Statistics

November 27th, 2009

It seems to have been a busy week for all things Wikipedia. The Wall Street Journal recently contained an article describing how the number of users had fallen by about 49,000 in the previous three months. The article was based on the research and doctoral thesis of Dr. Felipe Ortega and constructed over a period of three years. It’s as meaty a document as you would expect for a thesis, with the conclusions it describes taking some time to fully digest.

Erik Moeller and Erik Zachte, the Deputy Director and Data Analyst recently rebuffed the report’s findings in a blogpost, stating that they measure a contributor as someone who has made five edits instead of just a single one, and that those numbers are holding somewhat steady. It also contains a small number of other statistics, but doesn’t comprehensively respond to the issue of contributor decline:

  • The comScore Media Metrix indicates that the site has received 6% more visits from September to October. This is a very small snapshot in time. There may be seasonal trends or other factors that have influenced this growth. A quarterly year-on-year growth figure would be more appropriate here, along with comparisons against the growth in internet availability worldwide. Regardless, the number of visitors does not translate directly to the number of readers that you have – for that, more in-depth metrics are required involving pageviews per visit, length of visit and so on.
  • Churn figures for the number of contributors are not available. While the number of active contributors has been holding steady at about 40,000 there’s no information about how many leave and join over a quarterly period. Service providers actively track churn rates as an indicator of user dissatisfaction and indication that the user experience needs to be improved.
  • The discrepancy between Dr. Ortega’s results and WMF’s own figures indicates a large volume of failed conversions from a reader to a full contributor. Analysis and understanding of what causes these failed conversions should be something that the WMF investigates and reports on, together with plans on how to improve the conversion rate. Again, the conversion rate is something that should be tracked in the same way as churn rate.

The blogpost from the Wikimedia Foundation has also included a small amount of information about their strategy plans for future growth. I’ve already commented on these in other blogposts, but I’ll summarise them here:

  • The usability initiative is unlikely to deliver sweeping benefits as it is focused purely on the Mediawiki interface. As a large proportion of the user experience is made up of the way information is presented, and that presentation is controlled by the active contributors instead of the Foundation. It’s already been declared out of scope by the usability initiative, and as such the entire end-to-end experience will not improve.
  • The strategic planning initiative is heavily siloed, and as such is unlikely to result in a cohesive end-to-end strategy without monumental effort. It’s also inefficiently organised and doesn’t work well at helping innovative new ideas to float to the top.
  • The outreach programme is heavily biased in pursuing cultural and historical repositories such as galleries and museums. There are few if any controlled studies into reaching out to the public at large, understanding their perceptions and concerns and working to bridge the gap between repositories and the public. Usability testing, public focus group work, user experience feedback and so on should all be part of what the Foundation is trying to achieve.

I can understand that what the Foundation is doing is important, but it is concerning that there remain glaring gaps in both the metrics presented and the future plans offered. If they are serious about changing how they operate, the user experience should be an integral part of that. After all, every single piece of content they currently hold can be copied under Creative Commons. The Mediawiki software is available free under the GNU General Public License. The only unique aspects of Wikipedia are the name, the contributors and the experience. If someone else can deliver something better in one or two of those areas, the Wikimedia Foundation may be in big trouble.

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Experience

November 26th, 2009

This article is a continuation of my series on Wikipedia, it’s design and ongoing strategy. This one focuses on the reader – the person who reads the occasional article or searches for something particular. Contributors, administrators, technologies and other options will follow later.

tesco_feedbackI was at my local Tesco doing some shopping for the weekend while I was thinking about this topic. While I was bagging up my groceries the checkout assistant ran my card, handed me my receipt and also gave me a small card. I’ve included a photo of it here as it’s one of those things that almost seems unreal – here you have a multinational corporation going out of it’s way to seek comments from customers. The reverse of the card lists five different ways you can provide your feedback, from sending a text message from your mobile phone to filling out a comments card in store.

You can bet that Tesco are going to act on the information they receive. The Clubcard phenomenon that started back in 1995 was designed in part to provide customers with offers that were meaningful to them as individuals, but also to allow a supermarket chain to start building analytics on their customer base. It’s very comparable to the kind of information that websites have been gathering on their visitors, being able to see how small changes make a difference in areas such as site navigation, advertising response rates and so on. It almost feels like crowdsourcing, with a specific goal set and a wide range of possible contributors targeted. Almost, even, like Wikipedia. Hold on to that thought of feedback though – I’ll be coming back to it later.

The appearance of Wikipedia is something that almost anyone who has used the Internet is familiar with. The same boxy layout with puzzle-globe logo in the corner has been around for a number of years. As far as providing the core information that a reader would need, you would think that a well laid-out article, some references and images would be all the casual reader needs. Unfortunately it’s become clear that someone just passing through and spending five minutes to glance at an article would benefit from a shedload more information in an easy-to-digest format. Before we talk about what’s missing, let’s remind ourselves what a Wikipedia article looks like.

wikipedia-example
Firstly, let’s guess how good this article is. It’s engaging, well sourced, clear and deep in coverage. But is it something that site contributors agree is something of high quality, or is it an article that looks good but in fact is riddled with problems? The only clue in this case is the star that I’ve circled in red in the top right corner. In this case we’re looking at a Featured article, one of only roughly 2700 articles out of a library of over 3 million – that means the chance of randomly stumbling on a featured article is nearly one in a thousand – even then you have to notice the small bronze star and understand what it means. If an article doesn’t have this mark, the reader is left to what they can infer from the content in order to draw their own conclusions about quality.

wikipedia-gradingInterestingly though, each article on Wikipedia is graded on a quality scale. This information can quickly help a reader work out how much caution they should treat an article with, how much work has been put into it and if there are any glaring issues. Unfortunately, information on article quality is tucked away on the discussion page where the casual reader is unlikely to find it. There are addons available that extract this information and present it on the article page, but they’re optional and require you to have a registered account there in order to use them. If Wikipedia is to restore confidence in what it is offering, it really needs to consider making article quality much clearer.

