Ariel Waldman

My frequency of blogging has gone down lately. Is it because of the pervasiveness of microblogging? For the most part, no. The answer is that I’m consuming a LOT more information than outputting, which leaves little time to share all the great things I’m learning about at the end of the day.

A great book I’m currently reading is The Psychology of the Internet by Patricia Wallace. The last edition was from 2001, so a lot has changed, but it takes on concepts and issues that exist and are still considered progressive today. So far, the book provides great insights into the reasons behind a lot of online behavior. Another great book I’m digging into is How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python. I’m by no means a developer, but I’m insatiably hungry to learn new things, so I’ve been toying around with the very basics of Python for fun. I definitely recommend this book if you have no experience with coding.

Another type of research I’ve been casually looking into is my referral links from Google that won’t reveal your name, but will reveal what search terms you typed in to get to my site. Here’s just a sample few:

• “I have a friend who is being stalked and harassed”
• “can the state or federal courts stop a stalker from continually using the courts to continue his stalking and harassment?”
• “why internet harassment in work should be bad”
• “aol tos me when i was being harassed”
• “how to harass someone on twitter”
• “can i file a harassment suit if i’m being harassed over the phone?”
• “can a banned user sue?”
• “twitter safety stalking”
• “my employer sent me some random item after firing me, can i sue for harrassment?”
• “isp tos violations liability case”
• “can you give a cease and desist letter for someone stalking you on the internet”
• “i’m being stalked how do use a private mail box as my physical address”
• “can someone be arrested for identity theft for less than $60″
• “when harasser starts more trouble after restraining order is giving”
• “does twitter track ip addresses”
• “twitter.com is not responding in a sane manner”

That is just a small sample of things people are looking to find out more about. It really hits me hard when I see that someone came to my site after typing into Google that they’re being stalked or harassed and are looking for resources.

Cyberstalking and harassment on-and-offline has been an ongoing topic I’ve talked with people about for years. From helping build site architecture and standards to sharing stories and screencaps, the one insight I have is that there is not enough awareness or education about these issues. Often times, people have good intentions with building sites and services, but may simply overlook taking these into consideration. Other times, I have read very gut-wrenching interactions. A personal example is when I have discussed publicly about being stalked. Some women decided to assume that I was delicately-skinned about mean blog comments and that I was grossly misusing the term “stalker” instead of them taking the time to *ask* me if their assumptions were correct (at which point I would’ve explained the long-term offline threat to my physical safety and that I had contacted the authorities before, but had chosen not to disclose those details in a blog post).

Of the resources that do exist, almost all are geared towards children and parenting. An interesting resource I stumbled across recently is a Teach Digital wiki about “Safe Digital Social Networking (DSN) -or- Proactive Approaches to Address Cyberbullying and Digital Social Networking”. I would love to work on a resource guide for these types of issues that expands the reach beyond just children.

Other interesting things I’ve been reading through (thanks to my lawgeek friend) include various laws concerning online behavior. Some great ones to follow are:

• “The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals today upheld a lower court ruling striking down the controversial Child Online Protection Act (COPA) that required Web operators to restrict access to large amounts of constitutionally protected speech.  COPA placed severe restrictions on a wide range of legal, socially valuable speech, including content relating to sexual identity, health and art. CDT, which has filed friend-of-the-court briefs opposing COPA and supporting parental empowerment technology, applauds the ruling. July 22, 2008″
• New Missouri law on online harassment and cyberstalking.

There are a ton of other things I’m consuming lately (not all of them so “dark”), but this has turned out to be a long post already! Hopefully I can get back into a more regular blogging routine again soon.

photo by Sami Niemelä

In addition to SWAT Summit, I had the pleasure of attending one of PSFK’s conferences in San Francisco this past week. PSFK is known for trend insights and bringing together unique and intelligent people from a variety of disciplines.

After a brief introduction by PSFK founder Piers Fawkes, Ed Cotton (BSSP) talked about why you should care about trends. Ed stated that trends are just stuff, from guerilla gardeners to cupcakes. Super-saturated society is not a new concept and inspiration for trends can come from anywhere, whether it be an RSS feed or a flower. The presentation talked about other “not new” concepts like how consumers own a brand and not the brand itself. This old concept got me thinking about the web 2.0 landscape and how social networks quite possibly are a smidge behind brands in learning this lesson. Many social networks/services/apps are still struggling with the idea that the community owns the service and not the service itself (a statement for a separate post that I intend to write more at length about).

