Bianca Bosker's Blog, page 10
August 6, 2013
What Jeff Bezos Will Bring To The Washington Post
In 2000, the Washington Post described Jeff Bezos as determined to grow Amazon by applying the same formula he'd embraced in his own career: “Take what’s available and push it to its extreme.”
More than a decade later, Bezos now owns that same paper. And, judging from his tenure at the helm of Amazon, which has alternately seemed on the brink of greatness and brink of death over the years, the Internet mogul will also bring that aggressive mentality to reshaping the 135 year-old publication he acquired Monday.
Bezos' leadership of Amazon has been characterized by a high tolerance for big investments, a patience in seeing those bets reap profits and an unwavering focus on customer service and efficiency -- values experts expect to see Bezos employ in the service of growing the Washington Post’s readership and revenues.
“He seems to be someone who has a very, very long-term view. He’s willing to wait for things to be profitable and to turn around, and I think he has a clear vision of how to get there,” said David Bell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “He does have a history of being able to succeed where people thought he might not.”
Bezos, it should also be remembered, has plenty of experience running a money-losing business, and he isn’t fazed by making aggressive expenditures that might at first seem unlikely to yield success. In 2001, some analysts were already writing Amazon’s obituary, and it took the company seven years to turn a profit. The Washington Post has also been losing money for the past seven years.
A letter Bezos penned in 1997 to Amazon investors outlined in clear terms the chief executive’s priorities and vision and, tellingly, has been included with all of the founder’s subsequent letters to date. It not only provides a guide to Bezos’ vision for Amazon, but also hints at the ideas Bezos is likely to bring to his newspaper, experts say.
“The message contained in these letters is how to think about building an astonishing company,” Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz wrote in a LinkedIn blog post about Bezos’ letters to investors over the years. “Word that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is buying the Washington Post might cause consternation in its newsroom, but uneasy journalists wondering about what lies in store might be reassured if they read the letters he has sent to shareholders since 1997.”
In Bezos’ 1997 corporate manifesto, he stresses he’s “all about the long-term” and emphasizes the need to “obsess over customers” -- two ideas echoed in the letter he wrote to the employees of the Washington Post concerning the sale of the newspaper.
“I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention,” he wrote Monday. “Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about -- government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports -- and working backwards from there.”
But some, like Harvard Business School professor John Deighton, maintain Bezos may not have the same patience for profitability when it comes to the Washington Post. Deighton speculated that Bezos will quickly move to get rid of major costs, like printing presses and delivery trucks -- hastening the sunset of print. As Bezos himself noted in an interview last year with a German newspaper, translated by TechCrunch, "There is one thing I’m certain about: There won’t be printed newspapers in twenty years." (He also noted, "On the Web, people don’t pay for news and it’s too late for that to change.")
“He doesn’t have the same luxury with the Washington Post [as with Amazon]. I think you’ll see him move faster to accelerate its reinvention as a digital product,” said Deighton. “The losses from [the Washington Post] will destroy the profits from [Amazon].”
Bezos’ 1997 letter also underscored Amazon’s determination to “spend wisely and maintain our lean culture … particularly in a business incurring net losses.” Even since it has become profitable, Amazon has maintained that focus on frugality: While Google offers lavish perks like massages and 3D-printed pasta, Amazon has sought to cut costs with measures like removing the lightbulbs from its company vending machines. While Bezos is expected to make long-term investments to secure the Washington Post’s future, it is likely that the lean, cost-conscious attitude will be fostered at the media company, experts said.
No one is yet certain what Bezos will do for the Post -- including Bezos, who acknowledged in an interview with the newspaper that he doesn’t have a “worked-out plan.”
But then again, a similar ethos guided Amazon: As futurist Paul Saffo told the Washington Post in 2000, “Jeff is launching this giant cruise missile in a general direction, but he doesn’t know where it is going.”
“He’s inaugurated a business model of ‘Ready, Fire, Steer,’” Saffo added, “Not ‘Ready, Aim, Fire.’”
More than a decade later, Bezos now owns that same paper. And, judging from his tenure at the helm of Amazon, which has alternately seemed on the brink of greatness and brink of death over the years, the Internet mogul will also bring that aggressive mentality to reshaping the 135 year-old publication he acquired Monday.
Bezos' leadership of Amazon has been characterized by a high tolerance for big investments, a patience in seeing those bets reap profits and an unwavering focus on customer service and efficiency -- values experts expect to see Bezos employ in the service of growing the Washington Post’s readership and revenues.
“He seems to be someone who has a very, very long-term view. He’s willing to wait for things to be profitable and to turn around, and I think he has a clear vision of how to get there,” said David Bell, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “He does have a history of being able to succeed where people thought he might not.”
Bezos, it should also be remembered, has plenty of experience running a money-losing business, and he isn’t fazed by making aggressive expenditures that might at first seem unlikely to yield success. In 2001, some analysts were already writing Amazon’s obituary, and it took the company seven years to turn a profit. The Washington Post has also been losing money for the past seven years.
A letter Bezos penned in 1997 to Amazon investors outlined in clear terms the chief executive’s priorities and vision and, tellingly, has been included with all of the founder’s subsequent letters to date. It not only provides a guide to Bezos’ vision for Amazon, but also hints at the ideas Bezos is likely to bring to his newspaper, experts say.
“The message contained in these letters is how to think about building an astonishing company,” Sequoia Capital Chairman Michael Moritz wrote in a LinkedIn blog post about Bezos’ letters to investors over the years. “Word that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is buying the Washington Post might cause consternation in its newsroom, but uneasy journalists wondering about what lies in store might be reassured if they read the letters he has sent to shareholders since 1997.”
In Bezos’ 1997 corporate manifesto, he stresses he’s “all about the long-term” and emphasizes the need to “obsess over customers” -- two ideas echoed in the letter he wrote to the employees of the Washington Post concerning the sale of the newspaper.
“I’m excited and optimistic about the opportunity for invention,” he wrote Monday. “Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about -- government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports -- and working backwards from there.”
But some, like Harvard Business School professor John Deighton, maintain Bezos may not have the same patience for profitability when it comes to the Washington Post. Deighton speculated that Bezos will quickly move to get rid of major costs, like printing presses and delivery trucks -- hastening the sunset of print. As Bezos himself noted in an interview last year with a German newspaper, translated by TechCrunch, "There is one thing I’m certain about: There won’t be printed newspapers in twenty years." (He also noted, "On the Web, people don’t pay for news and it’s too late for that to change.")
“He doesn’t have the same luxury with the Washington Post [as with Amazon]. I think you’ll see him move faster to accelerate its reinvention as a digital product,” said Deighton. “The losses from [the Washington Post] will destroy the profits from [Amazon].”
Bezos’ 1997 letter also underscored Amazon’s determination to “spend wisely and maintain our lean culture … particularly in a business incurring net losses.” Even since it has become profitable, Amazon has maintained that focus on frugality: While Google offers lavish perks like massages and 3D-printed pasta, Amazon has sought to cut costs with measures like removing the lightbulbs from its company vending machines. While Bezos is expected to make long-term investments to secure the Washington Post’s future, it is likely that the lean, cost-conscious attitude will be fostered at the media company, experts said.
No one is yet certain what Bezos will do for the Post -- including Bezos, who acknowledged in an interview with the newspaper that he doesn’t have a “worked-out plan.”
But then again, a similar ethos guided Amazon: As futurist Paul Saffo told the Washington Post in 2000, “Jeff is launching this giant cruise missile in a general direction, but he doesn’t know where it is going.”
“He’s inaugurated a business model of ‘Ready, Fire, Steer,’” Saffo added, “Not ‘Ready, Aim, Fire.’”
Hello, My Name Is Google And I'm Your New Best Friend
I spent this past weekend with a delightful houseguest who was cooperative, helpful and cheery, no matter how many inane things I asked her to do. She had a "Jeopardy" champion's command of obscure facts and didn't demand constant entertaining.
