern. While easier said than done, it’s a fix that will curb some of the security issues: we hope Twitter hurries up in changing their API to require OAuth.
Twitter - we know you’ve been meaning to do it, but hopefully you really mean it this time. Because quite frankly, we as users are fueling your growth and the promotion of your API without some sort of safe-guards like this, is irresponsible (especially as these attacks prove you are going all the more mainstream. I don’t want to tell you how to run your business - it doesn’t have to be OAuth - but for crying out loud, give us some security for our digital identity.
One final Big But
Twitter has strong arguments to not jump onto OAuth, some of which they’ve said publicly and some that I think might be issues. They certainly have a competent team, and whilst they know the benefits, they also understand the fact that jumping onto OAuth or any type of delegated authorization will not fix all problems. However it’s a start. Here are some issues:
- OAuth is only good for services over web browsers. It is a real pain (or virtually impossible without some hacks) to use it for the client side (ie, on the desktop) and mobile sites - both of which Twitter has a lot of users that use it this way. The response to that is that some security is better than none - it’s not a big deal that users will have to authorize applications via the browser (and Twitter can just point a hairy finger at the standards community so they can fix it). At least give users the option to determine how secure they want to be.
- Twitter will need to support multiple authentication systems due to the limitations of oAuth. This is a real issue, but not an impossible one to manage, and the community is certainly willing to help out. My main point is that this is actually a security issue that matters, and because the cost is borne by the users and not the company, it’s not given equal recognition.
- The user experience will suffer for users. Well the reason users will “suffer” is because now, instead of just entering their password, they will now have to click a few buttons on different screens. As the screenshots show above, the user experience is not affected that much and I think while a valid point, it’s more a “different” user experience
- The user experience will suffer for developers. Yes it will, because instead of the lazy option to just ask users to hand over their password, they actually have to write some code to get the appropriate permissions happening. But this is a core reason why the DataPortability Project supports widely-supported Open Standards, as it minimizes the costs to business: once a developer learns it once, they know it for all future application development. And like I said above: a bank not puting a code on your bank card, is more painful for your bank, but better that pain than the option without which poses risks for users.
- It will not prevent phishing. Lachlan Hardy gives a useful explanation on why (notice all Australians give the best explanations ;)), as theoretically, people will be more prone to phishing attacks because of the ease. This is a valid point, as people potentially will just blindly click away to their doom, but let’s also remember there will also be a lot more control. A site can monitor suspect services to alert users, there is a full digital paper trail, and a user can revoke their authorization at any time. Certainly a bit of control is better than none, and by reducing the weak spots in the chain, more targeted efforts can be made to ensure users’ security is no compromised.
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The songs of data portability
Some New Year’s music to get your data portability going.
Charlie Perry, cebperry, 30, Australia. Song starts 3 minutes in.
Danny Ayers, djayers, 44, Italy. “Get Your Data Out,” 3:57.
I’m always impressed by hidden talents. It’s so hard to fit everything we are into data structures.
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Blog posts on Liako.Biz for 2008
I launched this blog in March 2005 as a travel blog. People would flood me with e-mails about my travels, and it made me realise how powerful blogging can be (not to mention fun). I re-started this blog in March 2007 as a "career" blog (whatever that’s supposed to mean). Probably its best now to describe it as my "passions" blog which evolves as I progress through life and think about things.
What I love about blogging is that it forces me to think; forces me to research and learn; forces me to challenge my ideas by interacting with other people. All the good stuff in life - I hope to give a bit more attention next year.
I also thought it it would be good if I summarised what I wrote about this year. Heck - let’s go back right to 2005. This will be the first in a series of three blog posts progressively released - starting with 2008 today, then 2007 tomorrow and finally 2005 two days later. For those that may post comments, bear with me as I have literally 24 hours of New Year’s concerts to attend to (get home at 6am from Shore Thing, ready for Field day at 11am). It may take me some time to recover and get back on a computer!
I’ve given you a brief summary to guide you on whether you should make the great leap and click. I was going to rank my articles with a simple "good, poor, average" and I ended up getting stuck reading some and think 90% are more or less the same style (so I am either consistently crap or consistently good).
Enjoy!
