What will Facebook do with its News Feed patent?

February 26th, 2010

This week Facebook was awarded the patent for the News Feed - a feature common to Facebook as well as other social networks such as Twitter and MySpace, and a number of social media apps and startups.

The patent refers to the method of displaying stories/news items relating to online activities to a predetermined set of viewers, and “assigning an order to the news items”. According to reports, the patent also covers the auto-generation of a user’s activity and the display of that to friends. That means the news updates you get when your friends upload videos and accept friend requests is covered by Facebook’s new patent.

It’s true that Facebook pioneered the News Feed technology back in 2006, and so on the face of it deserves to own the patent…but what does this mean for the rest of the social media industry? Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network, and so if it’s going down the road of seeking patents for its technology, this could really hamper innovation and progress within social media, and render networks such as Twitter useless.

It’s currently unclear what Facebook plans to do with this patent. It could take the hard line and pressure Twitter, MySpace, Google etc into taking down their News Feed features, or at the opposite end of the scale it could choose not to exercise its patent.

The reason why social media has evolved so quickly is all down to collaboration, the mashup of content and technology and the sharing of creativity. Patents are arguably not a good thing in this space, but what can we do to stop them?

At the moment this is primarily an industry story, but should Facebook choose to make use of the patent, it’s likely to reach the attention of a wider audience. Ultimately the power rests with individuals to stop Facebook from agressively patenting its technology - if the business becomes too commercial in its focus, it will lose popularity, and could suffer massively in terms of online PR.

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What will the internet-connected world look like in 2020? Pew knows..

February 25th, 2010

As you may have seen last week, The Pew Internet & American Life Project published the findings of its fourth ‘future of the Internet survey’ carried out between December 2nd, 2009 to January 11th, 2010.

If you’re not familiar with The Pew Internet & American Life Project, it focuses on surveying ‘web users and experts’ to help predict the future of the internet. The 895 respondents, 371 of whom were considered ‘experts’, were all opt-in, self-selecting and broken down as follows; scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers, along with Internet users screened by the authors.

The respondents were asked to consider the future of the internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the likely innovations that will occur. The survey required them to assess different “tension pairs” - each pair offering two different 2020 scenarios with the same overall theme and opposite outcomes - and to select the one most likely choice of two statements, some of which are overviewed below.

The survey has its fans and its critics, and certainly shouldn’t be taken as gospel, but I think it offers an interesting insight into current thinking on future issues and theories, which are often used to fuel related ‘future of the Internet stories’ as has been the case in the last week.

So, now we’ve done the introductions and the disclaimers, what about the juicy stuff?
Well, the “Is Google Making us Stupid?” meme that famously sprouted up in 2008 via the cover of Atlantic magazine, originally attributed to technology scholar Nicholas Carr,  features heavily. He argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. This line of argument was not supported by the survey as 76 percent of respondents believe that the Internet will make people cleverer in the next 10 years, while also improving reading and writing abilities. For a full run down on this question, look here.

The graphic below, which was taken from the research, shows the distribution of responses to the paired statements. The first column covers the answers of 371 long-time experts who have regularly participated in these surveys. The second column covers the answers of all the respondents, including the 524 who were recruited by other experts or by their association with the Pew Internet Project.

You can see the full report here, with responses to the following questions:

Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now?

84% of experts say most innovations come out of the blue and will not be predicted

Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years

64% of experts say yes

Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?

42 percent of the experts believe that in the next 10 years, anonymous online activities will “sharply decrease” due to the stricter Internet safety and identification system, but 55 percent of people believe it will still be easy to scan web pages anonymously.

Overall, the survey is a good guide, sure it doesn’t exactly offer a revolutionary window to the future, but it perhaps confirms a deeper change that many have previously suspected in the way the human mind and behaviour is reacting to the community approach of the web.

It could be argued that the web is returning us to our original human characteristics of community values and shared intelligence but on a much larger scale, with the bonus of this shared knowledge available 24/7, at least to those that have access.

