Editor’s Note: Nir Eyal is the founder of two acquired startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. Nir blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. Follow him on Twitter @nireyal.
If you’re like me, you’ve had enough of the Facebook IPO story. For tech entrepreneurs struggling to build stuff, the cacophony of recent press is just more noise. That’s why when my friend Andrew Chen posted an insightful analysis of Facebook user data, I was happy to get back to learning from what the company did right instead of debating what its bankers did wrong.
Chen calculated Facebook’s historical ratio of daily active users (DAU) to monthly active users (MAU) and the stats are startling. Since March 2009, when the earliest data is available, approximately 50% of Facebook users logged in daily.
As other technology companies struggle to maintain DAU to MAU ratios of 5% or less, Facebook’s numbers appear stratospherically high in comparison. But what is equally surprising is the consistency of that ratio over time. Despite periodic user revolts in reaction to changes in the site, the ratio remained strangely stable. In fact, the number has risen over the past year and is now hovering at 58% as of March of this year.
It’s as if Zuckerberg has steered the company by this golden ratio. Which begs the question: is there some wisdom here regarding this ratio as a predictor of Internet success? Obviously, there are no guarantees and starting cutting edge tech companies will always be risky business. But, assuming you have a solid business model, there are good reasons to believe that if there is one metric to focus on while building your business, it’s the percentage of users who come back daily as expressed by this ratio.
As I’ve written previously, I believe a mastery of the mechanics of habit design is increasingly deciding startup winners and losers. Not only because habits cement user behavior in an increasingly cluttered digital world, but because a high-engagement product is also a high-growth product. The two are one and the same. A high DAU to MAU ratio is a great indicator of the strength of user habits and, ceteris paribus, I’d bet on a business with the higher ratio over a competitor every time. Here’s why:
More is More
When it comes to web and mobile startups, high DAU to MAU is more important than the size or growth rate of an entrenched competitor. Case in point, Facebook defeated much earlier competitors like MySpace and Friendster, both of which had healthy growth rates and millions of users by the time Facebook got started.
This is because of what I call the “more is more principle.” High user engagement has an exponential effect on user growth. As David Skok points out on his blog, “The most important factor to increasing growth is not the Viral Coefficient, but the Viral Cycle Time.” Viral Cycle time is the amount of time it takes to complete a viral loop and it has massive impact on user growth. “For example, after 20 days with a cycle time of two days, you will have 20,470 users,” Skok writes. “But if you halved that cycle time to one day, you would have over 20 million users! It is logical that it would be better to have more cycles occur, but it is less obvious just how much better.”
Having a greater proportion of DAUs dramatically increases Viral Cycle Time for two reasons. First, daily users initiate loops more often – think tagging a photo on Facebook. Second, more daily active users means more people to respond and react to each invitation. The cycle not only perpetuates; with high DAU to MAU, it accelerates.
One Way to Grow
Those who talk tech split into two dogmatic camps. Some prioritize growth and accept low engagement, while others believe a company needs to nail engagement before focusing on growth. I believe this is a false dichotomy. If you have only one or the other, congratulations, you’ve got squat.
Let’s first take a look at user growth. Distribution, of course, is critically important and no company can survive without a sound customer acquisition strategy. Not only is growth essential but it is something engineer-driven companies love to work on. In fact, the title of “Growth Hacker” has recently become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley digerati. Tweaking viral coefficients and instantly seeing the results is intoxicating. It’s startup feedback at its finest.
But optimizing growth without engagement has its pitfalls. As Peter Thiel recently told his class at Stanford, the effectiveness of distribution channels tends to follow a power law. Just as businesses tend to have only one revenue stream, they also have only one good growth strategy – the effectiveness of which is 10x the results of other distribution channels. The problem with having only one real way to grow is that the method becomes obvious to others and is quickly copied. For example, in its early days, Facebook capitalized on users importing their email contact list to drive growth. But soon thereafter, so did everyone else.
