Results tagged “thinktank”

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a wonderful idea that was started to help us celebrate our heroes in technology and science, and to identify female role models. I'm using the day instead to talk about how the women I know (or don't know yet) in the tech industry can pursue some interesting opportunities in the future.

Nearest and dearest to my heart is ThinkTank, the open source social network insights application that we're creating at Expert Labs. Besides being created by a woman, we've been able to start up an active, vibrant community that is supportive and inclusive of new members. I think that our habit of mentoring our newest contributors is part of why we were one of the youngest apps to be selected for Google Summer of Code students to participate in, and I think it also explains why we have a mailing list and community that's never had a single flame war, personal attack or ego battle. It also helps that we're doing meaningful work that helps government make better decisions every time we fix a bug in our application. Even if you've never considered yourself a coder, there are instructions on how to participate that make joining the project as easy as editing a file in Google docs.

Put simply, at Expert Labs we'd love for ThinkTank to be the most woman-friendly open source effort that exists.

Open For Submissions

As someone who's been on the Advisory Board for the Web 2.0 Expo NYC since its inception, I'm also eager to point out that the call for proposals is currently open, with just three weeks left in the window for submissions. Make a note to spend some time this weekend to write up a proposal — don't put it off and then kick yourself for not submitting! My contact info (phone number and email) is right on this page if you want to get in touch with any questions about how to make your proposal better. I'd be eager to have much better representation on stage this year, and O'Reilly has committed to this goal as well.

A side note: I've been highlighting on my Twitter account when events that I participate in make diversity a priority, as with O'Reilly's statement, Kevin Werbach's Supernova event, and others. Previously, my policy had been to simply decline participation in events that had speaker lists that weren't representative of our industry. Instead, I've decided this year to accept some of these opportunities to speak, but use some of my time on stage to (respectfully) mention the issue to the participants at the event. I'm still not sure whether boycotting or speaking up will be more effective, but clearly it's time to try some new strategies.

I've also been following the PHPWomen open source project partnerships, which provide another set of mentoring and guidance opportunities for projects that want to encourage women to participate in their work. It seems like a good model that more open source efforts should embrace.

Finally, J-Lab and the McCormick Foundation are sponsoring a New Media Women Entrepreneurs challenge, to offer $12,000 to a female entrepreneur who has a great idea for a media business. There's only three weeks left to apply to this challenge as well, and while I'm not involved in it and have no connection to the organizers, I'd be happy to volunteer my help to anyone who wants to submit a proposal as well.

Why It Matters

In all, there is a ton of opportunity for the brilliant and talented women in our tech industry to excel despite the pervasive and persistent obstacles in the way. I urge everyone to support these efforts, and am always happy to be a resource to point out that the reason I embrace diversity and opportunity for everyone in our industry is because it leads to the best, most innovative, and most successful new creations. Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

A few months ago, I started as director of Expert Labs, a new independent non-profit effort with the goal of improving government by letting policy makers tap into the collective wisdom of the public. We're part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and because our goal could have seemed a bit nebulous I've held off on explaining the full vision of the effort until today, when we're announcing our first project, platform and project director. Here's the highlights:

• We'll be collaborating with the White House in support of the Grand Challenges initiative. The President has defined a list of the biggest scientific and technological challenges facing America, as part of his Strategy for American Innovation. But they need our help, especially from those of us in the scientific and technological community: What should our highest priorities be for the biggest technological challenges of our time? What items have been omitted from the President's list of priorities? In short: If you had to pick the next project on the scale of the moon landing, or the human genome sequencing, what would you suggest? And how would you find the leadership and community that would achieve that goal? These are the questions we want to help answer.

• To help get answers for these questions, Expert Labs will be sponsoring the development of a technology platform that allows policy makers and community members to ask questions across the existing social networks that exist on the web. My guideline for the technology platform was that it be free and open source, make smart use of existing technologies and APIs, have a thriving developer community, and be appropriate for use in cloud environments for easy deployment by government agencies, private industry, and even individuals. So I'm excited to announce that we've selected the ThinkTank application as our first official technology platform project at Expert Labs.

• And, as you might expect since we've agreed to sponsor her application, I'm ecstatic to announce that Gina Trapani is joining Expert Labs as our Project Director for the Grand Challenges project, overseeing our technology efforts around ThinkTank and making sure that the platform is a good fit for the community of policy makers, scientists, technologists and the general public that it's designed to serve. Gina is of course the founding editor of Lifehacker and publisher of Smarterware, a best-selling author, and a co-host of This Week in Google, one of the most popular podcasts on the Internet. She's also an incredible talent and a woman of remarkable character and I couldn't be more excited to have her on the team.

