Crowdsourcing gets practical

Driving on the highway teaches you a lot about the basic instincts of humans. 

• People who drive in a closed lane to pass traffic, only to merge at the last minute possible 
• People who signal for an exit 500ft away while in the left lane
• People who change lanes constantly in slow moving traffic just to get one car ahead

While most driving behavior may have a selfish tint, speeding tickets drive people to work together. 

When I am speeding with other cars around me, I have a lower level of risk to get a speeding ticket than I am driving solo on a highway. If there was a cop ahead of me, the car in front of me (who is also speeding) would most likely slow down. Thus, I would slow down. If he does not slow down, he will most likely get a ticket from the cop in front of us.

His braking is a warning to me that something is up. This is a “crowd-sourced” radar detector. Crowdsourcing works when incentives are aligned to cooperate and there is low variability between outcomes (up or down, yes or no, good or bad). 

Here, no one wants to get a ticket but everyone wants to drive above the speed limit. Sometimes, even drivers going the opposite direction as me flash their brights in warning of an imminent cop. 

Crowdsourcing works and aggregate actions of individuals do translate into broad trends. It is just very difficult to find those right incentives. 

Google has got to be kidding with this. Is this clean and a usable interface?

every consumer has solved all of their problems

Don’t be disheartened. Read on.

Think about every popular solution on the web, from AirBnB to Ebay. Each website had an alternative in the real world before the online solution. Before AirBnB, individuals used yellow pages, local ads, and HomeAway to rent out their place. Before Ebay, individuals used garage sales and local auction houses. 

Consumers are hacks by nature. Consumers want their lives to be as easy as possible and respond to market offerings by trying to limit their downside, whether it be the cost of time and money.  

When consumers want something or desire an outcome, they usually have some way to make it happen. It maybe messy. It may take a lot of time, but consumers get it done.

The goal of an innovative web offering is to surplant the existing solution with an easier and better solution. 

There is one caveat to this general truth. The best companies create their own market and create their consumer demand. Companies like Apple and LuLuLemon saw a hidden need in the market. With clever messaging and marketing, they were able to create their own demand. There was “no market” for tablets before the iPad and bam…overnight, the tablet market exploded. 

why techies treat people bad

According to the LA Times, technology encourages people to lie.

A new paper expected to be published this year in the Journal of Business Ethics finds that people are more likely to lie through text messaging than face-to-face communication, such as video conferencing or audio chat.

The LA Times writes,

Lying via text makes intuitive sense. It’s what researchers call “lean media,” which means it doesn’t effectively transfer the rich emotional cues that might alert someone to duplicitous behavior. You can’t stutter over text, or twist your hands nervously, or dart your eyes.

A majority of communication is fielded through body language over what is literally being said. Approximately 93% of personal communication is nonverbal. 

We have all received a text message that we read wrong or read into the message a duplicitous intention. Read the following messages with altered emphasis to see what I mean (in italics):

“I am going to the movies” - You are not invited

“I am going to the movies” - Regardless, I will make it to that movie. 

“I am going to the movies” - You are interrupting me or I am begrudgingly going to see a chick-flick.

An alteration in emphasis changes the meaning of the message, but this is lost with text messages.

Since the main mode of communication on the web is text, messages lose a higher level of meaning over inter-personal communication. The loss in transfered meaning reverts to a dehumanization of the communicators.

When the study’s participants were lied to face-to-face versus through text messages, those that were lied through text were more upset than those lied to face-to-face. The researches believed seeing or hearing an individual speak builds a personal rapport that is removed in text. Basically, the text message has an author and physically seeing/hearing the author reminds us there is a person behind the message. 

To the surprise of the authors of the study, text messaging removes the human element of communication. The message is only words on the page. There is no author, there is no human. This is one reason why online debating, aka Facebook debates, never appear to be docile, polite, and professional (here is an example). Most online debates quickly turn from light bickering to a full-on war (so, just stop now).

The communication vehicle is essential and can radically change perception. Technology is, so far, only adepth at communicating the literal words. 

Video messaging and video chats pull in a facial element of nonverbal communication, but there are still significant problems. Ask yourself, what do you when you video chat on Skype? You usually surf the internet or work on other things. You typically do not watch the person you are chatting with. Video chatting tends to alter nonverbal communication since we are typically sitting down and facing a screen.

Next time you are offended by an email or are passionately wrapped up in a Facebook debate take a step back. If it is an online debate, assess if the discussion is really worth your hours of online research to support your response. Frankly, I’d rather spend time with people in real life (“IRF” for the techies) than spend hours on Quora or forums. 