Italian_cuisine_orangeWork is also underway by outside organisations such as the University of California to analyse the history of articles and track changes. Powerful tools allow readers to instantly identify suspect information. They might not be able to do much about it, but at least they can be aware that the information needs further verification before repeating it elsewhere. The WikiTrust extension is currently developed as a plugin to MediaWiki and could possibly be computationally expensive – it may be something that the developers would want to draw in as core capability, again to improve the level of information presented to the reader.

amazon-helpfulNow, remember that thought about feedback? Well, it’s probably no news at all that collecting feedback from users is something that has been happening on the web for years. Amazon started collecting reviews for books, but it was only when they started asking readers if they found the reviews helpful that they started to take off. By displaying the most helpful reviews, Amazon managed to improve the quality of information presented to the reader through a completely automated system. In the same way, Wikipedia could use this technique to gain metrics on their articles, not just to see if someone reads them but to see if people like them. Maybe even pop up a simple request for more information if someone doesn’t like an article, and display all feedback prominently and centrally. The problem with Wikipedia’s current model is that it encourages feedback on article discussion pages. For an article in the doldrums that’s rarely examined, discussion page feedback can go largely ignored. By collecting it all centrally, the volunteer editors can gain instant feedback on what articles are liked and disliked, and prioritise their work accordingly. It really needs to start collecting reader information as much as possible as soon as possible, building a database of information and then acting on what the reports reveal. If the site is still visited by hundreds of thousands of visitors every month, collecting more information than a simple page impression is vital.

There’s a whole other piece to the puzzle though, and that’s usability. Making web pages and sites usable by a wide audience is seen as so important that the US Government has an extensive resource on the subject. In it, two things are mentioned that are seen as critical to the success: full end-to-end testing, and using groups of people unfamiliar with the product being tested. This means that to undertake meaningful usability analysis, groups of people that are completely new to Wikipedia should be let loose on the entire project and test a series of use cases by following a script. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s own usability project falls short of these requirements:

The Wikipedia Usability Initiative is realized by a grant from the U.S.-based Stanton Foundation. The goal of this initiative is to measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral studies, thereby reducing barriers to public participation. With an initial focus on English Wikipedia, eventually this research and development will be implemented across all languages and possibly to other Wikimedia projects.

Why is this, you might ask? The truth is, much of the user experience isn’t controlled by the Wikimedia Foundation who maintain Wikipedia, but is crowdsourced by the community of contributors that work on the site regularly and any changes have to be agreed by consensus. This means that an outside view is rarely if ever heard, and an internal feedback loop develops where decisions are taken in the interest of the community. These might not be in the interest of readers, especially if the readers don’t make their opinions heard. Wikipedia desperately needs a proper usability initiative, with wide-ranging ability to test all aspects of the project and not just the core interface or underlying software.

There are of course many other areas that Wikipedia can improve it’s reader experience. Detecting first-time visitors and providing them with an introduction is one, while introducing a reccomender system to analyse what an individual reader is reading and suggest other articles they might like to look at is another. Making more use of metadata embedded in article infoboxes in order to provide more powerful searching, such as “tenor opera singers born before 1945″ or “mountain peaks above x meters above sea level in Europe”. Being able to identify how many articles a citation is used in. All these things are additional features though – items that go above the baseline user experience and offer additional capability. It’s why I haven’t gone into them in detail here – in my opinion there’s a need to take care of the core features first, with the value-added stuff being able to follow on later.

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Feedback

November 19th, 2009

For about a month now, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Strategy Wiki has been trundling along in a desperate attempt to try and work out how to evolve over the next five years. Trouble is, it’s become apparent that the whole process has rapidly devolved into minute detail where every tiny detail is being closely examined to try and identify a way forward. It’s really a mirror of how the concept of using a wiki has become wedded to almost everything the Foundation does, with additional requirements being plugged into the Mediawiki framework no matter how clumsily they fit. It’s not a recipe for finding good ideas, it’s a recipe for reams of documentation and ideas with no clear way to identify the wheat from the chaff.

So how should it be done? Research into crowdsourcing techniques indicates that it works best when you have a large number of people, preferably removed from the immediate problem, who then submit ideas on how to solve it. Others can then comment on those ideas and provide feedback, while even the most meagre of participants can give an idea a simple thumbs up/down to help rank and sort ideas. A great example of this is WebStorm, which is ideal for collecting a large number of ideas on a general topic and allowing them to be weighted by participants. Another possibility is InnoCentive, which also specialises in capturing ideas and helping organisations work out solutions to their problems. The important thing is that there are common web themes and platforms out there that really demonstrate with a little research how to do this kind of work, yet falling back on a Wiki seems somewhat clumsy.