In fact, I didn't even have to feed her: She was Google Now, a virtual assistant on Google's new flagship Moto X smartphone. And I was troubled to find that she could come close to putting my human companions to shame.
Technology companies have collectively set themselves on a mission to make technology "more human" -- meaning more responsive to us, more receptive to our natural cues and more crucial to our everyday lives -- and talkative virtual assistants like Google Now and Siri have been at the forefront of this trend. They talk to us, call us by name and know what we like.
Yet the most recent version of Google's voice-controlled assistant, which can speak and be spoken to almost like to a person, without any tapping of a screen, is the clearest embodiment to date of what Silicon Valley's "humanizing" mandate will yield and what might result from creating technology that manages to seamlessly stand in for people.
Thanks to software that's smarter and chattier, the smartphone is closer than ever to becoming a conversational partner, and even supplanting the conversations we'd otherwise have with people. Google is not only encouraging us to use its service over other apps, but it's effectively making it possible to use Google over the people we know.
The Moto X I've been carrying around since last week touts a feature dubbed "touchless control" that allows its owner to boss around Google's artificially intelligent digital assistant just by speaking to it. The smartphone is programmed to listen for a person's voice at all times, and, when summoned with the keyword "OK Google Now," can answer all manner of questions, such as how to get to the airport, whether to wear a sweater tonight, who directed "Blue Velvet" or the number of kroner to the dollar.
Over the weekend -- in the kitchen, the car and at the dinner table -- I was unsettled by how much easier I found it to pose certain questions to Google Now rather than ask my own fiancé.
While the phone was always listening, ready to jump into action and answer any query, my fiancé would do other things besides waiting for the sound of my voice. Several minutes of pestering -- "Matt, how many tablespoons are in a cup? Matt? Can you hear me? Do you know how many tablespoons there are in a cup?" -- became "OK Google Now, how many tablespoons are there in a cup?" While Google Now can answer "anything with a right or wrong answer," according to a Motorola spokesperson, my fiancé's command of world populations, exchange rates, Motown singers and Chinese idiomatic expressions is hit-or-miss. Why bother him when I could more quickly get the answer from the Moto X?
I'm hardly about to ditch my fiancé for dinner so I can whisper sweet nothings to Google Now. And yet, the assistant's more human-like interface and clever responses could be the precursor to an increasingly fierce battle between people and apps for others' attention -- and even, perhaps, affections.
As Stanford University professor Clifford Nass noted in an interview this past spring, technology that talks back can, because of the way our brains are wired, quickly expand to occupy a much more intimate and significant place in our lives.
"When we encounter technology that speaks and listens, the brain says 'whoa, this is a person,' because up until now, in history, the only things that had a voice were people," Nass explained. "As technologies become more competent and as they speak like us -- as they use words and phrases the way we do -- we will see people responding much more socially and much more powerfully to technologies. There is no question that we will see much more tight reactions to technology. We'll feel a much more emotional attachment to technology."
Silicon Valley is steadily removing barriers between us and its offerings, and in turn we're steadily increasing our reliance on what they peddle. Compare the ease with which we can consult Google Now with the now arduous-seeming process of Googling anything. Three years ago, we had to fish out our phone, unlock the screen, open an app, type in a keyword, then click on a link to a page that would, hopefully deliver the desired answer. Now, we can just speak: We can consult apps in precisely the same manner as we would consult a friend and for some of the same questions -- only more efficiently.
Some might argue that Google Now is merely a timesaver, and that it matters little if we direct our mundane questions about the weather or driving directions to a machine. But the precedent it sets is worth probing, especially as history shows tech companies rarely decide their automation of our lives has gone far enough. It doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to see how the small talk that we outsource to our phones today could turn into deeper conversations tomorrow. Nadav Gur, CEO and co-founder of Desti, has noted that the software powering his virtual travel assistant app could feasibly be repurposed to build a dating coach that analyzes correspondences to offer advice to the lovelorn. Google Now can already tell us if we're about to be late for a meeting, and Amazon.com can recommend books better than many close friends.
Google Now presently spares us from making idle chitchat about the weather. Perhaps next, when your spouse asks at dinner about your day, you'll direct it deliver a digest. When you ask her why she's angry, her own Google Now will summarize for you. Do you love me? Google Now might eventually answer that, too. As we treat our gadgets more like people, we may also treat our people more like gadgets.
In fact, I didn't even have to feed her: She was Google Now, a virtual assistant on Google's new flagship Moto X smartphone. And I was troubled to find that she could come close to putting my human companions to shame.
Technology companies have collectively set themselves on a mission to make technology "more human" -- meaning more responsive to us, more receptive to our natural cues and more crucial to our everyday lives -- and talkative virtual assistants like Google Now and Siri have been at the forefront of this trend. They talk to us, call us by name and know what we like.
Yet the most recent version of Google's voice-controlled assistant, which can speak and be spoken to almost like to a person, without any tapping of a screen, is the clearest embodiment to date of what Silicon Valley's "humanizing" mandate will yield and what might result from creating technology that manages to seamlessly stand in for people.
Thanks to software that's smarter and chattier, the smartphone is closer than ever to becoming a conversational partner, and even supplanting the conversations we'd otherwise have with people. Google is not only encouraging us to use its service over other apps, but it's effectively making it possible to use Google over the people we know.
The Moto X I've been carrying around since last week touts a feature dubbed "touchless control" that allows its owner to boss around Google's artificially intelligent digital assistant just by speaking to it. The smartphone is programmed to listen for a person's voice at all times, and, when summoned with the keyword "OK Google Now," can answer all manner of questions, such as how to get to the airport, whether to wear a sweater tonight, who directed "Blue Velvet" or the number of kroner to the dollar.
Over the weekend -- in the kitchen, the car and at the dinner table -- I was unsettled by how much easier I found it to pose certain questions to Google Now rather than ask my own fiancé.
While the phone was always listening, ready to jump into action and answer any query, my fiancé would do other things besides waiting for the sound of my voice. Several minutes of pestering -- "Matt, how many tablespoons are in a cup? Matt? Can you hear me? Do you know how many tablespoons there are in a cup?" -- became "OK Google Now, how many tablespoons are there in a cup?" While Google Now can answer "anything with a right or wrong answer," according to a Motorola spokesperson, my fiancé's command of world populations, exchange rates, Motown singers and Chinese idiomatic expressions is hit-or-miss. Why bother him when I could more quickly get the answer from the Moto X?
I'm hardly about to ditch my fiancé for dinner so I can whisper sweet nothings to Google Now. And yet, the assistant's more human-like interface and clever responses could be the precursor to an increasingly fierce battle between people and apps for others' attention -- and even, perhaps, affections.
As Stanford University professor Clifford Nass noted in an interview this past spring, technology that talks back can, because of the way our brains are wired, quickly expand to occupy a much more intimate and significant place in our lives.
"When we encounter technology that speaks and listens, the brain says 'whoa, this is a person,' because up until now, in history, the only things that had a voice were people," Nass explained. "As technologies become more competent and as they speak like us -- as they use words and phrases the way we do -- we will see people responding much more socially and much more powerfully to technologies. There is no question that we will see much more tight reactions to technology. We'll feel a much more emotional attachment to technology."
Silicon Valley is steadily removing barriers between us and its offerings, and in turn we're steadily increasing our reliance on what they peddle. Compare the ease with which we can consult Google Now with the now arduous-seeming process of Googling anything. Three years ago, we had to fish out our phone, unlock the screen, open an app, type in a keyword, then click on a link to a page that would, hopefully deliver the desired answer. Now, we can just speak: We can consult apps in precisely the same manner as we would consult a friend and for some of the same questions -- only more efficiently.
