Both of these services analyse your patterns and email behaviour to make suggestions…..leaving the only question as “when will Gmail write the email for me, sent it and respond so I can spend all day on the beach?”

*Got the wrong Bob*  is a new Labs feature aimed at sparing you this kind of embarrassment. Turn it on from the Labs tab under Gmail Settings, and based on the groups of people you email most often, Gmail will try to identify when you've accidentally included the wrong person — before it's too late. When's the last time you got an email from a stranger asking, "Are you sure you meant to send this to me?" and promptly realized that you didn't? Sometimes these little mistakes are actually quite painful. Hate mail about your boss to your boss? Personal info to some random guy named Bob instead of Bob the HR rep? Doh!
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-in-labs-got-wrong-bob.html

*Don’t forget Bob* ….Have you ever realized you mistakenly left someone important out of an email, or just spent too much time trying to decide who from your long list of contacts to include?

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-in-labs-suggest-more-recipients.html

http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2010/08/hbrs-idea-watch-strange-but-tr.html

start at 4.25 on the pod cast for  "Defend your research from Harvard Business Review/ Sept 2010 - interview from Leif Nelson Prof @Berkeley"

Research on people watching TV shows - interrupted with commercials and non-interrupted; expected outcome would be that people enjoy more the one that was not interrupted.

However, pretty strongly people enjoyed the TV with commercials more, good news for advertisers.

Reason and rational is adaptation.  What is this.  Consider a 10 minute massage, the massage gets less enjoyable as time goes on. if you cut the session in half and start again, the enjoyment increases.

Why do people like and pay for premium channels without ads - plots are complex and provide natural interruption by stitching story lines. Designed to keep enjoyed high.

Smart take and counter intuitive research

https://www.recordedfuture.com/how-media-analytics-works.html

The value of your digital footprint is in the analysis – not sure if this really does anything new or different but good to make you think.

Guest blog from Ajit Jaokar.   Original post is here

Overview

The many privacy related issues raised by the Web will be amplified in the world of mobility and even more so, in a world dominated by sensor networks. Current thinking seems to converge on one important conclusion: through the combined interaction of law, technology and Internet literacy, people should be in a position to control how their own personal information is made available and used for commercial (or other) purposes.

In this post, we explore the feasibility of users managing their own data. i.e. if we indeed want users to manage their own data, what are the issues involved in making this happen? We also look at an alternative i.e. allowing devices to mirror social privacy norms. Hence, I see the discussion as ‘Changing user behaviour to incorporate new device functionality’ OR ‘Changing device behaviour to mirror privacy expectations in human interactions

Privacy and management of data – A background

Today Facebook has become the lightning rod for privacy and they continue to push the issue with new products like “check ins” where facebook allows others to “tag” or check you in at a location, provided you are Facebook friends. Predictably, this has drawn fire from organizations like the ACLU – American Civil Liberties Union when they say Facebook Places: Check This Out Before You Check In. And we see new products and services that are launched to protect user privacy. For example The Fridge aims to be a service that shares content with a group i.e. if you belong to a group everyone can see it. You don’t have to ‘friend’ everyone and by the same token, no one outside the group can see it. Cataphora’s freeware “Digital Mirror” helps to gain an understanding of what we might look like to other people online.

The complexity and benefits of social networking data

Discussions about Privacy generate a lot of ‘heat but little light’. The concerns of data management are known and everyone has a view on it. Everyone wants to be protected and most people have a perception of being ‘exploited’ by companies. But social network data is complex. Noted security expert Bruce Schneier recently published a revised taxonomy of social networking data. It can be summarized as:

• Service data is the data you give to a social networking site in order to use it. Such data might include your legal name, your age, and your credit-card number.

• Disclosed data is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.

• Entrusted data is what you post on other people’s pages. It’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over the data once you post it — another user does.

• Incidental data is what other people post about you: a paragraph about you that someone else writes, a picture of you that someone else takes and posts. Again, it’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over it, and you didn’t create it in the first place.

• Behavioral data is data the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with. It might include games you play, topics you write about, news articles you access (and what that says about your political leanings), and so on.

• Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends self-identify as gay, you’re likely gay yourself.

There are other ways in which data benefits society. 10 ways data is changing how we live lists the benefits as: Shopping, Relationships(dating), Business deliveries(ex courier services), Maps, Education(schools), Politics(openlylocal), Society (social and spatial relationships through location data), War (wikileaks), Advertising, Linked data and the future.