What the Wikimedia Foundation desperately needs are cohesive strategies that tackle the bigger issues they face in a unified way, not in a fragmented and piecemeal approach. It needs to engage with it’s readership more meaningfully and not just relying on page impressions or Alexa rankings as an indication of how they are performing. The foundation’s biggest asset is that it faces very little competition, while it’s biggest weakness remains what would happen if someone else produced something that was easier to use and easier to participate in. This is critical – all Wikipedia content is licensed as freely available under a Creative Commons agreement, making it quite trivial for someone to assemble a better framework purely in order to pull in editors and lure others away from Wikimedia projects. The feedback gained from the silent readership could be something as trivial as “Was this article helpful to you? Yes/No” – you know, the kind of thing Amazon has been doing for years for weighting reviews and which Facebook use successfully for calculating advert popularity. It could be something as complex as promoting the use of talk pages, or organising the global Wikimedia Chapters to go out and engage the public. Hold focus groups, ask members of the public to participate, that kind of thing. Without this external view to help shape and mold an organisation’s perception of itself, it just becomes an internal feedback loop that reinforces already held beliefs.

So what should the Wikimedia Foundation be doing? Over the next few posts, I’ll be looking at one aspect of the service and describing how things could be improved. None of it will be rocket science and none of it will be demanding the impossible, but all of it should be focusing on making the experience better for the readers and editors alike. If you think something’s worthwhile, feel free to shout out in the comments.

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Follow

November 19th, 2009

To follow or not to follow? It started off as a simple enough question asked by Glen Le Santo yesterday over twitter. Is there a form of twitter etiquette that suggests that you should follow back everyone that follows you? Needless to say, the responses were many and varied but most seemed to be selective about who they follow back. It seems that for most of us we tend to read up on who our followers are, scanning through their previous tweets and deciding if it’s someone we’re interested in following. Some of us prefer to defer the decision by a couple of weeks then check back, or unfollow if the person doesn’t seem to be engaging with their followers. Straightforward enough, and all seems sensible so far.

The question then evolved to one of business – should businesses just soak up followers, never follow up and just tweet broadcast, or should they use it as a tool to engage their followers and respond to queries as well? This one’s a trickier question to answer, and really needs to be broken down into chunks in order to understand how businesses are using Twitter already and how they can develop this in the future.

The passive monitor

It’s no secret that firms already monitor the internet for discussions involving them and their products. References cropped up during the twitter discussion, while anyone who runs a blog or similar will have seen the various media monitoring firms scan their articles whenever a particular business name crops up. It’s natural for this to extend into publicly viewable social networks such as twitter, where keyword searches are easy to perform and can provide instant results on what people are saying or linking to when discussing the firms they interact with. For some businesses, this is as far as their involvement with social networks goes.

The broadcaster

In previous years, it was the email newsletter, the RSS feed or the “news” webpage that kept customers informed about new products or services that a business was launching. Nowadays, Twitter feeds and Facebook fan pages are beginning to replace RSS as the medium of choice when informing customers about recently added product lines. News publishers are starting to use Twitter to announce new articles, with even blog authors getting in on the act of announcing when a new post has gone up. It’s a simple idea, but it only uses one half of a social network’s potential. Users become familiar with the concept of two-way communication, and can quickly get turned off if it becomes too businesslike or mundane.

The engager

Possibly the hardest trick to master is becoming more engaging with customers using social networks. Customers prefer businesses that follow them back, and perceive that those who don’t are usually unengaging broadcasters. Customers prefer to have relationships with the businesses they use, and some of them are now starting to use Twitter as a natural extension to this. Having said that, people understand that not all firms should be on Twitter and that it largely depends on what typeof business they’re in and what they’d use the service for.

The main concern when a business looks at using Twitter is cost – will it require substantial investment to engage with customers over Twitter? There’s no reason to suggest it would – customers already have access to their suppliers via phone, email or even face-to-face in a high street store. Corporations may be fearful of a deluge of complaints heading their way through social networks, without realising that their great power is being able to gain instant feedback and respond to everyone at once instead of having to send out individual replies.

One thing that all forms should be aware of is how customers want to engage with them and being able to cater for that. It doesn’t mean having to set up shop on every single social network, but making sure that the business has a suitable presence on ones that customers are using already is a sensible move. It’s what separates your local family butcher from a local electrical retailer – you would expect the latter to be more responsive to social networks than the former. It’s also sensible to understand what your customers prefer to use each medium for – do they prefer to phone up to discuss billing issues, do they prefer the high street store when looking to make a purchase? How does it interlink with other ways in which you support customers online – do you provide self-service or self-help online, or even live chat support? With each of these things, the likelihood of customers contacting a business via Twitter about these issues is reduced.

The future

Indications are that Twitter and social networks in general should be examined by all firms seeking to put together a communications strategy that involves some online aspects. Their strategic choices on how they build and use online presences will affect how customers perceive them, and should be considered carefully. One thing is clear though – more study and research is required in this area in order for businesses to become more comfortable with how hey handle this medium.

Communications constantly change. Call centres, email responses and online help tools are all examples of how business has needed to evolve in order to keep in contact with customers. All the indications are that this will continue to happen, with instant messaging, Google Wave and VOIP all becoming potential additions in how customers may want to interact. Social networks form a part of this evolutionary change, and it is important for business to keep them on the radar when forming plans. The challenge will be making sure these plans are developed and constantly refreshed as the communication landscape changes.

