Tyler's Toolbox

I read an interesting article on USA Today’s website: “Some ditch social networks to reclaim time, privacy”

The reporting is on the trend of more and more people quitting social networks.  What spoke to me most is how much of a minority opinion this was. Here’s a quote:

Lucca, Italy-based Seppukoo helped 20,000 people erase themselves from Facebook after the site launched last fall. Two-month-old Web 2.0 Suicide Machine — where a noose dangles near a ticker tracking the digital mayhem (“181,898 friends have been unfriended, 329,908 tweets removed”) — has been used by 2,600 people. Thousands more are waiting to be accommodated by the site’s small server, says Walter Langelaar, 32, one of three programmers who created the “art project” for Moddr, a media lab in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

20,000 people?

2,600 people?

Facebook has 400 Million active users. Twitter is in the mid 8-digits. Myspace is in the hundreds of millions.

With more users, you’ll have more attrition — I don’t think the “trend” being reported here is much to think about. Facebook has maintained incredible user-activation (50% of it’s users log-in daily). The examples in the article are clearly  from a minority.

My friend Ben Casnocha posted yesterday about privacy, RIP Privacy and Identiy Synthesis on the Web.  It’s a good read, and I would wager he would agree with my statements above, especially given his statement that: “many users do not understand how their personal information is tracked and displayed. But I do not think the majority mainstream users of any age care and I think no young people care. Young people will soon replace old people.”

Ben and I may be buying slinkys on this one, but the privacy argument is becoming moot.  Here’s my outlook:

1. There are still large risks associated with giving up privacy, but far fewer than decades past.
2. Our culture is clearly headed to sharing more, not less, information.

Bottom Line:  Privacy is dying. We are wasting our time trying to save it. Instead, let’s make the world safer for those who are living out in the open — because pretty soon, the majority of us will be.

It sounds radical, and full of the brashness of youth, but… I’m pretty sure it’s correct. I think that message needs to be spread wide and far. And I don’t just mean removing the risk to US Citizens like those profiled in USA Today above, I mean protesters in Iran. As Jonathan Zittrain noticed in a talk I attended last year, Iran could pretty easily/cheeply use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify and persecute dissidents (starts at 32:45).  The safety of privacy will increasingly be an illusion that can be destroyed almost at-will by those with real power.

You want that in twitter friendly length?  No problem. Put this in your pipe and tweet it:

“Focus on making the world safer for living without privacy — soon, you won’t have any left.” /via @tylerwillis  http://bit.ly/bOdSSN

I’ve been thinking more about systems for success recently.

Adopting a framework is generally the best path to success.  In building a successful startup, you can holy-war over what the framework should be (e.g. Viability, Feasibility, or Desirability), but at the end of the day any framework is better than no framework. Building a successful life is no different.

This thought is something I’ve discovered while I’ve been exploring a framework for personal success the past few months (standards project), and I’ve executed some experiments in quantifying my life:

1. In Iceland I tracked a ton of personal stats about our trip, all food/drink we consumed, how many steps we walked, etc.
2. I tried Facet of Life to track data through email.
3. I added health goals to my standards project, to keep track of promised outcomes.
4. I used dailyburn/iPhone to track sleep, caloric consumption, stress, weight, exercise and energy levels on a daily or more frequent basis.

I like these experiments, I also really like tracking things — it appeals to my inner data-geek[1]. I’m competitive, so I feel a need to improve what I measure; I now unconsciously optimize for: Diet, Energy, Sleep, Exercise. Yep, pretty good list.

Experiment #3 above taught me a bit about how to build a framework that utilizes my own nature to increase the likelihood of good outcomes.

• I’m competitive, so I feel a need to improve what I measure.
• I’m also “lazy” — meaning I like to conserve energy.

I realized that my tracking can be difficult when I don’t have control of food preparation. Standardizing my intake around a core group of meals would greatly help me spend less time concentrated on tracking. So I just choose 6 meals and ordered enough food to make them for 2 weeks from safeway.com — this wasn’t a difficult decision, it was an efficient one. It also improved my health. My framework made it easy to make a limiting choice that was positive on my health.

Lesson learned for my standards project: I will focus more on frameworks that utilize a desire to be awesome + a desire to conserve attention to encourage efficient/scalable improvement.

[1] It also offends my sense of uniqueness, none of us like to feel like we’re robots, and I feel a certain elegance to living life unpredictably. But, at least for me, growing up is about accepting that choosing to put yourself in a routine isn’t the same as having a routine thrust upon you.  Embracing chaos means remaining ever-vigilant, that’s hard. Choose routines that conserve energy, and use that energy for chosen moments of chaos embracing.

This is a great program for social media introduction moderated by Sarah Lacy. Sarah does a fantastic job.

I moderated a panel on this two weeks ago and I WISH it was this good. I give myself a B, this gets an A. If it had less emphasis on search, it would be an A+.  Anyone who was at my panel and now reads my blog, consider this a good followup!

Here’s the description (which I’ve edited):
Social media and online marketing tools are fast becoming the most efficient tools to market and communicate with constituents/customers/members. But it’s not as easy as it seems. Learn the most common mistakes and prime opportunities in the social media world. How can your company use networks like Facebook, Google and Twitter? Come hear the leaders in this contemporary marketplace reveal the secrets of small-business success.

It’s worth the hour, go listen.

disclosure: it features a friend who really rocks that panel. You’ll figure that out in the first 5 minutes, after 30 minutes you’ll really be glad he’s there. That friend is Jeremy Toeman, and I didn’t know he could speak that well. Fantastic!

The past three days I’ve gotten in two political arguments with folks who I perceive as creating rifts in the political process and slowing things down. The first was with Karl Rove and a Karl Rove supporter. The second was with an old classmate from film school who was protesting our treatment of George Bush and Barack Obama.