Next on the agenda was San Francisco Snapshot with Colin Nagy (Attention), Amit Gupta (Photojojo), Jeremy Townsend (Ghetto Gourmet), Kevin Allison (Financial Times) and Liz Dunn (Funny Or Die). After living in San Francisco for almost a year now and loving it, this was a great session for me to sit in on. San Francisco is fairly unique - despite being geographically smaller, it tends to hold its own internationally. The panel discussed how the time shift of the Pacific Time Zone from the rest of the world (e.g. we wake up later and are the last ones to go to sleep in the U.S.) allows for innovation. Someone in the audience asked about how SF residents come off as very smug about everything and I really enjoyed Liz Dunn’s answer. Liz smiled and said (I’m quoting from memory), “well, it’s like LA has the celebrities and New York has the financial power, and we (SF) are like the nerds saying “well, I didn’t want to hang out with them anyway!”. Our celebrities in SF are like Steve Jobs, a nerd, and I think that says a lot about who we are”.

The rest of the conference featured more brilliant minds and inspiring talks. Andrew Hoppin (NASA) and Ezra Cooperstein (Current TV) discussed how they engage and collaborate with individuals and communities from around the world. Gareth Kay (Modernista), Eric Corey Freed (Organic Architect), Frank Striefler (Media Arts Lab) and Josh Morenstein (fuseproject) gave examples of how to make inspiration matter. One of the most notable examples was an architect asking about the menstrual behaviors of a client - the client confessed that she wanted a wall that was three feet in front of the toilet because when she experienced cramps growing up, she would put her feet on the wall in front of her. By taking the time to learn such intimate details about the client, the architect was able to design a house that truly worked on a custom level.

Listening to so many positive examples and people was inspiring and comforting to know that many are dedicated to making positive changes across the world on a one-by-one basis.

The first ever SWAT Summit kicked off this last week in San Francisco. The aim of the conference was to help advertisers effectively enter and work with social networks.

Due to unfortunate scheduling, I was only able to make it for the last half of the one-day event (earlier in the day I was attending PSFK’s conference). My friend and colleague, Steve Hall of Adrants, had the honor of speaking at two sessions, one of which was The Science of Measuring Campaign Success (User Metrics and Engagement). The session included Ian Swanson (Sometrics), Kim Kochaver (Federated Media), Troy Young (VideoEgg), and Anna Banks (McCann Worldgroup). Steve grilled everyone on if the case studies they were presenting actually worked at the end of the day, and it was obvious that some of the panelists were agitated by this question.

The panelists discussed how demographic targeting/analyzing tools in Facebook were making it easier for clients and ad agencies to measure success in social media. I couldn’t help but raise my hand and ask if this was actually considered progress. By these standards, it seems like advertising is making little to no progress by taking the same solution (demographics, impressions, etc.) and trying to force-fit it into a new problem (social media). I’ve been ranting for a while that demographics are dead. It seems like advertisers are taking the easy way out by using traditional metrics and refusing to spend effort towards educating clients about what is relevant in social media. Additionally, I never once heard the panel mention the idea of building custom metrics based on social media analysis and relevance to the individual project.

I think it’s important for conferences like SWAT Summit to talk about these issues, but I wish there was more representation from the social media side (for the half of the day I was there, it seemed very advertiser-heavy).

Day 2 of Supernova 2008 kicked off this week with a variety of panels to choose from. While many of the Web 2.0-ers were getting settled in the Open Flow Track, MC-ed by Tantek Çelik, , I joined the alternative crowd for the Privacy and Security in the Network Age panel.

The session started with the overarching ideas around privacy. Online, everything we do creates data and/or a transaction. A lot of privacy concerns are no longer about who you are, but what you do. Typical “duh” factors exist such as technology is always moving faster than laws. Even when laws are made, they risk being ineffective, as many have seen in the case of the CAN-SPAM Act, or lacking true protection, as with the company-not-user-data-protection under Sarbanes-Oxley. Bruce Schneier, of BT Counterpane, brought up various points about how he views the reality of privacy. In the “security vs. privacy” argument (e.g. you have to give up your privacy to gain security) Schneier stated that you should call bullshit on that false dichotomy, giving examples such as burglar alarms, and that the reality is about “liberty vs. control”.

