• Paper size
• Telephone numbering plan
  
• Interstate highway standards

But I think the most unsettling thing besides lack of control is, for many people, the uncertainty, the feeling that the privacy ground keeps shifting beneath our feet. With over 50 (and growing) different settings to think about (see the NYTimes infographic) and subtly polysemous terminology (“pages”, “like”, “connections” and so on) it’s hard to know not only what the universe of settings consists of, but what each  settings’ options mean for the sharing of your information. And I say that as a tech (cough) “elite.”  What about the 399M others who aren’t deeply versed in cookies, caches, config files, and related technocrap?  They’re screwed. And when they find out, they become scared and outraged.  I explained to someone recently some of the ways one’s information gets shared, and I got the shocked reply, “You mean when [my son] plays that stupid Mafia game, Facebook gives them my information?“  I wouldn’t be surprised if more people do start to bail out.

So I have a new Facebook strategy for myself and I’m recommending it to others: “look but don’t touch.”  I’ll log into Facebook and see what my friends have posted, maybe comment on or “like” their statuses or photos, but that’s about it. But wait, you might say, if everyone does this, won’t there be no content left in Facebook?  Well, sure, but that’s the point. Like many people, I’m sure, I’m hesitant to leave Facebook entirely, because I do derive a great deal of enjoyment from it. But that enjoyment derives from the social experiences I’ve had there, not from Facebook per se –  til now they’ve just done a remarkably good job at hosting it all.  So when my friends want to host their social experiences at Facebook, I’ll be happy to attend and participate and respond.  But I’ll host my own social experiences elsewhere for now, and if my friends want to be part of them, they can follow me there. I like being public — I tweet a lot!  I have a fully-stocked RSS reader and even occasionally post here on my own blog, am on email and IM and Skype all day, and keep my personal webpage current. I want a fully-connected digital life in which privacy means not invisibility, but rather control.

This approach also includes cleaning out my profile (no links to interests, groups, universities, geographic areas, or unnecessary demographic information), the existence of which is kind of perverse anyway. Who is this information for (besides marketers)?  My friends already know where I have worked and gone to school.  So what’s left?  Am I expected to make a new friend online because we both like This Old House?  Isn’t that the kind of thing newsgroups were good for?  Maybe listing your schools and workplaces is a good way to find old friends/coworkers, but that’s just a shortcut. For nearly everyone (see: giant component), if you click on your friends’ friends long enough, you’ll find everyone you’re looking for.  Remember, you’re already connected (socially) and you can leverage that to get connected (digitally).  Don’t forget that the latter is just a representation of the former.

I think the account closing/cancellation approach is misguided because, even though it accomplishes the goal of keeping one’s own information private, it does so at the expense of depriving oneself of valuable social experiences with one’s friends.  “Look but don’t touch” instead slowly weans people off of Facebook and makes them less reliant on a single gateway to social life online.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that another reason I’m not deleting/closing my Facebook account is that I’m optimistic they’ll get it right eventually, and I want to be there for it when they do.  Plus, I am geeky-proud of my under-2000 user ID number, having signed up in March 2004. It has elicited compliments from other nerds — I’d have to be crazy to give that up.

Because yesterday I had the pleasure of of having lunch with Tyler Cowen during his visit to Cornell’s Behavioral Economics and Decision Research center. It turns out he was kind enough to link to my blog from Marginal Revolution. Welcome new visitors!

Why the ironic welcome? Because it was a post discouraging adding new things to your RSS feed reader. Kind of self-defeating on my part, perhaps, but I hope you’ll stay.

I’ve been using Hadoop and MapReduce to study some really large datasets this year. I think it’s going to become more and more important and open the world of scientific computing to social scientists. I’m happy to evangelize for it.

One of the ideas that didn’t make its way into the final version is that even though the tools and data are becoming more widely available to laypeople, asking good social science questions — and answering them correctly — is still hard. It’s comparatively easy to ask the wrong question, use the wrong data, draw the wrong inference, and so on, epecially if the wrongness is subtle. As an example, I think the OkCupid blog is interesting, but it’s not social science.

Social science has long been concerned with sampling methods precisely because it’s dangerously easy to incorrectly extrapolate findings from a non-representative sample to an entire population. Drawing conclusions from internet-based interactions can be problematic because the sample frame doesn’t match the population of interest. Even though I learned to make a cigar box guitar from Make Magazine, I don’t assume I know that much about acoustic engineering. Likewise, recreational data analysis is fun, illuminating and perhaps suggestive of how our social world works, but one ought not conclude that correlations or trends tell the whole, correct story. However, if exploring and experimenting with data can spark an interest in quantitative analysis of our social world, then I think it’s all for the better.

Link: http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2010/04/scaling-social-science-with-hadoop

Completely separately, the other day I was reading (Cornell’s own) Steven Strogatz’s excellent New York Times blog making math accessible — and interesting — to non-mathematicians. In the most recent post, he mentioned the well-known, silly formula for bounding socially acceptable age differences in dating: the minimum acceptable age for a dating partner is defined as (n / 2) + 7, where n is one’s own age. *

These two things go together, I promise.

