When Google plus Your World came out, many critics were underwhelmed. Although there were privacy concerns about personalized search results, the site’s social media elements were actually conservative considering the arsenal of tools available for finding people online. At a Social Media Week panel on Tuesday, pioneers in geosocial networking predicted a more sophisticated – and slightly creepy – future.
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foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was the subject of a keynote interview as part of Social Media Week New York, conducted by Fast Company‘s Austin Carr at JWT’s Media & Communications Hub in Manhattan.
Crowley mentioned that the company has grown from four employees and 100,000 users to 50 employees and some 6.5 million users, saying, “Going from 100,000 users to 6.5 million users, a lot of things break in the middle.”
Describing how the foursquare platform evolved, he said, “You can get 10 random foursquare users in a room and ask them what drew them to the platform, and you’d get 10 different answers. What should I eat? Can I get a special? We threw 10 things at the wall to see what sticks, and all 10 of them stuck. It’s a good thing, because it shows how rich the platform is and how rich it could be. How do you boil everything that foursquare does down to one sentence? I don’t think we want to tell people how to use the product. We want people to teach us how they’re using it. The initial design was, ‘I go out for happy hour, I broadcast my location, and a bunch of people show up.’ ”
Crowley continued, “Can you use game mechanics to incentivize and encourage people to go out and enrich their lives? I think there’s something good about software that can get you to try new experiences. No matter where I’m standing in Manhattan, there’s 1,000 options of things I could be doing right now. foursquare can help me filter those options.”
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were the hot topic at WikiLeaks and Online Civil Disobedience, a Social Media Week New York panel hosted by the Personal Democracy Forum and moderated by its editor and curator, Micah Sifry.
Speakers at the event, in order, were Deanna Zandt, author of Share This: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking; Evgeny Morozov, author of new book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; and John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The event was held at Hearst’s Art & Culture Hub in Manhattan.
Zandt made it a point to differentiate between DDoS attacks and hacking, saying, “Denial-of-service attacks are not hacking. Hacking tends to be where systems are broken into and data are compromised. None of the business data or practices was compromised in any way. I do feel that DDOS is a civil form of disobedience.”
Speaking specifically about Anonymous, the group responsible for attacking several corporate Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks, she said, “In the past, Anonymous hasn’t done anything in this scale that was explicitly, overtly, hugely political,” adding that the group was made up of “chaos enthusiasts — they’re interested in the drama of chaos unfolding. It’s not as if there was this sleeper cell of people who were ready to attack this big, bad corporation.”
On digital activism in general, Zandt concluded, “I’m often very, very frustrated with what the face of actual digital activism looks like. We have the ability and the freedom to risk ourselves for the benefit of many who don’t. We can’t ultimately rely on these digital tools to do our dirty work. If governments and corporations can easily collude to disable our ability to communicate with one another, what is our response?”
