Krishwords

The sudden and unexpected demise of Marc Orchant has left a great void in the blogosphere but it has also raised a very important question in our minds. Yesterday, I twittered about it. Today, Dave Winer has raised a much more general question about the total web presence of a deceased person. Robert Scoble has responded to Dave with a post in which he suggests that huge corporations like Microsoft, Google or Amazon should come up with a hosting solution so that we can save our web presence for 100 years after our death. I don’t see a business solution for this. These archives hosted in the servers of big corporations dies along with the companies. Even for a well established company like Microsoft or Google or Amazon, 100 years is like an eon. The chances of survival for these companies are less compared to even our own chances of living for 100 years. Under such a scenario, any reliance on such large companies will only offer a little more shelf life for our web presence than what we can offer ourselves during our lifetime. We need to look in a totally different direction. We need to have a non profit solution like Internet Archive. These non-profit entities, supported by altruism, have a better chances of surviving than a company in a competitive playing field where profit making is the only motive (and the only option for survival). We should either talk to Internet Archive folks and ask them to come out with a solution for this or develop a solution along the lines of Internet Archive itself. It is good that Dave Winer has kickstarted this discussion in the blogosphere. It is time we all think about it. If this discussion leads to something fruitful, it will be the great tribute to Marc Orchant.

Today I woke up reading a troubling news about an University of Washington student was held in Italy on the suspicion of her involvement in the murder of her apartment mate. Later, Monica Guzman of Seattle PI kickstarted a discussion on facebook about how the media is using the information from the suspect’s social networking profile, to portray her as an irresponsible college student. Monica raised a very important question about whether media’s use of such information is a correct approach. I responded to Monica through facebook but I thought I will add my thoughts here in this blog (as this is related to the topics of interest in this blog).

With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, etc., the notions about stuff like privacy, relationship, etc. have changed. In this facebook era, people share even the tiny little details about their life. People don’t give an awkward look at those people who share all sorts of information about them. It is considered to be a normal thing in this facebook world. The old world notions about privacy is totally dismantled and we are in a world where even very personal information like the birth of a baby is shared in an almost live format. When people are becoming more and more open about their personal life, they will end up sharing photos and videos of their drunken dementia too. First, there were reports about how companies are snooping into your online information to make recruiting decisions. Then, we came across reports like how parents are digging into their child’s online footprints to know more about their actions. Even in a conservative country like India where parents are highly involved in their kid’s arranged marriage, there were reports about how they use Google to dig out information about prospective bride or groom. Today, we are seeing how media is scraping out from the online social networking profiles to conduct a media trial in front of the public.

Not only the idea of privacy, even the idea of friendship has changed in this era of social networks. You can be friends with people you have never met and you may never even meet in the rest of your life. Calling such online acquaintances as friends is considered a norm in today’s world. When we agree to change the notion of privacy and friendship in this facebook world, it is just not fair to use the old world ideas of morality on the information available in the new facebook era. It is unfair. It is time for the old world ideas of morality to evolve, to match the new world notions of privacy and friendship. In my opinion, I am even against companies digging into information like naked photograph from the beach, while making recruiting decisions. Under such a scenario, using the facebook posts and youtube videos to conduct a media trial is ridiculous. If Amanda Knox was involved in the murder, she should be punished for her act. But scraping up her drunken video and using it to conduct a public trial through media is shameful. This act should be severely condemned and discouraged. What do you think about this call for a change in our ideas about morality?

Update: Here is Monica’s take on the issue.

There is a talk about getting rid of Whois for privacy reasons. I don’t understand the need to get rid of whois when there are other ways to protect the privacy. One of the registrars, with whom I have many of my domains registered, offers me free privacy protection. Instead of getting rid of Whois, they can force the registrar to offer optional privacy protection. The following are the reasons why I would personally want Whois to stay

• When a company contacts me or my company for a transaction, I do a whois check to see how long their domain has been registered. It helps me evaluate the risk factors. I suppose others will do the same thing about our company too.
• When I am in a lazy mode and want to change the nameservers of a domain or check its renewal date, I check the whois to get the relevant information (about the registrar where the domain is registered so that I can use the correct domain admin panel or the renewal date).
• As a person donning the avatar of security consultant, I find whois to be one of the useful services in my security toolbox.
• Many times, especially in cases where the other party was not using privacy protection, whois has helped me reach them to buy a domain of interest. It will not be handy in cases where privacy protection is enabled. However, since the owner of the domain gets to control the information that is showing up in whois search, it is not a serious privacy issue if offered with the option of free privacy protection. It will help those domain owners reach out to potential buyers for the domains they own.