It is this difference in terms of the way we gain and measure intelligence that should be the fundamental issue of the ‘Is Google making us stupid’ question, rather than trying to measure intelligence or learning in a traditional way, we need to consider the changed landscape and that future generations simply won’t be constrained by the memory-focused approach to intelligence that some still have.

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Is 2010 the year of mainstream immersive online learning?

February 11th, 2010

Is this the year when immersive online learning goes mainstream? I think it might be.

Surveys, like the one just launched by Richard MacManus, editor of ReadWriteWeb will help by giving us a clearer picture of what kids want from their web time.

Richard is asking parents to sit with their kids and complete the quick survey. Out of that, we could spark a whole load of new ideas from bright young minds around how they want their fun and engagement delivered. There should also be strong indicators of how they’re learning through games.

Just to say, before going on, that this post was sparked by conversations with a client, MOOFU, that works in the 3D learning and planning space. Disclosure done!

The MD, Nick Palfrey and me (among many others!) both think that 2010 could see widespread adoption of games-based environments for collaboration, exploration and user-led learning. We’ve seen in the past three months particularly, a growing noise in the area of “learning as fun”.

This week, Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield announced he’s going back to his games roots with a multiplayer online game, Glitch. The BBC then reported that 13.3 million people in the UK regularly play casual games and spend around £280 million a year on that – according to data from the UK National Gamers Survey.

It’s more common currency now that the idea of gamers as young, slightly asocial males is way too narrow to use in any useful analysis of game demographics. Mega-popular sites, like the girl-gamer Thumb Banditscontinue to demolish the view of games as man-terrain.

As games culture helps to shape the way people of all ages engage online, the acceptance of games-based learning as a lifelong tool will become generalised. We can look to the US for a lead here. UGM Social Media recently had a blog post showing how immersive learning is taking off, albeit schools-focused for now.

At the Quest2Learn school in New York City (funded by the Bill and Amanda Gates Foundation, among others) learners use a range of social technologies, from video games to social networking, to solve hypothetical problems.

Away from the digital elites, the Federation of American Scientists has developed a first-person shooter-inspired cellular biology curriculum. With Immune Attack, Young gamers explore the fully-interactive 3D world of an ill patient and assist the immune system in fighting back a bacterial infection.

Dr. Melanie Ann Stegman evaluated the educational impacts of the game: “The amount of detail about proteins, chemical signals and gene regulation that these 15-year-olds were devouring was amazing. Their questions were insightful. I felt like I was having a discussion with scientist colleagues.”

As the Building Schools for the Future initiative matures, I’m sure that 3D immersive learning will need to be one the main elements, enabling communities to engage in virtual learning spaces that mirror the physical education environments and … pause for breath… make learning like, fun.

The UGM blog says that games-learning technologies are “on the cusp of freeing education from its 2D textbook prison” – and we can add that these socially inclusive tech innovations will free the learner from the physical boundaries of educations buildings. Exciting times indeed!

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Safer Internet Day and beyond means serious fun with identity and privacy

February 9th, 2010

Safer Internet Day 2010 has again raised awareness of safer and more responsible use of online technology and mobile phones, especially among children and young people globally.

Insafe launched a pan-European quiz on 1st February, for 5-11 and 12-15 year-olds, open to individuals or school classes who compete with the objective of becoming increasingly aware of their role in protecting themselves and others online. An online SID Fair will also showcase participating organizations across the world, and schools are invited to register the events they will be running to mark the day.

SID’s “Think before you post” campaign asks not only young people but also challenges every digital citizen to examine how we deal with identity and privacy in digital environments. It’s a subject that academic colleagues Lorraine Warren and Kieron O’Hara have looked at in some detail.

There’s still a long road before we have constructed a theory and research methodology so Lorraine and Kieron’s early work is extremely valuable in mapping out the terrain.