December 2008
- A milestone year in my life: Basically, a mini biography of my career. The decisions I made and the experiences I’ve had that will determine where I will be heading
- The evolution of news and the bootstrapping of the Semantic Web: Highlighting how the New York Times is making available news data in the form of API’s. The significance of this in my eyes is a huge shift in the evolution of the news media, and separately, I mention that this might make the vision of the Semantic Web a reality in an unintended way
- Thank you 2008, you finally gave New Media a name: I indicate how 2008 was the tipping point for the Information Age’s Social Media to finally trump the Industrial Age’s Mass Media. I researched the history of the concept of Social Media, explained what "media" really is, and how the term "Social Media" is the perfect term to describe what we’ve been calling these evolving communication trends.
- The makings of a media mogul: Michael Arrington of TechCrunch: A detailed analysis of how a nobody became one of the most influential men in the world as a New Media pioneer. Mr Arrington even thanked me!
- The future of journalism and media: A look at the Watergate scandal as well as my own personal experience with a university publication, to understand the core dynamic of the media. I argue that what made the mass media tick in the past, was a marketplace, and it’s one that can be applied in digital media going forward.
- So open it’s closed: I make an argument that the term "Open" is being abused and has lost it’s meaning. We need better guidelines on what constitutes an "Open Standard" before it becomes too late.
- Social media and that whole “friend” thing: A post about how there is pressure to subscribe to peoples content on various services, even when you don’t want to receive their content. The result is an unusable service. I reflect on how Google Readers friends option is a simple but more effective way of social media, as it removes this pressure.
November 2008
- The broken business model of newspapers: An analysis of problems with the newspaper industry - too much detail in articles create extra cost, changes to the news cycle has changed their relevance, and incentives and structures are not aligned with what their strategic goals should be
- Online advertising - a bubble: Long detailed analysis on why advertising is basically screwed in the long term (thanks to the Internet)
- Liako is everywhere…but not here: Some links to content I have been creating elsewhere, as this blog had been neglected!
- The Rudd Filter: I wrote an e-mail to every senator of the Australian parliament on the proposed Internet censorship laws. As a postscript, it made an impact as I got responses from the key people who are the balance of power in the Senate
- You don’t nor need to own your data: We live in an economy now, where you don’t need "ownership" to live your life. This will certainly make you think!
October 2008
- The mobile 3D future - as clear as mud: Recounting my experience from iPhone 1G to Nokia N96 back to the iPhone (3g). I conclude that the reason we never got the vision of the mobile web in the past, is because the interface has been the missing link for so long
September 2008
- Silicon Beach Australia podcast #1: Link to my first podcast recording, with Mike Cannon-Brookes (CEO of Atlassian)
- Three startups in 24 hours - lessons in the costs of innovation: A post I wrote live from Startup camp Australia about roadblocks that this little Petri dish of innovation showed
- Thoughts on privacy - possibly just a txt file away: A discussion about privacy in our online world and thinking a little outside of the box for easy solutions with existing practices
July 2008
- Silicon Beach Australia - the movie!: An announcement post for the Silicon Beach Australia community which exploded in interest after I created it
- The DataPortability governance framework: a template: An update, history and recognition post of the many months of hard work for the team that created the governance and workflow model for the DataPortability Project. It was a challenge because existing models aren’t designed for an online virtual world that we operate as.
- Internet censorship in Australia: The responses from the Federal government on my letter six months earlier protesting against the proposed Internet censorship regime
June 2008
- Organisations need to be a size 12: A deep think about the problems with Industrial Era organisations and how we need to adapt them to the Information Age
- It’s the experience that matters: How the digital revolution is making us realise content is about an experience. Content is not something you control.
May 2008
- Advertising on the Internet needs innovation : Explaining the problems online and attempts to monetise content. I survey the landscape to explain we need a new approach.
- What is data?: Responding to the chest-beating about the DataPortability Project, I tried to inject a bit more perspective into the debate by explaining the difference between data, information and knowledge - and their implications
- The value chain for information: My proposal for an information value chain. Someone even made a video to explain the concepts, if you don’t feel like reading!
- Emerging trends? Nope - its been a long time coming: I dug up something I wrote in 2003 on emerging trends, to prove a lot of what we talk about today have been a long time coming.
- Analysing the user experience from two social networking sites: MySpace and and Geni both sent me similar e-mails, and I highlight the different approaches and business models at play
April 2008
- It’s all still alpha in my eyes: Highlighting that the Web 2.0 era is dead, but really that’s a distraction for a bigger thing at play. I write about what I think are the trends at play.
