apk zenonia 5

I just got back from the VLAB Multi-platform Social Networking event, which I thought was very interesting overall. Jeremiah Owyang did a great moderating job, and Jia Shen, Sourabh Niyogi, Ken Gullicksen and Steve Cohen brought lots of different viewpoints to the discussion. Growing and deriving value from Apps within Social Networks is still full of lots of unknowns, but it was good to hear some basic shared principles come through - my summary of one point was 'before you think about a Business Model, make sure you have a Pleasure Model'.

Another point well made by Steve Cohen of Bebo was something I've been thinking for a while too - the hunger for 'Viral' growth is a mistake - what you really need is 'Organic' growth. Just as we distinguish between Organic search results and bought or spammed ones, social network sites and their users are distinguishing between the viral apps that are essentially parasitic, using their hosts as a means to their propagation, and the ones that organically become part of the social ecology, making both the site and the users richer by their presence.
I spent the last weekend fighting off a flu virus, partly by eating lots of organic fruit. I expect social networks and their users will continue to do the same.

My talk from LIFT is here for you to watch below (20mins, needs flash):


The others are up at the LIFT Video site

I'm in Geneva for the LIFT conference, watching Bruce Sterling riff on Carla Sarkozy as a black swan. The photo is what the sunrise looked like over the Alps at breakfast.

I've long been involved with amateur theater and music performance (my boys are performing in a Schumann recital tomorrow with the rest of their piano teacher's pupils), and I grew up seeing double bass cases plastered with Musicians' Union "Keep Music Live" stickers around the place, but I always thought this was a luddite rearguard action against the tide of recorded media that began flowing about a century ago.
But this week, the news was that Rock Band  had sold 2.5 million downloaded songs for you to play along with (it comes with 58). 
Having researched this thoroughly with my boys, the fun of this game is more in the playing than the listening — the 'guitar' playing is clearly simplified, though the drumming is pretty close to reality, and the less said about my 'singing' the better.
Looking at this in the longer view, it can be seen as the return of sheet music in a new form; before recordings took over, sheet music sold for amateur performers was the dominant form. Here's Douglas Adams again:

during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’

Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6 said:

“Al-Qa’eda has prospered and as it were regrouped largely because of the energy and effort it has put into its propaganda, largely through the internet.”

Sir Richard added that the internet had become the main channel for “radicalisation” and coordination between al-Qa’eda cells. He said: “In dealing with this problem, there is no alternative to imposing significant controls over the internet.”

This is what I call the "cup of tea" problem, after Douglas Adams:

Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people 'over the Internet.' They don't bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans 'over a cup of tea,' though each of these was new and controversial in their day.

Some people have been surprised that tea was controversial, but William Cobbett's 1822 'The evils of tea (and the virtues of beer)' had this to say:

It must be evident to everyone, that the practice of tea drinking, must rended the frame feeble and unfit to encounter hard labour or severe weather, while, as I have shown, it deducts from the means of replenishing the belly and covering the back. Hence, succeeds a softness, an effeminacy, a seeking for the fireside, a lurking in the bed, and in short, all the characteristics of idleness, for which, in this case, real want of strength furnishes an apology. The tea drinking fills the public-houses, makes the frequenting of it habitual, corrupts boys as soon they are able to move from home, and does little less for the girls, to whom the gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. At the very least, it teaches them idleness.

Which brings me to the attack on MapReduce today, which spectacularly misses the point by attacking a programming technique for not being a database and contains the striking line:

Given the experimental evaluations to date, we have serious doubts about how well MapReduce applications can scale.

(MapReduce is what Google uses to run complex data-manipulation problems on lots of computers in parallel to do things that databases fail at, like building an index for all the webpages it has found, or rendering map tiles for everywhere on earth in Google maps).

Fraud however, is.

Jeremy Clarkson scoffed at the UK Government data leak debacle, and published his bank details in The Sun:

"All you'll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take it out. Honestly, I've never known such a palaver about nothing," he told readers.

But he was proved wrong, as the 47-year-old wrote in his Sunday Times column.

"I opened my bank statement this morning to find out that someone has set up a direct debit which automatically takes £500 from my account," he said.

"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again.

"I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake."

Police were called in to search for the two discs, which contained the entire database of child benefit claimants and apparently got lost in the post in October 2007.

They were posted from HM Revenue and Customs offices in Tyne and Wear, but never turned up at their destination - the National Audit Office.

The loss, which led to an apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, created fears of identity fraud.

Clarkson now says of the case: "Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy."

I'm amazed that the normally combative Clarkson has accepted this feeble excuse from his bank, when they have just handed out a huge sum of his money to someone else against his wishes, revealing that they are failing in their primary purpose of keeping money safely.

That their security process can fail spectacularly in this way, enabling fraudsters to siphon off money, is sadly all too common.

What is notable is that the banks have spent enormous sums of money promoting the concept of 'identity theft' through clever TV adverts, diverting their customers' attention from their security cock-ups, despite the fact that they are liable for the fraudulently dispersed funds. I don't understand why the banks continue to use "mothers maiden name" as default password, and enable debits this way, then hide behind data protection legislation when their error is pointed out. Clarkson should be railing at the idiots at his bank, too.

Update:

Thanks to Kerry Buckley in the comments for this excellent comedy sketch that sums it up perfectly: