When Social Networks Violate Trust: Yaari.com = Social Network Virus + Spam Engine

I just got taken for a ride and I am pissed.

I got an invite from an Indian friend that I respect, inviting me to join Yaari.com, what purports itself to be an Indian social networking site. He’s a very savvy guy and generally on the forefront of what’s hot and cool in Indian tech. So I thought “hey–must be something here, I should check it out.” After all, India tech is hot and I like to stay on top of what’s happening.

So I signed up. They asked if I wanted to check my GMail contact list for friends on Yaari.com. I thought: I have a lot of friends in India, most are serious web geeks, let’s see who’s here.

When I went to add my GMail password I paused for a moment. The conversation inside my head went something like this: “Give my email password to a site that I never heard of… that’s a bad idea! But then again I have checked my Gmail contacts against other sites buddy lists before and I never had a problem. Well, it was X that invited me and I trust him… so, I guess I will trust this site.”

And that usually works.

Usually.

But as it turns out, Yaari.com appears to be a site that is crafted to do nothing more than dupe unsuspecting people into giving up their friends email addresses; a social virus posing as a social network to harvest emails for spammers.

So, usually you can trust invites from your friends, but what happens if your friend was duped into trusting an untrustworthy site and you, in turn, trust what you think is his recommendation? Well…. it’s not really his recommendation and that’s not trustworthy, is it? The chain of trust was compromised somewhere along the line.

So, what happened was, that my entire Gmail contact list was spammed with invitations to join Yaari.com WITHOUT MY CONSENT. My trust had been compromised and they took advantage of that and then used my reputation to spam my friends.

And my friends signed up.

And the cycle repeated.

After this whole mess, I had a friend point out that if you Google Yaari you see that they are a scam. A bit late, I am sad to say.

I feel terrible that I fell for this. I feel worse that my trust was used to compromise other people.

Sadly, it seems to be a new enough scam that it works and works well. This is likely to be a new frontier for scammers. Expect to see more exploits like this springing up.

They could have done worse: they could have hijacked my Gmail account. That could have been a disaster. I guess I should consider myself (relatively) lucky that the worst that seems to have happened is that I suffered embarrassment and put my friends through some inconvenience. Not to say that’s a trivial matter, but I think how much I depend on my Gmail account and I shudder to think what could have happened.

But for all of you that read this the lesson to be learned is this: it’s not enough to trust the person that you get an invite from on a social network, you MUST VERIFY YOU CAN TRUST THE NETWORK IT WAS SENT OVER.

I should have seen that. My hesitation is clicking the button was the little voice inside my head telling me what I already knew. My scam sensor went off and I chose to ignore it.

There is a first time for everything…

Some Tips for Secure Social Netwoking

• Be more aware of the dynamics of trust on the Internet. You must think of trust not as a person or a name, but as a chain of events and each link in the chain must be trustworthy
• Never give out your passwords to any site–trusted or not. Yeah, we already know it–but social networks have conditioned us to behave otherwise.
• Google and email providers need to make a great effort to educate users not to give up their password for any reason and provide alternate ticket-based access to contacts that can be authorized–much like Yahoo is doing.
• Browsers should be flagging sites like Yaari.com as phishing scams. They are potentially as dangerous as banking scams; access to email passwords can divulge tremendous amounts of user data and can give scammers the ability to reset passwords–which is even better then the password itself

Google Chrome Changes the Game: The Browser as Platform

Google announced their new browser named “Chrome” today. Check out the blog post and, better yet, the Google Chrome comic book.

The platform wars just moved from the OS to the browser and Google took a commanding lead.

Rather than re-write everything, allow me the luxury of re-purposing my Tweets:

• Chrome is all open source. They have made the world their R&D department. Brilliant.
• Chrome just increased the importance of Javascript dramatically. They launched a platform where Javascript is the dominant language.
• Google just moved the development platform to the browser. The OS just took a backseat
• If MS was afraid that Google had them in the Search Engine Market, they should be shitting themselves about now about the browser market.
• Chrome will set the bar for what people will expect in a web browser.
• Google didn’t have to reinvent the OS; they just had to build the best browser that could run on any OS.
• Automated testing against google’s vast index of web pages is a stroke of brilliance for stability testing a browser.
• Chrome should solve the biggest annoyance I have with my browser: better memory management so I don’t have to restart my broswer 3X daily.
• Chrome is privacy-oriented. That’s a good thing.
• The name is very toungue-in-cheek: chome is a refernece to the UI for an application, Google wants Chrome to be the UI for the user’s web experience.
• This is the biggest architectural leap in computing in a long time.