- What is the DataPortability Project: Explaining what the DataPortability Project is doing from a big picture point of view
- The DataPortability Logo competition: Explaining the process we went through to select a new logo for the DataPortability Project (we had hundreds of submissions)
- Information overload: we need a supply side solution: I explain how the business models of current are forcing content creators to create more and more content, despite content consumers not being able to keep up.
- The most important lesson in business: Explaining what an accountant is useful for, and that at the end of the day, cashflow is king (you don’t need an accountant to tell you that I argue!)
- How business is done on the Internet: My analysis of how business is done on the internet, split by business model, revenue model, and product models
March 2008
- Facebook users: more and more in just four months: A March 2008 review of the split of Facebook’s users, and the differences by country since November 2007
- How to piss your customers off - a lesson courtesy from eBay: How eBay’s e-mail strategy is something that needs to change
- Here’s a secret: the semantic web is the boring bit: Giving some perspective on the semantic web and companies sprouting now to cater for it.
- February 2008 DataPortability project report: An announcement of the DataPortability Project report
- Net neutrality: A video on net neutrality
- DataPortability is about user value, fool!: Understanding the point of data portability
- Can you answer my question?: I look at "data", "ownership" and "ownership"
- Control doesn’t necessarily mean access: An example with health is that controlling the benefits to your data is not the same as getting access to it as it may not be in your best interest
- My presentation at Kickstart forum: I was asked to speak at a conference in front of Autralia’s technology journalists on what the DataPortability Project was
February 2008
- An opportunity to make your mark: An announcement post on the logo making competition for the DataPortability Project
- I’m back!: A quick personal note giving an update on things
- Don’t cry for me, Argentina!: I spent a month in South America and wrote a post about it.
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The evolution of news and the bootstrapping of the Semantic...
The other month (as in, the ones where I am working 16 hour days and don’t have time to blog), I read in amazement a stunning move made by the New York Times. It was the announcement of its first API, where you could query campaign finance data. It turns out this wasn’t an isolated incident, as evidenced by yet another API release, this time for movies, with plenty more to come.
That is massive! Basically, using the same data people will be able to create completely different information products.
I doubt the journalists toiling away at the Times have any idea what this will do to their antiquated craft (validating that to get the future of media you need to track technology). As the switched on Marshall Kirkpatrick said in the above linked article for Read Write Web "We believe that steps like this are going to prove key if big media is to thrive in the future."
Hell yeah. The web has now evolved beyond ‘destination’ sites as a business model. News organisations need to harness the two emerging business models - platforms and networks. Whilst we’ve seen lots of people trying the platform model (as aggregators - after all, that is what a traditional newspaper has been in society), this is the first real example I have seen of the heritage media doing the network model. The network model means your business thrives by people using *other* peoples sites and services. It sounds counter intuitive but it’s the evolution of the information value chain.
This will certainly make Sir Tim Berners-Lee happy. The Semantic Web is a vision that information on the web is machine readable so that computers can truly unleash their power. However this vision is gaining traction very slowly. We will get there, but I am wondering whether the way we get there is not how we expect.
These API’s that allow web services to reuse their data in a structured way may just be what the Semantic Web needs to bootstrap it. There’s an assumption with the vision, which is that for it to work, all data needs to be open and publicly accessible. The economics are just not there yet for companies to unlock their data and my work this year with the DataPortability Project has made me realise to get value out of your data you simply need access to it (which doesn’t necessarily mean public data).
Either way, for me this was one of the biggest news events of the year, and one that very quietly has moved on. This will certainly be something worth tracking in 2009 as we see the evolution of not just the Semantic Web, but also Social Media.
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Thank you 2008, you finally gave New Media a name
Earlier this year Stephen Collins and Chris Saad had flown to Sydney for at the Future of Media summit, and in front of me were having heated discussions on how come nobody invited them to the Social Media club in Australia. As they were yapping away, I thought to myself what the hell are they going on about. It turns out things I used to call "blogs", "comments" or "wikis" were now "social media". Flickr, Delicious, YouTube? No longer Web 2.0 innovations, but social media. Bulletin boards that you would dial up on your 14000 kbps modem? Social media. Online forums discussing fetishes? Social media. Everything was now bloody social media (or Social Media: tools are lower case, concept uppercase) and along with Dare Obasanjo I was asleep for the two hours when it suddenly happened.
However it turns out that this is a term that’s been around for a lot longer than we give it credit for. It hung low for a while and then as some significant events occurred this year the term became a perfect fit to describe what was happening. It’s a term that I’ve been waiting to emerge for years now, as I knew the term "new media" was going to mature one day.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our new world and way of defining it: 2008 is when the Information Age’s "social media" finally displaced the Industrial Era’s "mass media". Below I document how, when and why.