Some might argue that Google Now is merely a timesaver, and that it matters little if we direct our mundane questions about the weather or driving directions to a machine. But the precedent it sets is worth probing, especially as history shows tech companies rarely decide their automation of our lives has gone far enough. It doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to see how the small talk that we outsource to our phones today could turn into deeper conversations tomorrow. Nadav Gur, CEO and co-founder of Desti, has noted that the software powering his virtual travel assistant app could feasibly be repurposed to build a dating coach that analyzes correspondences to offer advice to the lovelorn. Google Now can already tell us if we're about to be late for a meeting, and Amazon.com can recommend books better than many close friends.
Google Now presently spares us from making idle chitchat about the weather. Perhaps next, when your spouse asks at dinner about your day, you'll direct it deliver a digest. When you ask her why she's angry, her own Google Now will summarize for you. Do you love me? Google Now might eventually answer that, too. As we treat our gadgets more like people, we may also treat our people more like gadgets.
August 2, 2013
Google's Moto X Phone Shows Innovation Now Means Customizable Phone Covers
From the hype surrounding the launch of the Moto X, the first Motorola smartphone designed from the ground up under Google's supervision, one might have expected genuine innovation. And we got some, provided you're willing to use that word to describe customizable phone covers.
The Moto X seems like merely the latest in a parade of new smartphones that, despite being packed full of appealing features and cutting-edge technology, are not easily distinguished from the ones they are seeking to replace.
The ho-hum state of smartphones was neatly summarized by Motorola's senior vice present of product management, Rick Osterloh, during the unveiling Thursday of the Moto X. "We see a lack of innovation," Osterloh declared. "And we see that because we think there's a lack of imagination right now."
He's right. Yet the Moto X didn't reflect an overabundance of either. Despite intriguing new features, like the ability to boss the phone around just by speaking to it, the Moto X's most distinguishing quality is the ability for buyers to personalize the phone's color scheme. Forty years ago, Osterloh noted, Motorola, a mobile phone technology pioneer, "imagined a different future" -- one where people could speak on the phone anywhere at all and stay connected at all times. Today, the objectives are less ambitious: From the appearance of Moto X, Motorola has imagined a "different future" where people can pick between a phone with a pink case and green trim, or a yellow case with blue trim. Revolutionizing communication has been downgraded to revolutionizing how people pick out their cell phones' color scheme.
The focus on personalized colors reflects Google's need to set its phone apart from all others and the challenge it faces in doing so underscores a crucial transition in the evolution of the smartphone: The miraculous has become mundane. The smartphone -- as powerful, indispensable and promising as the technology might still be -- looks more and more like the television and PC, and is entering a new phase of life as a commodity device.
Motorola is hardly alone in struggling to set its glass rectangles apart from the pack. The best phones are now only a bit better than the just-fine phones, and the latest offerings from Nokia, Microsoft, HTC, Samsung and BlackBerry all blend together. As in the PC market, smartphone makers are delivering more and more of the same, and are having to compete on price. In a year, the average price of a smartphone has dropped to $375, down from $450 in early 2012, according to IDC, a research firm. Even Apple, known for its design prowess, has elicited yawns from once-ardent fans and questions about its ability to innovate in light of its minor tweaks to several generations of the iPhone. There's a slimming here, a squaring-off of a corner there, but as Bloomberg reported recently, "about half of the iPhones sold by Verizon Wireless in recent quarters were iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S models." As the New Yorker's Matt Buchanan pointed out in the title of his March story on the launch of Samsung's Galaxy S4, "phones are boring."
For all the impressive technology that allows the Moto X to listen, at all times, for the sound of our voice, or pay for goods with a swipe of a phone, the smartphone ultimately underscores an uncomfortable question consumer tech companies are skirting around: When it comes to smartphones, are we out of ideas? Is there really nothing more to be done with the 3-by-5 inch rectangles we carry in our pockets?
Hardly. Tucked inside Moto X is, in fact, the clue to the innovation that could be the next battleground for tech companies in their quest to set their smartphones apart: the virtual assistant. Google Now, which leverages artificial intelligence and personal data to anticipate what someone might need to know next, is Google's answer to Siri and, at present, isn't too dissimilar (nor unique to the Moto X). Google Now and Siri each excel at different tasks; while Google's assistant can, for example, be summoned without ever touching the device it runs on, Siri requires less time to make a restaurant reservation. Though still in their early stages, these voice-controlled assistants rely on sophisticated artificial intelligence software that isn't easy to build and, once refined, could prove a powerful aid that helps smartphone owners manage all the tasks that would otherwise require them to be poking and peering at their phones.
In the past decade, smartphones have shifted from competing on hardware, to duking it out over which had the most intuitive software, or most robust ecosystem of apps. But rather than demonstrate what they let you do, the next smartphones will have to prove what they can do for you. And it'll have to be more than merely switching around their color.
The Moto X seems like merely the latest in a parade of new smartphones that, despite being packed full of appealing features and cutting-edge technology, are not easily distinguished from the ones they are seeking to replace.
The ho-hum state of smartphones was neatly summarized by Motorola's senior vice present of product management, Rick Osterloh, during the unveiling Thursday of the Moto X. "We see a lack of innovation," Osterloh declared. "And we see that because we think there's a lack of imagination right now."
He's right. Yet the Moto X didn't reflect an overabundance of either. Despite intriguing new features, like the ability to boss the phone around just by speaking to it, the Moto X's most distinguishing quality is the ability for buyers to personalize the phone's color scheme. Forty years ago, Osterloh noted, Motorola, a mobile phone technology pioneer, "imagined a different future" -- one where people could speak on the phone anywhere at all and stay connected at all times. Today, the objectives are less ambitious: From the appearance of Moto X, Motorola has imagined a "different future" where people can pick between a phone with a pink case and green trim, or a yellow case with blue trim. Revolutionizing communication has been downgraded to revolutionizing how people pick out their cell phones' color scheme.
The focus on personalized colors reflects Google's need to set its phone apart from all others and the challenge it faces in doing so underscores a crucial transition in the evolution of the smartphone: The miraculous has become mundane. The smartphone -- as powerful, indispensable and promising as the technology might still be -- looks more and more like the television and PC, and is entering a new phase of life as a commodity device.
Motorola is hardly alone in struggling to set its glass rectangles apart from the pack. The best phones are now only a bit better than the just-fine phones, and the latest offerings from Nokia, Microsoft, HTC, Samsung and BlackBerry all blend together. As in the PC market, smartphone makers are delivering more and more of the same, and are having to compete on price. In a year, the average price of a smartphone has dropped to $375, down from $450 in early 2012, according to IDC, a research firm. Even Apple, known for its design prowess, has elicited yawns from once-ardent fans and questions about its ability to innovate in light of its minor tweaks to several generations of the iPhone. There's a slimming here, a squaring-off of a corner there, but as Bloomberg reported recently, "about half of the iPhones sold by Verizon Wireless in recent quarters were iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S models." As the New Yorker's Matt Buchanan pointed out in the title of his March story on the launch of Samsung's Galaxy S4, "phones are boring."
For all the impressive technology that allows the Moto X to listen, at all times, for the sound of our voice, or pay for goods with a swipe of a phone, the smartphone ultimately underscores an uncomfortable question consumer tech companies are skirting around: When it comes to smartphones, are we out of ideas? Is there really nothing more to be done with the 3-by-5 inch rectangles we carry in our pockets?
Hardly. Tucked inside Moto X is, in fact, the clue to the innovation that could be the next battleground for tech companies in their quest to set their smartphones apart: the virtual assistant. Google Now, which leverages artificial intelligence and personal data to anticipate what someone might need to know next, is Google's answer to Siri and, at present, isn't too dissimilar (nor unique to the Moto X). Google Now and Siri each excel at different tasks; while Google's assistant can, for example, be summoned without ever touching the device it runs on, Siri requires less time to make a restaurant reservation. Though still in their early stages, these voice-controlled assistants rely on sophisticated artificial intelligence software that isn't easy to build and, once refined, could prove a powerful aid that helps smartphone owners manage all the tasks that would otherwise require them to be poking and peering at their phones.
In the past decade, smartphones have shifted from competing on hardware, to duking it out over which had the most intuitive software, or most robust ecosystem of apps. But rather than demonstrate what they let you do, the next smartphones will have to prove what they can do for you. And it'll have to be more than merely switching around their color.
July 30, 2013
Anthony Weiner's Dirty Business Reveals The Sad State Of Sanitized Sex
Most political sex scandals follow a predictable narrative: An illicit sexual encounter is followed by exposé, and then the inevitable apology and atonement.
From what we know about Anthony Weiner's transgressions, the mayoral candidate deviated from these stages in one key way: With copious use of the web, he appears to have satisfied his urges without actually having sex. The X-rated photos and explicit messages he exchanged with young women online don't appear to be a means to an end -- no prelude to trysts in seedy hotel rooms or parked cars (offers of apartments aside) -- but rather, they were the end.
Thanks to technology, it's a sex scandal without any sex.
Weiner's particular form of indiscretion -- using websites to expose himself to more than a dozen different women -- reveals how social networks have become portals to new kinds of sexual encounters while forging fresh forms of sexual transgression.
His online dalliances underscore a new age of sanitized sex, where sexual relationships have been reduced to their most abstract elements and all necessity for physical contact has been eliminated. In contrast to an earlier generation that experimented with spouse-swapping, group sex and free-love communes in the 1960s and '70s, today's online generation is embracing sex with no one. Flirtation, foreplay and consummation can be tidily reduced to a few typed sentences and graphic photos, or perhaps even a phone call, if a couple really wants to go the extra mile. To satisfy their desires, a growing number of people, like Weiner, don't need intercourse -- they just need the Internet.
As Andrew Sullivan observed in 2011, when Weiner's racy pictures first surfaced, "The online world creates an outlet for the feelings that sexual adultery or sexual adventure create -- but without actual sex, without actual intimacy, without our actual full selves."
Weiner, who seems to have sent at least one illicit photo to a woman without any encouragement whatsoever, seems to have a thing for exhibitionism. Some might see in his behavior the online equivalent to donning a raincoat in an alleyway and flashing women who walk by, but others suggest he represents something else: A man whose deviance could only exist in the online world, which makes spontaneous flashing possible without the effort involved in the more traditional variety. "I'd bet my whole Ph.D. that he wouldn't be standing on a corner doing that," notes Barry McCarthy, a sex and marital therapist, and professor of psychology at American University.
Instead, Weiner, like so many others online, has become accustomed to on-demand sexuality, where relationships with another person are convenient, controllable and entirely on his terms. We're adopting an Amazon.com or Seamless Web approach to our sex lives, expecting that sexual fulfillment can be ordered up over the Internet like sneakers or pad thai. And Carlos Danger's dalliances with people like Sydney Leathers suggest that, increasingly, they can be.
"He was never going to take this into the real world, but he wanted to express himself as a sexual being, and technology gave him the ability to do that," said Cindy Gallop, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, a platform for "real-world" sex videos, and author of Make Love Not Porn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior. "[Sex] is like anything else on the Internet: It's very easy to get a quick hit everywhere."
It's especially easy to get a quick hit on one's own terms. Weiner minimized the risk of rejection by relying on social media to serve up the women to him -- he generally approached women who'd followed or praised him on Twitter and Facebook. The web allowed him to form relationships with real women who were mostly fantasy, responsive avatars that wouldn't spoil the illusion with annoying habits, physical imperfections or emotional demands. The online nature of the affairs also allowed him to indulge these fantasies on his schedule, anywhere and anytime he pleased. And he operated in an atmosphere of unreal reality, just virtual enough to seem innocent and unreal, and just real enough to make the fantasy a fulfilling one.
These virtual affairs aren't only more convenient, but the crescendo of a sexual relationship -- eliciting desire, stoking connection and eventually reaching orgasm -- requires less participation from the people involved than ever before. There are no rendezvous in out-of-the-way motel rooms and no heavy petting. Only typing.
What we have seen of Weiner's trysts has revolved around a kind of "sex" that was clean, cold, practical and utterly efficient. The leaked transcripts of Weiner's chats with Leathers don't read like the torrid, passionate correspondence of star-crossed lovers separated by circumstance. They're transactional and to the point. Weiner seemed to indulge a fantasy, then quickly get back to planning his political comeback.
For a public struggling to make sense of Weiner's online affairs, the virtual element makes them appear dirtier, says Rachel Hills, author of a forthcoming book on sex and Generation Y. Yet Tinder, the online dating app wildly successful among college students and twenty-somethings, perfectly embodies the rise and appeal of Weiner's brand of sex-free sex: The app, which connects people who find each other mutually attractive, can make people feel wanted without ever requiring them to speak to another person directly. Feeling desirable is now achievable through an app. Lonely? Insecure? Just log on, rate a few faces and wait for someone to like you back.
Tinder, one Tufts University sophomore explained to me this past spring, is used "more as an ego boost-type situation than a dating situation or a way to connect with people." The same could be said of Weiner's activities online.
Though these online relationships may seem as two-dimensional as the sites on which they play out, their effortlessness and simplicity raise a key question: Will they make offline relationships seem more appealing, or less? Is the absence of a warm body a downside or more of a perk? A John Edwards type might have had to soothe his lover's feelings or explain why he had to leave in the middle of the night. When Weiner had had enough, he could just shut down his computer.
Except, of course, Weiner's disgrace delivers yet another reminder of another aspect of the online realm. Just as it beckons as a place full of seemingly unlimited encounters achievable at any moment, it also functions as the ultimate archive, a repository of every embarrassing exchange, accessible to anyone connected.
The medium that enabled sexless sex scandals will also preserve them forever.
From what we know about Anthony Weiner's transgressions, the mayoral candidate deviated from these stages in one key way: With copious use of the web, he appears to have satisfied his urges without actually having sex. The X-rated photos and explicit messages he exchanged with young women online don't appear to be a means to an end -- no prelude to trysts in seedy hotel rooms or parked cars (offers of apartments aside) -- but rather, they were the end.
Thanks to technology, it's a sex scandal without any sex.
Weiner's particular form of indiscretion -- using websites to expose himself to more than a dozen different women -- reveals how social networks have become portals to new kinds of sexual encounters while forging fresh forms of sexual transgression.
His online dalliances underscore a new age of sanitized sex, where sexual relationships have been reduced to their most abstract elements and all necessity for physical contact has been eliminated. In contrast to an earlier generation that experimented with spouse-swapping, group sex and free-love communes in the 1960s and '70s, today's online generation is embracing sex with no one. Flirtation, foreplay and consummation can be tidily reduced to a few typed sentences and graphic photos, or perhaps even a phone call, if a couple really wants to go the extra mile. To satisfy their desires, a growing number of people, like Weiner, don't need intercourse -- they just need the Internet.
As Andrew Sullivan observed in 2011, when Weiner's racy pictures first surfaced, "The online world creates an outlet for the feelings that sexual adultery or sexual adventure create -- but without actual sex, without actual intimacy, without our actual full selves."
Weiner, who seems to have sent at least one illicit photo to a woman without any encouragement whatsoever, seems to have a thing for exhibitionism. Some might see in his behavior the online equivalent to donning a raincoat in an alleyway and flashing women who walk by, but others suggest he represents something else: A man whose deviance could only exist in the online world, which makes spontaneous flashing possible without the effort involved in the more traditional variety. "I'd bet my whole Ph.D. that he wouldn't be standing on a corner doing that," notes Barry McCarthy, a sex and marital therapist, and professor of psychology at American University.