The information that goes into whois is controlled by the owner of the domain and a privacy protection option gives the owner to anonymize the information offered through whois. Under such a scenario, getting rid of whois is meaningless. I want whois to stay.

According to Businessofcinema.com

Eros International has collaborated with Internet television service Joost (www.joost.com) to provide more than 200 Bollywood movies and over 600 music videos from Eros’ catalogue including films like 1942 A Love Story and Salaam-e–Ishq.

This move is fascinating because Joost consumes quite a lot of bandwidth and bandwidth is expensive in India. Who are they targeting? Non Resident Indians? I don’t think Joost will pick up in a big way in India till they sort out the broadband mess. NRI community using Joost is a small audience for this deal to be significant. Unlike many people in India, I wouldn’t put Bollywood on par with Hollywood in getting worldwide audience. Under such a scenario, this deal doesn’t make any sense to me. If you have an alternative opinion on this, feel free to add it in the comments.

Fred says

What’s coming is the programmable web, the semantic web, and the social web. We are already seeing signs of all three movements. But when they come together, we’ll have something fundamentally different than we have today and that’s progress.

If you are a firm believer in the disruptive nature of second life like me, here is an interesting video about how San Jose State University is doing distance education through second life. Also check out Deepak’s blog for information on how scientists use second life.

PS: Deepak blogs along with me at TechBizMedia.

Robert Scoble kicked off a discussion today with his prediction that Mahalo, Techmeme and Facebook will beat Google. In the videos, he seems to be pretty convinced that Mahalo can beat Google. I disagree with Robert’s take on this. I had a few back to back tweets with Robert on the topic. In one of the tweets he asked whether several Mahalos can get together to beat Google. In this post, I am going to disagree with the thesis that “Mahalo can beat Google”. I am using Mahalo here but it applies to any human powered search engine with Mahalo’s approach to search.

Before I offer my views on the topic, I want to make the following clear.

• I completely agree with Robert that SEMs (Search Engine Marketers) are a pain and we need better search results.
• If, by any chance, Robert had meant that Google should be beaten in the search game, I am in full agreement with it too. We need to stop Google’s possible search monopoly and there should be heavy competition to force Google to continue innovating.

Having said that, I want to categorically state that Mahalo, in its current form, can’t beat Google. The reasons are many. Some of them include

• Human powered search cannot scale like machine based search
• Human powered search has built in bias in the system
• Human powered search will definitely lack in freshness
• Human powered search doesn’t mean much in non text search world like Image Search, Video Search, Book Search, etc.
• Human powered search is a ridiculous thing when it comes to desktop search.

There are many other reasons where Mahalo and other similar search engines will fail. However, these are the few reasons that just popped out immediately after watching Scoble’s video. Let us dig a little deeper on these reasons.

Human powered search engine in the Mahalo mould cannot scale like an algorithm based search like Google. Even if we assume that Mahalo grows like how Robert expects in the next four years, with 100K “volunteers”, it still cannot cover all topics in the world, it still cannot cover all languages in the world, it still cannot cover all the specifics in a particular topic, it cannot cover all the variations of a particular query, etc.. It might cover a search query “HDTV” much better than Google. But I searched Mahalo with queries “Dent on HDTV” and “Scratch on HDTV”, an hour back. It returned back saying there are no matching results. Even though it offers better results for HDTV, it fails miserably when you get into specifics on HDTV. Imagine the variations in queries on HDTV from all over the world, “HDTV with a spot”, “HDTV with a broken edge”, “HDTV and Bestbuy problem”, “HDTV with loose switch”, “HDTV’s remote not working”, “I just peed on HDTV”, etc. There is no way Mahalo can scale to take care of such specifics on even a single topic, along with everything else. Comparatively, HDTV is an easy problem to solve. There are much more difficult problems in this world which Mahalo cannot solve or may not bother to solve. Let us say I make a web page about a topic HDTV that contains a sentence like “not gone triple ribbon belt mother cook with mould acumen”. If someone searches for HDTV, my page may show up after the first 50 pages of Google results and not at all on Mahalo. But if someone searches for the sentence I mentioned above with double quotes, it will show up in the Google results and there is almost zero chance that it will show up in Mahalo (unless if my content is a killer content except for that particular sentence I quoted above). Now imagine endless new queries. Ask.com CEO claimed that 60% of their searches are unique. Even Google seems to have claimed that 20-25% of their total queries were not made before. Mahalo cannot even attempt to solve the search engine needs of all the internet users in this world, even if it scales like what Scoble hopes. It is like trying to build a 200 storey building without involving any machines and just with one brick at a time. It is just not humanly possible. Scaling problems will ensure that any attempts to create a completely human powered search engine is a failure.