Origins of the term and its evolution
The executive producer of the Demo conference Chris Shipley is said to have coined the term during a key note at the Demofall 2005 conference on the 20th September 2005. As she said in her speech:
Ironically, perhaps, there is one other trend that would at first blush seem at odds with this movement toward individuality, and that is the counter movement toward sociability.
As one reporter pointed out to me the other day, the program book you have before you uses the term “social” a half-dozen times or more to describe software, computing, applications, networks and media.
I’m not surprised that as individuals are empowered by their communications and information environments, that we leverage that power to reach out to other people. In fact, blogs are as much about individual voice as they are about a community of readers.
The term gained greater currency over the next year, as Shipley would use the term in her work and various influencers like Steve Rubel would popularise the term. Brainjam which popularised unConferences first had the idea of a Social Media Club around the time of Shipley’s keynote and eventually formed it in July of the following year, which created more energy towards pushing for the term. Other people starting building businesses based on the term, like PR professional Drew Benvie who from April 2006 has been writing the Social Media Report (and created the Social media Wikipedia page on 9 July 2006). Benvie said to me in some private correspondence: “When social media emerged as a category of the media landscape in 2005 / 2006 I noticed the PR and media industries looking for suitable names. The term social media came to be used at the same time of social networks becoming mainstream.” Back then it was more a marketing word to conceptualise online tools and strategies to deal with them, which is why there has been disstate for the term that prevented its adoption.
It was 2008 however when several news incidents, innovations, and an election entrenched this term into our consciousness. Later on, I will explain that, but first a lesson.
So what is Social Media?
A debate in August 2008 created the following definition: "social media are primarily Internet and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. " I like that definition, but with it, you could arguably say "social media" existed when the first e-mail was sent in the 1970s. Perhaps it’s going to suffer the fate of the term globalisation where in the 1990s people didn’t know the term existed - but by 2001 in high school, I was told its been around since the 1980s and by my final year of university in 2004 I was told "globalisation" started in the 1700s. Heaven forbid it turns into a term like "Web 2.0" where no one agrees but it somehow becomes a blanket term for everything that is post the dot com bubble.
The definition is off putting unless you have a fundamental understanding of what exactly media is. It might shock you to hear this, but a newspaper and a blog are not media. A television and a Twitter account, are not media either. So if you’ve had had trouble getting the term social media before, it’s probably because you’ve been looking at it in the wrong way. Understand what media really is and you will recognise the brilliance of the term "social media".
Vin Crosbie many years ago answered a question I had been searching half a decade ago on what was new media. Crosbie’s much citied work has moved around the Internet, so I can’t link to his original piece of work, but this is what he argued in summary.
- Television, books and websites are wrongly classified as media. What they really are, are media outputs. We are defining our world on the technology, and not the process. Media is about communication of messages.
- There are three types of media in the world: Interpersonal media, mass media, and new media
- Interpersonal media, which he coined for lack of a established term, is a one-on-one communications process. A person talking directly to another person, is interpersonal media. It’s one message distributed to one other person, from one person.
- Mass media is a one-to-many process. That means, one entity or person is communicating that one message to multiple people. So if you are standing in front of a crowd giving a speech, you are conducting a mass media act. Likewise, a book is mass media as it’s one message distributed to many
- New media, which is only possible due to the Internet, is many-to-many media.
I highly recommend you track down his more recent analysis (a more recent article dug up from the Internet archive ).
Now the thing is, that’s a brilliant way of breaking it down but I still didn’t get what many-to-many meant. When the blogosphere tried to define social media it was a poor attempt (and as recently as November 2008, it still sucked). But hidden in the archives of the web, we can read Stowe Boyd who came up with the most accurate analysis I’ve seen yet.
- Social Media Is Not A Broadcast Medium: unlike traditional publishing — either online or off — social media are not organized around a one-to-many communications model.
- Social Media Is Many-To-Many: All social media experiments worthy of the name are conversational, and involve an open-ended discussion between author(s) and other participants, who may range from very active to relatively passive in their involvement. However, the sense of a discussion among a group of interested participants is quite distinct from the broadcast feel of the New York Times, CNN, or a corporate website circa 1995. Likewise, the cross linking that happens in the blogosphere is quite unlike what happens in conventional media.
