TechCrunch
Obama's NSA Panel Is Dead Before It Even Starts, Lacks Tech And Telco Execs
As part of his promises regarding better oversight of the National Security Agency, President Obama called for expert external opinion on where the lines of privacy should be drawn:
Fourth, we’re forming a high-level group of outside experts to review our entire intelligence and communications technologies. We need new thinking for a new era. We now have to unravel terrorist plots by finding a needle in the haystack of global telecommunications. And meanwhile, technology has given governments — including our own — unprecedented capability to monitor communications. – President Obama.
And yet, no. Obama’s panel is not a set of outsiders in the slightest. As some have pointed out in recent days, the group is instead a slurry of insiders, former insiders, and a previous colleague of the president’s.
Member Michael Morell is from the CIA, Richard Clarke is former national security, Cass Sunstein is ex-Obama White House, Peter Swire was part of the Clinton administration, and Geoffrey Stone is also University Chicago stock, same as the president.
Stone, at a minimum, is part of the ACLU, and thus might have a bit of a backbone on the privacy side of things. But the group is surprisingly un-outsidery, and hardly undogmatic. This has not gone unnoticed. However, something that fewer have noticed is that the group contains no technology or telecom folk.
This is almost comical, as we are arguing over digital and telephonic surveillance. PRISM, tapping of fiber-optic cables, storing the nation’s phone records, and forcing telcos to send huge swatches of the Internet to the NSA, and yet not a single voice from the industries impacted will take part.
In the age of cynicism, this must be a high point.
The group is in fact a good mix of people from the establishment who have perspectives on security, but it is utterly incomplete. To exclude from the conversation companies that are directly impacted by the NSA — bullied is probably a better word — is to silence possible dissent. And that is the opposite of open, or fair.
Not that in this discussion there has been much proffered openness of fairness, but when the president assembles a panel of “outsiders” to examine current policy, one could hope for a bit of each. In the assembled group, those in favor of curtailing the NSA’s surveillance activities couldn’t win a voice vote. That’s not so good, really.
If we are going to legally force tech and telco firms to hand over private information of regular folks, they deserve a hand in the discussion. Unless, naturally, the meetings are a sham in the hopes of quieting public outrage and dissent. In that case, a few former insiders can be tossed together for a chat that will mean little and accomplish less. Which appears to be the case.
At each stage of the NSA revelation saga, the government has obfuscuated or offered little. This is another example of the latter.
Top Image Credit: Mark Skrobola
Twitter Reverses The Flow Of Its Timeline In Effort To Humanize It For Newbies
Twitter just flipped the format of its timeline with a new conversation view. The full timeline will still show in the traditional ‘newest stuff at the top’ view, but now there are linked conversations which display tweets in an easier-to-understand format.
At first glance, this might seem like a simple update that links related tweets together with a thin blue line and a fancy expandable box. But the reasons for this go deeper than just making it easier to read. It’s also making it feel more human and less Twitter.
The new view is rolling out on Twitter.com, as well as in the iPhone and Android apps and features an ‘old’ tweet first, with newer replies to it in order afterwards.
Here’s an example of an expanded conversation in a timeline (only a couple of the replies are visible until you spread them out):
Note the timestamps along the side. Instead of the traditional ‘countdown’ as you go up, the tweets actually get older, not newer. This is a reversal of the way that Twitter has worked before. And, at least to my eye, it’s much easier to follow conversations when you’re reading them chronologically from the oldest tweet through replies that add to the discussion.
From the beginning, Twitter has had its own system of communication. Third-party developers helped define the conventions like the @ symbol, the RT and more, but that system has grown increasingly opaque to new users of the service. As with any network, the conventions grow organically to include in-jokes, little nooks of oddness and big swaths of unintelligible conversation.
Twitter had backed itself right into a similar situation by letting the audience define those conventions for so long. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, Twitter wouldn’t be half of what it is if those early enthusiasts hadn’t stretched and pulled the SMS messenger into its current shape. But, if Twitter wants to execute on its plan of embracing media companies and new users that will actually interact with and engage, it now needs to make things simpler and more coherent.
Recently, at the D11 conference, CEO Dick Costolo indicated that Twitter need to address this communication issue:
As far as what Costolo says that Twitter is missing, he says “simplicity”. ”Bridging the gap between the awareness of what Twitter is and…going in and understanding what it is right away.”
That gap is what happens when you have people who are deeply invested in a platform, and others who find the complex jargon and mechanics of Twitter confusing. Costolo specifically called out the ‘period before a user name’ behavior when you want a reply to be seen by all as confusing. “Because of the 140 character constraint, users have created this remarkable language for communication,” he says.
“Public real-time conversational distributed” is where Twitter wants to ‘enhance its abilities’. That’s where Costolo says that they’re spending almost all of their time. This is one of the reasons that Costolo says that they haven’t put a lot of time into private group chat.
Instead of private group chat, we now have ‘public group chat’.
That being said — the conversation view is bound to cause some complaints among long-time users. There’s a bit of jumping around involved with conversations expanding and contracting. When tweets are replied to, the conversation also gets pushed upwards in your timeline, moving whole bunches of tweets at once.
There’s also the fact that the conversations, while making linked tweets easier to read, arguably make the timeline itself harder to read. Twitter is emphasizing atomic units of conversation over a ‘big stream of sayings’. For better or for worse.