But having competitors copy you is a high-class problem. It means something is working. Worse yet is discovering a fantastic viral loop that drives growth only to see engagement crater when users realize there’s little long-term value in the service. Ringtone businesses, sheep-throwing Facebook games circa 2008, and today’s social video sharing apps using questionable growth tactics, are just a few of the “leaky bucket” businesses that occur when distribution outpaces engagement.
When it comes to building a big business, clearly a good acquisition channel is mandatory, but not sufficient. Given the power law of user growth, you will likely only have one major way of acquiring customers and it won’t be much of a secret. You’ll need some other competitive advantage.
Engagement as Advantage
As opposed to distribution channels, the mechanics driving user engagement do not follow a power law. In fact, it is the nuances of user behavior that make the competition irrelevant, just as it did in the case of Facebook’s early rivals.
Discovering non-obvious user needs and creating accompanying habits is accomplished through deep observation grounded in solid behavioral theory, followed by methodical trial and error. It takes time to create new habits and getting the user to act the way you’d hoped is accomplished by uncovering a thousand tiny insights into the user’s psyche. The process of uncovering latent needs is characterized by understanding more about users than they know about themselves.
The distribution strategy will always be obvious, but the behavioral insights are important secrets that can only be discovered through rigorous testing. Zynga had one obvious way to acquire users, namely Facebook ads. But the company has a cadre of behavioral insights it uses to craft addictive games. It collects terabytes of information daily to alter game dynamics to boost user engagement. Quora primarily drives users to its site through Google search traffic. But the conjecture about all the reasons why the service is so sticky spills over a long question thread. Instagram posted images to Twitter and Facebook to drive user acquisition, placing its growth strategy in plain sight. However, the founders, one of whom studied psychology as a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford, acquired a deep understanding of what makes users tick and click.
But why can’t behavioral design be copied like a distribution strategy? Because competitors are not able to recognize and act upon these kinds of insights. You can know the competition’s product feels better to use, but you won’t know why. Engaging products gain their advantages by leveraging tiny improvements, which together create huge advantage. From the outside, you can’t tell what’s working and what isn’t.
For example, the iPhone is objectively a better designed, more user-friendly, and ultimately more engaging product than the Android experience. But why? Nearly everyone, when given the choice between an Android interface and an iPhone, chooses the iPhone. There are plenty of good reasons to own an Android, but intuitive interface ain’t one. Google knows this and yet they can’t replicate Apple because they don’t know the answer to “why?” You can’t make decisions between seemingly identical interface choices unless you’ve walked the path of user behavior. Without this knowledge, copying the competition becomes a game of throwing darts at features.
Habit design requires a fundamentally different, though complementary skill set to growth hacking. Designing high-engagement products is an art which is increasingly becoming a science. The craft crosses the disciplines of psychology and design – both fields which are hard to learn in a short period of time. Unfortunately, designing habits often falls in the organisational abyss between the founders’ vision and what is technically feasible.
But those companies able to habituate users quickly enjoy massive advantages. Not only does engagement drive growth for the reasons stated above, but users tend to shut out other, sometimes superior, solutions. In fact, business history is peppered with technically inferior products beating competitors because of the fierce loyalty of habituated users (I’m looking at you Apple addicts). Users only have time and brain cycles for a limited number of services. If a high proportion of users are using your service daily, they aren’t using the competition’s.
Can’t Have One Without the Other
But focusing on engagement without growth is also a losing proposition. For one, virality is not something that can be bolted on to a product after it is in the wild. Distribution is not an afterthought and it needs to be built into the core of the experience. Either the company has a viral growth mechanic or it doesn’t. So no matter how engaging your service is, it will remain niche unless there is a way to get it in front of new users en masse.
Creating a company with both high engagement and high growth requires a sound distribution engine fueled by active users. Both engagement and growth are essential to a company’s viability and by adhering to the tao of DAU and MAU, founders have an accurate point of focus to increase their odds of success.
If your family owns multiple Apple devices and you have several different Apple IDs among you, it can become overwhelming or confusing or just plain maddening to figure out where your content is. It doesn’t have to be that way: To manage your media and app purchases more effectively, you may want to consider having a single family iTunes account.