Phew! That's a lot of great news. Since I announced my role at Expert Labs two and a half months ago, we've been hard at work meeting with folks across the Federal Government to find out how we could be of the most value. The truth is, when I started this project, I really only had a hunch that there was something amazing happening at the confluence of technology and government. But the months since have shown that my optimism there is well-founded, even if it is still just early days for this kind of effort.

The Startup Mindset

You see, Expert Labs sits at an interesting intersection. We are not part of the government, don't take any money from the government or any tax dollars, and don't take orders from anyone in the White House or any other part of the administration. In the early days of refining Expert Labs, I saw us as something like a "gCombinator", creating technology that serves government needs, but with a model that looks a lot more like an entrepreneurial technology incubator.

And while we're proudly independent, we've also been given a remarkable amount of access. The federal government as a whole is making an incredibly rapid evolution towards becoming more open and accessible, particularly to technologists. You can look at something like the OpenGov Tracker and see the results of this in real time. That's not to say things are ideal; Only 611 ideas for improving government have been submitted in total thus far. But I think that we can get orders of magnitude more Americans to participate in, and suggest ideas for, better governance if we make it as easy as just using Twitter or Facebook. And I think we can provide great motivations for them to do so if we show that their ideas and inspiration have direct impact on the policy decisions that are made.

This is a time of remarkable opportunity for the tech industry that I have spent my career working in. I'm just a regular guy, who was working just a few years ago as a PHP coder building content management systems. Today, I've been able to go to the White House and help make the case that a better technology platform, connected to the social networks we already use, could have the same transformative effect on policy making that it did on the world of media or business. And they were ready to listen, not just to me, but to our entire community. (I'm not saying that to name drop; In the new world of open government, things like visitor records for the White House are actually easily accessible.) I mean, hell, I got excited just knowing that my project's website got linked to from the White House blog — imagine when that's a two-way conversation for all of us!

And if you're a web programmer today, you can have a huge impact, even if you don't know the first thing about government or policy. You don't have to work for the government to work for your country. All you have to do is follow the ThinkTank project and make submissions of any code fixes or improvements that you have. Or join the mailing list and become part of the community. Or simply run the app for your own business and submit your feature requests about how it could be better suited to answering large-scale questions on various social networks. Simply by playing with new technology, participating in an open source project, and sharing what you've learned about what works in crowdsourcing ideas online, you can make a huge impact in our government's ability to listen to our ideas.

Just Getting Started

I'm incredibly excited to get started with our first official project at Expert Labs, and there are more to come in the future. Today, I hope you'll read over the Grand Challenges Request for Information from the White House and understand a bit more about what this project is about. Then you can visit the Expert Labs site (or follow @expertlabs on Twitter) and keep up to date with us as both the technology platform and the overall Grand Challenges effort progress.

• Check out Gina's own announcement of coming on board with Expert Labs.
• We also have an official announcement on the Expert Labs site.

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, I'll have gained another follower or two on Twitter. Within an hour, I'll have added more followers than 99% of Twitter users ever have. On a typical day, I'll have averaged 100 new followers every hour. It's not that I'm great at writing tweets or because of any effort or merit on my part; It's because I'm part of Twitter's list of suggested users.

The Suggested User List has been one of the most controversial and misunderstood parts of the explosive growth of everybody's favorite cerulean social service, though the company has loudly hinted that its life is limited. So I thought I'd explain a little bit about what Twitter is like when you're on the list. I'll explain the surprising impact that being added to the list has on replies and retweets. And at the bottom of this post, I'm even offering up a chance for people who are curious about being on the list to win some prizes, too.

What is the list?

Twitter's Suggested User List works in a fairly simple way. When a new user signs up for Twitter, they're presented with a list of about 20 "default" accounts to follow. These recommendations are a random subset of a full list of over 400 suggested users. In addition, the full list appears on the Twitter site itself, so if any user clicks on "Find People" at the top of their Twitter page, they're only one click away from choosing to follow some suggested users.

It's obvious why the team created these suggestions; If you just signed up for Twitter and weren't following anyone, it'd be a pretty boring service. Social applications have provided plenty of precedent for the practice of suggesting content or connections, but Twitter's exceptional success and the fact that tweets are seen more as a new medium rather than merely a feature of the Twitter service have made the suggested user list into a polarizing reminder of the company's power over the service.