As a side note, when do you think Twitter will remove handles from its feed altogether, relying on the name field alone? That will make it even more ‘human’ and could free up a few more characters if they move the handle to a ‘metadata’ field.
There’s also an interesting side effect to conversations in that you’ll only see people who you follow in a ‘collapsed’ view, but when you expand it you’re going to see the whole shebang, including new users that are unfamiliar to you.
That has the potential to raise some eyebrows when it comes to newbies seeing ‘strange’ people in their feed, but the tradeoffs could be worth it. Remember: Twitter is always looking for ways to encourage users to follow new people. More than almost any other network, you only get out of Twitter what you ‘follow’ into it.
If you happen to tap into a conversation now, and see a new user with a clever reply to one of the folks you follow, you might very well decide to follow them. That’s a clever little bonus to this new view.
The new conversation view isn’t just about making it easier to read connected stuff though, it’s also about taking advantage of the unique nature of Twitter. This harkens back to the ‘Town Hall’ jargon Twitter seems to be enamored with lately. These aren’t just linked conversations, they’re linked conversations that are happening in real-time. That’s something that no other network currently has going for it at such a scale and in public.
There is a ton of stuff going on in the messenger space, with WhatsApp garnering hundreds of millions of users, Instagram tweaking its platform to be ‘messenger’ friendly and Facebook surfacing messaging features in a big way. But Twitter might actually scoop them all by making itself more welcoming to coherent, readable conversations. (And it also helps explain why Twitter wanted control of its basic experience so badly that it cut third-party developers off at the knees.)
At least, that’s what it’s likely hoping, or it wouldn’t have changed the fundamental building blocks of the service in such a major way today. The timeline is no longer immutable. It’s been bent and will continue to be bent in the service of Twitter’s grand plan. Who knows what it might look like soon enough.
Founder Stories: Zendesk's Mikkel Svane On Applying Customer Service To Business
Can you measure corporate performance based on customer happiness? According to my Founder Stories guest this week, Zendesk’s Mikkel Svane, happiness is actually an important metric in the business of customer service.
What has happened over the last five or six years is that the notion of customer service has changed from just being this call center to something where you can create real meaningful long-term relationships with your customers and think about it as a revenue center.”
Zendesk produces a customer service platform that is used by more than 30,000 businesses worldwide. Started five years ago in Denmark, the once “virtual bootstrap” startup now has 400 employees and is experiencing at least 100 percent growth year over year. In our conversation, Mikkel and I discuss why he decided to move Zendesk to the U.S., how to create corporate culture when a third of the company works locally, and why Zendesk is opening an office in Madison, Wis.
We try to keep this culture of exchanging a lot and traveling a lot and really getting to know each other as people. I think getting the individual people to meet each other is kind of the platform for building good structures that can scale globally.”
Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.
Twitter Updates Android, iOS And Web With New Conversation View, Abuse Reporting
Twitter has just released an update for iOS, Android and the web application with a brand new interface for conversations, as well as enhanced sharing and abuse reporting capabilities. According to the official blog post, the idea is to make it easier to follow and discover conversations.
With the updates, users will see full conversations between people they follow in their timeline as opposed to standalone @replies that may be sent hours or even days after the original tweet (the conversation starter) was sent.
This always allowed for strange, context-free tweets in the consumption experience, but with the new update users will have a bit more understanding of what’s being tweeted back in forth in a conversation.
Conversations are shown with a blue vertical line between them, with the first tweet in a conversation appearing on top, chronologically. If there are more than two replies, you can click into the blue line to see all the replies in that conversation.
This is a pretty major update to the way that Twitter works and is fundamental to getting a larger demographic on a social network that can be pretty scary and unfamiliar at first.
But that’s not all. The update also lets you share conversations via email, as well as the ability to share individual tweets by email on either iPhone or Android. Android users even have the benefit of sharing tweets via PM within Twitter.
Past the conversations revamp, Twitter has also included the ability to report individual tweets for abuse or spam directly from the web and Android apps, which was previously unavailable. The feature, which has been available on iPhone for quite a while, will roll out slowly.
The updates are available now in the Apple App Store and Google Play.
Take a look at the video:
With Trendrr Acquisition, Twitter Continues To Beef Up Its Social TV Efforts
Twitter has acquired Trendrr, a company that tracks social media engagement around TV content, as announced in a Trendrr blog post and confirmed in a tweet by Twitter.
Trendrr says it’s “excited to be joining Twitter’s world class team, enabling us to realize bigger opportunities that drive better experiences for users, media and marketers – across Twitter and around the globe.” It also says it will continue to honor its existing contracts but will not be signing new ones.
For its part, Twitter says the acquisition “will help us to build great tools for the rest of the TV ecosystem.”
It’s pretty clear that Twitter sees TV to be a big part of its monetization efforts (not to mention user growth). In fact, the company recently announced a feature that will allow advertisers to target Twitter ads at users who just saw their TV commercials. The feature was based on technology from Bluefin Labs, the social analytics company that Twitter acquired earlier this year.
Trendrr was first launched in 2007 and was developed by digital agency Wiredset. It recently made news by releasing a report stating that Facebook has five times more discussion around TV than Twitter, though as we noted, it was a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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