Tag Archives: social networks

Blog

Citizen Sensor: crowdsourcing public works reports

Tired of your local government authority ignoring all those little patch-up jobs that would make your town or city a nicer place to live? Maybe you should try crowdsourcing a form of polite, transparent, insistent (and very public) pressure, and applying it to the affected area? That’s what SeeClickFix are helping people to do in an assortment of cities in the US, and it seems to be working [via SlashDot]:

The first city was New Haven, Conn., and the mayor and the chief administrative officer were both very receptive. So receptive that the mayor wrote a letter to about 100 other mayors around the country. The majority of responses since have been really positive. You get a few where they’ll say, “Oh, but we already have a website where people can report issues.” And, of course, our response is, “Yes, you do. But that website does not display issues publicly when you post them.”

We have a ton of features that exceed standard city websites, and that helps move the ball forward in terms of acceptance of public, transparent, collective reporting. But in the beginning, really the only one-up we had on a city website was that we were a map-based transparent web reporting tool, and they were usually just a closed web form that was no better than leaving a phone call. You still had the same black box syndrome.

[…]

I don’t think I’ve ever had a public works official say to me, “We don’t want this because it’s going to make the information public.” No one wants to be on record saying that. So what we do is, we don’t really give them a choice.

The information is going to be public whether city governments receive alerts or not. And then we sign them up to receive alerts, if they don’t sign themselves up. Many, many city governments have signed themselves up. But many others have been signed up by us or by a media partner or by one of their constituents.

They appear to have thought fairly thoroughly about potential gaming/obstructional behaviour from the authorities, but I wonder if they’ve spent the same amount of time thinking about ways malicious reports could exploit the system? There’s gotta be an angle there, though I can’t think of one immediately.

Of course, the next logical step – once you’ve submitted countless reports left endlessly open due to budget and resource constraints – is that you get together with your local neighbourhood and use a similar set of social tools to set up a public fund of cash and/or person-hours in order to start fixing the problems yourselves…

Blog

Even people who play Farmville want to avoid playing Farmville

1 Comment

The road to FarmvilleI’m probably going to upset a few people by saying so, but I loathe Farmville. If you do too, this darkly funny but simultaneously serious analysis of the Farmville phenomenon in socioeconomic terms will probably make your week [via Chairman Bruce; image by taberandrew]:

One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely because they invest physical effort and in-game profit into each harvest. This seems plausible enough: people work over time to develop something, and take pride in the fruits of their labor. Farmville allows users to spend their in-game profits on decorations, animals, buildings, and even bigger plots of land. So users are rewarded for their work. Of course, people can sidestep the harvesting process entirely by spending real money to purchase in-game items. This is the major source of revenue for Zynga, the company that produces Farmville. Zynga is currently on pace to make over three hundred million dollars in revenue this year, largely off of in-game micro-transactions.[10] Clearly, even people who play Farmville want to avoid playing Farmville.

[…]

Even Zynga’s designers seem well aware that their game is repetitive and shallow.  As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less.  Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks.  In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville.  For such a popular game, this seems suspicious. Meanwhile, Zynga is constantly adding new items and giveaways to Farmville, often at the suggestion of their users.  Hardly a week goes by that a new color of cat isn’t available for purchase.  What fun.

Beyond the snark, though, there’s a serious point being made:

The most important thing to recognize here is that, whether we like it or not, seventy-three million people are playing Farmville: a boring, repetitive, and potentially dangerous activity that barely qualifies as a game.  Seventy-three million people are obligated to a company that holds no reciprocal ethical obligation toward those people.

It’s always been easy to manipulate people using existing networks and patterns of social obligation, but now the social web has made that into a fast-moving billion-dollar business model. Add five years, stir vigorously; your technothriller plot is ready to serve.

Blog

Facebook profiles are not two-faced

According to recent research, Facebook profiles actually reflect their owner’s personality more accurately than a brief face-to-face encounter might manage to do:

Back’s team administered personality inventories that evaluated 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social-networking site. Inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.

The subjects — who ranged in age from 17 to 22 — took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves.

Then, undergraduate research assistants — nine in the United States and 10 in Germany — rated volunteers’ personalities after looking at their online profiles. Those ratings matched volunteers’ actual personality descriptions better than their idealized ones, especially for extraversion and openness.

Not everyone is entirely convinced, however:

Adriana Manago, a psychology graduate student at UCLA, calls the new findings “compelling” but incomplete. College students on Facebook and other online social networks often augment what they regard as their best personal qualities, Manago holds. In her view, these characteristics aren’t plumbed by broad personality measures like the ones measured in Back’s study. And students’ actual personality descriptions may have included enhancements of their real characteristics, thus inflating the correlation between observers’ ratings and students’ real personalities, Manago notes.

“Online profiles showcase an enhanced reflection of who the user really is,” Manago proposes. In a 2008 study, she and her colleagues found that 23 college students sometimes used another online social networking site, MySpace, to enhance their images, say by Photoshopping acne out of a picture or posting a video of themselves driving a sports car at high speeds.

Somehow this revelation is both cheering and depressing at the same time… I wonder how those results would differ for older age brackets?

Blog

How publishers can exploit “virtual currencies”

Given that publishing economics are pretty topical at the moment, this video embedded in this post from GalleyCat last Thursday seems either alarmingly prescient or laughably silly, depending on your viewpoint.

Here’s the thesis in a nutshell: those mind-numbingly infuriating and spammy Farmville games your friends play on Facebook are surprisingly good at generating income for their creators, so publishers should take a leaf from the same book to spice up their own online offerings. The theory does come from the president of a company called Orca which specialises in developing virtual currencies for corporations, so a certain bias in favour of the idea is to be expected…

Here’s an excerpt (which I’ve excerpted in turn from GalleyCat’s post – yay, lazyweb!):

“They convert [virtual currencies] at prices that are not easily divided–one dollar gives you 33 credits [for example] … People don’t necessarily think, ‘it cost me 42-cents to send my friend a virtual beer.’ I think when the publishing industry starts thinking about how they chunk up content–whether it be articles or chapters–it shouldn’t be a debate of whether an article is worth one dollar or three dollars. An article should cost 43 credits.”

My immediate instinct is that this idea stinks, though that’s probably due to my kneejerk loathing of Farmville, Mafia Wars et al; maybe there’ll be a way to graft virtual currencies onto the publishing ecosystem without introducing the intrusive “social” aspects (read as “spamming”) and underhand pricing structures that seem to inform such games, which I suspect wouldn’t gel well with the book-buying demographic. But then again, if you get rid of those aspects of the system, you’ll probably never make a dime with it… so it’s back to the drawing board, I guess.

Blasphemous Geometries

Redefining friendship: Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age Origins

8 Comments

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

###

“The Antiques Roadshow” – For an entire generation of people who grew up [in the UK – Ed.] in the 1980s, those three little words herald a wave of unease and bitterness.  Like a Renaissance magus, they conjure forth memories of Sunday evenings dominated by the looming return of school and the perversity of one’s parents’ taste in television.  You see, younglings… prior to the internet, cable TV and the explosion of cheap consumer electronics, most young British people were trapped not only in a four channel world, but in a world where only one TV channel was ever really accessible to them : the one that their parents wanted to watch.  Continue reading Redefining friendship: Facebook, MMORPGs and Dragon Age Origins →