Sue me now: I have used BitTorrent to sample stuff I was not in a position to buy or was not sure whether I wanted to buy. It’s been piracy, legally, but my defences, which I am sure wouldn’t see me win in court, but which might help here are:

(a) I buy more music and games than most people. Check out my iTunes, gamers gate, direct2download and metaboli accounts (you can’t because they are private, but I assure you they are burgeoning).

(b) I feel ripped off by a lot of MSM releases. I buy a music album and I only like two tracks. I buy a game and every level is the same as the first, or normally, worse. That’s not fair, and internet sharing gives me a means to test properly before I buy. I don’t want to give cases in point right here, but it’s certainly true. OK - found Neil Finn through Blip.FM (an internet radio malarkey, like a mix between Twitter and Last.fm). Then I bought two of his CDs. Fair deal? I think so.

(c) I go on to buy or follow a lot of stuff I get this way. I might download your first album or game, but then I’ll go on to buy your second or third. I might come to your gig, tell my friends how great it is, etc., etc.

(d) The content producers very often haven’t created a way for me to sample the product - e.g. downloadable tracks, a streaming radio station or a lengthy games demo. Twenty pounds is (sadly) a lot to me, and I want a way to test the worth of new purchases.

(e) In the case of digital downloads, the producer’s marginal costs are zero, especially if it’s been bit-torrented. They aren’t losing money (because of b, c, and d, above).

Anyway, the main point of this post was supposed to be about the mechanism of these things. It is a file-sharing mechanisms, but it isn’t really about sharing at all. It is about getting.

No-one (hardly) goes to a bit-torrent site with the view of sharing something. They want to get something. “I want Crysis Warhead” or “I want the new Girls Aloud album” (really?)

These mechanisms and sites aren’t publicly-funded charities, so there has to be some way that users pay for that bandwidth/opportunity.

For many sites, like Rapidshare, for example, there’s a ‘freemium’ model - which is not a BitTorrent site. So there’s advertising on public pages and an upgrade to faster bandwidth, etc. There are a lot of variations on that theme.

But I am not very interested by that and its many variants. I am interested in BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is an internet protocol rather than a site (though it does have a site). The idea is decentralised traffic - a site, like PirateBay, most famously (though quite possibly hundreds of sites), posts a “map” - or torrent file - which shows how to link to other users who have the pieces of the treasure you’re seeking. And then you download from all of those sources, sharing them with other users at the same time. Ideally, you’ll go on to share them more with other users, once you’ve got the file you’re looking for, although there’s little compulsion to do that. Some sites that publish torrents (the little files that contain the ‘map’) enforce ratios. To download more that 20MB of a new file, for example, you need to have uploaded 10MB of another file.

BitTorrent has proven tricky for the Internet Police to close down because it is about user-to-user (they call it peer-to-peer). Closing down BitTorrent isn’t about shutting down a single site, like Napster, it’s about stopping millions of users doing what they want to do. There are also lots of perfectly legal uses for BitTorrent, such as sharing music, video, anything you’ve produced copyright-free or under a Creative Commons license.

It may be the case that under the new MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) between the BPI and the six major UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs), that web traffic that looks like a torrent (that’s the word for a file being transferred using BitTorrent) will be cut off by your ISP. The ISPs don’t really want to do that, for fear of losing customers, so they’ll need to be forced into it by legislation or (more likely) fear of legislation.

Back to BitTorrent and why it’s interesting.

BitTorrent is interesting to social media folk because it enforces sharing, to some extent. If you do not allow others to download the parts of a file you have already downloaded, then you’ll not be able to download any more. It’s wholly mathematical about the way it does that: the more you share, the faster you’ll be able to download. Many people have attempted to hack that system to get what they want instead of benefitting the swarm (the users attempting to get the file), but have been unsuccessful, to date.

To put that into more ’social’ terms: the more value you add, the more value you derive.