I propose a new heuristic for deciding what previous scholarly works to cite — do not cite any work produced a larger number of years ago than twice your age. It is 2010 and I was born in 1980, so the earliest acceptable work for me to cite is 1950. This is good, because I am now old enough for The Human Group, for example, but bad because I won’t be able to cite Simmel until I’m 80. But maybe that’s not so bad. As of now, younger and mid-career professors can cite most anything post-WWII, which seems pretty reasonable. Many senior faculty can reach back to Weber and Durkheim. Marx, on the other hand, is approaching the event horizon.

The benefits of this are clear. Younger scholars can focus on developing concrete findings but retain the ability to fit those findings into the theoretical developments of the past several decades. By the end of one’s career, in contrast, one gains the flexibility to situate one’s work in the larger context of the full intellectual history of the discipline.

* Note that the inverse function doesn’t necessarily work as the maximum acceptable age for a dating partner, just the age of the person for whom you represent the minimum acceptable age. It’s an open question as to whether acceptability goes in both directions– if a is an acceptable dating partner for b, is b an acceptable partner for a? I don’t think this is true. There are perhaps some age disparities in which either the younger or older partner would be seen as making a normatively unacceptable choice, but the other partner would not. I’d also suggest that (n / 2) + 7 is gender-specific. But I’m not a demographer or a gender scholar, and this isn’t even close to science anyway.

Today I thought of a nifty hack to control my “impulse reading” — things that I read on a whim during a bout of web surfing. It adapts a popular trick from personal finance to control impulse spending, which is to wait 30 days before making a purchase.

When I encounter an article I’d like to read, I open it in a new tab in Firefox and leave it there. Right now I have about a dozen tabs open. Some of them have been there for days. Invariably, when I make my way back through them, I read maybe 1/3 of them. Most of them just don’t seem as interesting anymore.

This has two other benefits. I can play “inbox zero” with my Google Reader, so I don’t feel like lots of things are hanging over my head, unchecked. Each feed is marked as read, whether I read it or not, or open it in a new tab for later. The second benefit is that I “batch” all my recreational reading into a contiguous chunk so that it doesn’t continually interrupt me during the day.

Twitter is all the rage lately. Media personalities in journalism, sports and Hollywood have started tweeting, and the masses have followed. Taking a break from our regularly-scheduled research, we wanted to see what effect these media personalities have had on Twitter’s growth. The answer is: a lot.

We randomly selected about 70,000 Twitter accounts* and plotted them by when they were created. The x (horizontal) axis is the age of the account, so “0″ (far left) is the most recent account (as of Tuesday night) and the far right represents accounts created about 1000 days or nearly three years ago.

About six months ago, the number of Twitter accounts exploded. However, two spikes occur: starting about two weeks ago and about 10-11 weeks ago. These coincide with two important media events surrounding Twitter.

The first comprises the celebrity trifecta of Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey and Larry King. Ashton and Oprah’s accounts were created in January (about 6 months ago, coinciding with the increase in new users), and King followed in March. Steady growth continued throughout the first part of the year, but things became more interesting in April.

On 4/13, Kutcher appeared on CNN and they announced a challenge: who could reach one million followers first? Oprah jumped on this bandwagon by having Kutcher on her show and sending her first tweet on 4/17. This coincides with the first (right-hand) peak. The peak was short-lived, and account creation decreased until nearly two months later when the Iran crisis developed, but that’s another story.

The question is, did Oprah/Ashton/Larry cause the spike in new accounts, or did they go along for the ride?

It is too early to see the after-effects of the Iran peak, but it will be interesting to see whether people who create accounts for news/geopolitical reasons are more or less “sticky” for Twitter than those who joined for entertainment reasons.

This post is sort of an advertisement for our group; several academic papers will be coming out of this summer’s work on Twitter, and we have already released a draft version of “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet” (boyd, Golder and Lotan), which describes Twitter users’ retweeting practices. Stay tuned for more.

* Methodology: We approximated the most recently assigned user ID and generated user IDs uniformly between zero and this maximum user ID. We ignored any user IDs that mapped to a nonexistent or suspended user account.

All sorts of applications, on the web and soon on mobile devices, are starting to realize that Twitter doubles nicely as a free broadcast channel for their in-application status messages. If you, for example, “Just secured a safe house in Berlin, Germany. #spymaster” then all your Twitter friends know about it, whether they are playing Spymaster or not. I don’t want to unfollow someone who I like and find interesting, but I only want the interesting parts, not necessarily their gaming activities.

Quasi-biomedical devices are starting to Twitter too — they are just novelties at this point, but there’s a potential here for turning Twitter into a passive stream of medical data that you may in the long run prefer to be private. Examples so far include heart rate monitoring, baby kicking (h/t @askpang) and my favorite, publicly quitting smoking.

But these applications using Twitter changes Twitter from a conversational medium to the ultimate activity stream. And unfortunately, any app who’d like to can pollute your stream.