Google has just moved to the forefront of the Browser wars and will force the competition to keep up. They have the brand recognition, industry leverage and exposure to get their browser installed in a LOT of computers.

Oh–an it’s also built on the same engine that the Android mobile browser will run on.

Mark my words: Google just changed the game on the web. Chrome is the lever they use to move the world.

Encylopedia Britannica Goes Wiki

Well, Encylopedia Britannica has gone wiki.

Not a bad move, but will they be able to be able to build a strong contributor base? One one hand there is some cachet to having your contribution approved by EB, on the other hand, it’s perceived as closed, old-school, stuffy and exclusive–which might put potential contributors off.

I do like the “open for contributions but expert moderated” model. I think it’s the best model for online travel content site and it’s the kind of model I see for travelguide.com’s future.

Is Twitter a Better Search Engine than Google?

I have had a flurry of thoughts since posted my blog “My New Distributed Brain.”

The result of that epiphany is this: that Twitter has the potential to be a better search engine than Google.

“But,” you say, “Twitter is a microblog? How can it beat Google at search?”

Are you on Twitter?

Try this out: the next time you have a question, post it to Twitter instead of doing a search on Google.

Did you get an answer? Was it The Right Answer?

This doesn’t work everytime–at least not yet. But it works often enough that I use this approach to answer a lot of questions on a daily basis.

It works well enough that I notice a lot of other people that I follow are using it to ask questions–and get answers. (Twitter founder Biz Stone, Jason Calacanis and Chris Pirillo come to mind.)

It works often enough that Google and the other search engines would be well advised to take notice.

Querying Twitter does not always work right now but Twitter is growing fast.

With it’s open and flexible APIs, people are finding more and more ways to use the Twitter platform in new and innovative manners.

Twitter is a great platform to tap the collective intelligence and channel it into enhancing–even transcending the search engine as we know it. It’s not AI, it’s all “I” (real human Intelligence).

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft–watch out!

Why Twitter?

Why Twitter?

Could another messaging / microblogging platform beat Twitter at this game?

Possibly–but Twitter has several advantages at this point:

• Large user base. Twitter has 1 million users and it’s growing 800% annually.
• It seems to have a user base that skews towards openness and community. Good, good.
• Following is open by default; following does not require consensus by both parties; one person can choose to follow another in an non-symmetrical relationship; this makes it easy for people to build a list of people they want to hear from, easy for people to build a following.
• The “Track” feature allows you to track words of interest to you: this is critical.
• SMS integration. Can send and receive tweets via SMS. Perfect for mobile search.

Would people really have time to answer all these questions? Don’t worry, as Clay Shirkey points out: We Have the Time! (Part 2)

Scenario: A Major Search Engine Acquires Twitter

Once this meme catches on, I see a very high potential for this scenario to unravel:

• One of the major search engines moves rapidly to acquire Twitter.
• The search engine uses the Twitter API to post some queries as tweets.
• People start to answer the search engine tweets; they do it for many reasons: ego, community, interest in the topic, self promotion–the reasons are many.
• The search engine uses Ajax to put twitter responses on the results page in real time, augmenting their algorithmic search results. (Thanks for pointing this out, Arthur!)
• The search engine becomes the #1 search engine AND the biggest social network on the planet, dwarfing the Google of today.

There is a whole lot more the Search Engine could do to optimize the process; this is an idea in it’s infancy. Options to increase performance include: caching results of previous similar tweets, using the tweets as another source of signals for standard search results, build and integrate a reputation system so that tweeters are ranked by their accrued trust and accurate ratings (this would help to prevent spam from cropping up in tweet results). And more. A lot more.

I have done a search (on Google) and I have not found a similar system proposed. Hmmm.

I did however, get an answer on a similar system when I tweeted about this idea. (See! See what I mean!)

@tewson pointed out that ChaCha is a search engine that can take queries from users via the web, voice and SMS and a real person compiles an SMS response, but this is no where near as powerful as querying the masses.

Sergei, Larry, if you guys are reading this, follow me on Twitter: @jfxberns. We should talk.

2008.06.18 Update:

@celerachan pointed out this blog on SheGeeks by Alana Taylor that, basically, reaches the same conclusion: She Geeks In Tech – Stop Using Search Engines, Start Twittering

My New Distributed Brain

I have become smarter recently. It is due to my new Distributed Brain.

I have recently begun to distribute my thinking across the globe with Twitter. When a question pops into my head, I first check the local cache (my memory), then I query the global memory (Tweet the thought or question on Twitter) to see if an answer or comment bounces back–and often it does. (And if that fails, there is the fall-back of Googling for an answer.)

What’s so special about Twitter for getting answers? It’s the amount of people that can have access to the data. Currently, there are over one million active tweeters–and it’s growing fast. Anybody who tweets can follow you on Twitter (unless of course, you make your tweets private–but the default is public which is nice.)

Of course not everybody does follow me, after all I have never been that popular, however, I do have a fair amount of like-minded individuals that follow me. But the big difference with Twitter is that people can track words. So if I tweet about Drupal, or Ubuntu or Thailand, anybody tracking those words can capture my tweet.

This Is Your Brain on Twitter

Here is an example:

While writing this blog, I was wondering if there were any stats on the number of twitter users. I did not know the answer, but I figured somebody using Twitter would. So I tweeted the question.

I got the Twitter usage stats I wanted for supporting facts in this article. It took a few seconds but it was EXACTLY the info I needed. My distributed brain is quite smart. Smarter than my local brain by itself.

I see this happening all the time on Twitter. People asking about restaurants in Bangalore, how to fix a code problem, where to buy size 13 shoes in Bangkok–queries that Google would choke on.

Why Is This Different?

Internet users have been using forums, search engines, chat programs and other apps for querying and sharing information for a long time. So, why is this different?

It has a potentially wider reach than regular chat/IRC programs.

If you know where to ask the question on IRC or a specialized chatroom, you can probably get the answer just as easily–but finding that place? That might not be so easy. On twitter, everybody who tracks the terms you use in your tweet can see it–a potentially larger audience.

It’s faster than a forum / mailing list.

With forums, like chat rooms, you need to know where to find the people that know the answer and then you have to wait–usually a few hours or even days–to get your answer. With Twitter, the answer often comes back in seconds.

It’s almost always more accurate than a search engine.

When you Google for an answer, an algorithm determines the response. Google does not (yet) have the technology to understand the question–but it has an algorithm that does a very good–but not perfect job–of figuring out what is relevant to your query.

If you use a human-powered search engine like Mahalo, you don’t get an answer to your question–you get a pre-built set of results based on the fact that your question is like another question their human editors have asked and compiled a result for. Again, it’s not THE answer to YOUR question–but AN answer to a question that is like your question.

Any Venture Capitalists Listening?

Here, potentially, lies the seeds for the Holy Grail of search engine technology: a real-time, human powered search engine. If you can build a user base willing to answer real-time questions (possibly leveraging an existing social network), find a way to at least reasonably filter / channel questions to the people with the answers, and a reputation system to prevent spam answer–then you could have a spectacular product.

But why would people answer other people’s questions for free?

Why do they do it now? It’s a great way to connect with other people with similar interests.

And it does not have to be free. Integrate something that leverages PPC ads and there is the potential for revenue sharing–on the order of billions of dollars of revenue per year. Oh yeah!

The new paradigm is the query becomes the social network.

I must ponder this more…. I feel a larger blog coming on.

Until then, follow me on Twitter: @jfxberns.

Facebook Sez: Party Tonight, Hangover Tomorrow!

Analyzing the data embedded in social networks is always a blast.

The Facebook Lexicon allows you to graph the relative occurrence of words posted to The Wall by date. Even more fun, you can graph more then one term at a time.

So, what happens when you graph the occurrences of “party tonight” and “hangover?”

It’s not often that a graph makes me laugh.

Kodak EasyShare? It Could Be Easier

I just had a friend email me some pictures from a trip we were on together a few weeks ago. She posted the pics to Kodak’s EasyShare gallery. Naturally, I wanted to see the pictures, so I followed the link.

I was stunned: I had to register just to view the photos.

Huh? Register to view photos?

WHY?

My friend wants me to see the photos. She did all the work: she took the photos, she posted them online, she emailed me… There is nothing in the photos that is of a private or sensitive nature, why would she be eager to make me register to see them–unless she was encouraged to as me to register.

I decided to see if that was the case.