Fran Maier, of TrustE, went on to elaborate that a lot of the current architecture for privacy online is a question of “choice or consent”. Examples like Facebook were given as case studies of more granular privacy controls. I have recently made similar remarks about FireEagle’s consideration of location privacy. Focusing on overall online privacy (not just focused on social networking), the panelists agreed that intrusion issues of spam and phishing were not about privacy, but rather about control. With issues of control, entrepreneurs can often take advantage by providing anti-spam/virus products. This made me question why, with the open APIs on social networks, no one has built a similar solution for blocking spammers/trolls/stalkers from friending you? It has been discussed before with all the chatter around data portability and XFN to include the ability to port your “block list” from network to network as well, but we’ve yet to see this come to fruition.

More importantly, the panel called for a system of accountability for privacy and security. It was stated that security includes how you live everyday (e.g. living in fear). Public shaming of companies used to work as one of the only ways to get them to increase their lack of security measures, but with data breeches being reported more often now, the press barely makes a mention of it anymore. While that is certainly a negative, the positive effect has been that it’s now a lot easier to resolve identity theft. Since identity theft is so common, companies know how to deal with it. On average, a victim of new account fraud loses only about $40 and 10 hours to clean it all up. Again, I have to wonder if the Web 2.0 companies will ever reach a time where dealing with identity theft, stalking, harassment, abuse, etc. will become so common that they (like credit card companies today) will know how to deal with it without putting their victim consumers through more trouble? I raised this question to the panel, who seemed pessimistic about that prospect. Unlike credit card companies, social networks have little if any financial incentive to provide security, and as such, it will most likely always take a second priority.

In the end, Schneier said that society may not be ready to handle privacy - similar to pollution, it may take a good 20 years or so for the masses to truly wrap their heads around it and do something.

This made me giggle. (Thanks, Adam!)

Additionally, Jeremy Toeman posted Working With Consultants: Some Dos and Don’ts

Supernova 2008 held day 1 of the three-day conference yesterday in San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. The opening session tackled “defining the challenges”, which was admittedly a fairly vague title. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, started off the session taking about the characteristics of organizing groups online and offline. Shirky pointed to prospering examples of organizing groups online such as the Meetup Alliance.

The presentation pointed out a number of case studies to gain insights from. From a flashmob being arrested in Belarus for organizing a collective “everyone eat ice cream at the same time” event to Xerox’s lack of source code in 1980, characteristic contrasts were made between the ease of online versus offline. It was explained that density and continuity in niche groups used to exist due to inconvenience, but those same aspects need to now exist by design online in order to be able to network and organize effectively.

Questions from the audience asked for advice on “community management” (or, lack of a better English phrase, as Kevin Marks stated). Shirky said that a self-policing communities often take care of the problems that arise. Later, Shirky clarified, to my concern of the possibilities for a community run by mob rule, that this mostly works and works when the community knows they can “call a cop at key moments”.

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Google I/O, a two day developer gathering in San Francisco. The first session I sat in on was OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web with Patrick Chanezon, Kevin Marks, and Chris Schalk from Google. The session aimed to answer “what does social mean?” and “how do we socialize objects online without having to create yet another social network?”.

While APIs provide data for friends, profiles, and activities in social networks, different APIs make it difficult for developers. This is where OpenSocial comes in. Based on HTML+Javascript+REST+OAuth, OpenSocial was promoted in the session as an easier way to develop applications for a variety of participating social networks at once. With upwards of 275 million user distribution, OpenSocial can definitely be seen as an API that opens the flood gates.

While OpenSocial is great for developers, what do users get out of it? Chanezon, Marks, and Schalk explained that the users are able to then use more applications. More applications aren’t necessarily a good thing, however, like in the case of Facebook where many users are experiencing the fatigue of using applications that lack relevance.

Marks discussed how containers (e.g. social networks) don’t choose users - they simply grow through homophily and affinity, sometimes bringing unexpected user bases. Because of this, OpenSocial provides a sense that specialization is no longer required. Though the lack of specializing may benefit the developers, I think it may hurt the users in the long-run. A lack of application specialization based on each individual network often overlooks the intricacies and quirks that resonate with the individual userbase, thus creating a less-than-ideal user experience and a lack of unique value propositions. OpenSocial may represent progress for open standards, but not if it means an outbreak of “Zombies vs. Vampires” starts following you from network to network.

(artwork by Cindy Li)

The first ever CupcakeCamp (inspired by BarCamp and the constant cupcake gatherings in New York) is coming to San Francisco this Sunday! CupcakeCamp was created by Cindy Li, Lynn, Marianne Masculino and myself with support from the cupcake-loving community.

To RSVP to CupcakeCamp, go here. We also have a wiki here.

