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Nevermind complicated algorithms and personalized content streams according to past search patterns and the like – Google has, for only the second time in its history, decided to offer specific results, a sort of guidance, in response to select search terms. When users search for phrases such as “ways to commit suicide” or “suicidal thoughts”, they now see the toll-free number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at the top of their results. We have to wonder – when will Google advise users buying cigarettes to seek help too? Sponsor The New York Times quotes Dr. Roni Zeiger, the chief health stategist for Google, as saying that the idea came from a Google user. “A mother wrote in a suggestion to us — her daughter had swallowed something that she thought was dangerous, and she had a hard time finding poison control,” Dr. Zeiger said. “Now when you search for poison control or similar queries, we make it straightforward to find the number for poison control.” So can we be as callous here as to wonder where else the company might take this? Can anyone really take issue with a company offering the phone number of a suicide prevention hotline to those looking up phrases like “I want to die”? Perhaps this could be a new direction – rather than simply offering results directly related to a user’s query, or looking to personalize content by looking at what friends and peers are looking at, or even looking at a users history, Google could offer up a Devil’s Advocate set of results on every query. Looking for a brand new SUV? While you’re at it, why not consider this beautiful, used bicycle that will help save the environment? Cheap cigarettes? Didn’t you mean Nicorette gum? McDonalds? Why yes, we do have a few diet programs and some instructions on healthy eating. In reality, we think that this could be a great compliment to all those apps and engines out there that simply look to show you exactly what you’re looking for before you ever even get to searching . Let’s use the web to challenge ideas, not simply echo them. As long as results are clearly identified, is there a problem? While this is a loaded area to look at (questioning Google’s action can be made to seem as if it were a promotion of suicide) we still think there are interesting implications to its actions that should be considered. Do we want Google to simply act as a firehose of data or can we expect it to tailor its results to do better for the world? And who’s version of better will it go by if we do? What do you think? Discuss
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Google Gives Suicide Hotline Number For Certain Searches: Diets For Fast Food Next?
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The effort to bring Facebook into the enterprise continues with more services using Outlook as a gateway to extend a contact network and use as a foundations for a CRM environment. SenderOK is one of the latest effiorts to give more context to email by showing a picture of the sender in an email message. Too bad it only works on Windows XP or Vista. Ugh. Sponsor But let’s take a look at the service as we are seeing more services that use email as a foundation for a social CRM environment. SenderOK compares itself to Microsoft’s Outlook Soclal Connector and Xobni , an email plug-in that provides a search and profile element for Outlook. But we hear a lot of criticism that Xobni is a memory hog and slows down computers. As one reader said about Xobni in our last post concerning Outlook plug-ins : “Interesting article, although I have my doubts about Xobni which I used for several months but had to uninstall as it had gotten to the point where it was nearly impossible to use (too slow). Harmony sounds promising; sharing documents in place of merely sending them as attachments (hence overloading the network) is becoming critical if one wants to keep only one copy and not scatter several around.” To be fair, Xobni is the leader in this space compared to other services. They have a loyal following. It makes sense that companies like SenderOK would go after this sector of the market. SenderOK features include a smart mapping capability to give a view of the person’s unread email across multiple accounts. It will also prioritize the email. Our interest stems from the SenderOK “business card” feature. Email includes an image of the person and their profile information in the header of the message. In Outlook Social Connector, the image of the sender blocks out the message. In Xobni, the image and contact information appears in a widget. We expect these services to proliferate as more startups turn their attention to Outlook as a way to build a user base. Xobni has proven that this approach works. Further, Google Apps now integrates with third party applications. Services such as Zoho CRM and Intuit are leveraging GMail integration to offer hybrid applications. Perhaps 2010 will be the year email is viewed more as a foundation than a nuisance to be eliminated. Discuss
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SenderOK: Email as a Facebook Connector and Social CRM Catalyst
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McKesson is a global health care leader that has 26 operating companies. The centrial IT group had the vision to automate “the last mile” of IT planning, the budget approval process. We think of it as the budget approval dance, and when containing costs, it’s a ritual that can leave scars. This company has evolved to the point of improving the cost of budgeting, and making it faster and smarter by understanding the assets, services, and service delivery of IT. Budgeting can be painful because it can be in slow-motion. Contrast this with the real-time controls of such as VMware V-Motion and Amazon’s web service console and we see a great linkup for driving process change through budgeting. And driving budgeting by cloud and virtualization. We took a look at McKesson’s journey and the service catalog functions of NewScale , an IT services catalog company. Sponsor McKesson: Let’s Start with Less Meetings and Less 5mb Spreadsheets NewScale has customers like McKesson and Charles Schwab and competitors like HP, IBM, Tivoli. The company has been growing its customer base and helping stable-state enterprises to leverage Service Management. And that leads directly into cloud procurement. We tracked the use case at McKesson, where the company landed at the service desk in the cloud as a means to the end in their journey to build a low-impact budget process . We see a lot of benefit in this approach, where if successful, it would mean that the advantages to go with commodity pre-approved services dramatically improves the timing and effort of procurement. This is a lever that gives Finance a significant hand in the IT spend. Since cloud and virtualization offerings can be spun-up with service call, the cloud is well positioned to be there as budgeting and approval processes are automated. In phase one, the company reported significant progress in moving processes towards the service catalog. One click vs. Fill Out the Form In the end, the move towards enterprise standards may be won over simplicity. Is it less clicks to provision. This means connecting the dots between processes, systems, software, teams, and policy. To EC2, or to EC2 through Official Channels: That is the Question IT services management comes into the picture and could make a difference in how the business and technical contributors of organizations are