To highlight my arguments, I am adding the picture of the result I got in Mahalo when I queried “mod_security rules for SQL injection attack”. You can see how badly it failed for this query. The scaling of Mahalo in the next 4 years, which Robert describes, may answer this particular query well. But, there are billions of other queries which may throw up similar results even after four years.

Human powered search like Mahalo has inbuilt bias which is difficult to manage. Jason feels that this bias can be managed with stuff like transparency, ethics codes, hiring people well, firing bad people quickly, early warning systems, etc. He claims that they take a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) on stuff like abortion, 9/11 and George Bush. I agree with him that with stuff like transparency, ethics code, etc., you can take a NPOV on few things like the queries he has quoted. Bring in diversity of queries and the different points of view attached with it. Now bring scale these number of queries. There is no way you can maintain NPOV consistently on all the topics and various queries associated with these topics. Jason even suggested the idea of Mahalo Ombudsman and included Jeff Jarvis as one possible candidate, which he rejected immediately. Even if he makes it ombudsmen instead of ombudsman, the scaling problem will ensure that the bias will stay in the system. Add to this the issues like embargo. For example, the embargo on Iran might prevent Jason to hire guides from Iran and this may result in inferior Mahalo results as far as topics related to Iran are concerned. But, an algorithmic engine like Google can just crawl the websites in Iran and have better results on the topics related to Iran.

Human powered search engine like Mahalo cannot keep the content fresh. Google crawls the web more frequently to keep its contents fresh. Now, I think, we can even inform Google about how often it should update our websites and this helps Google to update its results with fresh contents. There is no way Mahalo can keep the content fresh on all topics and related to all queries. The scalability problem described above, will make sure that the Mahalo content is stale except for a smaller percentage of terms.

I think it is pretty obvious that human powered engines like Mahalo cannot do much in the areas like Image search, Video search, Book search, etc. Add to this, the search in other languages, reverse phone number look up, etc. I don’t even have to talk about how ridiculous it will be to consider human powered search when it comes to desktop search.

Robert ignores the longtail concept when he talks about human powered search engines replacing the algorithm based ones. The very concept of longtail came into existence due to the phenomenon called internet. Under such a scenario, betting the future of internet on something that uses the hits and ignores the longtail (remember his discussion on social fabric? He talks about bumping the results up based on the number of people who trust a particular person (Michael Arringtons and Robert Scobles of the world)). I do agree that Google uses pagerank which can, in some ways, be likened to the hits in the longtail concept. However, a well structured query in Google will also get results from the longtail of web pages whereas it will not be fetched in the social fabric approach of Mahalo. This is a very important point and I just hope I have put it forward clearly.

So what is the solution to the search engine problem? Is Mahalo doomed for failure? What about 100s of Mahalos? Well, I am not an expert in search engines to offer a solution to the problems, in the current day search engines. But I strongly believe that human based search engines like Mahalo cannot replace (or beat) algorithm based search engines like Google. My solution is still algorithmic based. My hunch feeling is that the future search engine will be a collection of vertical search engines which may use Robert Scoble’s trust concept to optimize the search results. As I told Robert in our twitter conversation, Mahalo can, at the very best, be a Google optimizer but not a Google beater. Vertical search engines, with Mahalos in the front for optimization, may offer the much needed solution to our search engine problems. Humans cannot replace machines in the search engine world. Mahalo may serve well for a niche market but it is not a Google beater. At best, it can be termed as a Google optimizer.

What is your take on Scoble’s thesis that Mahalo and other trust based human search engines will beat Google? Do you agree with him? If not, why do you think human search engines cannot beat Google? What do you think will be the Google killer?

PS: It is 2:15 AM. I will correct any mistakes in the morning.

Here is Robert Scoble’s recent post

Out of 1,048 items on my link blog in the past 30 days only 490 came from the top 35 blogs.So, more than half of the value of that link blog came from the B, C, D … Z list of my 772 feeds.Shows that being on the A list isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you’re only reading the “A list” you’re missing 558 posts