Sure enough, it appeared to be a not-so-subltle ploy by Kodak to ask people to get their friends to register.

Kodak: don’t you think your customers are smart enough to see through the artificial barrier you are throwing in their way, barrier that is obviously to your own benefit?”

Kodak has a golden opportunity for viral marketing here and they squandered it by setting up barriers to entry—barriers that are obviously a manipulation that is in Kodak’s own self interest.

But is encouraging people to ask their friends to register really in Kodak’s best interest?

I would assert that Kodak would get FAR MORE BENEFIT from encouraging people to allow their friends immediate access to view photos and then, once they are on the site, Kodak could promote their products and services. Hell, if my friend posted 20, 30, 50 photos, how many opportunities is that to communicate messages and make offers about the products and services that Kodak offers?

Their core business is hardware, accessories and photo printing services–not photo sharing. Open up photo sharing—make it wide open and remove all barriers—go to great lengths to get people to your site—and use that to market your core products. The free users of a photo sharing site ARE EXACTLY THE TARGET MARKET FOR YOUR CORE PRODUCTS!

Why are you encouraging people to create barriers for your potential customers?

If this is the strategy that Kodak uses to market to the Generation Digital, they might as well stick to hawking rolls of film.

ADDENDUM

OK, I broke down and finally registered and took a look at he pictures–it was from a friend after all. The disappointment did not end at the required registration; the site navigation was horrible; a zillion thumbnail images made the page take forever to load and the navigation between images was slower than molasses on a cold winter day. Quite a poor user experience in all.

ADDENDUM 2

And what should I read just days after I posted this? An awesome article called Signup Forms Must Die. Read it–it’s a great article. Too bad the guys at Kodak never read it.

Pownce Needs Better Viral Tools to Succeed

In theory, I like Pownce. It’s like Twitter on steroids–and I love Twitter; so I should go gaga over Pownce. But, like most people, I haven’t gotten past the “OK, this is Pownce. I am here. Is anybody alive?” stage.

I have made three or four attempts at warming up to Pownce and every time I walk away thinking “it should be interesting, but… it’s not.” Today I made one more effort at becoming a fan–but with a more critical eye as to why it was not clicking for me.

No Critical Mass of Friends

The main flaw to enjoying Pownce is that none of my friends are using it. There is nobody to communicate with. No friends using, it, no motive to use it.

Maybe I could start using it and, get my friends to use it. Well I tried that. But the lack of a good client that is fast, easy and simple to install means that I am not checking Pownce messages when they were online. I did not reply, they stopped using it. They did not use it, I stopped checking. Catch 22.

So the problem is that there is no critical mass in my social circle. But that arises from another problem…

Not Enough Options for Pownce Clients

The main reason that there is no easy to use client–and probably won’t be for the foreseeable future.

With Twitter, I didn’t get tweeting until some friends of mine who were tweeters showed me how to use Twitter through Google Talk. I always have Google Talk open, so once their Tweets started to appear on Gtalk and I started replying… I was hooked.

There is no equivalent for Pownce. No GTalk integration as far as I know. (There could be; the Pownce pages, by the way are really weak when it comes to telling you ways to use Pownce easily—an opportunity missed to remove that barrier.)

Sure, there is the Adobe Air client but I use Linux as my desktop (and so do a large percentage of my techie friends), so an Air client would require that I download and install Air for Windows (which, Adobe in their infinite wisdom, tells me I cannot do as there is not client for my platform–no option to download the Windows client on Linux–just a “no client available error message) and figure out how to run it under Wine. It’s too much work for a social service that none of my friends are using.

Catch 22.

I could use the web page, you know, just sit at the Pownce page and hit F5 every minute. But why do that when my friends are no using Pownce?

Catch 22

To make Pownce viral, they need to have a client that either is one you are already using (GTalk) or one that is so fast, easy and simple to set up that you are willing to waste 30 seconds to do so. Nobody is going to jump through hoops to set up a client for an social tool unless there is overwhelming critical mass to lure them; there will be no overwhelming critical mass until there is a fast, easy and simple client setup.

But if there was some action to see, I might jump through a hoop and install a client. But there is not and that’s is because…

Pownce is Not Viral Enough

Twitter lets you follow people. It’s one sided and at times oddly voyeuristic, but “following” different people or services can keep involved long enough to build up a social network on Twitter.