Instead, Weiner, like so many others online, has become accustomed to on-demand sexuality, where relationships with another person are convenient, controllable and entirely on his terms. We're adopting an Amazon.com or Seamless Web approach to our sex lives, expecting that sexual fulfillment can be ordered up over the Internet like sneakers or pad thai. And Carlos Danger's dalliances with people like Sydney Leathers suggest that, increasingly, they can be.
"He was never going to take this into the real world, but he wanted to express himself as a sexual being, and technology gave him the ability to do that," said Cindy Gallop, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, a platform for "real-world" sex videos, and author of Make Love Not Porn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior. "[Sex] is like anything else on the Internet: It's very easy to get a quick hit everywhere."
It's especially easy to get a quick hit on one's own terms. Weiner minimized the risk of rejection by relying on social media to serve up the women to him -- he generally approached women who'd followed or praised him on Twitter and Facebook. The web allowed him to form relationships with real women who were mostly fantasy, responsive avatars that wouldn't spoil the illusion with annoying habits, physical imperfections or emotional demands. The online nature of the affairs also allowed him to indulge these fantasies on his schedule, anywhere and anytime he pleased. And he operated in an atmosphere of unreal reality, just virtual enough to seem innocent and unreal, and just real enough to make the fantasy a fulfilling one.
These virtual affairs aren't only more convenient, but the crescendo of a sexual relationship -- eliciting desire, stoking connection and eventually reaching orgasm -- requires less participation from the people involved than ever before. There are no rendezvous in out-of-the-way motel rooms and no heavy petting. Only typing.
What we have seen of Weiner's trysts has revolved around a kind of "sex" that was clean, cold, practical and utterly efficient. The leaked transcripts of Weiner's chats with Leathers don't read like the torrid, passionate correspondence of star-crossed lovers separated by circumstance. They're transactional and to the point. Weiner seemed to indulge a fantasy, then quickly get back to planning his political comeback.
For a public struggling to make sense of Weiner's online affairs, the virtual element makes them appear dirtier, says Rachel Hills, author of a forthcoming book on sex and Generation Y. Yet Tinder, the online dating app wildly successful among college students and twenty-somethings, perfectly embodies the rise and appeal of Weiner's brand of sex-free sex: The app, which connects people who find each other mutually attractive, can make people feel wanted without ever requiring them to speak to another person directly. Feeling desirable is now achievable through an app. Lonely? Insecure? Just log on, rate a few faces and wait for someone to like you back.
Tinder, one Tufts University sophomore explained to me this past spring, is used "more as an ego boost-type situation than a dating situation or a way to connect with people." The same could be said of Weiner's activities online.
Though these online relationships may seem as two-dimensional as the sites on which they play out, their effortlessness and simplicity raise a key question: Will they make offline relationships seem more appealing, or less? Is the absence of a warm body a downside or more of a perk? A John Edwards type might have had to soothe his lover's feelings or explain why he had to leave in the middle of the night. When Weiner had had enough, he could just shut down his computer.
Except, of course, Weiner's disgrace delivers yet another reminder of another aspect of the online realm. Just as it beckons as a place full of seemingly unlimited encounters achievable at any moment, it also functions as the ultimate archive, a repository of every embarrassing exchange, accessible to anyone connected.
The medium that enabled sexless sex scandals will also preserve them forever.
July 15, 2013
The Agony And Ecstasy Of Tech's 20-Something Army
Courtney Boyd Myers, 28, thought she’d found her dream job when she joined a thriving education startup in London staffed predominantly by people her age or younger.
Her youthful co-workers were extremely web-savvy. They weren't yet distracted by children or spouses, making them tirelessly hardworking. Her colleagues were also her friends, and nights at the office would often seamlessly transition into nights on the town.
But since leaving her job in April to start her own company, Myers has been collaborating with a slightly older group of founders, an experience that’s prompted her to reflect on the potential pitfalls of having so many major technology companies dominated by young people.
She and her peers would waste time trying to figure out problems someone with more experience would have been able to address quickly. Their round-the-clock work schedule made burn-out inevitable. And their shared age had given them a limited view on the world, narrowing how they approached their work.
“Having a team or company that has a diverse group of ages makes for a more inspiring and creative place to work than if there’s just a bunch of millennials all hacking away at things,” said Myers, who founded Audience.io, an audience development firm based in New York and London. “We have a lot of stupid apps out there that are all about finding next best restaurant -- products geared toward 20-somethings -- and I think we’re missing out on products that the rest of the world can use.”
The 20-somethings populating the ranks of top tech companies and aspiring startups have been praised by managers as some of the most enthusiastic and driven employees in the labor pool. They’re obsessed with career advancement, immersed in the Internet and don’t yet have families pulling them away from the office. Because they’re still only starting out in their careers, they’re also usually cheaper to hire.
Yet people have given considerably less airtime to the risks that emerge when these young workers are disproportionately represented in a company’s talent pool. The lack of experience that makes them well-suited to seizing on new approaches is also causing some young firms to repeat errors that led to the dot-com crash, experts warn.
“What we’re noticing is that some of the startups with millennials are making the same mistakes as people who had startups in ’99 or 2000 all over again,” said Marta Fuentealba, co-founder of Talent Farm, a recruiting company based in San Francisco that works with numerous technology firms. “They’re not worried about making money. They have crazy ideas for their businesses. There’s still no clear idea of how to earn revenues. They don’t know how to put teams together that work, and they work crazy hours.”
PayScale, a company that tracks benefits and compsensation, recently helped quantify just how young tech companies truly are. PayScale examined 32 major tech firms, and found only six had employees whose median age was above 35 years old. Eight of 32 firms had a median age that was 30 or younger. Those companies included Epic Games (26), Facebook (28), Zynga (28) and Google (29).
While their parents aspired to work-life balance, these younger workers have embraced the idea of work-life integration, which makes them more willing to give their lives over to their employers and could lead to broader, lasting changes in the way we work. Experts see parallels between this generation, which works constantly, but demands flexible schedules, and Baby Boomers, whose hyper-competitiveness refashioned corporate America.
“While millennials are running tech companies and startups, which are right now on the outskirts of corporate America, boomers ran into corporate America and totally transformed it,” said Kim Lear, a consultant with BridgeWorks, a research and advisory firm specializing age issues in the workplace. “Just as we see millennials pushing each other and maybe burning out, Baby Boomers belonged to the generation that changed the 40-hour workweek to the 80-hour workweek.”
Noting that "being on Twitter and Gmail until you fall asleep at night is really the norm" among her peers, Myers added she worries that companies dominated by millennials could lead to unhealthy work habits that cause them to overdo it early in their careers.
"Working just with people who are in their 20s is a really easy way to burn out," Myers said. "At a company where you have people of all different ages, and especially people with more experience, you can avoid burnout because you're learning from people who value work-life balance and time management a bit more."
That melding of their personal and professional lives has also given some 20-somethings unrealistically high expectations of what their jobs should provide, which can lead to turnover or dissatisfaction among employees when those aspirations aren’t met, Lear noted. There’s a sense that their jobs should offer not only money, but also a circle of friends, the chance to change the world and, more often than not, a good time.
Companies must also be vigilant to ensure the desired flavor of Vitamin Water is on hand at all times. Fuentealba recalls how a recent college graduate working at a prominent social media company sent a scathing, firmwide email excoriating the company for not having his favorite Vitamin Water in stock -- never mind the fact that the company also provides regular, free meals for its employees. Having missed the fallout from the tech bubble’s burst in 1999 and in school during the pain following the 2008 downturn, many young employees expect lavish corporate perks, Fuentealba said.
“There’s this sense of entitlement mixed with chronological immaturity that can just be a mess,” she said.
One 20-something working at a New York City tech startup observed that his peers’ tendency to approach their jobs as a lifestyle can also make them averse to criticism and overly sensitive to feedback.