What you would do is take one of your Apple IDs — the single username to manage all your Apple accounts — associate it with a single iTunes account and a credit card, and assign it to all of your iOS devices. From here on out, you can continue to make all of your family’s purchases for all of their devices from that one iTunes account.
However, there’s one exception: iCloud. It may seem like you would want a separate iCloud account for each device because each iCloud account comes with a mere 5 GB of free storage. This hardly seems enough to back up even one 64 GB iPhone 4S or iPad. Each member of your family may own multiple Apple devices and want to have all of their data equally accessible from each device. But having a separate account for each device does not make much sense either.
So what can an Apple ID do?
Some of the confusion over how to handle multiple Apple IDs comes from not knowing exactly what is possible. For instance, every Apple ID is not automatically enrolled with all of Apple’s services. You can create your AppleID and enroll it in each Apple service individually as you need to. You do this by logging into that service with your Apple ID. Additionally, each device can utilize multiple Apple IDs at the same time. Some of Apple’s services can be configured once per device, others multiple times per device. For example, each device can only be backed up to one iCloud account whereas each device can have multiple iCloud email accounts configured.
It can be hard to figure out how to do this. Some Apple IDs are set in the device settings, other are set separately per an individual app setting. The chart below illustrates how many Apple IDs you can have associated with each device, and where the ID associated with that service is configured:
We’ve narrowed down your options and here are some suggestions for best organizing your family’s devices and Apple accounts:
One iTunes Apple ID for apps and media
Using the chart above as a sort of Apple ID map, you can plan which services you want to use, and just how you want to configure them on each family member’s device. To start, take one Apple ID and associate it with an iTunes account for all of the app and media purchases your family makes. This is the account that is linked to a credit card. With each Apple device, the purchased apps, music, books, magazines, TV Shows and movies account will be accessible by all of the devices registered with this account.
Keep in mind that the rules are changing. Whe the iPad first came out, it used to be that you could authorize up to five OS X computers with the same iTunes account. And in turn each OS X computer could sync its locally stored library of purchased apps and media (via a USB cable) to an unlimited number of iOS devices. With Apple moving away from physical access, cable-based direct syncing and online music storage in the cloud through add on services like iTunes Match, the opportunity exists for more than a household of devices being configured to access a single iTunes account’s media files.
This now means that a single account that access its music via the cloud can only have up to 10 devices and computers combined. Ten sounds like a lot for an individual, but not a family. Think of a family of four having a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad each. That’s 12 computers and devices, not including any Apple TVs and additional iPods scattered throughout the house.
When configuring your family’s Apple devices, these settings are part of each device’s primary iCloud account. While each device can have multiple iCloud accounts associated with it, only one of these iCloud accounts can enable a select set of features. These features include Bookmarks, Photo Stream, Documents & Data and Storage & Backup.
Unfortunately, since these features are configured only via the iCloud settings on the device, they must all be associated with the same iCloud account. This fact is really disappointing since it would be nice to configure all of your family’s devices on one iCloud account for iCloud Backup, and a separate one for app-based Documents & Data. This would allow a user to have to pay once for additional storage on that one shared family-sized backup iCloud account.
One Apple ID to keep track of all of your family’s devices
With your family’s iTunes purchases under control, and the core features of iCloud storage taken care of, there is one particular feature of iOS 5 that can be set separately from a device’s primary iCloud account. When it comes to locating each of your family’s devices, do not rely solely on the Find My Friends app to locate their position. Create a common family iCloud account and configure each device to use this account in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings. In fact, you can even create this iCloud account without creating a new Apple email address. This family iCloud account’s sole purpose will be to keep track of all of your Apple devices.
Configuring each device in such a manner does not interfere with the use of a different app, Find My Friends. You only need to have one account on the device enable the Find my iPhone service. Then the Find My Friends app will use that enabled service to share your location with whatever account is used to log on with the app. That means each family member can still individually manage who knows their whereabouts via the Find My Friends app.
