Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

I’ve recently been making it a habit to take photographs at the conferences I’ve been attending, and in some cases have begun posting some of those pictures to socalTECH’s Facebook profile and the photo sharing site Flickr, for use in stories and blog posts. In doing so, I’ve run across a very, very distinct “generation gap” in the privacy expectations of people here in the technology community.

That “generation gap” is around what are the reasonable assumptions one would have about how private, or not, photos and video should be in this day and age of social networking and the Internet. I’ve found that there seems to be an age line (somewhere around the age of 30 or so) where people are very, very concerned about their privacy and image. Above that age line, there are visceral and very strong reactions to having their photograph posted to a blog, photo sharing site, or Facebook–even if it’s to a limited audience; below that line, there’s almost a total nonchalance and feeling that it’s “business as usual” to share fleeting images of your life.

From a strickly legal point of view (though I’m not a lawyer–informed legal opinions welcome), photographers who are taking pictures for use in magazines, newspapers, or for other news usage, do not need to get a person’s permission to use that photo. You usually need a model release and permission only if you are taking a picture that is going to be used in an advertisement, brochure, catalog, or other commercial usage. However, in practical usage in the pre-Internet social networking world, that meant that most folks would never ever get their image published anywhere, unless perhaps they were at a local event that ran an article on a weekend happening, or if you were a celebrity someone really cared to see in print.

With the advent of social networking and photo sharing sites, it seems that those social norms — that you weren’t likely to have your image published somewhere even if someone took your photo — have shifted dramatically. In fact, if you are regularly out in the community at conferences and events, or a speaker at a panel, you’re very, very likely to have a picture of you posted from that event, or have you in the background of one of the half a dozen video podcasters wandering around. Plus, there are so many people now with cell phone cameras or taking their own digital photos, that you’re likelihood of being photographed and posted on the Internet are quite high. However, that fact apparently hasn’t dawned upon everyone involved, particularly the post 30’s crowd.

I was recently at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood event, and ran across a venture capitalist (not from the area) who was on a panel, and asked him if I could take a picture of him for the newsletter. His answer: “No– No flickr! No Facebook!” And this was someone who was being streamed live via web cam to thousands of people in the AlwaysOn live broadcast. In another case, I took picture of someone — with permission — to try to show the many folks here in the community networking, and they asked me to take the picture down. It’s actually not the first time I’ve run across this, it just seems to be a regular occurrence now — folks I know who are in their 20’s want their photo taken, posted, and tagged on Facebook; those who are over 30 — want nothing to do with this new world of photo sharing, Facebook tagging, and Flickr. It’s a very interesting, distinct generation gap.

So what does that mean to you? I think it’s clear that there’s a shift in opinions on how much privacy people are willing to give up in the day and age of social networks; those opinions are very different depending on your age group; and startups and technology companies are going to have to adapt to different norms on privacy expectations for their services. Adoption of services for the “No Flickr! No Facebook!” crowd will be distinctly different from the “See me on the Internet!” crowd. It will be interesting to watch.

One of the interesting stories I gathered from this week’s AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference in Beverly Hills came from a off-the-beaten path session focused on what it takes to launch yourself as a “branded web personality.” The panel — which included an eclectic mix of “web celebrities,” including Hooman Khalili, a Bay Area DJ who runs the web site Hooman.tv; Spooky Dan, the pierced-death-goth host of Bloody-Disgusting.com (focused on reviewing horror movies); Carrie Keegan, the bad-mouthed host of NGTV (btw, best not watched at work due to profanity and nudity), and Metal Sanaz, a “Myspace celebrity” focused on death metal.

Aside from the amusing sight of folks in khakis and blue blazers chatting with pierced/tattooed Web celebrities, the panel was very interesting because it became abundantly clear that in the day and age of the Internet, it’s very easy to find celebrity and fame — but not necessarily the fortune which used to go hand in hand with fame.

Case in point might be Metal Sanaz, who — despite apparently having nearly 700,000 friends (well, according to her profile, 655,582), is “user number 1001″ on MySpace, and apparently huge in getting metal bands signed and exposed to fans and music studios — apparently isn’t actually making any money from being an Internet celebrity. Sanaz told the audience her tale of being extremely popular, but being completely unable to make any money, sell advertising, or find sponsors because she can’t due to MySpace rules on advertising. And, how she’s (finally) working on a new web site in hopes of actually being able to cash in on her Internet celebrity and pay her rent. One gets the sense that she’s living hand to mouth (at one point she mentions wishing she could “actually pay my crew for all their hard work” and even thinking “about killing myself” over the stress). The others also echoed that thought, talking about how advertising wasn’t quite paying for their edit-and-video intensive sites (Keegan amusingly saying though that it didn’t matter because the company had a number of investors who were bankrolling the effort anyway, even though they weren’t actually making any money).

It appears that the new world of Internet social networks, video, and other innovations — which make it easy to get the distribution you once had to get a record contract for in the music business, or the promotional efforts of a movie studio–has created a new class of celebrities. Those celebrities, although they have a measure of “fame” in a sense that lots of people know who they are, are fans, and follow their every move–haven’t got an established way to convert that celebrity into hard dollars. At the same time (by coincidence, the LA Times had an article on Ed McMahon’s fame-but-not-fortune), regular celebrities are starting to feel the pressure of the Internet on their traditional path to fortune. It seems like, while the Internet now provides the tools for anyone to become a celebrity with “fame”, someone still needs to figure out the “fortune” part.