“The millennial generation … is not the best at dealing with negative feedback and craves positive feedback,” he said. "And then once you throw in the ability to respond or confront people instantaneously on Twitter or Facebook or email, you get a lot of heated thinking and rash decisions that prior generations didn't even have the opportunity to do."
As much as they might recognize their faults, 20-somethings in tech aren’t poised to upend the status quo.
Asked whether she’d make a point of hiring middle-aged employees to staff her burgeoning startup, Myers said she’d consider it, but had no immediate plans to do so.
"People in their 60s have really interesting insights and a beautiful view of the way things have come up in their lifetime, and patterns they've seen," she noted. But, she added, "There's too much catch-up. I'd rather take them out to lunch every so often and glean insights that way."
Her youthful co-workers were extremely web-savvy. They weren't yet distracted by children or spouses, making them tirelessly hardworking. Her colleagues were also her friends, and nights at the office would often seamlessly transition into nights on the town.
But since leaving her job in April to start her own company, Myers has been collaborating with a slightly older group of founders, an experience that’s prompted her to reflect on the potential pitfalls of having so many major technology companies dominated by young people.
She and her peers would waste time trying to figure out problems someone with more experience would have been able to address quickly. Their round-the-clock work schedule made burn-out inevitable. And their shared age had given them a limited view on the world, narrowing how they approached their work.
“Having a team or company that has a diverse group of ages makes for a more inspiring and creative place to work than if there’s just a bunch of millennials all hacking away at things,” said Myers, who founded Audience.io, an audience development firm based in New York and London. “We have a lot of stupid apps out there that are all about finding next best restaurant -- products geared toward 20-somethings -- and I think we’re missing out on products that the rest of the world can use.”
The 20-somethings populating the ranks of top tech companies and aspiring startups have been praised by managers as some of the most enthusiastic and driven employees in the labor pool. They’re obsessed with career advancement, immersed in the Internet and don’t yet have families pulling them away from the office. Because they’re still only starting out in their careers, they’re also usually cheaper to hire.
Yet people have given considerably less airtime to the risks that emerge when these young workers are disproportionately represented in a company’s talent pool. The lack of experience that makes them well-suited to seizing on new approaches is also causing some young firms to repeat errors that led to the dot-com crash, experts warn.
“What we’re noticing is that some of the startups with millennials are making the same mistakes as people who had startups in ’99 or 2000 all over again,” said Marta Fuentealba, co-founder of Talent Farm, a recruiting company based in San Francisco that works with numerous technology firms. “They’re not worried about making money. They have crazy ideas for their businesses. There’s still no clear idea of how to earn revenues. They don’t know how to put teams together that work, and they work crazy hours.”
PayScale, a company that tracks benefits and compsensation, recently helped quantify just how young tech companies truly are. PayScale examined 32 major tech firms, and found only six had employees whose median age was above 35 years old. Eight of 32 firms had a median age that was 30 or younger. Those companies included Epic Games (26), Facebook (28), Zynga (28) and Google (29).
While their parents aspired to work-life balance, these younger workers have embraced the idea of work-life integration, which makes them more willing to give their lives over to their employers and could lead to broader, lasting changes in the way we work. Experts see parallels between this generation, which works constantly, but demands flexible schedules, and Baby Boomers, whose hyper-competitiveness refashioned corporate America.
“While millennials are running tech companies and startups, which are right now on the outskirts of corporate America, boomers ran into corporate America and totally transformed it,” said Kim Lear, a consultant with BridgeWorks, a research and advisory firm specializing age issues in the workplace. “Just as we see millennials pushing each other and maybe burning out, Baby Boomers belonged to the generation that changed the 40-hour workweek to the 80-hour workweek.”
Noting that "being on Twitter and Gmail until you fall asleep at night is really the norm" among her peers, Myers added she worries that companies dominated by millennials could lead to unhealthy work habits that cause them to overdo it early in their careers.
"Working just with people who are in their 20s is a really easy way to burn out," Myers said. "At a company where you have people of all different ages, and especially people with more experience, you can avoid burnout because you're learning from people who value work-life balance and time management a bit more."
That melding of their personal and professional lives has also given some 20-somethings unrealistically high expectations of what their jobs should provide, which can lead to turnover or dissatisfaction among employees when those aspirations aren’t met, Lear noted. There’s a sense that their jobs should offer not only money, but also a circle of friends, the chance to change the world and, more often than not, a good time.
Companies must also be vigilant to ensure the desired flavor of Vitamin Water is on hand at all times. Fuentealba recalls how a recent college graduate working at a prominent social media company sent a scathing, firmwide email excoriating the company for not having his favorite Vitamin Water in stock -- never mind the fact that the company also provides regular, free meals for its employees. Having missed the fallout from the tech bubble’s burst in 1999 and in school during the pain following the 2008 downturn, many young employees expect lavish corporate perks, Fuentealba said.
“There’s this sense of entitlement mixed with chronological immaturity that can just be a mess,” she said.
One 20-something working at a New York City tech startup observed that his peers’ tendency to approach their jobs as a lifestyle can also make them averse to criticism and overly sensitive to feedback.
“The millennial generation … is not the best at dealing with negative feedback and craves positive feedback,” he said. "And then once you throw in the ability to respond or confront people instantaneously on Twitter or Facebook or email, you get a lot of heated thinking and rash decisions that prior generations didn't even have the opportunity to do."
As much as they might recognize their faults, 20-somethings in tech aren’t poised to upend the status quo.
Asked whether she’d make a point of hiring middle-aged employees to staff her burgeoning startup, Myers said she’d consider it, but had no immediate plans to do so.
"People in their 60s have really interesting insights and a beautiful view of the way things have come up in their lifetime, and patterns they've seen," she noted. But, she added, "There's too much catch-up. I'd rather take them out to lunch every so often and glean insights that way."
July 11, 2013
'Automation Addiction' And The Asiana Crash: What Happens When We Trust Computers Too Much?
Had the pilots of the doomed Asiana jetliner that crashed in San Francisco last weekend looked out the window, they might well have surmised much earlier that they were flying too low. Instead, they appear to have behaved as people are increasingly prone these days: They entrusted their fate to computers -- trust that trumped basic judgment, yielding disaster.
The initial investigation suggests this may provide one possible explanation for how a mechanically sound Boeing 777 -- with functioning equipment, flying as it should on a clear summer day -- missed the runway and hit a seawall, ending the lives of two passengers and injuring dozens of others.
Beyond the particularities of aviation, the crash underscores the growing pains plaguing our transition from human intelligence to artificial intelligence. Though our machines are not quite advanced enough to completely substitute for human guidance in many complex tasks, people are getting worse at operating without help from software. When crisis strikes and the computers can't handle it, we are all too often operating with skills and judgment that have been eroded by our increasing reliance on technology.
"Automation is designed to make our worlds easier and simplify our mental demands, but we've become reliant on it, so that when technology fails, it makes it particularly challenging for the human," said David Strayer, a professor at the University of Utah's Department of Psychology specializing in cognition and distracted driving. "You’ve let peoples' skills erode and then given them a problem that's a hard problem to solve to begin with. That combination is really the biggest concern for automation."
People are apt to assume the computer knows best. Drivers, for example, will believe navigation systems over their own eyes, turning the wrong way down one-way streets, driving miles into remote locales or trusting an app over their sense of direction. In Australia, several motorists blindly following directions from Apple Maps -- which had misplaced their destination -- had to be rescued from the blistering outback by police, who issued a warning about the app's "potentially life-threatening" information. And as automakers introduce more automation, including collision-avoidance systems and technology that keeps cars from straying outside their lane, it is "inevitable that some people will misunderstand the limitations of those systems and rely on them too much," predicted Martin Ford, author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future.