Bandwidth in the Twitter stream can be seen as a Commons [1]. It’s a resource that we all share, and each of our tweets consumes a little bit of it. The individually rational choice is to use up as much of the bandwidth as we’d like — promote your web game, your mobile application, your blog, whatever. But if every application pollutes the Twitter stream, then pretty soon it’s a cesspool that’s not of use to anybody. The collectively rational choice then is to conserve the bandwidth, but good luck getting anyone to do that, because it’s counter to their own individual motivations.

This sounds an awful lot like email or usenet. You’d like an uncluttered inbox and uninterrupted conversation, but spammers — free riders in consumption of your bandwidth — want to use up some of your bandwidth.

In these situations, we use filters. ISPs and users deploy spam filters. Mailing lists get routed into their own folders. Some people get flagged as “high importance.” Filters are the internet’s version of remediation when the stream gets polluted.

If Twitter (the company) doesn’t want Twitter (the service) to collapse under its own weight by treating all streams equally, then something has to be done.

Twitter seems content so far being a monolithic, inclusive source for tweets of all kind, conversational, application, or otherwise, and letting all the filtering happen downstream in third-party applications. Any why not? It’s worked well for them and a huge number of apps now populate the Twitter ecosystem.

So far I’m not completely pleased with my options. Application creators sometimes sort of allow filtering in a basic way, e.g. by person, but I want filters that match the power of email filters. Something like, “All tweets with some hashtag #xyz go into folder XYZ unless the tweet is from @myfriend, in which case it goes to my inbox.” This way I can choose which tweets to read now, to save for later, or to ignore completely if I like.

Why doesn’t Thunderbird support Twitter? It supports email, RSS and usenet, so why not Twitter? The structure’s pretty similar. Think of a tweet as an email with a sender and a subject, but no recipient or body. Is anyone interested in building this?

Notes

[1] Of course, Twitter is not exactly a commons. It’s not an open protocol like email or usenet (NNTP). It is interesting to note that Twitter, like Facebook, are in principle government-like (and FB explicitly thinks of itself this way), but so far Twitter has been as hands-off as Facebook has been hands-on regarding control of cultural expression.

[2] Update: Fred said nearly the same thing a year ago!

It’s really nice to be back in Cambridge. Angie and I have a fancy MS-subsidized apartment (they take really nice care of their interns!) from which it takes me a full 4 minutes and 30 seconds to walk to work, about 2 minutes to the Kendall Square T station, and maybe 10 minutes to the mall. I’ve already bumped into one old friend on the street, and expect more.

Like my old lab at HP, Microsoft New England boasts of physicists, theoretical computer scientists, game theorists, and what-have-you. There are frequent lab-wide lunches and people are actively multidisciplinary. So it’s a pleasantly familiar experience. But the view from the MS lab is just fantastic (h/t @yardi for the pic).

Alice, Sarita and I are all studying Twitter, but from different and interesting approaches — more on our results as we produce them. From informal conversations with friends who are interning elsewhere, it seems like everyone is studying Twitter in some capacity this summer. The contrarian in me wants to run in the other direction, but there’s a lot I want to know about how Twitter works, and I think it can be a useful case study to do some interesting social science, so I’ll ignore my knee-jerk response and stay with it. My prediction is that CHI’10 will be loused with Twitter papers, many will get in but many will not, and by CHI ’11 or ’12, everyone will be jaded and tired of Twitter papers. And so it goes.

The hotel I’m staying in for this conference is nice, but making me pay for internet access is like making me pay to use the blinds or the sink. Charging for internet access would make Thenardier proud.

You can tell the hotel — and, of course, many others like it — are struggling against an outmoded but profitable idea, that internet access is a luxury, rather than a requirement. There is wifi — but only in the lobby. There is wired net access in the rooms — but at $11.95 a day and with a 2-ft ethernet cable, so my laptop can’t leave my desk if I do decide to purchase it.

This is completely broken.

The best explanation I’ve read is that net access is complimentary in cheap hotels as a perk, but it’s fee-based in expensive hotels, because people in expensive hotels are business travelers who will expense it, and so the buyers have minimal price sensitivity. And building the cost into the room fee is a nonstarter because advertised price of a service must be low, even if add-on fees make the “real” fee higher.

I think the solution is not in “free” internet access. It can’t be, since we’ve already established that many of the people making the purchase aren’t absorbing the cost, so competing on price won’t work. What will work, is competing on “easy”.

When I open my laptop, I want to be on the local network right away. No click-throughs, no scratch-off-and-enter-a-code, both of which invariably break every time I turn my laptop on. I want to be able to see local network resources, including any printers in the business center. The print jobs would have to queue in something like CloudPrint. I’d like the hotel website that the proxy invariably redirects me to, to be something useful. The ubiquitous useful folder of hotel services should be that webpage — you already know I’m in your hotel, so show me that instead of the Reservations page.

If I’m here for a conference, I probably know other people in the hotel. Have they checked in yet? Are they free for dinner? Can we share cabs to the airport? The hotel creates temporary, geographically-bounded real communities for groups of conference travellers. Design something special, and I’ll stay in your hotel, and you won’t have to charge me twelve bucks to check my email.