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Soon

September 23rd, 2009

It’s a strange word, wherein the context of it’s use imparts as much information as the word itself. For example, “I’ll e-mail you the latest product specs soon” has an entirely different meaning to “You’ll soon be able to try out this new product for yourselves”. One implies a response later that day, while another could mean later the week or even later in the year. It takes on a variable quality of it’s own, as if it denotes a reference in time that refuses to be tied down and instead leaps carefree, giving program managers and marketeers alike a headache. And yet for some, the mention of Soon starts the Long Wait, that period of time when product fans around the world gather themselves together like some massively extended family awaiting the arrival of a newborn.

The Soon I’m referring to in this case is about the imminent release of Google Wave into public beta, following several months of developer-only sandbox access. If you’re interested in more detail about it and one and a half hours spare, you might want to watch the initial developer conference presentation here. In brief, it’s a new communication method that Google hopes will eventually replace email as the protocol of choice. Instead of an email essentially being a file that’s sent from one person to another, a wave is a conversation stored on a central server that you invite people to edit. You can embed media into a wave like photos, video and applets in the same way that you can embed them in an email, but again a single copy is held centrally. Changes are tracked much like a wiki, and several people can edit or add to a wave at the same time. Updates can even be displayed character by character in real-time.

All this sounds pretty reasonable when you’re sitting at your PC at home or at work. We have solid, reliable Internet connections that we tend to rely on. They’re perfect for apps that completely exist on the Internet, where you go to a website with your browser and know that by and large, what you’re doing will work. It’s why there’s been this huge resurgence of thin client computing, where whole teams have a very basic PC with a browser installed, accessing every system and application through the browser. All the storage is done on a collection of servers, with modern networks and infrastructure taking the load. Google have even designed Wave so that different businesses and organisations can have their own installation, with Wave servers across the world talking to each other when information needs to be shared between them. To achieve this, all the protocols and the majority of the software will be open sourced.

Look ma, no wires!

Web apps are fine when you have a solid, stable Internet connection.But what happens when you want to access your Waves while away from the office or travelling on vacation? The MaxTatton Blog poses this type of question by pondering why Google haven’t sought to integrate Wave into their Android mobile operating system and making it a unique selling point of the device.The difficulty is, it’s not as simple as simply providing a mobile-tailored version of the Wave website. There are people who like to access their email offline, like the Blackberry user who clicks out replies to messages on the Tube or the road warrior who checks his email archive for key items. These are people who understand that the Internet is not always there for them, and who need communications mechanisms that understand and support this.

While it’s likely that there are engineers working away in the background on this, it becomes a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Do you rush out and support a protocol that has little early adoption in the hope to foster growth further, or do you hold back on development until you have more certainty that the investment is worthwhile? Where would the tipping point be if development was held back, and what would it look like? Should it be Google’s place to develop a mobile interface, or should it be left to other developers? Do you start building Wave to Email or Wave to IM bridges first, or do you look to run access to each technology in parallel? All these questions start brimming to the surface as soon as you look at integrating it with your existing organisation, and there’s no easy answer to any of them. That said, Google shot itself in the foot when it announced that it wouldn’t directly support Internet Explorer.

Catering for the client

Any kind of mobile wave client would need to evolve some kind of push and sync capability in order to work for most heavy email users. Products like BlackBerry, GoodMail and so on cater for instances where a handset wanders out of coverage, catching up when it reappears and re-establishes a connection. They involve a datastore of communications that’s held on the device and allows the user to browse messages whenever it’s convenient. Apple do a similar thing with the Visual Voicemail service on iPhone – messages are downloaded as audio files and saved on the handset to play back whenever they’re needed. Looking at the Wave architecture though, all of this sync-federate-journal work is performed by the central server, in concert with other Wave servers hosted by other organisations. As a result, any Wave for Mobile capability is going to involve running what looks like a mini Wave server in it’s own right, playing sync and catch-up when it can.

Syncing email in itself is a relatively straightforward task – you push out an alert to the handset that tells it there are emails to pick up, the handset connects and downloads the waiting messages. Comparing that to a journaled XML document where the user may only have visibility of small chunks, and things start to get slightly more complicated. Start allowing editing to happen in real-time, with updates being broadcast character by character, and the complexity grows even further. Part of the job of any mobile Wave service is to cut down the data sync to only what’s needed to maintain cohesive communication. This is partly to ensure that the average handset owner doesn’t get bombarded with update alerts continually, but also to make sure that the data connection doesn’t get saturated with updates that don’t really add value to the message. Saturating the connection may be more of a struggle with a 3G or WiFi connection, but many current email devices only use 2G for communication in order to extend battery life. In addition, WiFi hotspots are limited and 3G coverage focuses on urban areas, forcing 2G as the network capability to design for.

It’s clear to see that the mobile client is already becoming a complex beat in it’s own right, just in order to be able to update and sync itself with the central Wave server. Throw in the additional controls that most enterprise IT managers require, such as password management, remote lock & wipe and so on, and it becomes a substantial project. Even then, the developer will need to work out if his client can interface directly with the Wave server, or if some form of middleware or bridge will be needed in order to provide a suitable level of service.

If not soon, then when?

It’s clear that Google needs to get an overall solution together for Wave that involves not just the server and desktop, but the Mobile user as well. This solution needs to be able to cater for situations where data connectivity is a scarce and intermittent resource but can still deliver a good user experience. That’s a big challenge, particularly for an engineering team that’s currently working at full tilt on either developing the mobile OS further or refining the Wave server infrastructure. As Lars Rasmussen mentioned during the Developer presentation, Google are looking to the developer community to fill in the gaps and as far as gaps go, this one’s huge. Once the server code becomes open sourced, there may be an increase in development from other third parties.