- Social Media Is Open: The barriers to becoming a web publisher are amazingly low, and therefore anyone can become a publisher. And if you have something worth listening to, you can attract a large community of likeminded people who will join in the conversation you are having. [Although it is just as interesting in principle to converse with a small group of likeminded people. Social media doesn't need to scale up to large communities to be viable or productive. The long tail is at work here.]
- Social Media Is Disruptive: The-people-formerly-known-as-the-audience (thank you, Jay Rosen!) are rapidly migrating away from the old-school mainstream media, away from the centrally controlled and managed model of broadcast media. They are crafting new connections between themselves, out at the edge, and are increasingly ignoring the metered and manipulated messages that centroid organizations — large media companies, multi national organizations, national governments — are pushing at them. We, the edglings, are having a conversation amongst ourselves, now; and if CNN, CEOs, or the presidential candidates want to participate they will have to put down the megaphone and sit down at the cracker barrel to have a chat. Now that millions are gathering their principal intelligence about the world and their place in it from the web, everything is going to change. And for the better.
So many-to-many is a whole lot of conversation? As it turns out, yes it is. Now you’re ready to find out how 2008 became the year Social Media came to maturity.
How 2008 gave the long overdue recognition that New Media is Social Media
The tools: enabling group conversations
MySpace’s legacy on the world is something that I think is under-recognised, that being the ability to post on peoples profiles. It gave people an insight into public communication amongst friends, as people used it more for open messaging rather than adding credentials like the feature originally intended when developed on Friendster. Yes, I recognise public discussions have occurred for years on things like forums and blogs, but this curious aspect of MySpace’s culture at its peak has a lot to answer for what is ultimately Social Media. Facebook picked up on this feature and more appropriately renamed it as "wall posts" and with the launch of the home screen that is essentially an activity stream of your friends, it created a new form of group communication.
The image below shows a wall-to-wall conversation with a friend of mine in February 2007 on Facebook. You can’t see it, but I wrote a cheeky response to Beata’s first message at the bottom about her being a Cabbage eating Ukrainian communist whose vodka is radioactive from Chernobyl. She responds as you can see, but more interestingly, our mutual friend Rina saw the conversation on her homescreen and jumped in. This is a subtle example that shows how the mainstream non-technology community is using social media. I’m currently seeing how non-technology friends of mine will share links that appear on the activity stream and how they jump into a conversation about it right there. It likes over-hearing a conversation around the water-cooler and joining in if you want.
This is what made Twitter what it is. What started as a status update tool for friends, turned into a chat-room with your friends; you can see the messages posted by people you are mutually following, and you can join in on a conversation that you weren’t originally a part of. Again, simple but the impact we have seen it have on the technology community is unbelievable. Like for example, I noticed Gabe Rivera a few days ago had a discussion with people about how he still doesn’t get what social media is. I wasn’t involved in that discussion originally, but its resulted in me partially inspired to explore the issue with this blog post. These are subtle, anecdotal examples but in sum they point to this broader transformation occurring in our society due to these tools that allow us to mass collaborate and communicate. The open conversation culture of Web 2.0 has helped create this phenomenon.
Another Internet start-up company which I think has contributed immensely to the evolution of Social Media, is Friendfeed. It essentially copied the Facebook activity screen, but made it better - and in the process, created the closest thing to a social media powerhouse. People share links there constantly and get into discussions in line. In the mass media, an editor would determine what you could read in a publication; in the Social Media world, you determine what you read based on the friends you want to receive information from. Collectively, we decimate information and inform each other: it’s decentralised media. Robert Scoble, a blogging and video super star, is the central node of the technology industry. He consumes and produces more information than anyone else in this world; and if he is spending seven days a week for seven hours a day on Friendfeed, that’s got to tell you something’s up.
The events: what made these tools come to life in 2008
We’ve often heard about citizen journalism with people posting pictures from their mobile phones to share with the broader Internet. Blogs have long been considered a mainstay in politics this last decade. But it was 2008 that saw two big events that validated Social Media’s impact and maturity.
- A new president: Barack Obama has been dubbed as the world’s first Social Media president. Thanks to an innovative use of technology (and the fact one of the co-founders of Facebook ran his technology team - 2008 is the year for Social Media due to cross pollination), we’ve seen the most powerful man in the world get elected thanks to the use of the Internet in a specific way. Obama would post on Twitter where he was speaking; used Facebook in a record way; posted videos on YouTube (and is doing a weekly video addresses now as president-elect) - and a dozen other things, including his own custom-built social networking site.