Isn’t that the ideal state for any social network? It’s already the case, in many ways, for many of these beasts, but think about how it could have a mathematical enforcement, the way BitTorrent has created:

1. No Spam
2. You receive only what you have requested
3. Effort == Rewards
4. Value == Rewards

I don’t see that state in any social networks of which I am currently a member, possibly barring LinkedIn. They all seem to be spammable, because there isn’t any real maths behind the contribution mechanism. I am no mathematian nor programmer, but have considerable respect for what both disciplines bring to the table.

So how to create that? I can see a few things looking sensible:

1. Private messages only, initially.
2. Public messages or message to your groups in return for recognised content.
3. Kudos of some kind being rewarded for sharing.
4. You can only share other people’s stuff.
5. But doing so raises kudos.

What else have I missed, or is this lala-cuckooland? Does social media need more Maths and less talk? I’d like to know.

I am working on a contribution to a white paper being prepared by Hotwire PR via Drew Benvie - my particular chapter is ‘Who Uses (online) Social Networks, and How?’

I have a feeling that my first stab at the answer - ‘lots of people in all sorts of ways’ - won’t stretch to 1000 words, so any contributions, quotes, introductions to eminent scholars and links are very welcome. By next Tuesday. I’m also considering its economic importance to UK, plc.

I suspect that my original answer is probably right, considering there are networks for old people, babies, dogs, zombies and pretty much everyone in between. However, some uses are likely to be more common than others. For the purposes of this article, I’ll define online social networks as web sites that allow users to create personal (and often personalised) profiles on their own pages within the site and also to communicate with and befriend other members, thus articulating and visualising their social networks.

Economic importance is tricky, too. Most stories from official sources are along the lines of “£10bn a day lost productivity due to Facebook”. On the other hand, how much money has been saved on things like research time, recruitment fees, knowledge-sharing, advertising and general strengthening of loose ties which one day lead to money changing hands?

Anyway, over to you. You can reply via email, if it’s a secret.

It’s about how we all lie online in terms of the way we present ourselves, or rather, that we’ve been lying about ourselves for an awful long time - how we feel, how we feel about our partners and jobs, our height, weight and age, for example - and this hasn’t changed just because technology has speeded up. According to psychologists, we tell between six and 200 lies a day in order to socialise (’I'm fine’), for play and fun, to hide misbehaviour, feel safer, feel private, feel better about the world for ourselves and to try to be more popular. There are lots of good (and bad) reasons to dissemble.

Lying is a bad thing for society, of course, as every major religion agrees. Though, on second thoughts, our culture does allow for things like white lies, keeping secrets and preserving our privacy, all of which are seen as good things by-and-large but which normally involve deception. Our actual practice means that deception is implicit to our social existence.

New information technologies that attempt to insist on personal transparency don’t really fit with our lying culture or our biological needs. There are conflicts between our cultural practises and our cultural ideals, and while we can work round those in meatspace, dealing with machines tends to expose those conflicts. (”Date of Birth?” on the registration screens of a service is a good example.)

Twitter, according to Bell, is about making an art out of confabulation. The construction of a lifestyle we present is both a biological necessity and a work of art in its entirety. On Twitter, you are allegedly telling the world ‘what are you doing right now?’. But I did a little search on Twitter for ‘having a wank’ (sorry, mum) and the lack of any direct matches would seem to support Bell’s contention.

I haven’t seen this subject addressed before and found the presentation fascinating. I am troubled by the idea that transparency is coming to be seen as a moral necessity. It’s like the web 2.0 equivalent of Daily Mail readers saying, “you wouldn’t object to CCTV if you had nothing to hide.” As individuals, hiding, privacy, confabulation, imagination and play are pretty important to mental health, I think. This is one reason why people are very concerned about who they let into their Facebook circle of friends. Facebook insists on people using their real names and thus makes it impossible to hide different circles and different personae from each other, the way you can offline. Facebook makes it impossible to lie, and that is arguably mentally damaging.

• enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks
• these networks often reflect offline networks in that they make explicit friend-of-friend links and other ‘latent ties’
• Friends on these systems are not necessarily friends in the offline sense, but are very likely to belong to the same offline social network somehow
• implement a (variably) visible profile system, which also displays a list of Friends within that system
• Friends can normally leave visible messages for each other - some actually evolved from messaging systems e.g. QQ and Cyworld
• Many social networks attract groups of quite similar people, at least initially.

So far, so good - not much that most people would find enormously controversial - and a useful list of defining characteristics to keep to hand the next time someone asks you, ‘So what are these social network sites, then?’

Then I read JP Rangaswami’s posts Some Friday Night Ruminations about Facebook et al. and  More Musings about what makes Facebook Different. The short answer to what makes it different, from the first of those posts is that:

I don’t quite know, but it is. Stuff like MySpace and Bebo are overtly narcissistic, it’s all about how you express yourself. Facebook, on the other hand, is about relationships and conversations.

So that kind of wrecks the neat list and the generalisations, because while I agree with them all, I can’t help but observe that he’s right.

In his later post, JP remarks Facebook seemed like ‘a site where communities coalesced and sometimes even collided’ - given its overwhelming take up among the UK and US population over the last twelve months, you find and re-find friendships with family, school-friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, lovers and rivals - its omnipresence and insistence on real names makes your Facebook identity a lot like your real-life identity. JP reckons this ought to be of value to enterprises because it allows work contact to deepen through the discovery of shared likes, random insights into a fellow’s personality which make you feel more intimate. This is a topic I wrote about in the Double Intimacy Score post at the end of September.

It seems to me that Facebook’s focus is on interaction, not representation. The home page, crucially, I think, is not your profile, but the lifestream of your network. The topmost item of everyone’s profile page is the stream of their latest actions and interactions on the network. That’s the big attraction, not creating the pimpingest profile page ever. That’s why you might go back several times a day - to see what’s going on in your neighbourhood. Once you’ve set your profile up, maybe automated streams from your blogs, flickr and twitters, etc., you’re not actually that likely to return to it very often at all. Once you’ve established contact with a Friend, you’re not even likely to visit their profile page very often, except the sub-sub-sections for new notes, imported items and photos, etc. The action’s in the actions. You add applications because they provide additional ways to interact with people. The action’s in returning that Poke, playing your turn at Scrabble, biting that chump. It’s the wall-to-wall page you look at, not the wall.

YASNS = Yet Another Social Network System

With Friends Like These: Why are people happy to disclose huge amounts of personal information online? Ben Hammersley asks whether our notion of privacy has changed.

The ‘listen again’ broadcast of Ben Hammersley’s programme is available here. (NB: the link might not work for long).

News Blog - Daily Brief: Official: Facebook Poised to "Take Over The World" - Portfolio.com

Among other things, it will allow businesses to set up their own Facebook pages and then reach out to real, live users — that is, potential customers — based on the interests they have described in their profiles.

If those interests include not seeing advertising, that is too bad. "There is no opting out of advertising," Zuckerberg said.

No opting out of advertising for Zuckerberg, perhaps. A $15bn dollar valuation has to have some sort of business model and since the open platform dropped the bottom out of the user gifts market, advertising is all they have left. I, on the other hand, most certainly do have alternatives (instructions on how to block Facebook Beacon ads).

On with the doom and gloom, though, and one presentation that I really enjoyed came from Marco van Veen, a manager at the Innovation & Collaboration Center at Heineken on why they said ‘no’ to Second Life.

Heineken obviously does a lot of advertising and sponsorship and isn’t remotely afraid to try out new forms such as product placement in films like Casino Royale. They could very easily imagine a Heineken bar or vending machines in SL, as could all of us - heck, why not a Heineken lake? - and obviously developers and marketing agencies kept coming to them with metaverse ideas. Initially, they had a lot of enthusiasm for the possibilities.