One thing is clear though, if Google wants to make this technology a success, it’s going to need to do more than give away Android phones to get other big players interested.

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Regression

September 17th, 2009

For anyone watching the print and online media organisations, it’s clear that change is in the air. Printed newspapers, struggling to compete against a tide of web based news agencies that deliver their content for free and update regularly, are having to change their business models in order to survive. Many have shut down completely, while others have cut back on the number of journalists or reduced the number of editions. Many cities in the United States have woken up to no longer having a local newspaper covering local issues. As advertising revenues fell during the economic slowdown, the writing was on the wall.

But of course, you know this already. It’s all well documented, well understood well publicised. We get that media in general is having a hard time of late. We appreciate it, feel sorry for them, but move on.

News Corporation

News Corporation: expanding the use of paywalls

There is one interesting nugget to the tale though. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is looking at monetising it’s news organisations. This means that much like you’d pay for a newspaper, you’d pay to access content on their website. While this itself is nothing new – the model is already used on the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, the spread to other more mainstream publications is interesting. By their very nature though, mainstream content has more news agencies devoted to it. Given the choice, I suspect most readers would prefer their generic news to be free rather than having to fork out for it. This leaves media in a rather precarious position – what is it that they produce that readers feel is worth paying for?

For me it’s tied in to the magazines I read, the websites I browse and the podcasts I watch or listen to. I rarely if ever by a newspaper these days – almost all the latest information can be reached on my iPhone as I’m heading in to work, and I can even tailor it to my interests. For me the real value of a journalist isn’t being first with the news, it’s about having a unique opinion or a novel insight on things. It’s about being able to share your opinions and insights with an anonymous reader in an engaging and clear manner, all the while being able to reason your thoughts with facts and examples. For me it’s also the one thing that doesn’t decay with time. A journalist’s thoughts at that moment, captured on a page, are worth preserving.

Wikipedia: relies on volunteer contributions

Which brings me neatly round to the second half of this topic, the crowdsourcing project known as Wikipedia. Over the years, the world’s biggest online encyclopedia has needed to develop content policies in order to avoid promoting hoaxes and hosting inaccurate and in some cases libellous material. The key policy in this case is regarding the verifiability of information:

The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. Editors should provide a reliable source for quotations and for any material that is challenged or likely to be challenged, or the material may be removed.

This means that almost every Wikipedia article has references at the bottom of it so that readers can verify what the article states. Being an online encyclopedia, many of these references are online sources that have previously been vetted for accuracy and reliability. They almost act as referrals, taking readers from the encyclopedia article to the reference material used to make it. It’s at this point where the idea of news agencies using paywalls to charge and gate access to their content, breaks the process of creating and updating articles.

Wikipedia relies on volunteers in order to produce and maintain articles, and while they’ll happily donate their free time, it’s fair to say that producing good quality new content is a lengthy process and hard work. Once you start asking these volunteers to fork out for subscriptions to publications in order to research a story, several things may start to occur. The most obvious one is that the charging organisations get fewer citations in encyclopedia articles, leading to fewer referrals and fewer page impressions. A more subtle effect though is subjective bias creeping in to articles, particularly if those media organisations that elect to charge have a similar political leaning. There’s also the reduction in volunteer workforce if only some of them are able to afford to maintain online media subscriptions and yet have the free time to work substantially on article content – it adds a tilt on a formerly level playing field. Finally, there’s this whole verifiability aspect – how can a casual reader verify a fact if the source material is hidden behind a digital subscription?

At the end of the day, I feel emotionally that erecting a wall around content is somewhat of an anathema to me. It breaks the foundation of being able to freely construct webs of linked pages that take a reader on a journey from one website to another. It hearkens back to a darker age of the Internet when walled gardens, content portals and gateways were the modus operandi instead of the open access service we have today. More than that though, it means that there are creative, insightful people out there whose opinions I will never read. Not because I’ll never stumble upon their work, but because their work will be squirreled behind a paywall beyond my sight.

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Complexity

August 13th, 2009

There’s been a fair amount of discussion recently on some research being undertaken by the Augmented Social Cognition team at the Palo Alto Research Centre. They have a simple mission: “understanding how groups remember, think and reason”. With this in mind, they recently started data-mining Wikipedia’s vast archive of user interactions in order to spot trends and understand what it says about Wikipedia. The statistics that have been heavily cited were that the growth rate of Wikipedia had slowed dramatically, both in the total number of edits and the total number of active editors. A follow up study indicated that the only group to have increased output was those with 1000 or more edits, while users with very low edit counts were up to 25 times more likely to have their changes removed or “reverted” than more seasoned users.

Even more interesting are the responses from Ed H Chi on the results he provided to New Scientist and The Guardian. Chi describes that there is “evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content” and that “Over time the quality may degrade”. He adds “To power users it feels like Wikipedia operates in the way it always has – but for the newcomers or the occasional users, they feel like the resistance in the community has definitely changed”. Startling stuff indeed.

Even more curious is how the growth model has changed over time. Chi starts off with stating that Wikipedia followed the hockey-stick growth that other popular sites such as Twitter and Facebook also experienced. However, over the last few years, the data no longer fit the model. In fact, follwoing their initial survey, he likened it to a population growth curve, where there’s a resource constraint that the population encounters. “As you run out of food, people start competing for that food, and that results in a slowdown in population growth and means that the stronger, more well-adapted part of the population starts to have more power.”