And I have also said before in the The fallacy of the Better mousetrap: Privacy advocates want to have their cake and eat it too you can’t have it both ways! i.e. publish your content/data and then ask for a share of profits! The future is likely to get more complex in a world dominated by mobility and sensor networks as I point out in The Silence of the chips

Changing User behaviour v.s. Changing device behaviour

How realistic is the idea of people maintaining their own data? i.e. changing user behaviour?

This sounds very seductive until you realize

a) That there is an extra step (inertia) to overcome in managing my data. This will be in multiple sites (facebook, MySpace etc)

b) Much of the data about me is not owned by me (ex comments about me created by other people)

c) The real concern often is metadata i.e. data insights derived by a site based on collective analysis of multiple people which is then retrospectively applied to individuals. Data is owned by individuals, metadata is owned by the site

d) In a world of Mobility and sensor networks (see silence of the chips above), the ability to individually permit or deny sensors to monitor information about people is probably unfeasible. What are the implications in that case?

The option is for us to maintain our behaviour but to have devices change according to society’s privacy norms

Danah Boyd raises an important point when she says that: Privacy Is Not Dead – The way privacy is encoded into software doesn’t match the way we handle it in real life. The reason for this disconnect is that in a computational world, privacy is often implemented through access control. Yet privacy is not simply about controlling access. It’s about understanding a social context, having a sense of how our information is passed around by others, and sharing accordingly. As social media mature, we must rethink how we encode privacy into our systems.

And Instead of forcing users to do that, why not make our social software support the way we naturally handle privacy?

Thus the question for me is: Is it realistic to expect users to take responsibility for their own data? OR should we make our social software support the way we naturally handle privacy? So, should we focus of changing behaviour of people OR changing behaviour of devices? The privacy concerns we are seeing are just the tip of the iceberg and I think this question would apply more to mobile and sensor data going forward.

I realise of course that this could be a false dichotomy but I feel that if we spent more efforts on making our devices mirror social norms of privacy, we could have a greater chance of success rather than changing the behaviour of people.

“How data analytics help to monetise the user base in telecoms, social networks media and advertising in a converged ecosystem”

Ajit Jaokar, Brian Jacobs, Alan Moore and Jouko Ahvenainen

This is an airplane book, easy to read and you can get through it in a round trip to Barcelona.   It is not a detailed read as it is about setting up a framework and moves the discussion forward.

The books takes time to set out in the first few chapters that markets are conversations and how if you can understand who is talking to who about what, you have the basic armoury to go into battle.  To understand this you need to appreciate that all those tracks, trails, clicks, messages, blogs, comments that you leave behind in a digital world are there to be collected and harvested. The more data, the more analysis the more value you should be able to create.  The book looks at social networks and there is a brief look at how media agencies work and how they are reacting (or not) to change.

Page 65 starts to look at the telco market and makes the valid point that operators think they own the customer, whereas they should be thinking the could get to know the customer ( difference between monopoly and loyalty!)

In getting to know the customer there are three rules to follow:- give the customer an incentive, an open platform or ecosystem and touch points.  These are then explored.

From Page 75 there is a good summary of Alan Moores Book “Communities Dominate Brands” and brings out the key point of alpha users, those who are most influential in attracting and keeping friends as part of the customer base. 

On page 94 there is a move from the economics and marketing into psychology and emotional behaviour as the book moves to talk about trust and reputation.

On page 112 the book points out that due to the social network, social data and life stream mean that we now have a living profile.  Once the bedrock of marketing, demographic segmentation and lifestyle categorisation; which was fixed for a period of your life and describes strata’s of the population, will now possibly become redundant.  Our new profile built on digital footprints will be living real time representations.  The eternal issue facing us all, however, is how do we extract the value from the data!

The later parts of the book drift into privacy and identity and the impact on people willingness to provide or give up data.

Overall well worth a flight read as it is likely to stimulate new ideas and ways of looking at your customers and the data you have (or should have) and the analysis you do do ( or should do)

Migrating some original work - May 2009

The economic climate means that there is a focus on costs and revenue at the expense of opportunity and innovation.  “In the bank” is winning over even “in the bag”, but it is also true that you cannot cost cut your way out of recession, you need to trade. Balancing future and survival is as much an executive skill today as at any time in corporate history.