I’m showing my technical background here, but I was recently browsing through my ever growing backlog of “friend updates” from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. and started thinking about the poor signal to noise ratio in social communications.

The signal to noise ratio–in electrical engineering–is a measure of how much useful signal you are actually getting from a communications channel, versus the background noise in the signal. For those poor souls who grew up in the world of analog, the noise is the snow on a bad TV set, and the buzzing you hear on a remote radio station. In the world of social communications, signal is the useful information you get from that information, and noise is the extra, useless stuff you just really don’t need to be filtering through.

Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites are great, but they’ve got a critical problem, which is the amount of noise is almost staggering; without some kind of filter, it’s very, very difficult to pull out the most critical information you need to know from the constant data stream. In figuring out signal-to-noise, engineers use the amount of power in the actual signal divided by the amount of power in the noise to determine how much useful signal you have. You could almost determine a numeric ratio by using the number of messages and updates in the feeds which are are non-useful information to actual informative information.

In a social sense, signal to me might be:

• Insightful pointers to interesting news or commentary
• Information about upcoming events or happenings
• Breaking news
• People joining or leaving a company
• Questions to the community, or trading of useful information
• Anything actionable - that you can act on in some way

Noise, on the other hand, would be:

• Details on lunch/dinner/breakfast or some other random detail of daily life
• System messages about who you have added as a friend (LinkedIn is particularly bad about this: once you get past a few hundred contacts this becomes an un-usable flood).
• Random stream-of-consciousness posts
• Auto-generated, GPS-powered “I’m here” information
• Micro traffic updates (everyone in LA on Twitter seems to be stuck somewhere in the city in traffic)
• Updates on all the contacts I have who have changed their profile picture
• etc.

In order to make these services more useful, there needs to be more signal than noise — and tools to filter out those signals from the massive data stream they’ve created. Those tools need to be built into the services (there’s plenty of random hacks for doing some kind of text-based filtering for Facebook feeds, twitter updates, etc.), and they need to be automatic, easy to use, and tunable. Social communications has lots of promise, but without some help improving the signal quality, it’s very easy to get completely inundated by the noise.

There’s been a lot of startups I’ve seen lately, focused on creating standalone companies around Facebook. The rush to create applications for Facebook reminds me a lot of the plug-in market. For those who aren’t familiar with plug-ins, those are the various software widgets that plug into larger applications — for example, in the photo editing world, for Adobe’s Photoshop.

The plug-in market for Adobe Photoshop is one where there are lots of innovative, cool companies creating software which creates neat visual effects, allows for modification of images, and other great added features to Photoshop. There are dozens and dozens of companies generating plug-ins, but one thing you soon realize — is that they’re mostly small shops, probably profitable, but not really an ideal firm for venture capital.

There are very, very few “platforms” where independent companies can be created which have the opportunity to break out–simply because your growth and market is limited and highly restricted by the platform you attach to. Among the few “platforms” which enable this are things which are very broadly applied (i.e. Sun’s Java language) and industry dominating leaders (Microsoft’s operating systems and some–but not all–of their applications, Oracle databases). For example, Microsoft’s email platform, Microsoft Exchange, is so widely deployed you regularly see companies developing solutions around Exchange who are able to create substantial, and sustainable business. Another effort (stil early) is Salesforce.com, which is trying to create their own ecosystem of indepenent providers with their Force.com program. But, even with well adopted platforms — think the Apple Macintosh — it’s difficult to grow a substantial company out of the confines of that platform. I wonder (and I’d love some examples) if there truly is a Facebook enabled business which can seriously turn into a substantial standalone company.

Here’s an interesting piece in USA Today (of all places!) about the perils of mixed social- and work-related social networks; the lead in story is from a local technology PR person, Wadooah Wali, at a high profile Internet company (which I’ve covered fairly regularly) in Los Angeles.

As I said before, I’ve been amused (and sometimes horrified) to find all sorts of things in Facebook profiles and other social networking sites from business associates which–in a day and age before social networking sites–I’d rather not know or see. Everything from politicial and religious affiliations, to things better left out of work and business (mostly involving alcohol or partying, but sometimes nudity and sex). Does it you at work to know your boss hates all the movies you like? Or, worse yet, the person you had been looking at promoting joined the “I hate my boss” group on Facebook?

There’s a great article by Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing fame) in Informationweek, talking about how annoying/creepy co-workers (and the like) are the reason why social networking sites are so volatile.

That’s the problem with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. — there are lots of people, and reasons, you don’t want to be connected into a social network. I notice — with some exceptions — that here in Southern California very, very few venture capitalists, investment bankers, or other “power players” are connected into any social networks. Not to mention if you’re a celebrity (aside from the “official” fan profiles on MySpace). Why? Simply, you don’t want people knowing what you are doing at every moment of the day; you don’t want everyone and their next door neighbor pitching you for deals; you don’t want people taking cycles out of your already overloaded schedule.

Everyone knows who I am talking about: we’re not talking about college buddies and good friends, we’re talking about the sort of scary guy who keeps coming up to you at industry events trying to get any venture investor to buy into his scheme to use ESP to contact aliens; the would-be entrepreneur who (violently) won’t take “no” for an answer; that wierdo you met back in college and thought you’d be rid of.

It might not even be a good idea for folks you do know, and perhaps even trust, to know exactly what you’re doing all the time. Do you want to let everyone know you spent last week in New York interviewing investment bankers? Or that, as a VC, advertise to the world that you are about to make an investment in a firm which you think is the “next Microsoft” — before the deal is done? Or, do you want to know prospective investors that you spent the weekend getting drunk with your college buddies?