So, what is the limiting resource that has dramatically changed the editing demographic? Well, for a year I heavily edited Wikipedia, starting there in Feb 2008 and becoming an admin in August last year. About a year later in March 2009 I stopped editing and retired. It wasn’t that Wikipedia no longer held an interest for me – far from it. It was just that I felt I no longer had anything to offer the site as it was apart from performing the routine administrative tasks of blocking vandals and removing content. In that time though, I learned a huge variety of policies, content guidelines and regulations about what could and could not be placed on Wikipedia. It’s this area that I think is the finite resource that Ed Chi talks about.

Let’s be honest, Wikipedia contains mistakes. Some of those mistakes are trivial, but some have caused real harm to companies, institutions or living people. As a result, policies sprang up about how content should be sourced and referenced, so that it can be verified to be true. Anything that doesn’t conform to these policies gets removed sooner or later, including additions that might be accurate but that remain unsourced. More than this though, Wikipedia editors will argue passionately and at length on a huge range of topics from date formatting to fringe science topics, and as such a range of peripheral-content policies such as a manual of style together with further processes for removing content have sprung up. There are even processes specifically designed for dispute resolution, as well as the management and eventual block of users who don’t adhere to the many rules now in existence. This is the limiting factor, the finite resource that Chi refers to in his research.

The inability of the average new population member (Wikipedia editor) to be able to quickly and easily understand all of these rules before they start editing is a real handicap to the further growth of the project. It’s what the growth curve has changed – as further complexity has been added to the project, the ability for a new user to be able to participate effectively is reduced. It’s why sites like Facebook and Twitter still enjoy phenomenal growth – they rely heavily on making the experience as easy and straightforward as possible for their users, and anything that adds complexity to the experience is removed. Conversely, Wikipedia requires users to become familiar with it’s complexity before they even start contributing

So, how does Wikipedia return to the meteoric growth it once enjoyed? As with so many other services, simplification is the key here. While some veteran users are comfortable with how the rules set has evolved, it has reached the stage where the barrier to new participants is too high to be able to recruit at a sustaining rate. Without being able to convert more new users into longtime editors through a simplification of the rules set, growth is likely to tail off and eventually decay. Whether this can be achieved by Wikipedia, or by someone else bringing in a new model and user experience remains to be seen.

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Integration

August 12th, 2009

It’s been a few days since the news broke that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed in what was described as “an 11th hour deal“. Since then, the tech media have been trying to come to terms with what this means for the social networking industry and where it’s likely to lead. What’s captivating is that many of these articles see this as a fight for users between Google and Facebook over the concept of real-time search – being able to feed a user with search results as that content is created. It’s something that Twitter does very well – so much so that news outlets have started tweeting links to new stories as soon as they are published. But dig deeper, and it’s possible to see how this deal isn’t just about real-time search, but much more besides.

Putting the imagery of battling industry heavyweights to one side for a moment , it’s worth focusing on the intricacies of the deal itself. It’s interesting that TechCrunch reports that the deal is more about talent rather than product acquisition. With this, we’re more likely to see FriendFeed slowly wound down as a separate service as Facebook incorporates more of the former’s capability. This means that all of the aggregation and real-time feed management that currently resides in FriendFeed will eventually find it’s way into Facebook in one form or another. Users already use Facebook to comment on links, articles and posts made by their friends, so FriendFeed doesn’t really add anything new here.

It’s Reveloution that comes close to explaining why the deal is important, but relegates them to the bottom of a five-point list. Ask anyone that manages a portal, website or other content respository and they’ll tell you that one of the most important concepts they work on is how visitors can discover content, either through an external search or by traversing the site once they’ve entered it. Journalists and marketers want their content to be discovered by as many people as possible, while advertisers and site designers want to maximise the relevance and opportunity for advertising alongside it. Make it easy for a user to discover more content that’s meaningful to them and the theory is that they’ll return to read more content housed there at a later date. They also recognise that conversations happen around content, but that unlike older mechanisms such as blogposts and forums the conversations are shifting to areas such as Twitter or Facebook that can potentially be much harder to mine for feedback. Again, these conversations are happening in real-time (linking back to the importance of real-time search).

All this is good stuff, but it doesn’t exactly show where the industry is heading. And although a few key components are highlighted, it doesn’t exactly round off the idea. To get to that, it’s probably worth looking back on an older technology – portals. Back when Yahoo and Google were fighting it out, the concept of personalised search portals emerged. The idea was that you’d set one as your homepage so that every time you launched your browser, you’d have content that was relevant to you. Their two products – iGoogle and My Yahoo! – are still out there and being used, but have failed to make an impact on the world’s browsing habits. They’re underpowered and underpersonalised, relying on a more generic approach. And it’s in this area where the Facebook-FriendFeed tech can really shine. Imagine that your homepage is filled with content from across all areas in which you have an interest, all tagged and sorted for your convenience. Things that your friends have found might have conversations attached, encouraging you to delve deeper. You might find something and want to alert others to it yourself – the key thing is that be it a blog post, status update, news article or anything else, you get the opportunity to discover it, share it and discuss it in one place. And by incorporating all this in one site like Facebook, it provides even more opportunity to provide advertising around it.