Companies who are taking the opportunity to adopt networked technologies, which have been developing over the last 5 years and in our view are starting to become stable enough to show promise, are likely to seriously enhance their ability to offer better services, provide unique customer experience, be more responsive, delivery on service promises and keep costs down, during these difficult times and the upturn.

A key driver for these pioneering companies in the adoption curve is how they handle and analyse customer and social graph data.  To explain this concept, this Viewpoint focuses on “The WHAT principle and the WHO effect”

We hope that our Viewpoint improves awareness, raises questions and promotes deliberation over lunch.

The WHAT principle

The focus of today’s higher value services is personalization – the making of your user experience, creating value from the reduction in churn and incremental service revenue, assuming that any incremental margin is not eroded by competitive pressures.  The focus on personalization is, to AMF Ventures understanding, a focus on WHAT:– what you as a user want to do; what service you want; what is needed now.  The sole benefactor is the individual, but does this create any value?  The assumption is that personalization provides focus, and that this focus leads to the ability to deliver engaging and personalized services including advertising.  This advertising being derived from the same advertising budgets, which is now redirected from other display channels.  Therefore does personalization actually create any new value and will it actually grow the overall spend of the entire market?

Commentators, consultants and media sellers will provide convincing evidence to back their own propositions and the purpose of this Viewpoint is not to debate the personalization opportunity but to introduce the WHO effect.  Whilst personalization will increase value for the provider [more effective marketing and efficient sales]; assuming that there is value for the user, it does not itself create new value for the entire converged industries.   However, personalization could create value, if the focus is on WHO and not WHAT!

The WHO effect

Personalization has been about the WHAT principle. This has focused on a single customer: ‘you’.  The WHO effect is the multiplier. The focus shifts from WHAT, to orientate on WHO you are doing something with.  In simple terms when you go for dinner, who are you with? When you are in a business meeting or seminar, who are you with? When you are at a concert, in school, or on holiday – who are you with?  The opportunity is that these ‘WHO’s’ are gravitating towards and enjoying the same experiences as ‘you’.  The additional profiles of those who you are ‘with’, can combine to create a new and incremental market value, assuming as a company you are able to reach these customer and deliver services that they want.

Consider the advertising issue created through personalization, it reaches you – one person in two billion.  The world is divided into two billion personalized worlds, only relevant to one person at any given time, and each person with an unequal bite of the advertising spend!  The WHO effect would suggest that as you are enjoying something with others, even though it is outside of their personalized preference, it is possible that it would be worth providing information on products and services to the group.  The WHO effect is the electronic ‘word of mouth’.  It assumes and depends on the fact that we adopt at different rates and some not at all. These issues provide the limitation to personalization and the WHAT principle, but opportunity to the WHO effect.

How WHO Works

WHAT based decisions are not using information in a sophisticated enough way. To move to the WHO based system, customer data needs to be understood in a more nuanced way. We think of data on 2 main axes: How ‘active the data is’ (static to dynamic) and ‘type of data’ (factual to behavioural)

Factual vs Behavioural.

Factual Data just is – date of birth, where you live etc.

Behavioural data is what you do, your footprint over time.

Dynamic vs Static

Static data is data that doesn’t change – your date of birth. Highly dynamic data is what is changing every minute – movement, current location etc. Some data is dynamic, but over long time periods – eg place of work, home address etc

Some dynamic data is repeated, ie there are patterns in it (such as the daily commute) that allow one to predict behaviours and events.

Clearly, if a service provider has a grasp of this information, they would be able to make better decisions about the user context and thus serve up better information or services to the user – critical for the limited real estate on even the smartest of mobile devices. 

Creating advantage

This WHO effect is not open to the traditional broadcast, TV and entertainment companies, although they are the traditional home of the display advertising budgets.  This service could be offered by Web companies, however as your profile and personalization has a dependency on your web access time, it could be difficult. The major benefactor of the WHO effect will be mobile companies as the mobile device becomes the platform to collect data, interrupt the connection and deliver the value.

Caveats

First: the opportunity to exploit the WHO effect is not open to companies who want to ‘control’ the user experience and developer environment such as Apple, they can only enjoy the WHAT principle. Open mobile platforms, open access services and developers who services work across all devices will be able to exploit the WHO effect. The multiplier value of mobile is not in knowing WHAT you are doing (location and attention), but WHO you are doing it with. 