rewarded for moving to a standard platform. Information Technology Infrastructure Library is tool set that has been given to IT managers to try to wrap standard language around IT service management. It gives the enterprise a common way to manage processes for IT and track the changes involved in building and operating systems. Services platforms like Amazon and Salesforce can be considered IT disinter-mediation. We all know a IT leader out there somewhere who is funding their project by credit card out in the cloud. IT, of course, knows this also (especially since they are likely watching your network traffic). One part of the service management offering is making it even easier than Amazon. Carrot, vs. stick. Service catalog management has the promise when it wraps things like Amazon’s EC2, or VMwares offerings, gives the enterprise a way to get the same service from the web. And, with budget approval and IT approval baked in, the carrot is there. All of IT moves towards transparency and IT processes as being measured as processes. In the ITIL community, there is discussion of the next layer of the library moving towards service delivery in the move towards ITIL Version 3. It’s easy to see that “provision server” becomes fully automated. Soon, all the IT functions below it become invisible. We see this as a future cloud inflection point, where instead of there “cloud services”, we are all in one. Zen Mashup What has been your experience in mashing ITIL, ITIL Service Delivery in your environment? Do your IT services flow like water? Discuss
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Got Budget? Virtualization as Poster Child for Less Meetings
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What if we took the leading sensor-based products currently being developed or already on the market, put them all under one roof, and added a typical American family? Would they just be the techiest family on the block, or would it have a significant impact on their lives? Here are six ways this Internet of Things family can see their lives change. They exercise more, save energy and water, budget better, know where their kids are at any moment, and they’ll always have the right lighting for activities in the house. Sponsor Bank Account-based Motivation We
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6 Ways to Better Living: Inside an Internet of Things Home
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During today’s SXSW keynote , social media research Danah Boyd , who works for Microsoft Research New England and is a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, talked about online privacy. Specifically, she focused on how users can navigate issues around online privacy and how developers can help them to do so. Sponsor Boyd, who has researched how mainstream users use social media for the last couple of years, argued that developers have to focus on questions about privacy and publicity as they use and develop these new applications and experiences. According to Boyd, privacy is not dead and users care about it – both online and offline – and often react quite violently when their expectations of privacy are broken. Google Buzz: Privacy Fail Looking at the example of Google Buzz , which she called a “privacy fail,” Boyd argued that Google didn’t do anything technically wrong when it release Buzz. Instead, Google made a number of non-technical mistakes that interrupted a set of social expectations its users had. Google’s mistakes: Building a public system in an environment that most people consider to be private (their email service). A lot of users actually believed that once they started using Buzz, Google would expose all of their private emails to the world. Google assumed that users would simply opt out if they didn’t want to participate. A lot of Google users, however, thought that they would cancel their Gmail accounts if the opted out of Buzz. Technologists assume that the optimal solution is the best and forget about social rituals. Boyd noted that users expect to be able to choose their friends, for example, a social ritual that Google interrupted when it automatically populated its users Buzz accounts with people they tended to send a lot of emails to. To explain these issues, Boyd distinguished between articulated networks (address books, Facebook, Twitter), behavioral networks (based on common behavior, location, etc.) and personal networks. According to Boyd, people don’t necessarily want to bring all of this info together (which Buzz did). Instead, they want to be able to separate different groups. It’s also important to remember that private and public are also not always clear binary opposites. While technology often makes it looks like this, in real life, things tend to get a lot messier. If you are out in a café, for example, you are in a public space, but you expect a certain community to be there – while you don’t expect others to be there – and you still expect a certain degree of privacy while you are talking to your friends. Facebook’s Privacy Fail Users generally don’t handle change well, which can have serious privacy implications. When Facebook asked its users to reevaluate their privacy settings a few months ago, the default choice was “everyone.” People encountered the Facebook popup with a notification about these changes, however, clicked through without reading it and suddenly all of their data was public. According to Facebook, only about 33% of users made changes. As Boyd noted in her talk, most Facebook users simply didn’t understand the privacy settings. Public by Default, Private by Effort By default, most conversations on social media services are now public, while making them private takes a conscious effort. By and large, teenagers, according to Boyd, are more conscious about what they can gain by being public, while adults worry more about what they could lose. That, however, can lead to shortsighted decisions and have serious consequences – something developers need to think about as they create their social media applications and especially aggregators. The Public-By-Default Environment is Not the Great Democratizer Just because something is publicly accessible, for example, doesn’t mean that people want it to be publicized. The launch of Facebook’s news stream, fore example, caught users by surprise as it broke the social contract on Facebook. While the data in the news stream had always been available, aggregating it violated the privacy expectations of most users. Developers, according to Boyd, have to ask themselves how the people whose content they are remixing and aggregating would feel if all of this data was suddenly available in one place. What Can Developers Do? There is no magical formula: privacy exists in social contexts and these contexts are complex and change constantly. For technologists, this is what makes it so hard to deal with these problems. Developers, said Boyd, have to learn to navigate these complexities and interact with their users. Developers also have to consider that privacy slip-ups can have real-world consequences for users. Developers have to ask themselves how they would feel if this information they aggregate would be disclosed. Just because you can see somebody, doesn’t mean they want to be seen. Wanting privacy is not about having something to hide, but about control and creating space to open up. Discuss
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Privacy Is Not Dead: Danah Boyd Talks About Privacy at SXSW
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