So that’s the deal, but what about the tech? The key thing about a portal is providing interconnects for people to drop in their own content, and there are signs that Facebook is already moving in this direction. By providing support for a multitude of apps from image feeds to multiplayer games, Facebook is moving away from being a service that people consume and towards a platform that developers create their own services to run on. This is most evidenced in games like Mafia Wars, a micropayments based MMO game that is available via Facebook amongst other methods. It’s not a world apart to imagine some of our favourite content providers developing small facebook apps or even just facebook-friendly feeds to sit on our portal view in a similar way. The trouble is, running a portal requires awareness of the symbiotic nature of the many services we use, and it’s not exactly clear that Facebook understands this.

While it’s clear that some analysts see this as an opportunity for Facebook to take on Twitter at it’s own game (or that it’ll even prompt Google to push for a buyout of Twitter), I’m not so sure that it’ll happen or even that it’s needed. Nowadays, web content can be commonly exposed through APIs. Both Twitter and Google have a set of APIs that allow developers to wrap services around them, from user authentication to automated status updates. It’s one of the reasons why there are tens of iPhone Twitter apps each offering a different experience, while there still remains just one for Facebook. But by leveraging the power of these APIs, it becomes far more possible to generate a tailored experience. And should Twitter fall out of favour and be replaced by something else, all a portal would have to do is access those new interconnects or APIs presented by whatever replaces it.

It’s thoughts like this that make the recent announcement of Facebook Lite all the more confusing. Although it’s purportedly intended for users in India, China and Russia where broadband isn’t commonly available, it also has a very similar look and feel to the web view of Twitter. While producing a lite version of Facebook is commendable, I just can’t help but feel they should be focusing on what makes Facebook a unique experience, instead of trying to ape another service that already works well. Facebook doesn’t need to compete with Twitter, it just needs to think smartly about how it can integrate Twitter’s open services into it’s emergent platform.

If Facebook’s serious about becoming the home of all our networks and not just our social ones, it needs to open up a little first. The web connoisseur of today is a fickle beast that doesn’t much care for limitations or walled gardens, yet values being able to integrate or mash-up services for a personalised experience. Facebook currently have the momentum, but there’s always some startup working out of a garage somewhere that may just beat them to it.

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Obvious

May 20th, 2009

This time, I’m starting an article with a noise. I’d like to have been able to say that the noise was a sonorous fanfare or roaring drum roll. As a result, it’s somewhat disappointing when I inform you that I’ve chosen to start this article with a “pfutt”. And not the pfutt of triumph, like a miniature steam engine being tested or a helicopter rotor starting up. No, the pfutt I want to you to think of in your head is the one made by electronic equipment, just before it gives out completely and makes it’s way to the great Radio Shack in the sky. It’s a rather depressing and British sort of failure, much like something breathing its last and quietly giving out, instead of a cacophony of flash, bang and acrid smoke that lingers around your flat for days afterwards. Anyhow, one mustn’t be too downbeat.

So as you can probably guess, Something Broke. The current culprit of choice is the power supply unit on my fiance’s computer, an unbadged and unbranded steel box that I should have replaced as soon as the collection of parts arrived about three years ago. But hindsight is wonderful in this instance, and now begins the laborious process of identifying the broken parts, ordering replacements and fitting them. It’ll be enough to keep me out of trouble, but it’s somewhat irritating all the same. Still, at least I won’t have to suffer the pain of many in my shoes by dialling some premium rate phone number to explain to someone who barely speaks my language why they should send an engineer out and what they need to replace. Be thankful for small mercies, I’m told. The fiance is currently happily using the gaming laptop we recently purchased, so at least there’s no immediate rush.

Spring cleaning has also been afoot – my own desktop has been scrubbed clean, with both XP and Vista installed and existing side by side. I’ve debated carving up a portion for Linux as well, but as my dev work is currently hosted online I’ve got no need for an Ubuntu installation. It was while doing all this work that I stumbled upon something that struck me as completely obvious, but which I’m amazed hasn’t happened. Every time I want to refresh my computer I have to back up all my user data, reformat the hard drive, reinstall the operating system and my applications, then finally reload all my user data. If I want to move from one operating system to another I usually have to install a new set of applications and hope my user data can still be read by these applications. And even so, if the drive fails all my user data is lost.

But hang on a minute, I carry around with me a device with an 8GB storage drive. Why can’t I treat the operating system as a commodity, where the PC, OS and any associated drivers are all stored in one location while my own applications, data files and so on are all retained independently of the OS on some kind of removable storage that I can carry around with me. If I want to use a different PC, why can’t I plug in a drive and just use all of my existing applications, licensed to me as an individual rather than a transient machine that may be replaced sooner or later? Why does my user data, application data and operating system need to be so closely intertwined?

This removable storage – let’s call it a Docker – I could plug it into my desktop and get my games, apps, music, documents and so on. I could unplug it and move it into my laptop and get exactly the same stuff available. If I was visiting friends, I could just take my Docker with me and plug it into their machine if I wanted to show them a game I had been playing. But more than that, because my Docker isn’t tied to an OS, I could plug it into a Linux box or a Macbook or any machine, and as long as it was compatible with my Docker it would run all the apps on it and allow me to use all my files. It makes the OS a commodity – I could pick and choose based on what I wanted rather than what ran the applications I wanted, because every OS would run the same apps.

With me so far?

So, what would the Docker look like? Would it be a solid-state-drive with a small interface, or something with a screen and Bluetooth if you wanted to exchange files on the move? Would it be something like an iPhone, giving you access to your files wherever you are? There initially sounds like a number of options on what this small device could look like and what it could offer people. After all, once you have a large storage device (I hear you can buy 512GB ones now) the possibilities are endless.