What's not obvious is why I was picked as a suggestion. I have a number of friends at Twitter, including about half a dozen let's-grab-dinner-when-you're-in-town level of friends. As Biz noted, I was an early an enthusiastic fan of the service. And I'd like to think I'm not a terrible tweeter — my updates are a mix of interesting links that I find, random thoughts, brief reviews/mentions of music and media that I like, and promotion for the projects I'm working on. But I'm obviously not a better tweeter than 99 million other Twitter users, I never asked to be on the list, and it's never been explained to me why I was chosen. Ultimately it's clear that the decision of whom to feature is essentially an arbitrary choice by Twitter , and that at best, I represent something they'd want to show new users.

A list of suggested contacts makes perfect sense when a service has about 10,000 users, to help them get started in an unfamiliar space. But it's a system that starts to strain a bit once a service reaches 10,000,000 members. (Or even, as it appears, nearly 100 millon members.) Of course, the folks at Twitter had no way of knowing they'd leap from a five-digit user count to a nine-digit one faster than anybody else on the web ever has. Combine Twitter's support for user-defined lists on the service and the criticisms of the list that have surfaced, and it's easy to see why Twitter's announced that the list's days are numbered. I'd be shocked if it doesn't disappear entirely in 2010.

So, I don't have any real issue with the fact the list was made in the first place; If I were a Twitter shareholder, I'd fully expect the team to design the best possible experience for new users. (If I were a substantial Twitter shareholder, I'd buy a round bed and fly it through space like Snoop Dogg. But I digress.)

I do have some misgivings about the effect of the list, though. In addition to showing how much control Twitter has over the medium they've created, the list also causes some pretty uncomfortable and awkward distortions. It conveys remarkable privileges to the few hundred of us who are members. A lot of celebrities, some past their prime, have pointed to their enormous numbers of followers on Twitter as evidence that they still command some sort of passionate following online. Other nascent talents have had their profiles raised by becoming "Twitter stars", with their thousands or even millions of followers held up as proof of strong demand for their ideas.

A Dutch kid sold his Breaking News account to MSNBC, and Kim Kardashian is famously selling her tweets for $10,000 a pop. But I've been able to determine that having hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers is basically only a measure of having been on the suggested user list, and doesn't consistently indicate any intent from Twitter users at all. So, not to take away from Breaking News or Kim Kardashian, but there are people making a significant amount of money simply by virtue of having been on the suggested user list.

And it turns out, those suggestion-heeding followers might not actually be paying any attention at all.

The Power of Suggestion

I had no advance notice I was going to be added to the list. I went out for coffee with a friend, and returned to find a few hundred emails in my inbox, all of them notifications from Twitter that someone had followed me.

To my surprise, and to the disbelief of nearly everyone who's asked me about it since, I wasn't immediately excited or thrilled to have won the Twitter jackpot. For the first weekend, I wasn't sure what to do with all these new followers, and I didn't update my status at all for 2 or 3 days after I first got added to the list.

Now, that's pretty unusual behavior for me — I've been blogging for ten years, and I'm fairly public within the tech industry. I don't get nervous standing in front of thousands of people when speaking, and over the years my blog's gotten a pretty significant number of subscribers as well, yet I never had any similar concerns here. So what changed? Well, I tend to use social services in a more personal way than my public blog post. And, honestly, the sheer rate at which people follow a suggested user on Twitter's list is overwhelming. Let's look at the velocity with which a suggested account accrues new followers.

Here's a chart of my new followers, courtesy of TwitterCounter;:

The small flat area at the extreme left of the graph is what my growth rate looked like before I was on the list. It doesn't seem like it, but that was actually an uncommonly high rate of new followers. For contrast, I did a comparison with Chris Messina, who accrues new followers at about the same rate I had been, writes about similarly geeky topics as I do, and actually started wtih more followers than I did:

Yes, compared to being on the suggested user list, a very popular normal Twitter user's growth looks pretty much flat. That's how different it is. Nevertheless, after a few days of being on the list, I decided I was going to just tweet the same way I always had, and not overthink things too much.

Finding Meaning

People who accept the suggestions of the list are almost all new Twitter users, and have barely formed a model of how Twitter works. In some cases, due to the extraordinary amount of hype around Twitter, they've barely formed an idea of how the web itself works before signing up for Twitter and becoming one of my ostensible followers.

There's precedent for this sort of "bundled content", of course. The crappy "shovelware"; programs that come with most Windows PCs are a perfect example — they often nag users, are frequently of little value, and often detract from the experience. I often update with non-sequitirs about stuff like peanut butter jelly time, so I have to imagine that a regular Twitter user seeing my updates must see me like a notice that their new Windows computer has cleaned up the icons on their desktop.

Of course, services like Amazon and iTunes feature content as well, but these are usually pretty straightforwardly analogous to endcap displays in retail spaces like a grocery store or Walmart; The stores sell placement and brands that want exposure pay for the real estate.