- A new view of the news: In November, we saw a revolting event occur which was the terrorist situation in India (and which has now put us on the path of a geopolitical nightmare in the region). However the tragic event at Mumbai, also gave tangible proof of the impact social media is having in the world .
What’s significant about the above two events, is that Social Media has robbed the role the Mass Media has played in the last century and beyond. Presidents of the past courted newspapers, radio and television personalities to get positive press as the Mass Media influenced public perception. Likewise, breaking news has been the domain of the internationally-resourced Mass Media. Social Media is a different but much better model.
What’s next?
It is said we need bubbles as they fuel over-development that leave something behind forever. The last over-hyped Web 2.0 era has given us a positive externality that has laid the basis of the many-to-many communications required for New Media to occur. Arguably, the culture of public sharing that first became big with the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us sparked this cultural wave that has come to define the era. The social networking sites created an infrastructure for us to communicate with people en masse, and to recognise the value of public discussions. Tools like wikis both in the public and the enterprise have made us realise the power of group collaboration - indeed, the biggest impact a wiki has in a corporation from my own experience rolling out social media technologies at my firm, is encouraging this culture of "open".
Its taken a long time to get to this point. The technologies have taken time to evolve, connectivity and a more interactive experience than the document web; our cultures and societies have also needed some time to catch up with this massive transformation in our society. Now that the infrastructure is there, we are busy concerning ourselves with refining the social model. Certainly, the DataPortability Project has a relevant role in ensuring the future of our media is safe, like for example the monitoring the Open Standards we use to allow people to resuse their data. If my social graph is what filters my world, then my ability to access and control that graph is the equivalent to the Mass Media’s cry of ensuring freedom of the press.
Over 700 people in my life - school friends, university contacts, workmates and the rest - are people I am willing to trust to filter my information consumption. It will be key for us to be able to control this graph
Newspapers may be going bankrupt thanks to the Internet, but finally in 2008, we now can confidently identify the prophecy’s of what the future of media looks like.
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OpenID Announces Results To Its First Election
At the DataPortability Project, we’ve monitored closely the first OpenID Foundation election and are proud of the maturity, leadership and appropriate procedure shown by the OpenID foundation in this area.
It is reported that 175 of the 217 eligible members voted. Congratulations to all candidates for their efforts.
Elected to serve 2-year terms:
| Snorri Giorgetti | 106 |
| Nat Sakimura | 89 |
| Chris Messina | 76 |
| David Recordon | 76 |
Elected to serve 1-year terms:
| Eric Sachs | 62 |
| Scott Kveton | 57 |
| Brian Kissel | 55 |
Not elected:
| Eran Hammer-Lahav | 54 |
| Joseph Smarr | 52 |
| Allen Tom | 42 |
| Luke Shepard | 37 |
| Johannes Ernst | 37 |
| Dick Hardt | 36 |
| John Bradley | 22 |
| Martin Atkins | 21 |
| Mike Kirkwood | 8 |
| Peter Nixey | 8 |
We thank all the candidates as the process revealed a lot of interesting discussion about what the future of OpenID should be. On behalf of the DataPortability Steering Group, I look forward to working with our colleagues at the new Foundation’s board.
Elias Bizannes
Vice-chair, DataPortability.Org Steering Group
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The makings of a media mogul: Michael Arrington of...
After recognising in my previous post that Michael Arrington has successfully captured the dynamic of the mass media to pioneer new media, my mind asked how did this guy do it. With some time on my hands, I looked into what I think is one of the most remarkable stories to occur in the recent tech boom that was Web 2.0 (yep, that’s past tense - it’s an innovation era that now has closed). How "a nobody — a former attorney and entrepreneur who, at 35, looked as if he might never hit it big " became one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. I’ve never interacted with Arrington, although I know plenty of people that know him well (through the Aussie mafia that grace the Valley). So this is coming from a completely objective but aware view. An outside view with purely the public record to track his success. Let’s see what the evidence tells us.
The accidental start-up
Reading through the archives of his main blog TechCrunch.com and his companion blog CrunchNotes.com, I came to realise his success could be identified as early as his first five months from the first post written. He launched TechCrunch.com on the 11th June 2005 with posts released daily if not multiple times per day. The blog averaged 5 posts every two days in its first year, with 879 posts (it was actually more, but a half dozen or so have since been removed).
His first post, which has since been removed (God bless the Internet archive), gives an insight into motivations for starting the blog.