Multiple secondary iCloud Apple IDs on each device
Most of the iOS features that require an iCloud account have been taken care of, except the ones that really matter most. At this point you can decide if you want a me.com email address or not. Each family member can create their own account (or accounts) for Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Notes.
When it comes to mail, not every third-party service out there supports all of these features. Hotmail, for instance, will support Reminders, but not Notes. Some Microsoft Exchange Servers will support Reminders, some Notes and some both Reminders and Notes. If you happen to configure your Google Mail as an Exchange service, you will not get Reminders or Notes. Yahoo on the other hand actually supports them all and AOL, well, just Notes. So be sure to pick a mail provider that will support all of the services you need.
Several independent Apple IDs for everything else
So what’s left? Quite a bit actually. FaceTime, GameCenter, Messaging, HomeSharing and even the Apple Store app. The default account used by each of these independent apps is the Apple ID configured to be used with the iTunes account on a particular device. But you can use any Apple ID you like.
These apps support features that are independent from both the iTunes account as well as the iCloud account that are configured on the device. They are managed separately, configured in separate settings and even stored in separate apps. You can sign out of each of these particular features and sign back in using a different Apple ID. And this will have no effect on the aforementioned iTunes and iCloud account settings on the device.
A good strategy
The idea here is that you can use multiple Apple IDs on each device, and at the same time each Apple ID does not need to be enrolled in every Apple product, feature and service. Decide what products and services you want to use first and determine how each device will be used. If you don’t, before you know it you could end up with a real rats nest of accounts.
Do consider using one master family account on all devices to manage iTunes purchases, and use that same shared account to track the location of all of your devices. As an added bonus, you could use the calendar, contacts and reminders with this shared family iCloud account as well. Once you have each device configured with these basics, let each family member decide which third-party email service they want. This may well be the best strategy to employ, until Apple sees fit to enable multiple users per device.
How many times have you gone out for some fancy food, and ended up spending the evening yelling into the ear of your dinner companion? An accomplished sound engineer has figured out a way to solve that problem, using technology similar to that of noise-canceling headphones.
Using 123 cleverly hidden speakers, an array of highly sensitive microphones and noise-canceling technology, sound engineer (and now restaurant owner) John Paluska has teamed up with Meyer Sound to create a way to make the noise of conversation cancel itself out, letting him control the ambient sound levels in his restaurant using an iPad app.
Paluska’s noise-canceling system’s beta test site is Comal, his restaurant in Berkeley, Calif. How well does it work? If the performance of noise-canceling headphones is any indication, this could be a breakthrough.
Mashable‘s third annual Social Media Day is on Saturday, June 30, 2012!
Social Media is quickly changing our world by bringing people closer together. So, in true Mashable style, we celebrate it!
In previous years, we have had incredible Social Media Day Meetups created by event organizers around the globe. To keep that tradition alive, we invite you to once again bring your fellow social media enthusiasts together in person by hosting a Social Media Day Meetup in your area.
Like any event, Social Media Day Meetups require planning. If this is your first time organizing one, here’s a couple of tips to get you started. If you have organized one in the past, here’s a refresher course!
Step by Step
Because we use the Meetup Everywhere platform, there is already a Social Media Day event set up for the over 1,500+ Mashable Meetup Everywhere communities.
2. Find the Meetup community nearest you and click on the city name to find the Social Media Day event page.
4. To be the sole organizer, give a date, time, venue and short description of the Meetup.
5. To be a co-organizer, leave other fields blank to allow another Meetup community member to fill them in, which will make him or her your co-organizer.
7. Check the meetup page frequently to answer questions and start conversations on the comment boards.
Find a Meetup Community Near You
Browse through this list to find a Meetup near you! If you can’t find your city, it may be up to you to create the event!
Get The Word Out
Make sure your community knows about your Mashable Social Media Day Meetup!
Here’s a few ideas to get you started promoting:
1. Create a Twitter account and Facebook page for your event
2. Find something that makes your event special, and let your local media know about it.
3. Alert local organizations that have similar interests about the event.
4. Encourage attendees to share the details, both online and by word of mouth!
Gather Organizer Tools
Our Social Media Day website is a one-stop-shop for everything you may need to plan your Social Media Day event.