Lorraine sets up the challenge and the goal really nicely in her recent posts; she argues for more detailed understanding of identity and its consequent effects on our view of online privacy. How, when and where we construct selves online has meaning for how we responsibly manage privacy.

As she says: “The challenge for today’s researchers is to take that thinking forward, and also create new ways of thinking about identity, how it is constructed and performed, not only in  Web 2 world, but looking  forward into a web 3 world too.  In doing so, we can make a useful contribution to the debate on privacy – because identity is the nexus between the individual and society, and where so many of the debates are played out.”

Her views are amplified in a post on privacy and identity in the digital age that deals with separation of multiple online identities

Dr Warren’s University of Southampton colleague Kieron O’Hara, also draws out a few pathfinder ideas in recent papers on the limits of the person, privacy and empowerment which are worth reading in detail(http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17123/ and http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18242/).

Out of all these early discussions, we can build a coherent picture that helps us focus on how we understand and engage online; what’s really valuable and worth protecting.

And, as Venessa Miemis argues in her EmergentbyDesign blogpost, as social networks expand they force us to reassess the nature and value of privacy and identity. At the same time, they also engineer an effect that changes relationships and responsibilities. This drives people to position their personal reputation in terms of the value it has to the networks to which they are connected. This echoes Dr O’Hara’s ideas around privacy as a public good and that is an area where open discussion and detailed research would make a positive contribution to our understanding of what we are online.

The debate continues and the Privacy and Identity panel, postponed postponed in January because of ‘snow on the mind’, has now been rearranged for Tuesday 23rd March at The Royal Society in London.

Details of the event are here http://webscience.org/events.html.

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Massive Multiplayer Online Games and learning for fun

February 1st, 2010

My two sons are both avid online game players, the elder preferring First Person Shooter and Sports titles, the younger favouring Role Playing Games. They’ve both been playing online since they were pre-teen from Habbo Hotel to Call of Duty, FIFA to World of Warcraft and GuildWars and beyond.

Rarely, the games were gruesome and I argued against playing them. It was pointed out with great sympathy (and concern for the aged), that this was not real life. And neither son has recently gone out and attacked anyone with a recently-bought two-handed mace… to my knowledge.

When they were easily impressed by their Dad, they loved to show their skills and knowledge of games. They were then even more impressed that some of their teachers also understood, even played these games.

At the risk of sounding like a ‘Dudley Dogood’, I think online multiplayer games are one of the most excellent learning tools out there. I know there are the ‘serious games’ and explicitly ‘educational games’ genres (maybe both should come with an advisory sticker – ‘This game can seriously bore your child to death’) but it’s the real, fun games that, for me, make a difference.

There are a crop of new games due out this year and early next that will take ‘accidental learning’ to a new level. I’ll be returning to those in another post but from what I’ve seen from the early videos and early beta reviews, I might even dust off my gamer cap and really embarrass my boys online.

Think of the potential for maths, economics, politics, history, sociology, anthropology. . . teachers. If teachers immersed themselves in the online MMOs and then drew out learnings from these fantastic worlds, how engaged would their pupils be?

We know that MMOs, particularly the RPGs, are highly social and structured environments where gamers learn new social skills and knowledge every day. These game spaces also provide youth with a very cool and safe space to test out identity and roles.

My younger son, for example, learned how to lead a group (of much older people) in World of Warcraft and the elder leads online squads to victory in some nightmarish battle-torn worlds (pass the ammo). Where else can a youngster lead a group of older players with authority, friendship and respect?

As Nick Yee pointed way back out in Mosaic: “The social skills learned in these environments are highly transferable to real life. After all, providing leadership for and managing over 100 people is an incredibly complex task no matter where it occurs. What’s even more interesting is that leadership training is an emergent function of these environments. It prompts us to wonder how effective these worlds might be if they were specifically designed as educational mediums.”

Others, from Raph Koster to Nicolas Ducheneaut and Robert J. Moore at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), reinforce Nick’s view of online games as a positive learning experience – oh, and just about the best fun, ever.

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