As they started to think through the business value of the project, though, several adverse factors dawned on them…

• They wouldn’t be the first beer brand to enter the world. The press and publicity that was showered on companies like Toyota, IBM and Starwoods when they debuted in SL wouldn’t be likely to be repeated for the third or fourth beer brand to enter.
• They found research from Market Truths (March 07 - costs $100 or L$12,500) which said that if brands fail to position themselves correctly in SL, they can expect a backlash from residents. This led the company to conduct its own research among residents. It turned out that almost half thought that the Heineken brand would not be a good fit within Second Life. Only 19% said they thought it would. Don’t ask me why that was the case - as I understand it, there was something of a backlash against all commercial brands in the world earlier this year and it may just be part of that.
• It didn’t sit very easily with the company’s CSR policy. Heineken wants to be seen as promoting the socially responsible use of alcohol. Clearly, if they made Heineken bottles and kegs available in SL, it would be reasonably likely that residents would play-act drinking to excess. What else is there to do with a keg of virtual beer? (or errm… real beer).
• Hand-in-hand with this came worries about the age of SL residents. It’s company policy at Heineken not to sponsor events where the proportion of adults is lower than 70%. Linden Labs’ own figures suggest that this is comfortably so, but the company had an alternative report created by ComScore that suggested that only 68% of SL residents are 21 or over. This made them fear that Linden’s figures were unreliable. Again, this wouldn’t sit well with their responsible drinking policy.
• Joined with this was some anxiety about litigation. It seemed a reasonable supposition that there are ambulance-chasing US lawyers sitting in SL and waiting for a beer brand to give some of their product to a minor. Such a suit could well seem newsworthy to a technophobe press keen to sniff out any suggestion of child abuse online.

Yes, I am an SL naysayer, but that’s not the only reason I found this a refreshing presentation. There’s such wide-eyed bollocks talked about virtual worlds that Heineken seem like geniuses for sensibly and thoroughly assessing the opportunity and turning it down on this occasion. As van Veen said, however, this is a very new medium, and the company has far from closed the door on a virtual existence.

Update: I’ve written two posts so far on VWF at our NMK site. One on the basics you ought to know and one on business models and possibilities. Also, this post is being discussed by listeners to the FIR podcast here.

One particular aspect that’s interesting to me [there is a work aspect to that in terms of how NMK may be participating, but that participation comes out of my own perception of what's interesting in New Media right now] is the debate on Saturday afternoon on privacy in this new world of Web 2.0 and the strange psychology that has developed around that.

On the one hand, we’re telling perfect strangers what we had for lunch and where we are on Twitter, give our name and address and phone numbers to Facebook, divulge our deepest personal secrets on blogs (but not this blog, dear reader, rest-assured), publish photos and videos of our social life. Transparency is held as an ideal. Self-surveillance, continual publishing and, above all, authenticity, are held as golden standards.

On the other hand, people are often appalled at the thought of Tesco’s (the biggest UK supermarket chain) analysing our shopping habits, Facebook personalising advertising for us, Google recording our searches and our ISPs and credit card companies selling our browsing and buying patterns to third parties. Within larger organisations, corporate IT departments are appalled by the risks we’re taking, but we hold our hands to our ears and say ‘lalala - open that firewall, you nazis’.

So are we being two-faced? Do we want our cake and to eat it too? It’s OK to hold up transparency as an ideal for businesses and corporations and to operate according to that ideal ourselves, but when those organisations take some very obvious steps in data-mining the information that’s available, then it’s suddenly a different story?

The plan, at the moment, is to unveil some new research on attitudes to privacy and to unpick the nature of these inconsistencies at the conference.