On it, you will find Social Media Day logos, tweets, photos and videos from events around the globe, and helpful videos such as this one:
Connect with Fellow Organizers
The Mashable Meetup Organizers Facebook group is an incredible community of 250+ organizers who plan Mashable Meetups of their own.
They’re a friendly, active bunch who are always willing to extend a helping hand to people treading the waters for the first time.
Inspiration
To get an idea of what a great Mashable Meetup is like, check out the photos below.
Good luck planning your Social Media Day 2012 Meetup. We can’t wait to see what you’re able to put together!
Photos:
Cincinnati
An awesome Social Media Day cake was made for #SMDay Cincinnati, the winners of our Most Social City contest. Photo by Christiaan Todd Photography.
When Mashable took a look at the English Premier League’s social media side last week, the main takeaway was that the 2012 season marked the big social push of the world’s most high-profile soccer league.
But Spain’s LigaBBVA — considered a tier below the EPL on the pitch, although it’s home to powerhouse clubs Real Madrid and FC Barcelona — actually looks to be world soccer’s digital leader. To get the fuller picture, we scoured social media sites, and consulted LigaBBVA as well as the Spanish sports and social media site Sportwist.
Perhaps the place where La Liga’s social media dominance shines most is with its biggest stars. Three of the top four sports-related Twitter accounts are from Spanish soccer — Real Madrid stars Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo have 10.7 and 9.9 million followers, respectively, while the FC Barcelona club account claims almost 5.2 million. Last month, Kaka became the first sports figure ever to break 10 million followers on the the network. Fellow LigaBBVA stars Andres Iniesta, Cesc Fabregas, Gerard Pique, Carlos Puyol, Xabi Alonso and David Villa each top one million followers as well.
The league itself maintains profiles on pretty much all the social web’s major networks — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest and multiple Chinese services.
LigaBBVA engages fans extremely well on Facebook in particular. The league’s official page has more than 1 million fans. During a stretch in April, engagement peaked according to Sportwist, with more than 55% of those fans “talking about” LigaBBVA teams, matches and players — an outstanding level of engagement for a brand in any industry.
LigaBBVA also dominates world soccer leagues on Twitter. The @LigaBBVA profile counts more than 280,000 followers there, compared with the official @premierleague account’s approximately 209,000 followers. LigaBBVA also has a Klout score of 74, compared to the EPL’s score of 70. The German Bundesliga — considered by many the world’s third-best league in overall quality of play — has a Klout score of 49.
On the Chinese social network Sina Weibo, Spain’s soccer league has 155,000 followers, as well as an additional 106,000 fans on the similar Chinese network Ren Ren.
What powers LigaBBVA’s social media popularity? Real Madrid and FC Barcelona, arguably two of the world’s three most popular club teams. Consider this, for example: Barcelona has more than 31 million Facebook fans and about 5.2 million Twitter followers; Real Madrid has over 28 million Facebook fans and 4.7 million Twitter followers. No other LigaBBVA team approaches a combined total of 500,000.
Why do you think LigaBBVA beats out the EPL on social media? Let us know in the comments.
Can better data and algorithms do for venture investing what they did for Wall Street? And now that you’re hearing how that sounds, would we even want them to?
You might have heard of Startup Compass back in April when Techcrunch covered its release of data comparing San Francisco, New York, and London as startup hubs. Originally an academic project, Startup Compass’ first tool, the Startup Genome Compass, is a startup benchmarking dashboard built on data from more than 17,000 businesses. The company announced the tool’s private beta launch today in a blog post that claimed:
Our goal has been to take much of the entrepreneurial wisdom amassed in Silicon Valley and put more structure, science and data behind it, enabling us to better separate myth from fact and share the learnings with the rest of the world…
…just like entrepreneurs, startup ecosystem players like investors, advisors and service providers have relied mostly on gut-level pattern recognition when evaluating and working with startups…
we should not underestimate the power of data to enable new novel applications. Every new industry that data flows into it seems to disrupt. The game of baseball changed when Billy Beane brought in the quants. Wall Street is now run primarily by high frequency trading algorithms designed by quants. Why hasn’t data disrupted the startup world yet?
