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18 July 2011

Google News adds Badges

Via Nick Diakopoulos, I see that Google News has added badges, awarded for reading an number of articles on a certain topics. You earn them privately and can then share them. Nick has some thoughts on his blog.

I agree with a lot of Nick’s thoughts. Having validated reading behavior is useful – though it’s also interesting to get the difference between what topics people read and what topics people want others to know they read. As Nick points out, it might be a way for people to communicate to others that they are an expert on a topic – or at least an informed reader, as I suspect that experts may have other channels for following the topics about which they care most.

Though BunchBall sort of looks down on the quantified self aspect, I do think it’s useful to give people feedback on what they are reading (sort of like last.fm) for news topics rather than what they think they read, though badges probably aren’t quite as data-rich as I’d want. At Michigan, we’re trying a similar experiment as part of the BALANCE project shortly, to assess whether feedback on past reading behavior affects the balance of political articles that subjects read.

If people do care about earning the badges, either to learn about their reading behavior or to share with others as a sign of their expertise or interests, then they’ll probably read more of their news through Google news – so that it is tracked in more detail. Thus, a win for Google, who gets the pageviews and data.

Google, why do you want me to earn a Kindle badge?

Influence When I first visited, I was encouraged to earn a Kindle badge. I couldn’t figure this out. Yeah, it’s an interesting product, but I don’t want to read a lot of news about it and a review of my Google News history showed that I never had through the site. So why, of all the >500 badges that Google could suggest to me (many for topics I read lots about), is it suggesting Kindle and only Kindle? If left me wondering if it was a random recommendation, if whatever Google used to suggest a badge was not very good for me, or it was a sponsored badge intended to get me to read more about Kindles (speaking of potential wins for Google…).

Whatever the case, this highlights a way that badges could push reading behavior – assuming that people want to earn, or want to avoid earning, badges. This can run both ways. Maybe someone is motivated by gadget badges and so reads more about Kindles; maybe someone doesn’t think of themselves as interested in celebrities or media and is thus pushed to read fewer articles about those topics than they were before. I’m not saying this is bad, per se, as feedback is an important part of self-regulation, but if badges matter to people, the simple design choice of which badges to offer (and promote) will be influential, just as the selection and presentation of articles are.

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21 June 2011

Sunlight Labs’ Inbox Influence: Sunlight or Sunburn?

Last week, Sunlight Labs released Inbox Influence, a set of browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox) and bookmarklets that annotate senders and entities in the body of emails with who has contributed to them and to whom they have contributed.

I really like the idea of using browser plugins to annotate information people encounter in their regular online interactions. This is something we’re doing on a variety of projects here, including AffectCheck, BALANCE, and Rumors. I think that tools that combine personal data, in-situ, with more depth can teach people more about with whom and with what they are interacting, and this just in time presentation of information is an excellent opportunity to persuade and possibly to prompt reflection. Technically, it’s also a pretty nice implementation.

There are some reasons why this tool may not be so great, however. With Daniel Avrahami, Sunny Consolvo, James Fogarty, Batya Friedman, and Ian Smith, I recently published a paper about people’s attitudes toward the online availability of US public records, including campaign contribution records such as the ones on which Inbox Influence draws. Many respondents to our survey (mailed, no compensation, likely biased toward people who care more about this issue) expressed discomfort with these records being so easily accessible, and less than half (as of 2008) even knew that campaign contribution records were available online before they received the survey. Nearly half said that they wanted some sort of change, and a third said that this availability would alter their future behavior, i.e., they’d contribute less (take this with a grain of salt, since it is about hypothetical future behavior).

Unless awareness and attitudes have changed quite a bit from 2008, tools such as Inbox Influence create privacy violations. The data is being used and presented in ways that people did not anticipate at the time when they made the decision to donate, and at least some people are “horrified” or at least uncomfortable with this information being so easily accessible. Perhaps we just need to do better at educating potential donors about in what ways campaign contribution data may be used (and anticipate future mashups), though it is also possible that tools like this do not need to be made, or could benefit from being a bit more nuanced in when and about whom they load information.

Speaking personally, I’m not sure how I feel. On the one hand, I think that campaign contributions and other other actions should be open to scrutiny and should have consequences. If you take the money you earn from your business and donate it to support Prop 8, I want the opportunity to boycott your business. If you support a politician who wants to eviscerate the NSF, I might want to engage you in conversation about that. On the other hand, I don’t like the idea that my campaign contribution history (anything above the reporting limit) might be loaded automatically when I email a professional colleague or a student. That’s just not relevant—or even appropriate—to the context. And there are some friendships among political diverse individuals that may survive, in part, because those differences are not always made salient. So it also seems like Inbox Influence or tools that let you load, with a click, your Facebook friends’ contribution history, could sometimes cause harm.

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17 July 2008

Smart Mobs, iPhone 3G, and AT&T’s Direct Fulfillment process

This is an iPhone post. I’d been waiting to replace my sometimes-barely functioning phone for a good while, so, like many others, I showed up at a local AT&T store on Friday in hopes of getting my iPhone. After spending an embarrassing amount of time in line, and shortly before getting to the front, we were told that the store was out. No problem, I’d place an order and get it when it shows up.

I didn’t think too much about it until a few days later when someone who ordered the same model and color phone at the same store several hours after me mentioned that their phone had shipped. Mine hadn’t, so the sequence of order fulfillment seemed a bit strange. Curious and confused, I turned to Google. This led me to several threads and blog posts discussing AT&T’s Direct Fulfillment system, the longest of which is a now 220-page thread on AT&T’s own customer support system. The discussion in this thread is interesting to me as a customer and as a student. Though the thread contains a bit of vitriol, misinformation, and even paranoia, the posters are able to work together to build a fairly coherent model of AT&T’s direct fulfillment process.

The thread starts out with questions about whether others have received their phones — customers’ questions that can help them calibrate their own expectations. Some eager customers soon noticed that in addition to checking their own order status, AT&T’s order status system allows users to view and track orders from others in their zip code by simply incrementing the order number in the URL. From this, users notice that some orders, placed after their own unshipped orders, have already shipped — is the system unfair somehow, or are some models just shipping sooner? The posters share information and anecdotes that confirm that at least some orders for the same model and color of phone are being posted out of order.

Elsewhere on the web, Greg de Vitry builds a tool that scrapes a range of order numbers and aggregates data from several users to count total daily shipments. The tool’s users see the tool’s shipment tally and begin questioning AT&T’s official statement that they are shipping tens of thousands of orders per day. Greg soon updates his tool to collect model numbers, which again confirms that orders are not being shipped according to first-in-first-out. As more users enter their information, it becomes plausible (if not likely) that forum readers and users of the tool have a better overview of the direct fulfillment process than many of AT&T’s own frontline employees.

The thread’s users eventually begin to seek media attention, hoping that if they expose the number of unshipped orders and haphazard fashion in which they are being filled, Apple and AT&T will be embarrassed enough to ship them their phones faster or compensate them. Users post to CNN’s iReport and email Fox News.

In addition to sharing information, the thread’s posters are telling jokes, commiserating together, and wishing each other luck. The conversation feels very similar to the conversations in the line outside of the AT&T store on Friday, except the forum posters have more diversity in information and can share it with the entire virtual line much more easily than they could with the local lines.

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