TechCrunch is edited by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare, with frequent input from guest editors. It is part of the Archimedes Ventures network of companies.
Archimedes Ventures was at the time a two partner firm that specialised in the "development of companies focused on Web 2.0 technologies and solutions." The fact the page listed Teare and is marked as part of Archimedes Ventures network of companies suggests this was a conscious business development effort on the part of Arrington. As he would later reveal, he was inspired by Dave Winer who said: “if you are going to build a new company, go to the trouble of actually researching what other companies have already done." Several months later in October, he posted an announcement that his startup Edgeio would be live soon, validating that TechCrunch wasn’t so much a "hobby" but a need to understand your market. Indeed, it seems TechCrunch just became a more formalised affair as he had been posting research into potential competitors on his personal blog publicly from March 2005 - and by the time he launched TechCrunch there were already four employees at Edgeio. No doubt, exposure and networking like any smart businessman was part of his agenda as well, which perhaps is why we saw a transition from a personal site to a TechCrunch brand (more on community building later).
On October 2005, TechCrunch was ranked the 566th blog by Technorati based on the amount of links it received from other websites. In December of that year, its ranking had climbed to 96th. One year on, in June 2006, it became the 4th most linked-to blog and has subsequently maintained its status as number 2 (not being able to beat another new media mogul Arianna Huffington who dominates the table, but that’s a story for another time).
The above graph shows an explosion, but it’s the first year that tells the story which forms the basis of this post:
- First week (June 2005): 63 RSS subscribers
- First six weeks: 500 RSS subscribers
- October 2005: 5,000 RSS subscribers
- November, 2005: 8,000 RSS subscribers
- June 2006: 65,000 RSS subscribers
Over that first year, 23,713 comments had been left, with around 1-2 million page views per month. However as the figures show, it was the first six months where this research turned into a prospective business ("help "), with subsequent months and years simply consolidating his growth: by year two, there were 2,000 more posts (double the output of the previous year); 115,608 comments and trackbacks in total (an average of 40 per post); and 435,000 RSS subscribers. Pages views in the month leading up to the 24th month in operation were 4.5 million, twice what it was the previous year. In September 2008, over a million people subscribed to the blog.
So how did he do it?
Compared to his peers/competitors, he joined the game quite late, and yet he is absolutely smashing them. Same software in some cases and same focus. The question is, what did Arrington do that others didn’t?
Whilst the metrics might track his growth, they don’t track how he did it, which has less to do with Search Engine Optimisation and more to do with hyping up a boom. Below I describe what I think are the Critical Success Factors that made TechCrunch what it is today.
1) Events.
TechCrunch wasn’t just a blog; it was a host. Early on, there were events hosted at Arrington’s house where people could network and mingle. It would be a mistake to think that TechCrunch later on got into the conference business as an alternative revenue stream, but the reality is, social networking was being organised in the real world in parallel to the online blog from as early as August 2005. To create a new blog and have 63 people subscribed to it within a week indicates a lot of offline activity to get those subscribers. The social meet ups reinforced his readership base.
2) Web2.0.
Arrington saw a tide building for a second tech boom and formed a loose group of allies promoting this tide. Add to the mix some existing high profile personal brands like Dave Winer and Robert Scoble - and in the process, you build your own personal brand. To use his words, he saw a parade and got in front of it.
When Tim O’Reily coined “Web 2.0″, it was a buzz-speak marketing word. What Arrington did was successfully exploit this dynamic by recognising the rising investment trend occurring. He built a community around Web 2.0 by being its tireless champion and channeling existing energies. And as the community grew, so did he. He realised that what goes down, goes back up again - and by tapping into this growth, he could grow with it. If this second boom was anything like the first, being at the front of it would be such a good career move that it probably didn’t even need to be said.
3) Excellent content.
Don’t underestimate the difference quality content has. Arrington has an analytical mind and is a clear communicator - he is a lawyer after all. Intelligence and an ability to communicate will beat even the most experienced journalist. I’ve been told that Arrington doesn’t understand tech, or at least makes a convincing image of not getting it, which probably explains the why he writes in plain English - even in the conversational style of writing that blogging is associated with, good clear English is rare to find. More importantly, he understood what all publishers have long known: good content is not just about the words. As Scoble highlighted long ago, one of the reasons that made Arrington such a popular writer is the simple use of images to break up the text.