This dependence on technology seems particularly acute in the airliner cockpit, where improved aviation technology now allows pilots to hand off their planes to a computer for all but three minutes of a flight during takeoff and landing. While this advancement has been an enormous boon to airplane safety, experts said, it has also given rise to a new issue now being explored as a possible cause of the Asiana crash -- so-called "automation addiction," the phenomenon of pilots so dependent on their computers that they have essentially forgotten how to fly.
Airplanes’ increasingly sophisticated computer systems have allowed manual flying skills to fall by the wayside, experts and safety officials warned, producing a new breed of pilots who are out of practice when it comes to hand-flying. They may be incapable of properly handling malfunctions during a flight and are likely to be studying their screens instead of, say, taking a look at the physical world and recognizing that their plane is about to plunge into the San Francisco Bay.
“Automation has reduced certain types of human errors. But in a way, it’s introduced new ones,” said Bill Waldock, a professor of safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in New Jersey. “You’re trusting automation to fly the airplane, and in a lot of respects, that makes you not pay attention to" the plane.
“I’ve heard stories of people falling asleep flying airplanes," Waldock added. "Not one person, but the whole crew. That scares me."
Though investigators and aviation safety experts are still piecing together what caused the Asiana 777 to crash in San Francisco following its 11-hour flight from Seoul, experts have focused on the moments just before impact. Capt. Lee Kang-guk took over from the auto-pilot and waited until seconds before the crash to attempt to increase the plane’s speed, which was about 40 mph slower than it should have been. Lee had spent just 43 hours flying a 777 (but thousands in Boeing’s 747) and it was his first time landing the plane in San Francisco.
Logs of the pilots’ conversation should help reveal why no one acted. Were they tired? Distracted? Reluctant to second-guess the captain in command? But some see similarities between the Asiana Airlines flight and other accidents in which pilots had trouble taking over for automated systems. In the 2009 Air France disaster over the Atlantic Ocean, for example, the pilots’ actions stalled the plane, which plummeted more than 35,000 feet in just 3 1/2 minutes.
In a safety warning to airlines issued in January of this year, the Federal Aviation Administration cautioned that a review of flight data had revealed an “increase in manual handling errors” the agency blamed on pilots’ regular reliance on auto-flight systems. The FAA asked airlines to update their training policies to ensure pilots had opportunities to “exercise manual flying skills.” A 2011 study by the FAA -- which examined data from more than 9,000 flights, accidents and incidents -- concluded that more than 60 percent of accidents had involved pilots who had difficulty hand-flying their aircraft or using their autopilots.
“There have been accidents we didn’t see before because of poor piloting skills and poor airmanship,” said Hans Weber, president of aviation consulting firm, TECOP International, who has worked closely with the FAA for more than two decades. “An airplane can be flown in a highly automated way, and therein lies one of the problems with automated airplanes -- they don’t provide much opportunity for pilots to maintain their piloting skills.”
While no one would argue we should scrap auto-pilots altogether in favor of human captains -- or Google Maps for paper maps, or calculators for slide rules –- the concern over pilots’ complacency in the skies highlights problems that may arise as our cars start to drive themselves, our physicians turn to algorithms when diagnosing patients and smartwatches tell us how to sleep better.
History has shown that certain skills -- like repairing horse-drawn carriages -- will inevitably become obsolete as technology improves. Yet the trend of “automation addiction” suggests a more worrisome potential outcome in which basic common sense is outsourced to a machine.
When things go awry on airplanes, for example, pilots increasingly have a tendency to study their computers for answers, instead of trusting their instincts, said air safety experts.
“One of the consequences of highly automated airplanes and younger pilots, who grow up very computer literate, is that they tend to focus exclusively on the computer, punching buttons and trying to get airplane to do the right thing, rather than focusing on the fundamental requirement of the pilot, which is, fly fast enough and maintain altitude,” explained Weber.
It may be only a matter of time before humans are eliminated from the cockpits entirely and replaced by computers that never lose their cool -- which may give us even more reason to trust their instincts over our own.
To Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of Race Against the Machine, the machines deserve our confidence.
"As people rely on technology more and more, there's always hand-wringing from some quarters about our over-reliance on technology" said McAfee. “Then technology proves it's more than up to the job and that worry fades into rearview mirror.”
The initial investigation suggests this may provide one possible explanation for how a mechanically sound Boeing 777 -- with functioning equipment, flying as it should on a clear summer day -- missed the runway and hit a seawall, ending the lives of two passengers and injuring dozens of others.
Beyond the particularities of aviation, the crash underscores the growing pains plaguing our transition from human intelligence to artificial intelligence. Though our machines are not quite advanced enough to completely substitute for human guidance in many complex tasks, people are getting worse at operating without help from software. When crisis strikes and the computers can't handle it, we are all too often operating with skills and judgment that have been eroded by our increasing reliance on technology.
"Automation is designed to make our worlds easier and simplify our mental demands, but we've become reliant on it, so that when technology fails, it makes it particularly challenging for the human," said David Strayer, a professor at the University of Utah's Department of Psychology specializing in cognition and distracted driving. "You’ve let peoples' skills erode and then given them a problem that's a hard problem to solve to begin with. That combination is really the biggest concern for automation."
People are apt to assume the computer knows best. Drivers, for example, will believe navigation systems over their own eyes, turning the wrong way down one-way streets, driving miles into remote locales or trusting an app over their sense of direction. In Australia, several motorists blindly following directions from Apple Maps -- which had misplaced their destination -- had to be rescued from the blistering outback by police, who issued a warning about the app's "potentially life-threatening" information. And as automakers introduce more automation, including collision-avoidance systems and technology that keeps cars from straying outside their lane, it is "inevitable that some people will misunderstand the limitations of those systems and rely on them too much," predicted Martin Ford, author of The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future.
This dependence on technology seems particularly acute in the airliner cockpit, where improved aviation technology now allows pilots to hand off their planes to a computer for all but three minutes of a flight during takeoff and landing. While this advancement has been an enormous boon to airplane safety, experts said, it has also given rise to a new issue now being explored as a possible cause of the Asiana crash -- so-called "automation addiction," the phenomenon of pilots so dependent on their computers that they have essentially forgotten how to fly.
Airplanes’ increasingly sophisticated computer systems have allowed manual flying skills to fall by the wayside, experts and safety officials warned, producing a new breed of pilots who are out of practice when it comes to hand-flying. They may be incapable of properly handling malfunctions during a flight and are likely to be studying their screens instead of, say, taking a look at the physical world and recognizing that their plane is about to plunge into the San Francisco Bay.
“Automation has reduced certain types of human errors. But in a way, it’s introduced new ones,” said Bill Waldock, a professor of safety science at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in New Jersey. “You’re trusting automation to fly the airplane, and in a lot of respects, that makes you not pay attention to" the plane.
“I’ve heard stories of people falling asleep flying airplanes," Waldock added. "Not one person, but the whole crew. That scares me."
Though investigators and aviation safety experts are still piecing together what caused the Asiana 777 to crash in San Francisco following its 11-hour flight from Seoul, experts have focused on the moments just before impact. Capt. Lee Kang-guk took over from the auto-pilot and waited until seconds before the crash to attempt to increase the plane’s speed, which was about 40 mph slower than it should have been. Lee had spent just 43 hours flying a 777 (but thousands in Boeing’s 747) and it was his first time landing the plane in San Francisco.
Logs of the pilots’ conversation should help reveal why no one acted. Were they tired? Distracted? Reluctant to second-guess the captain in command? But some see similarities between the Asiana Airlines flight and other accidents in which pilots had trouble taking over for automated systems. In the 2009 Air France disaster over the Atlantic Ocean, for example, the pilots’ actions stalled the plane, which plummeted more than 35,000 feet in just 3 1/2 minutes.