His exact words are as follows:

“When terrorists killed thousands and we fought back, you said “murderer.” When the idiot took over the banks and auto companies, wants to eliminate term limits, takes Palistine’s side, kissed our enemies’ feet, and wants to “just talk” to our long time nemesis, you still call him hero. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH OUR FREAKING COUNTRY?!?!?!“

I am really fed up with our inability to broach issues. What follows is my first attempt at a piece of writing on this issue. It was written quickly and is a quick edit of something I wrote re-actively as a response in an email, and because of this it seems rough and incomplete. I’d love your feedback and thoughts on this issue to help clarify this important issue.

Before I get too deeply into this, I want to be clear: no party gets what I’m about to say right. I’m engaging you because I hope to sway your opinion one-on-one, not because I’m claiming liberals or conservatives are any better at the course of action I’m suggesting. Our political system is very broken, and people on both sides of the aisle are responsible. I’m hoping that some of us can adopt civility and use our example to influence others, and eventually, to influence the system.

The claims that I’ve seen made from political pundits and journalists grate on me daily. Few if any of their points is intended to be a critique of a policy decision that describes why the decision was wrong, they are all one liners that offer no real analysis of any action, but serve to sound very bad and make people fearful. Here’s how a message could be packaged in a way that creates opportunity for discussion:

“Obama is pushing the agenda of meeting with Iran without preconditions. Opening lines of communication like this legitimizes a brutal regime that hates us, as the only superpower in the world our vote of legitimacy is an important one and we should be more careful about how we use it — offering to meet Iran without trying to use the value of that meeting to force them to make changes is a mistake.”

I would probably rebut that, as I believe openness offers far more power in the decentralized world that has evolved over the past two decades, but at least I can respect the viewpoint put forth — and discuss it rationally. If a pundit were to defend their viewpoint, whatever it is, with that level of detail I can rationally evaluate it and decide if it offers anything.

This is hard to do, because it makes us vulnerable. Complex, well thought out ideas that resound with many people on different levels can be retorted with pithy one-liners that inspire a frothy response from a core group. In those situations it often feels like the complex thought loses — but in reality that thought has contributed to a better conversation, better information for decision making and a move towards slowly bridging gaps and potentially widening it’s proponent’s appeal.

Complex, well-defined plans should not be the types of propositions our system punishes, and if more of us on both sides start to value discussion over rallying behind sound bites, we can marginalize those who cling to the us vs. them mentality. This can’t come from one party, it’s got to be a widespread effort.

What most pundits discuss serves one purpose: To anger people who align opposite them and rally people who align with them. Most of the folks that defend these actions and follow their lead, don’t do this purposefully, but are reacting to feeling marginalized politically. It’s an understandable emotion to be annoyed, fearful, and angry when people in power share very different goals or beliefs than you. Lashing out in that situation is common and comforting. It isn’t effective though, as it only increases the rift between the groups. Emotions have no place in politics, it is a complex world that is built upon compromises, and compromises require rational thinking.

I have faith that many of us are equipped mentally, spiritually, and physically to recognize that our initial reaction isn’t always constructive and because I believe us to be capable of that, I hope that we’ll engage in more meaningful ways.
If dividing citizens and encouraging them to fight with and ignore each other is your goal — we must marginalize you.

What do you think?

I pay attention to what smart people pay attention to.

I moderated a panel on social media yesterday for IPN, and got really deep into using facebook and twitter (especially twitter) to monetize, serve customers, learn market data, generate sales and get referrals.  We missed however one of the core uses of social media — understanding more about people’s habits, in particular about their attention profiles.

I get real-time and relevant data from following the folks that I see as leading thinkers in their field, and this is primarily how I learn about trends in my industry, or in tangential industries, that I can capitalize. By utilizing tools like delicious and twitter, I can see what smart people pay attention to.  By lowering the bar (and the risk) for them to publish information, they are more willing to share — and that’s something you can benefit from.

If you turn on the fire-hose and consume the active sharing of information from 10-20 sources, you’ll see your rate of learning jump up. If you were one of the people who weren’t on twitter at the talk, let me ask you to do the following things to test this theory.

1. Signup for an account at twitter and get an RSS reader (I suggest google reader)
2. Identify a topic you’d benefit from learning more about, like, marketing using social media.
3. Search for 3-5 experts in this field who use twitter, and follow them (for social media marketing, let’s say @jacobm @jeffwidman and @garyvee). Read every tweet. My tip is to get it sent to your phone.
4. Note if any of them have blogs, if so, subscribe to them in google reader (Jacob, Jeff, and Garyvee all do).  Also look for the more traditional leaders in this space who aren’t really using twitter yet (like Seth Godin) and subscribe to them as well.   note: do not use this opportunity to subscribe to topic-specific blogs or twitter accounts, as these can have overwhelming volume and generally just parrot back what the leaders have already known for hours/days/months. If it’s really important, one of the people you’re following will talk about it.
5. Now, identify if any of them are using Delicious to share bookmarks. If so, subscribe to an RSS feed of their posts in google reader.  Jacob does. So does Jeff.
6. Read EVERYTHING.

It shouldn’t be too much. It’s rare that individuals post more than 1-2 blog posts a day, 1-10 tweets a day, or 5-10 bookmarks a day.  If it’s impossible for you to follow along you can cut people out and remove the noisy folks.

For the advanced class, rinse and repeat the above with twitter, youtube, vimeo, tumblr, etc. Look for where people on the forefront are sharing what their attention is on and make it your priority to pay attention to that as well.

Do this for a week, and I think why you’ll see it’s one of the most powerful tools to quickly gauge what an industry is working on at that moment, and what tips can you pickup from the thinking of experts.