It’s a long post, littered with intelligent caveats, so if your inclination is to dismiss it, read the whole thing first. The idea is to track key performance indicators across sectors and stages, and then search the data for insights into why startups succeed or fail.
So could data disrupt venture investing? Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge told me it already has, thanks to blogging and social media. Where venture used to be opaque, there now exists “an incredibly transparent process.”
But could efforts to more rigorously apply statistics to startup data transform the art of investing? There he’s skeptical.
“Data is never going to change relationships and the importance of relationships,” he told me.
My inclination is to agree. The case for applying data and even the most basic formal models to areas previously ruled by human intuition is strong and has been demonstrated in predictive domains as diverse as politics and marriage.
But as Bussgang suggested in our conversation, the data that Startup Genome Compass provides will be a useful input, not an algorithm to replace the messy venture process. (As an aside, I wrote two days ago that the venture process clearly involves skill, which is more than can be said for some other areas of finance.)
Where Algorithms Can Help: Crowdfunding
Whether or not Startup Genome Compass will significantly change venture investing, I imagine it could be incredibly useful for the coming crowdfunding wave. Crowdfunding platforms are working to prevent really bad bets, in part to meet requirements of the JOBS Act and in part because they know that perception will matter a lot in these first years.
What if a platform like the Startup Genome Compass could function as a check for non-professional investors? Someone is trying to bet $1000 on a startup that the data indicates has an extremely low chance of making it to its next funding round according to the Compass’s modeling. That investment could be prohibited or even better, just set off an alarm that raises the requirements for completing the investment. Want to invest in a company that the data suggests is about to fail? No problem, but you have to talk to a platform provided investment officer first to ensure you understand what you’re doing.
***
Even if Startup Compass’ claims of disruption are overblown, it’s hard not to be excited about more data on startups. HBS Professor Noam Wasserman’s 10 years of survey data on startups, compiled in a must read book, offered a good check against industry truisms around how to found a successful company. I asked Professor Wasserman about Startup Genome Compass’s vision and here’s what he told me:
I am a huge fan of shining the light of data on the rules of thumb, gut-level decisions, and anecdotes that usually drive entrepreneurial decisions. After all, that’s the core goal of my own research and of my book: To identify which rules, gut-level decisions, and anecdotes are misleading or even dangerous. Steve Jobs exhorted founders to “follow your heart, but check it with your head.” We will never be able to remove all of the “heart” – we definitely should not want to do so! – but data can and should be a powerful complement to it.
And if the startup world’s intuitions are really that good, they shouldn’t have anything to fear.
The discussion at the Mesh 2012 conference (full disclosure: I am a co-founder) touched on a number of different elements of what Carvin did during the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, including two important factors that allowed him to take on the role that he did. The first was the nature of his job at NPR, which — as a senior digital strategist — allowed him to experiment with new tools and take risks. The second was the fact that he already had a number of contacts in the Middle East through his work with Global Voices and other social advocacy groups (Harvard researcher and author David Weinberger, whom I also interviewed at the conference, live-blogged the session with Carvin).
Both of these meant that Carvin was perfectly positioned to do what he did when dissidents started revolting in Tunisia, and then following that in Egypt and Libya. He also noted with a laugh that “it helps when you have ADHD” (which he does), because for several months during the height of those revolutions, he was spending almost every waking minute reading or posting on Twitter, managing several lists of dissidents and thousands of responses from followers. His peak output reached 1,400 tweets a day at one point, whereupon Twitter blocked his account as spam.