But does it have to exist at all, or could it all be “in the cloud”? Could we just hold our Docker as a virtual container on the internet, with users able to access their data anywhere they choose to go? Or would the Docker be something physical but with a synchronisation service from someone like Google, ensuring that everything on it is continually backed up. Lose your docker and you could have it locked and wiped next time it speaks to the cloud, while your replacement rebuilds your file structure from everything you have backed up.

Will it happen?

Unlikely. The OS makers like the application lock-in they get so far, as it creates a barrier to migration. If it does start to happen though, it’ll probably be in hybrid devices that double as phones, MP3 players and so on in order to keep costs down and provide users with an incentive to try. Still, if it does happen, I’d be surprised if I was the first person to come up with the idea.
Sometimes, overcoming the status quo is the biggest obstacle an idea faces.

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Cloud

March 24th, 2009

It’s not every day that a new product stands up and makes you do a double take, and having it announced this week makes it even more surprising. The Game Developers Conference is usually a quiet affair, with maybe a casual announcement or two about a console price drop or a new title in production. Today’s announcement has literally screwed up conventional wisdom and thrown it in the trashcan, in more ways than one.

onliveThe service is called OnLive, and it’s the product of seven years of development by incubator Rearden Studios and it’s founder Steve Pearlman. In fact, if you read Steve’s resumé you’ll find firms like Atari and Apple listed on there. Simply put, OnLive uses a cloud computing platform in order to provide a gaming experience to end users, regardless of the platform being used. The processing, interfacing and rendering is all managed on a backend server farm with the result streamed to a simple device that decodes the stream to display on the TV. For the PC and Mac, you don’t even need the device as all the work can be done on something as low-spec as a Macbook Air or even a netbook. All the grunt and horsepower you’d normally have in the latest console or high end gaming PC can now reside in a warehouse miles away from you, and you’d never need to worry about upgrading again. Sounds great, right?

To get into a bit more detail, the broadband connection suggested by the service is about 1.5mbps for standard 480p TV, while hi-def 720p will need a meatier 5mbps connection. This is great news for those of us huddled round the local exchanges, but for those out in the sticks the service might not run too well. It works by using a new video compression algorithm that inserts about a 1ms delay into shunting the video to it’s destination, but when you compare that to the 100ms delay that can be experienced when playing multiplayer games in Europe it quickly becomes tiny in comparison. There are five server clusters planned for when the service launches in the Summer once beta  trials are complete, hopefully meaning that network latency is kept to a minimum. The box itself uses a micro-USB socket for power, with a paur of full-size USB sockets there for additional controllers or a mouse/keyboard combo, and has HDMI to squirt the signal up to your HD-ready TV. There’s also an optical SPDIF for hooking it up to audio gear as needed. Bluetooth is also in there for those of us who hate wires trailing everywhere. For those who want to play on PC or Mac, you’re looking at a 1MB web browser plugin before you can start shopping for games. Once you’ve picked and purchased a title, it’s on your screen in single digit seconds.

The OnLive Console: Boxing clever?

The OnLive Console: Boxing clever?

There’s a little bit of community stuff in there as well. As well as being able to spectate on other users playing their games, you’ll be able to build up a friends list for multiplayer action and also capture your own game sessions as brag videos, should you want to show off your skills. Since the video is captured in the cloud, it’s online and shareable instantly in all it’s high-quality glory. Big-name publishers like EA Games, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft and Atari are among those who are signed up to offer games on the system, although there won’t be any platform exclusives as there are with traditional consoles. 16 games were shown including the new Prince of Persia, Mirror’s Edge, Burnout: Paradise and Crysis. Even independent developer 2D Boy has ported the incredibly popular World of Goo to the platform. Transferring a PC game to the OnLive service apparently takes a couple of days, with an SDK available to make it easy.

So what’s the snag? As with any new service the price has to be right in order to make it appealing to the gamers. While the price of the box is said to be very cheap (we’re looking at the £50 to £100 mark) it’s the ongoing costs that are the great unknown with this one. It’s not clear if you’re going to be paying a subscription in the same way as Xbox Live, or if you’ll be renting or buying games. Trialling games will be available to give gamers an idea of what a title is like before picking it up, something that XBox Live supports but only if you download a demo copy to the console. Although the service might be cheap and easy to pick up and install, it could work out to be more expensive over time. There’s also the mindset of more traditional gamers that owning your own consoles and media is important. There are a lot of Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive consoles kicking around that get pulled out of the attic and dusted off every so often, and some gamers are rightly concerned that they’ll still be able to enjoy the games they buy today in five to ten years time. There’s also the variable effects of the network – with broadband providers having concerns over the use of peer-to-peer, BBC iPlayer (and Hulu in the States) and anything else that required a constant level of bandwidth there may be difficulty in getting broadband providers to agree to treat the service fairly.

That said, there’s definitely potential to the service. It might be that the service has legs initially, but I’d probably suggest that it would work incredibly well with Valve’s Steam service. There are also a handful of other ways I can think of that could make service uptake even better, but I’ll wait to see what other announcements come out of the GDC. I am curious though as to whether other applications of this cloud service have been thought of by Rearden Studios, and I’m sure other experts will pick up on them shortly. It’s an interesting development, and time will definitely tell if it proves to be a success. Till then, roll on summer!

Update: IGN have a video demo of the service here. Gametrailers have video interviews with Steve Pearlman here(part 1) and here (part 2)

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