“Acquaintance Spam” – now that’s a term we need.

Plaxo is a particularly obnoxious with their viral attempts to hide behind my friends in as they strive to get to know me better. Each time I mention it to a Plaxo using acquaintance they explain that there is some button in there and sooner or later they hit by mistake … they are always really sorry about that.

There is a really evil dynamic where in the the product marketing people at these social networking sites create attractive nuisances that draw in the unwary, clueless, overeager or desperate networkers – who then hurt themselves and their ‘friends.’

update: snam Social Networking Spam 🙂

update 2: Stacy Martin replies in the comments below. Man, she’s got my sympathy! “stacy martin plaxo evil” gets 4 hundred plus hits at google!

This paper by Odlyzko and Tilly (pdf) is both tantalizing and extremely frustrating. At one level it’s a joke. An amusing joke though. The paper’s title is “A refutation of Metcalfe’s Law and a better estimate for the value of networks and network interconnections.”

The paper is fine; and it certainly needed to be written; but there is a much meaty paper close to this one that I wish somebody would write for us. One with a more careful critique of the three big laws and a more careful enumeration of the tools at hand for doing the valuation of networks.

There are three naive models for network value, each progressively outrageous in their estimates. Sarnoff’s law – that a broadcast station value is proportional to the number of customers it reaches; or O(n). Metcalf’s law that a communication network’s value is proportional to the number of connections it enables; or O(n^2). Reed’s law – that a network’s value is proportional to the number of groups it allows to form; or O(2^n).

All three laws are obviously bogus; though they get progressively more bogus as you go along; but that doesn’t preclude finding interesting valuable businesses using each of these models. Source Forge, Yahoo Groups, and MeetUp are, for example, businesses based on Reed’s law – businesses that strive to generate as many groups as they possibly can. Sarnoff’s law is useless if the broadcast system you form can’t usefully create meaningful audiences for advertisers or in other terms the next N listeners are too poor to buy what your selling.

It’s shooting fish in a barrel to make fun of these laws; but it can be good fun. The paper has fun taking a pot shot at Reed’s law. It points out that a few increments in N and you have a network that’s the scale of the entire economy. It’s amusing. Problem with humor is sometimes it’s true. The economy is a set of groups embedded in a set of networks. That’s what we mean when we talk about supply chains and firms.

That most frustrates me about the paper is that how close it comes to working on a key question. Why don’t networks merge if the laws suggest such merging would generate huge value. I think of this as the tower of Babel question. If we all spoke Chinese, or English, or Spanish, the world would tap into some really vast efficiencies.

The paper frustrates me because it argues that networks fail to merge because the end state value is too small, I just don’t think that’s right. Networks don’t merge because the transitions costs to get there are what frustrate the transition. Vested insterests. Sure the laws are over the top, but in the long run highly interconnected societies do generate truly mind boggling amounts of value.

Our lack of good tools for estimating the value created by network merging undermines our ability to form larger groups. So the paper frustrates me not because it’s wrong to make fun of the existing laws but because it’s “better estimate” appears to be almost as light weight an attempt as the models they hope to displace..

Weird decorative contact lenses.

Update:
From today’s spam:

I find that Payment News is a good blog to keep an eye on if your interested in identity issues.

For example today I learn that The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency might actually be a place with the regulatory muscle to do something useful:

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency … has issued guidance describing response programs, including customer notice, for security breaches (PDF) that involve unauthorized access to customer information.

I have no idea exactly what the regulatory reach of the Comptroller of the Currency actually is. I doubt it reaches the firms traffic in aggregated credit, marketing, and medical profiles of us all.

One of the leaders in the profiling business is a company called Fair Isaac. For example one of their businesses is selling the tools credit card companies use to notice possible fraudulent patterns in the transaction streams. I assume they are the ones to thank when I get a phone call shortly after my daughter first uses her credit card after landing in Japan.

My model of these profile building companies is that they are architecturally ambivalent about their relationship with the people they are profiling. Two reasons for that. First off they are basicly in the business of selling gossip, so they have trouble framing the relationship in a socially acceptable way. Second off, their primary customer trusts them more if they maintainn a degree of distance from those who they are profiling.

So it’s interesting that Fair Isaac has been doing a number of things to publicize the FICO (aka your credit score) as if to make it part of their product line. Don’t you just love that name? “Fair Isaac”

Then we have this delightfully jab:

“Most banks spend more on washing windows than on money lost to phishing,” said Jim Bruene, editor of the Online Banking Report

Most solutions to the RSS/Ping/Forward-chaining problem have privacy issues.

Consider the simple big-service-in-the-sky approach; i.e. introduce an intermediary. The intermediary then does the polling for the users and the users check up with the intermediary from time to time. The privacy problem with this approach is that that the intermediary can capture a model of the user’s reading habits. That’s a bummer.

Here’s an alternate design, mostly just to show it’s possible, of a way you might temper that problem.

Groups of users band together to form a crowd and this crowd fills the role of the intermediary. The crowd collaboratively polls all the crowd’s interests. Each node knows the full set of crowd interests, but it has no way to know who injected a particular interest into the crowd. Interests can time out over time, but interested nodes can insert them before that happens.

With a two exceptions each node runs much as it would otherwise. It randomly polling sites whenever it’s model of that site’s status gets too stale. Of course it has a much larger cache since it’s drawing sites from the union of the crowd’s interests. Of course it has the added work of keeping a much larger cache and maintaining synch with it’s neighbors.

Once groups form it’s fine, at least from a privacy point of view, for them to turn around and subscribe to the services of a large scale intermediary like Feedster, Technorati, or Pubsub. Those updates can be pulled into the crowd in bulk. They can even be pushed to the crowd from the intermediary.

The engineering for a thing like this isn’t very complex. Reengineering the existing feed readers would be.

I think this is a very cool idea! Automatically extracting a color pallet from a photograph.

This seems related

Stumbled upon this image today. Chartreuse.

Eve’s post draws my attention to this argument in support of the Oasis IPR policy.

It would be a good thing if we had a more in depth discussion of what makes for a good IPR policy for a large rambling standards bodies. Lots of polarization on this topic. Pretending that patent pooling isn’t part of the job of a standards body doesn’t fix the problem. Standards bodies need to work to create certainty about about the rules and that includes creating bundles of patent rights.

But, back to the posting. I disagree. It makes two arguments. First is a you pay you play argument and second is this IPR stuff is just like the rest of the negotiation. Too simple. The pay/play argument is the power argument; and that tends to be toxic to collaborative activities. While you can’t eliminate the pay/play arguments in these organizations bringing them into the foreground is usually a sign things are breaking down. That said, the open source community has standing in this discussion. Pretending it doesn’t is silly.

The essay argues that the long term benefit of having meeting the needs of the open source community are less than the short term benefit of attracting various parties to standards negotiation table. But is that really a trade-off that needs to be made? The trade-off: shunning the most likely source of momentum over the long run in exchange for a hypothetical increase in labor in the short run. It’s also rhetorical a balancing act first you have you have to tell one group of people to take a hike. On the other hand you need to argue that leaving the IPR policy structured so each technical committee must guard against IPR traps is actually more inclusive and fair minded. I’m not convinced.

In a fine example of the revenge of the long tail I picked up this virus at Harvard. At a talk on honor and revenge, no less. I’ve been sick for a week!

It’s important when sick not to nurture those negative thought patterns. For example that the principle trigger of bankruptcy is medical events.

While I am on the mend, I’m with Wally!