Cupcakes Take The Cake recently interviewed me about CupcakeCamp and my personal cupcake views.

Can’t wait!

Wow, totally did not expect today to be as overwhelming as it was. There are a lot of things being thrown around, some valid and others completely nonsensical, so I’d like to clear a few of them up (hoping to be less long-winded than my last post).

Twitter did respond, twice on Get Satisfaction, first here and then here. The general reaction seems mixed with some people satisfied by Twitter’s response while others are not. A lot of the friction seems to be around how Twitter should be perceived. A decent portion of Twitter users see the service as a community (similar to Flickr), while Twitter chooses to view themselves as a “communication utility” (similar to AT&T). But ultimately, this is an issue of accountability. And Twitter’s strategy of revising their Terms of Service rather than living up to the agreements they made with users is troubling.

To be clear, it wasn’t my intention to bring a mob with pitchforks to Twitter’s door. I don’t believe in mob-rule and again, I like Twitter and the people who work there.

It was my intention to speak out about a community management issue and to focus on the decisions a company made. I did not write this to “cry”, “whine”, or be “insecure” about being called a “c—”. To put it bluntly, I’m not and I certainly don’t let things like this ruin my day. I feel like it’s a prerequisite for any blogger or person who puts themselves “out there” to have a thick skin. Yes, the reality of the internet is dealing with these issues - Violet Blue has a great post called “Every girl online is fat, ugly and unsexy. Here’s how to get over it“. If I didn’t feel like I could “deal” with these issues, I wouldn’t be involved in any of the things I am.

The issue *is* about the decisions that were made and answers I was given directly from Twitter. It didn’t seem like they had a process or policy to their TOS and did not handle it as well as other services had. Overall, it came off as inexperience with community management issues.

Admittedly, a couple of Ev’s tweets were off-putting, but this was a rough day and I don’t think that anyone was very happy by the end of it. I feel that some of his frustration may be from the fact that a number of people (both publicly and privately) told me cases where Twitter had banned a user for more extreme violations. In my post, I outline that in my phone conversation with Jack:

I asked Jack if Twitter had ever dealt with stalkers or banning people before and he told me they never had.

It was pretty clear in conversation and I remember being shocked about that fact afterwards. Neither here nor there, it seems to be a miscommunication, and I’m glad people are sharing their different experiences with me.

This has generated SO many opinions, and I very much appreciate the critical and supportive sides to this. It’s extremely inspiring that people feel as passionately about these topics as I do, whether or not they agree with me or Twitter.

So, I’m not quite sure yet where this leaves everything. As stated earlier, it seems to come down to a disagreement over how some people view Twitter and how they view themselves.

(Note: I turned comments off on the last blog post, because after 276 comments and your own mother finally chiming in at the end, there’s probably little else to say that hasn’t already been said). (Comments are now closed on this post as well).

Update: Copying and pasting from my last post for those not wanting to click-through: This is already disclosed in the about section of this blog already, but I am stating it again here at the request of others: I am the community manager for Pownce, however, this issue started before I was working at Pownce. The opinions stated here do not reflect my clients/employers and I did *not* write this in the interest of them. It is well known that I am not a Twitter-hater (much the opposite).

Update 3: Please see my follow-up post about Twitter’s response.
I started using Twitter in March 2007, just before their SXSW explosion. Not surprisingly, I instantly became addicted and since then have used the service for everything from personal to professional.

Overall, Twitter is a great platform to connect with friends and co-workers and it felt safe in an “everyone knows everyone” sort of way in the beginning. However, as with any social network that continues to grow (especially one that focuses on broadcasting messages to the masses), it opens itself up to the prospect of abuse, harassment, spam, and other types of typical Terms of Service violations. Considering the social network-sphere as it exists today, most people would assume that Twitter would be prepared to react and take action against TOS violations - their TOS page even states “(These terms of service were inspired, with permission, by Flickr.)” - Flickr being well-known for taking action on TOS violations, even when the violations are debatable.

As I found out last month, the reality of Twitter is that they refuse to warn and/or ban people who use their service to “abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users” (to quote their forth line item on their TOS page). What does this mean? In short, anyone can use Twitter to consistently harass you and ruin search results for your identity and Twitter won’t execute any means of community management.

In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter’s community manager and received a response that let me know they cared about the situation:

“[We] have decided, as a preemptive measure, to remove [the user’s] updates from the public timeline. … If you have anymore problems with [this user], please let us know right away, we’re here to help :)”

The harassment continued throughout the course of 2007. Since Twitter and I had an open dialog started, I would periodically report cases of continuing harassment (some of which spread between Flickr and Twitter). Twitter would take no action while Flickr would immediately ban and remove all traces of the harassment.