Cable TV Hates Twitter

Who says using Twitter is just posting a mindless thought without any repercussions. Courtesy of CableTV, a ComCast reseller, Twitter.com is the new evil environmental, destroying company on the block to battle.

Disregarding the logic gaps on CableTV’s part or the fact there is a Twitter sharing button on the post, my take away is that today’s technology is more than just a tool. If technology is inter-woven into our daily life, technology must include moral postulating and worldviews. These assumptions should be discussed. 

The graphic is below.  

Meet the King

Meet the king!

One of my cousin’s has a young baby boy. He is about one years old and quite adorable, but he is insistance to always be right. He demands adults to bring him water. He demands for adults to play with him. He even waves his hand, palms facing you, when you do something he does not like. 

Not surprisingly, he also loves technology. He took my iPad one day (without asking) and played with it for hours. He knew all of the hand gestures and he loved Angry Birds as much as me. 

The ease-of-use and intimacy of the iPad speaks to both infants and adults. 

In the the 21st, technology has shifted from a industrial device to a personal device. The proliferation of smart phones and social media has made technology no longer about code to access information, but an intensely personal experience for you to explore what you want. 

This movement towards a more personalized web and technology is noticeable. Think about these slogans: 

Facebook- Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.

Twitter- Follow Your Interests.

Votizen- Gain an audience with officials 

These sites are attempting to appeal to users in a very direct fashion. These types of sloganeering directly tells users, “you will get X benefit” from using my site.

Taking this analysis to a higher level, what are the main functions of these applications:

Social networking: connecting you to other people so they can hear from you. 

Blogging: sharing your thoughts with the world, so they can read what you are thinking.

Political Action: getting your voice to the politicians. 

Even our basic hardware (PCs, Mobile Phones) seek to be deeply rooted into our everyday lives and to tell us that we are fascinating individuals and our every thought must be interesting to someone. 

Disregarding the inevitability that someone will probably find you interesting (although Google rankings may say otherwise), this does not speak to the quality or meaningfulness of our interaction with the web. 

This personalization encourages us to be selfish. How do we act when our internet signal slows down? How do we act when we loose connection? Frankly, quite immature. Just the other day, Twitter crashed. What did I do when I saw the Twitter whale? I pushed refresh over and over. When an app on my phone crashes over and over, I think in my head, “wow, what an awful piece of crap”. 

Personal technology is pushing us to treat the world as if it is our own playground. We see the world as if everything is ours to control and play with. The problem is the world is full of other people with different interests. We may view the world in the form of text and augmented reality, but personal technology still needs the real world to function. 

Don’t wait until your phone dies or your computer is infected with malware to lift up your head and see the person you are sitting next too. Life is not as friendly as an uninstall. A life without Facebook may seem weird today, but a life without a foot in reality is simply foolish. 

We are all kings… in or head. 

Three take ways about the future of technology

1. Social is dead. We will enter a post-social or a neo-social world
2. The internet will be a mix of web, cloud, and apps. Cloud will not be the future
3. Business social applications will be hot over the next ten years. 

Why do you “like” stuff on Facebook?

1. I thought it was funny
2. My friend postsed it, so I had to like it
3. It caught my attention
4. The website asked me to do it
5. I got a free gift if I liked it
6. Someone asked me to like their page
7. I was bored
8. Habit
9. This story needs to be seen by others
10. I sympathize 
11. I liked it

Do I ever remember what I liked in the past? 

Likes does not have any conclusive meaning

Texting: Short and Lazy

Being more accesible can lead to poor communication. 

“Hey I just got done workin out what is going on”

“Cause yalll were not together”

“Geussed what? You know who I am talkin aboot?”

In cause you have not noticed, your texting habits make you look lazy.

I took a look through my text messages threads today and I noticed the pervasive trend that I do not finish or even attempt to finish my thought when I send a text message. I send texts along with misspellings, no punctuation, and full of valley girl similarities. When Swipe suggests or autocorrects the wrong word, I think in my mind, “They will get what I am trying to say” as send it along, refusing to go back and edit. 

It is quite intriguing that some of us, including myself, act as if the person in front of us is less interesting than who can be reached on my phone (If you leave your phone on the table when you are meeting with someone face to face, you believe this statement.) yet we have such a low quality conversation, riddled with shortcut, errors, and delayed responses. 

My friend Jeff Novich said through Twitter:

The spread of 140 character conversations has lowered our patience and willingness to focus on the task at hand. The low quality of our texting messaging only feeds the flame.