No doubt, Arrington’s previous staff writers, ones I am familiar with like Nik Cubrilovic, Duncan Riley and Marshall Kirkpatrick, made a big difference in TechCrunch’s growth: Kirkpatrick’s ground-breaking RSS and research skills to find news, Cubrilovic’s Arrington-style writing ability, and Riley’s industry relationships to often break news - is how they made compelling content. However, Arrington quite uniquely stands out and it’s why when he tried to take a break and to focus on the business side, he was pulled back in to raise the quality. TechCrunch is Mike Arrington: it’s been proven you can’t separate the two (at least, yet).
4) The media dynamic.
As I recently argued, the mass media at its core is about playing a game, but in the context of web 2.0 it is about understanding the dynamics of a market place. He had access to Venture Capitalists (VCs) as he was a corporate lawyer as well as an entrepreneur with experience to boot - access that other entrepreneurs quite simply didn’t have.
He was able to successfully take advantage of the VC paranoia that they might miss the next Google or Facebook. They literally were desperate to hear about the next big thing. For them, Arrington was a deal-type lawyer who would review things in plain English and present it with pretty pictures. On the flip side, you had entrepreneurs dying to get in front of these VCs as well as general exposure for their start-up. When Arrington decided to put advertising on the blog, it was a natural progression: entrepreneurs wanted to get exposure to VCs, future employees, and buzz amongst their peers. People on the other hand, are willing to consume this content because it’s free market research for them - catering in the audience for both investor and the entrepreneur. Powerful stuff? God yeah - that’s the kind of captive audience that’s addicted to crack cocaine.
To give you an idea of impact, I was told by an entrepreneur whose company was profiled in that first six months, that they got something like 30 VC calls and e-mails over a holiday period. After less than three weeks, they had Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers email, say "Hi, just another VC here. Can we meet next Thursday?". They had a list of meetings that kept them going for weeks. My own personal experience this year through the DataPortability Project saw first hand what exposure and support from TechCrunch could do, and suffice to say, it’s impressive. We had VCs wanting to talk to us about data portability, even though we’re non-profit!
This offline social networking is key to what ultimately became an online social media business. What’s very telling is a comment left by Valley legend Dave Winer, a man Arrington repeatedly showed admiration for and I am sure his relationship is what gave him a boost at the start. It reflects several things, but foremost, Arrington had a lot of goodwill in the community as a leader of the industry by existing heavy weights. He connected the various participants in what ultimately is a marketplace. Forget about Edgeio - this was the making of a new media business that would show the dying mass media what the future looks like for their industry. TechCrunch became the channel of choice for so many people to get their voice heard for competitive, strategic and ego reasons.
Concluding thoughts
TechCrunch started as a hobby and research project to test a bunch of the stuff he’d been reading about in the Web2.0 space. After the crash, he pretty much dropped out and watched a lot of college football - he needed a way to get back into it. Arrington probably knew he could write well, but I don’t think he realised how much of an impact his ability could have. The use of images in content, and the frequency of his posts made TechCrunch in the first six months, combined with offline social networking, the positioning as a champion of the Web 2.0 community, and exploiting the dynamic of a marketplace is what made him what he is. By the end of 2006, I don’t think Edgeio got much of Arrington’s attention at all - he’d been hooked by the excitement of writing, leading opinion and eventually, the power that attracts people to positions of note and influence, whether it be media, celebrity, business or politics.
This post only touches on the surface, as the Critical Success Factors in that first year do not give a full picture. Arrington’s involvement with the presidential primaries process, his disruptive influence with DEMO through the TC40/50, the Crunchies and even the people who keep trying to take him down add a further dimension to the TechCrunch story. He’s a man with more haters than Murdoch, but that’s doesn’t make him any less brilliant.
Arrington can get right up the nose of people with massive vested interests, and he loves to stir the pot - like the traditional press practice, controversy sells. Living in a massive rented house with all but a big dog, he can pretty much operate without fear. If it all exploded tomorrow, he’d probably have a beer, and enjoy a good long holiday and another season of college football. That’s what makes a journalist fearless, and that, combined with his obvious passion for the sector and the power he wields makes for a pretty dynamic combo.
He’s made no secret of his desire to be bigger than C|Net (without having to cop the overheads of their business model). Take out download.com, and I think it safe to say he’s reached that: maybe it’s time he puts his eyes on something a bit bigger. Although I doubt he needs to be told that - he’s already making history along with another select few, who through raw talent are pioneering “new media”, ready to replace the financially bankrupt mass media as the influencers in our society.
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DataPortability Community Manager Volunteer Role
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