Pownce requires you to add a friend and them to accept you. I have added some friends that have accepted me and tried to add some random people that might be interesting to communicate with–but the have not returned the favor. (Maybe the Pownce–or maybe they got bored and gave up–who knows.)

The Follow and Track features of Twitter are hugely viral. I could have become a Twitter fan without a single friend if somebody had shown me how to Track key words then follow the people that regularly tweet about what interests me. I could have started with interest and made friends.

Pownce lacks this. Or, I should say. Pownce has not shown me how I can do things like this.

Same difference.

So… Pownce continues to be relegated to something I check occasionally to see if it has gotten better social tool, rather than becoming a part of my life.

Oh well, only so many minutes in a day. If you can’t capture my interest for a few, you will so have none.

On The Role of the Brand in Social Media Marketing

I was just reading The Role of the Brand in Social Media Marketing from Search Engine Watch.

He lists seven tactics marketers can use to build their brand in Social Media:

1. Boost the Fun Factor – Find out what social sites your customers and influencers frequent, and help them accomplish something new there. This does not mean inserting your brand as a social media billboard. It may mean offering an application that entertains or informs, or starting and growing a community based around your customers’ areas of interest. Caveat: Start it, facilitate it, but don’t try to control it.

2. See the Forest and the Trees – Pay attention to the smaller, niche social network sites, where people are gathering around their areas of interest and hobbies. Brand opportunities around these newer micro-social sites will increase as they begin competing and winning attention from the large, noisy social sites.

3. Widgets are Welcome – Incorporate a widget into your next online marketing program. Widgets are portable applets that appear on blogs, Web sites, and social networking sites. These self-contained applications allow page owners to personalize their sites quickly and easily. At the same time, widgets allow you to engage your audience with compelling content while also strategically and subtly branding your company or product.

4. Conversation is King – If you develop an application for use in social networks, or if you build a custom network, enable seamless conversations using the tools that users are familiar with. Promoting text conversation among participants is one thing, but also facilitating conversations using video and audio can help boost interactivity and brand resonance. Also give them a way to connect back to you by subscribing to a custom feed and giving them direct access to someone internally.

5. Engage – Find something that appeals to customers at an experiential level. Once upon a time, you built it and they came. Nowadays, they won’t show up unless you effectively engage them. Show your customers that you thought about them at a human level and not as simply “users.” This will impact every approach you take and will force the personalization for target demographics regardless of the tools you use to reach them.

6. Research and Listen – What is appealing to the people you want to reach? The only way to learn about their preferences and what they will or won’t embrace is to monitor their activity, as well as the culture of the community you wish to reach and create. By observing, you’ll uncover not only the ideas to build or deploy relevant tools, services or campaigns, but also the methods and strategies for creating genuine excitement and participation.

7. Don’t Go It Alone – Making the wrong move in the social media space can do more damage than not participating at all. Look to technology, marketing, and strategic business partners to create an effective and appropriate presence on the social web.

And he closes with the advice:

Remember that your brand influencers are online to connect with people who care about the things they care about. They are there to make meaning, not to be broadcast to. They are there to participate and create, not to be advertised to. The more your brand can assist people in connecting with others online to create or share something new, the more favorably you will be received in these new and influential social circles.

I think that there is a critical point he missed here: the way to get people to promote your brand in the social media space is to realize that, in social media, each person s their own brand and a critical part of social media is personal brand building. Each person builds his or her own brand to attract people that are interested in the things and ideas he or she is interested in. in he social media space, the brands you associate yourself with are much like the clothes you wear on the street of the beer you order in a bar: it’s a statement about who you are.

If a brand can make a statement about who a person is, what they care about, then they will want to be associate with the brand. Geeks associate themselves with Apple and promote Apple because it’s a statement about who they are. Photographers associate with Nikon or Canon because it defines who they are.

Does your brand define a person? Does their association with your brand help a person promote their brand? Is your brand make a statement that promotes something people care passionately about?

TinyURL-like Module for Drupal – Tweeters Take Note!

Just ran across a nifty little module for Drupal called Knurl.

“Knurl is a module that provides a URL shortcut and redirection service similar to TinyURL or TightURL.”

Every time I see a short URL I think: hey, there is something that can can be sent on Twitter. Or by SMS. Seems like this would be a great module for somebody that wanted to interface to send messages via Twitter the Twitter API or SMS news.

This module will be rattling around the back of my mind until I come up with a way to use it.