After just a few days of being on the list, though, I made an interesting discovery that offers a dramatic distinction from buying featured position in an online store: Being on Twitter's suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.

Once in a while, I get confused replies from people asking who the hell I am, but for the most part they don't interact with me at all. The replies, retweets and conversations that happen for me on Twitter have the same frequency and volume that they would have had if I'd never been added to the list. I'm sure celebrities (whether on the suggested user list or not) get a disproportionately high number of people trying to catch their attention, but for a normal person, being on the list just adds followers, not real connections.

Twitter followers who come from the suggested user list don't form real relationships or respond to the suggested users like "normal" followers do. If I'd have continued gaining followers at the rate I had been before being on the list, I'd have about 10% as many followers, but I suspect I'd have exactly the same number of replies and retweets. Before being on the list, a typical link that I tweeted would get between 250 and 500 clicks; After being on the list that hasn't changed at all.

And for me, that's a little off-putting. I feel very much like I've earned the readers who subscribe to this blog. When I meet someone at an event and they tell me they've read a post of mine, or that they regularly read my blog, it's still a thrill, even after a decade, because there is some core sincerity to the exchange, a real basis to the relationship. With Twitter, it's hard for me to tell whether someone's made a decision to follow me because they find my ideas interesting or entertaining, or if they just were too lazy to change the defaults when they signed up.

I'm not complaining; I know a lot of people would love (or think they'd love) to be on the list. I've had some remarkable bits of serendipity, like my next door neighbor discovering me on the list. But I also missed the notification that my cousin was following me on the service because there's too much noise for me to turn on notifications. For the way I use the web, I value meaningful connections much more than I do sheer volume of followers.

Adding to the feeling that these aren't "real" connections is that almost nobody has gotten more than 200,000 followers or so without being on the suggested user list. I'd be curious to know the most popular account that's never been on the list, but at the very least the combination of prominently featuring follower count as a "score" on people's profile pages while also having the only path to earning a high score being an arbitrary selection through an opaque process is a recipe for leaving a lot of people frustrated or mystified. Indiscriminate followers might be of some value for a business that just wants to have a lot of people to talk to, but for an individual, being on the list only has value to those who want to brag about the number. I'll admit I've been tempted to use my follower count as a credential in my work lately as it's taken me to less tech-savvy corners of Washington, D.C., but the fact that the number is meaningless made me feel it'd be dishonest and would misrepresent my actual influence.

Because I've been privileged enough to be on the list, I've tried to use the power for good. I am very happy that I'll be able to promote my work with Expert Labs to a larger audience, though I don't think I have any way to translate this audience into followers of @expertlabs. I have also tried to promote worthy efforts by my friends or to support charities. But there's also generally a continuous stream of requests from spammers and schemers and just plain icky hustlers who want, expect or even demand that I promote their work to my large follower base. Explaining to them that these followers don't click on links, reply or retweet requests does nothing to dissuade them, unsurprisingly.

So if I had a choice in the matter and knew then what I know now, would I choose to be on the list? I'm not sure, but I think probably not. But, since I am, I wanted to try to do something interesting before either the suggested user list disappears or I ask (As Jay Rosen did) to be removed from the list.

Open to Suggestions

I want to see what interesting information we can tease out of my place on the suggested user list. There are a number of questions that immediately pop to mind, which I don't have specific answers for:

• Has the rate of replies or retweets per day (or per week) increased as much as my follower count has?
• Do I get more favorites from users, proportionate to the number of new followers?

I suspect there are lots of other bits of data that I think could be compelling, and the good news is that we might have a way to process some of that data. I've been running Gina Trapani's smart little Twitter application ThinkTank (formerly Twitalytic) since before I was added to the suggested user list. The app can pretty easily be customized to return whatever data queries we're interested in. As a result, I have an archive of all my followers, tweets and replies going back for months. So I'm proposing a simple contest to solicit ideas for what information people are interested in mining from the account of someone on the suggested user list, and I'll provide a prize to one random person who suggests an idea, as well as one random person who contributes code to help.

Here's the prizes and how to participate:

• Have a question or specific bit of data that you'd like to know about an account on the Suggested User List? Submit it to Twitter with the hashtag #sulidea and one random person who makes a suggestion will get a $25 Amazon gift certificate.
• If you're a programmer, watch ThinkTank on GitHub, commit any updates you have to the project, and one random person who commits code to the project will win a 500 GB portable hard drive. It's really cute!

I'll run the contest until January 15th, and then just pick a winner at random from people who tweet or submit code. I think there's great potential to discover some surprising insights about how the suggested user list really works.