Second: user pre-acceptance and buy-in is critical – “Snooping” behaviour has already blown up in a number of companies’ faces. Users need to be certain that data will not be misused, sold on or otherwise exposed.

Third: trust is critical.  Is your Brand value on of trust and what will the user trust you for?

Fourth: regulation and law.  This is a black hole of debate

Fifth: this concept is deeply embedded in “web as a platform concept” This is a change from domains, destinations and portals. A way to understand this is to view that owning a top level domain such as www.news.com is not important.  Users will never visit this site, but rather interact with the data that comes from this source via Twitter, RSS feeds, readers, blogs and social sites.  The stats on your site are not important, but rather where you content is consumed and how? Customer ownership, as per caveat one, is not important – owing the customers data is.

Migrating some original work to here - first posted in May 2009

Today we are concerned in some ways by the thought that CCTV can capture our actions and the issues about our privacy.  This is balanced with the comfort that so are others and those who have nothing to hide are safe.  Data (video) is kept in the promise that at some point it could be used to protect you, and conversely used to capture you, when the algorithms become sufficiently good to interrupt actions, I hope never intent.

Today, in the most part, the CCTV system cannot link the image of you to an identity of you.  When this link is established could it be used to make your personal data more secure?  If you lost your phone, image the local CCTV network acknowledging that it is not you holding your phone and locks the device up, or indeed starts to track it.

Would such data (systems linking images to identity) be of use, or are the benefits outweighed by the possible downsides?

I have been on a search for a context button.  What is it and why do I want one?

When writing about my, your, our digital footprints it has become obvious to me that just putting the date and time on a post is a bit of a nonsense.  It is far better to leave the date out as it ages the blog post and if it is old it may get skipped (why read old stuff).  However, when searching I want the date on articles so I can tell if current or relevant.

Date ages me but what I do want, however, is a content button.  When someone comes to http://blog.mydigitalfootprint.com I think it would be good to have a button that says CONTEXT on each blog.  The button takes you to a service say from WSJ, Times, Guardian, NEWco etc  and provides key (contextual) stories of the day/ week/ month that are relevant to the blog.  It could be presented as images, text or  video, lists etc, but is a summary of what was happening about the time a blog was posted and hence provides some context.   I would love it if users could decide about the top stories by category on the day, which then provides the historical context of that day in history.

Please let me know if you have this service or want to develop it.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine, but it's not pretending to be Google, and it isn't trying to do "search". It's actually doing something more subtle: it's doing semantic search. It depends on data (trusted) and not keywords (crawl the web and index)

Google uses tweaked versions of its original "lots of people link to this page" algorithm. Wolfram Alpha is  closer to Wikipedia and is looking to distinguish between Ford, the car, and ford, the method of getting across a river as input and therefore deliver results that are of value.

Impact on Digital Footprints - Wolfram Alpha doesn't care as it is looking for facts and how it can be compared.  If this is future search, will privacy go away?

Excellent video from Ted Talks on what they are developing

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/05/greater-choice-and-transparency-for.html

Users can now opt out of being tracked around the web by Google Analytics, the tool I use to track traffic and trends on my websites, just after we discovered SSL secure search. Google Analytics has launched tools that allows users to opt out of having their information (inc IP address), sent to Google.  It is a simple browser plug-in for IE 7 or 8, Google Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox (no Opera or Safari yet)

Google will always get user information in aggregate, from all those who use the web, which provides them with a satellite view of web activity.  Google tends to know more about a user’s activities across multiple sites than any individual site knows and can use the analysis of the data to improve services aka My Digital Footprint business model.

So is this a preemptive strike before something else, or a tool providing some protection, or have Google run the numbers and predict that the opt outs will be so small (or repetitive to certain sites) that this will not effect the aggregate.

You can also check what Google thinks you are interested in and opt out of targeted advertising. Opting out of those will not stop Google’s display of small text ads on its sites or on other sites, because those ads are displayed, based on the content of the page you are looking at, not on your previous browsing behavior.  The opt-out utility does not block Google’s DoubleClick advertising cookie, which tracks you at sites around the net that use DoubleClick to show ads.  Finally it spears that opting out of Google Analytics will not prevent your IP information or search queries from being logged by the site directly or through other web analytics tools.