Not a newswire, but a crowdsourced newsroom of public editors
But Carvin also talked about how he approached the reporting of real-time events on Twitter, and how he doesn’t really like having what he did called a “newswire.” Instead, he says he prefers to think of it as a crowdsourced newsroom — with him as the reporter, or the anchor (or “news DJ,” another term he likes to use) pulling in reports from different places, and then relying on his followers to act as editors and sources, fact-checking and verifying and also distributing the news that he was curating. As he put it:
I get uncomfortable when people prefer my twitter feed as a newswire. It’s not a newswire. It’s a newsroom. It’s where I’m trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That’s a newsroom.
In many cases, Carvin says, this process worked remarkably well — and quickly. In one photo of Egypt, for example, someone he asked for an opinion said that the corner of a building in the background was clearly a prominent local landmark, and then sent a link to a Google Earth view of the building, allowing Carvin to confirm within minutes that it was the same location. He also gave his followers what he called “fire drills,” in which he would ask them to fact-check photos that he knew were fake and then he would look at how many errors they found.
And what happened when he made a mistake and posted something that wasn’t accurate? In one case, he distributed a photo he thought was of a woman who had been shot in battle and was being attended to by nurses — but it turned out she was actually dead, his followers told him, and her body was being prepared for burial. Carvin says he admitted his mistake multiple times, and then retweeted both the criticisms and the corrections as broadly as possible:
You have to be prepared to be accountable in real time. When I screw up, my followers tell me.
News as a process, and the virtues of being human
The NPR editor, who is now working on a book about his experiences, says he believes in the “news as a process” approach, as author Jeff Jarvis and others have described it — in which not only is the reporting of an event crowdsourced in real time, but new information is added and mistakes are also corrected by readers, who journalism professor Jay Rosen has called “the people formerly known as the audience” (recent events have also shown how social networks like Twitter and Reddit can act as fact-checking engines).
As I tried to argue in a Twitter debate on Friday with a number of people (which Craig Silverman of the Poynter Institute curated with Storify) I think there is a lot of public value in doing what Carvin did, by assembling and fact-checking and correcting information in real time. That’s not to say editors don’t have value, or that reporters shouldn’t try to report things as accurately as possible. But when errors are made, I think admitting them publicly and being seen to correct them (not something traditional media is very good at) actually builds trust.
For me — and I think for Carvin — doing this is connected to a larger principle, and that is the value of being human, and of expressing that humanity, even if it means acknowledging a mistake. The NPR editor also admitted that in some cases he was so disturbed by the videos and images he was seeing from Egypt and elsewhere that he responded on Twitter in a way that he says might not have been professional — but he still felt was justified. As Weinberger noted in his live-blog: “Andy perfectly modeled a committed journalist who remains personal, situated, transparent, and himself.”
This is the kind of thing that mainstream media outlets discourage, just as many try to avoid admitting that they have made mistakes. Restrictive social-media policies put in place by many of these outlets seem designed to remove as many of the elements of being human as possible from the practice of being a journalist — which I think is the exact opposite of what needs to happen if traditional journalism is to survive. And I think Andy Carvin is a pretty good example of what one possible future of real-time, crowdsourced journalism actually looks like.
After finishing the second edition of "Version Control with Git," author Jon Loeliger talked to me about some of the advice he offers and how to use Git effectively as changes to code pile up.
Highlights from the full video interview include:
What's new in Git since the first edition of the book? [Discussed at the 0:38 mark]
Importance of understanding concepts behind Git [Discussed at the 2:40 mark]
How to manage complicated branching [Discussed at the 3:33 mark]
Aspects of Github beyond storage [Discussed at the 6:22 mark]
You can view the entire conversation in the following video:
OSCON 2012 — Join the world's open source pioneers, builders, and innovators July 16-20 in Portland, Oregon. Learn about open development, challenge your assumptions, and fire up your brain.Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR
Chrome/Firefox: Ever run into a video that's blocked because you aren't in a supported region? It's annoying, but ProxMate is a simple extension for Chrome and Firefox that unblocks region-specific content from YouTube, Hulu, and Grooveshark. More »
iOS: The Chronic Dev Team has just released its new jailbreak too, Absinthe 2.0. The jailbreak works with the new iPad, iPhone 4S, and all previous models running iOS 5.1.1. More »