This small piece of data clearly highlights the importance of longtail in the blogosphere. This brings into focus why blogs really took off in the first place. One of the reasons for the success of blogs is the frustration of readers with the “hit based approach” present in the traditional media. This “hit based approach” slowly caught up with the A-List bloggers. Once Ryan Stewart twittered saying “High tech culture is like a combination of a hamster wheel and an echo chamber”. This is the feeling I get when I listen to many A-List bloggers. If it is all about ignoring the long tail of b-, c-, z- lists, there is absolutely no difference between traditional media and blogosphere. This is where people like Robert Scoble come into picture. He is different from others like Mike Arrington, Om Malik, Pete Cashmore, etc. He is more committed to the philosophy of blogosphere than the other A-Listers. I am not undermining the role of other A-List bloggers. In fact, I have great opinion and respect for people like Mike Arrington and Om Malik. On any topic related to tech, I would always want to know what Mike and Om think about the issue. But I am differentiating here in terms of sticking to the core values of blogosphere than anything else. For all practical purposes, Mike Arrington and Om Malik are no different from the journalists at the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. But Robert Scoble takes a different approach to blogging and thatz what I want to highlight in this post. Once, when talking about the elitism of A-List bloggers, Robert told

Are you worried about the elitism of A list jerks like me?

Then FREAKING LINK TO NEW BLOGGERS THAT WE HAVEN’T HEARD ABOUT YET!!!

That’s how you take down the A list. Link, baby, link!

He got it absolutely right. It is the long tail that matters in blogosphere. By taking time to share the good posts from all sorts of people in the blogosphere, Robert is actually doing justice to the concept of blogs. He is a different kinda A-Lister. He is among a small breed of A-Listers who are committed to keeping blogosphere from taking the path of traditional media. Probably, thatz why I like him even though some times he exposes his lack of knowledge on certain topics. He is a dude who is ensuring that conversations are not just the privilege of an elite group but part of the democracy in the blogosphere. Keep going Robert. Blogosphere needs people like you.

Tags: Blogs, Blogosphere, Robert Scoble, A Listers, Long Tail, Longtail

Fring has just released a Windows Mobile app. You can download it here. I am installing it. It got my dash, running Windows Mobile 6, hung twice and once the registration process was on forever. I am yet to succeed in my installation. Will update here once I get it done. This was one app I was expecting for a long time. I will post my experience after I get it working.

Update1: I got it working finally. It is really cool. I did a test call with fring test call service. It works flawlessly. I will try Skype/MSN/Gtalk call in the evening and see if they also work without any problems.

Update 2: It sucks big time. If I use the software, quit and then open it again, it hangs big time. Not sure if it is a problem with their software or an issue with Windows Mobile 6 memory management but the experience sucks big time. This is one app I wanted badly. I am hoping that the folks at fring fix this issue soon. I also wish that these wireless companies offer phones like Dash with a version of embedded Linux packed into it. I will be more comfortable with them than Windows Mobile.

Dave Winer makes an astute observation about social networks. (Also see the discussion on Techmeme)

Eventually, soon I think, we’ll see an explosive unbundling of the services that make up social networks. What was centralized in the form of Facebook, Linked-in, even YouTube, is going to blow up and reconstitute itself. How exactly it will happen is something the historians can argue about 25 years from now. It hasn’t happened yet, but it will, unless the rules of technology evolution have been repealed (and they haven’t, trust me). Permalink to this paragraph

I have been thinking about this for sometime now. I am not happy with the centralized form of social networking sites like facebook. I am fascinated by Marc Canter’s idea of Digital Lifestyle Aggregator which doesn’t lock you into a single system. Thatz why I liked his PeopleAggregator networking system. My hunch feeling tells me that the future of social networking is an open standards based decentralized networks in the People Agrregator mould, with something like OpenID being the single point of entry needed to connect with people. Facebook is an amazing platform. There is no doubt about it. I am excited about their platform, which can be seen by the number of facebook related posts I have made. Still, there is something in me, the open source part of me, which tells me that facebook could be the next Microsoft or the hundreds of other companies, that lock you into their product. We need a decentralized social networks based on open standards. After all, what we have in Facebook or Myspace, are our friends. They are fruits of our time. We should be able to take them anywhere we go at any time we want. Marc Canter may be too early in his idea of open standards based social networking or the “old age” can be attributed, by others, to Dave Winer for making a hypothesis like the one above. But the social networking platform, in its current form, cannot serve the needs of our society. We needed a Microsoft to understand the importance of open source and open standards. Probably, Myspace and Facebook (to some extent), will provide us the “Microsoft” of the social networking world. I can show a simple analogy from the real life to drive home the ideas of Marc Canter and Dave Winer. People go to various community events to socialize but they could also stay at home and socialize with their friends, from the convenience of their home. Similarly, I might be heading over to Facebook to socialize but I should also be able to socialize, in the same way, from my blog or my website. This is where decentralized services and OpenID kinda authentication mechanisms play a pivotal role. I agree with Marc Canter when he says that we need to take our friends with us wherever we go. I also agree with Dave Winer when he says that the centralized system like Facebook or Linked-In will blow up and result in explosive unbundling of (decentralized) services that make up social networks.