Unfortunately, in 2008 it escalated to a level that could no longer be ignored. Tweets were being fired off directly calling me a “cunt” amongst other harassing language. On March 14, I wrote to Twitter, giving the example URLs of abuse and stated to them clearly:

“Since this is an ongoing case and due to the nature of the content, I think this person is clearly violating Twitter’s TOS and I find it necessary for Twitter to uphold to this: “4. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.” Honestly, I believe this harassment has gotten way out of hand for too long. I am writing to you and to Twitter to remove this user for consistent long-term harassment.”

Twitter responded after 3 days:

“Unfortunately, although [this user’s] behavior is admittedly mean, [s/he] isn’t necessarily doing anything against our terms of service. I’ve been following [their] profile since your first complaint to monitor [them], as well. We can’t remove [this user’s] profile or ban [this user’s] IP address; [they’re] not doing anything illegal.”

To which I replied (at which point, Jack, Twitter’s CEO was copied):

“I don’t believe this is a case of illegal activity - this is a clear case of harassment which is outlined in your TOS.

To be blunt, I find that someone using your service to call me a “cunt” in a public forum is defined as harassment.

Again, your TOS states:
“4. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.”

It’s Twitter’s responsibility to uphold the TOS, otherwise the TOS has no meaning.”

At this point, Jack responded requesting a phone discussion about the issue. My notes from the phone call on March 19:

I told Jack that it the harassment has escalated and that it was a very clear violation of their TOS and that I had had similar cases of harassment on Flickr in which Flickr took down all 3 of the harassing accounts. I asked Jack if Twitter had ever dealt with stalkers or banning people before and he told me they never had. Jack explained that they’re scared to ban someone because they’re scared if it turned into a lawsuit that they are too small of a company to handle it.

Jack additionally explained that their TOS was up for interpretation, to which I responded that it isn’t. I explained that it clearly states “You must not harass other Twitter users” and that harassment is defined as continuous small attacks, which this is.

Jack then asked me about what other social networks had done. I said that Flickr deleted all the profiles and that services like Digg and Pownce don’t think twice about banning abusive or harassing users because it’s part of the TOS. (Note: Flickr is known for asking users to take down content and/or banning accounts that might even very loosely be *considered* as harassment, which, again, I find interesting, considering at the end of Twitter’s TOS, it states: “(These terms of service were inspired, with permission, by Flickr.)”).

Jack asked me what good it would do to ban my stalker since it seemed obvious that the stalker would continue to stalk me elsewhere. I told him that it was not his nor Twitter’s responsibility nor business to stop my stalker, but that it was very much their responsibility to identify users violating their TOS on their own service and take action accordingly.

At the end of the conversation, Jack asked me “well, what would be a happy resolution for you?”. I responded saying that seeing the user who is consistently harassing me banned. I told him that I totally support Twitter and want to see them do well and was trying to understand their fear of getting sued, so I said that at the “EXTREMELY least” that Twitter needed to send the user harassing me a warning, that Twitter didn’t owe the user any information other than the fact that they had been reported as violating their TOS and to cease or be banned. I very much stressed that Twitter needs to send users violating TOS a warning at the very least if they don’t ban. Jack then said he would need to talk to their lawyers about that and would get back to me by the end of the next week.

Jack didn’t get back to me until I emailed him on April 9 with 8 new instances of abuse that included my full name and email address, attached to words like “crack-whore” and “lesbian porn”, to which he emailed me back a response:

“Ariel,

Apologies for the delay here. We’ve reviewed the matter and decided it’s not in our best interest to get involved. We’ve tasked our lawyers with a full review and update of our TOS.

Thank you for your patience and understanding and good luck with resolving the problem.

Best,
Jack.”

Thanks, Twitter. It’s great to know that your Terms of Service that you force everyone to agree to don’t mean anything.

Update: I’ve also started a topic on Get Satisfaction about the issue that also outlines how Twitter’s excuse of being sued holds no ground under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Update 2: This is already disclosed in the about section of this blog already, but I am stating it again here at the request of others: I am the community manager for Pownce, however, this issue started before I was working at Pownce. The opinions stated here do not reflect my clients/employers and I did *not* write this in the interest of them. It is well known that I am not a Twitter-hater (much the opposite).