Without the benefit of any evidence whatsoever, though, here’s a couple of hopefully inflammatory thoughts:

• Transparency online is held as a gold standard of behaviour because it’s viewed as a return to past, lost, possibly illusory norms where people dealt with each other face-to-face and where a firm handshake was all you needed to create genuine trust and a reliable relationship. Our virtual existence craves some solidity where it is lacking.
• That the transparency lobby is thus a mechanism of nostalgia. They’re Golden Ageists. That’s fine, but it’s a narrative about commercial practices that potentially shifts the visibility of what is happening to the data you’re sharing. I’m putting on my post-modernist hat, and suggesting that narratives are the way we understand the world. But one of the counter-narratives might be equally valid, one about big business set to exploit consumers at every opportunity.
• Holding those two (and more) possible narratives in our heads at the same time is far from impossible. We live in a world of warring narratives, each of which interpolate us at some times.
• That the Cluetrain has already been railroaded by those bastards in big business who can see how to manipulate this state of affairs.

I personally like the idea and practice of being transparent online about my behaviour, the things I like and don’t like, and how I’m feeling. It’s liberating to not operate under a corporate persona, or maintain a series of separate online identities. If that allows advertisers to target me better (I like really expensive, funky, creative adverts for cheap stuff, btw) then that probably won’t do me much harm. Does it harm ‘people in general’ to be transparent? That’s a harder question and automatically makes me sound either incredibly patronising or self-deluded if I say ‘yes’.

But ‘yes’, I think it does. The companies that have the most money and thus the most advanced data-mining techniques might ultimately be the most successful. They’ll target us better, harder, faster, more creatively and more often. Because we’ve opened up. That’s bad news. Commercial success would be a meritocracy in an ideal world, I think: the best companies would be most successful. Transparency is often cited as a way of making that happen - the best companies will expose their internal workings and personality, and thus win support - but it is also a way of making it fail - the consumer population becomes infinitely ‘bucketable’, targetable, individually identifiable by the corporations with the best, most-expensive technology and resources.

Kalin is like a Web 2.0 version of Holden Caulfield - he starts his talk:

…dropped out of high school at 15. ran away to live in boston with my uncle, who was like the purple sheep of the family. eventually found my way to new york. had about 15 jobs. i was a carpenter for a while. that stuff is brutal. started to want to get an education but couldn’t pay. so i attended classes at about 8 different colleges using stolen IDs. doing it this way meant i really took ownership of my education…

And so on. He hasn’t got any slides: he’s typing addresses into his web browser to bring up pictures he’s posted to his blog. He’s chewing gum while he speaks, which is amplified by his microphone. Some of his demos aren’t working.

It’s pretty weird, but also absolutely mesmerising. Etsy is an arts and crafts marketplace, but it’s also, as it turns out, a challenge to the state of commerce on the web.

Regular commerce has become less and less about people and the inherent value of objects. This is reflected by the history of money. Money used to be made out of gold - coins had an inherent value. Then came banknotes, which were symbols of value rather than possessing a real value themselves. Now it’s about credit cards - money has become 1s and 0s flying across the Internet. At the same time, corporations own all the means of production and distribution. Commerce has become utterly dehumanised and psychotic.

Etsy began with the idea of a marketplace. But a return to what a marketplace used to mean before the twentieth century. Marketplaces used to be communities, places where people exchanged stories and news as well as money and goods. Because etsy is just for handcrafted, bespoke items, it brings the humanity back into trade. Every item is its own story and has a human face attached to it. This means that etsy attracts and retains audiences. People talk about what they’re buying and selling, because the items are interesting and unique of themselves. Buyers develop relationships with sellers and maybe ask for a personalised version of items they’re interested in. The software is supposedly finding ways to increase the face-to-face contact between members, to add a bit of a virtual world element, but it isn’t working today.

But the broader premise of the site is working. Etsy has 100,000 sellers listing 10,000 items a day.

Really interesting stuff - the more virtual many aspects of our lives are becoming, the greater the value being put on personal and personalised relationships, services and items, like we’re unconsciously reaching for balance.