In a safety warning to airlines issued in January of this year, the Federal Aviation Administration cautioned that a review of flight data had revealed an “increase in manual handling errors” the agency blamed on pilots’ regular reliance on auto-flight systems. The FAA asked airlines to update their training policies to ensure pilots had opportunities to “exercise manual flying skills.” A 2011 study by the FAA -- which examined data from more than 9,000 flights, accidents and incidents -- concluded that more than 60 percent of accidents had involved pilots who had difficulty hand-flying their aircraft or using their autopilots.
“There have been accidents we didn’t see before because of poor piloting skills and poor airmanship,” said Hans Weber, president of aviation consulting firm, TECOP International, who has worked closely with the FAA for more than two decades. “An airplane can be flown in a highly automated way, and therein lies one of the problems with automated airplanes -- they don’t provide much opportunity for pilots to maintain their piloting skills.”
While no one would argue we should scrap auto-pilots altogether in favor of human captains -- or Google Maps for paper maps, or calculators for slide rules –- the concern over pilots’ complacency in the skies highlights problems that may arise as our cars start to drive themselves, our physicians turn to algorithms when diagnosing patients and smartwatches tell us how to sleep better.
History has shown that certain skills -- like repairing horse-drawn carriages -- will inevitably become obsolete as technology improves. Yet the trend of “automation addiction” suggests a more worrisome potential outcome in which basic common sense is outsourced to a machine.
When things go awry on airplanes, for example, pilots increasingly have a tendency to study their computers for answers, instead of trusting their instincts, said air safety experts.
“One of the consequences of highly automated airplanes and younger pilots, who grow up very computer literate, is that they tend to focus exclusively on the computer, punching buttons and trying to get airplane to do the right thing, rather than focusing on the fundamental requirement of the pilot, which is, fly fast enough and maintain altitude,” explained Weber.
It may be only a matter of time before humans are eliminated from the cockpits entirely and replaced by computers that never lose their cool -- which may give us even more reason to trust their instincts over our own.
To Andrew McAfee, a research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of Race Against the Machine, the machines deserve our confidence.
"As people rely on technology more and more, there's always hand-wringing from some quarters about our over-reliance on technology" said McAfee. “Then technology proves it's more than up to the job and that worry fades into rearview mirror.”
July 8, 2013
Facebook Graph Search Attempts To Solve The Social Network's 'Big' Problem
The new search tool Facebook introduced Monday marks an attempt to fix a problem the social network helped create: Thanks to its emphasis on sharing, currency of friend requests and growing member population, Facebook users have become "friends" with hundreds of people they don't know well and don't know much about.
With Graph Search, which is rolling out to the site's U.S. users first, Facebook is expanding its focus from "friending" to being friendly -- all with an eye toward giving the social network more control over its users' social calendars.
Two Facebook employees who worked on Graph Search pitched the feature as a way for members to "navigate connections" and "make them more useful" -- Facebook-speak for making it easier to find information others have shared, or figuring out which acquaintance has done what. With Graph Search, the social network promises, you can discover new things to do (just search "friends who are French who like restaurants in Paris"), call up photos you've taken with buddies in the past (look up "friends who have uploaded photos with me") and find friends you never knew shared your interests (search "people who like Arrested Development and live in New York City").
Facebook's push underscores a new reality of our social lives: We've accumulated more "friends" than we can possibly be friends with, and belong to overgrown social networks that we have trouble managing.
"Facebook flattens every relationship you have into the same thing: a friend," explained Alice Marwick, a professor in Fordham University's department of communication and media studies. "Facebook Graph Search is trying to help you distinguish patterns in this big amorphous mass of people."
Since its inception in 2004, Facebook has pushed to free relationships from the constraints of time, place and actual, real-world connection. The average Facebook user now has over 300 friends -- 7 percent of whom they've never met in person and nearly double the number psychologist Robin Dunbar claims we can cognitively handle. In a tacit acknowledgement of how unwieldy online social circles had become, Facebook in 2012 encouraged its users to banish friends they didn't care to hear from (but couldn't for etiquette reasons de-friend) to a third category of people who would remain absent from the News Feed: "Acquaintances."
Now, by making data about our friends more easily accessible, Facebook aims to help us organize the vast number of people we've connected with online, transforming them from a generic group of "friends" to more discrete categories of people we could, say, take to the ballet, pester for travel tips or ask out on a date because Facebook says they're single.
Like so many of Facebook's changes, however, there's at least as much in it for the social network as for its users. Graph Search highlights Facebook's ambitions to move from address book to social planner -- from a repository of contact information and memories to a place that gives us ideas for things to do and people to do them with.
That's particularly crucial for Facebook's efforts to woo ad dollars, as the social network must demonstrate to advertisers that it helps people decide how to spend their money. By serving as a friend-powered tour guide, Facebook aims to position itself as a place to discover not only who's doing what, but what we'll do next with whom or with which company's product.
It remains to be seen what relationships or experiences Graph Search will enable, but, at least so far, the information it surfaces seems best suited to helping Facebook users do what they've always done: peer, unseen, into other peoples' lives. After all, knowing what someone likes to do isn't the same as being able to do it with them.
In a video demonstrating its new search tool, Facebook shows off Graph Search's capabilities with queries like, "my friends who like trail running," "my friends who like road trips" and "my friends who like dancing," then follows each with footage of happy hipsters -- who presumably connected via Graph Search -- dancing on ski slopes or snapping pics from the back of a car. Facebook is where you find fun, the video suggests.
Yet it's hard to imagine Facebook users wouldn't already know such basic details about the people they'd ask to join them for any of those activities. Since when have we invited people to dinner parties because they liked "dinner parties" on Facebook? Or picked road trip companions simply because they joined the "road trip" Facebook group? The utility of Graph Search may bump into social norms that dictate whether it's creepy or weird to invite loose acquaintances to a concert.
"I'm not convinced that [Graph Search] has effects on face-to-face relationships," said Marwick. "These relationships don't exist in a vacuum, and there might be reasons you don't ask someone to do something with you that have nothing to do with whether or not you share an interest. ... Facebook doesn't allow us to skip over that."
Maybe we'll keep our dinner party guests and road trip companions limited to "my friends who don't rely on Facebook to remember what I like."
With Graph Search, which is rolling out to the site's U.S. users first, Facebook is expanding its focus from "friending" to being friendly -- all with an eye toward giving the social network more control over its users' social calendars.
Two Facebook employees who worked on Graph Search pitched the feature as a way for members to "navigate connections" and "make them more useful" -- Facebook-speak for making it easier to find information others have shared, or figuring out which acquaintance has done what. With Graph Search, the social network promises, you can discover new things to do (just search "friends who are French who like restaurants in Paris"), call up photos you've taken with buddies in the past (look up "friends who have uploaded photos with me") and find friends you never knew shared your interests (search "people who like Arrested Development and live in New York City").
Facebook's push underscores a new reality of our social lives: We've accumulated more "friends" than we can possibly be friends with, and belong to overgrown social networks that we have trouble managing.
"Facebook flattens every relationship you have into the same thing: a friend," explained Alice Marwick, a professor in Fordham University's department of communication and media studies. "Facebook Graph Search is trying to help you distinguish patterns in this big amorphous mass of people."
Since its inception in 2004, Facebook has pushed to free relationships from the constraints of time, place and actual, real-world connection. The average Facebook user now has over 300 friends -- 7 percent of whom they've never met in person and nearly double the number psychologist Robin Dunbar claims we can cognitively handle. In a tacit acknowledgement of how unwieldy online social circles had become, Facebook in 2012 encouraged its users to banish friends they didn't care to hear from (but couldn't for etiquette reasons de-friend) to a third category of people who would remain absent from the News Feed: "Acquaintances."
Now, by making data about our friends more easily accessible, Facebook aims to help us organize the vast number of people we've connected with online, transforming them from a generic group of "friends" to more discrete categories of people we could, say, take to the ballet, pester for travel tips or ask out on a date because Facebook says they're single.
Like so many of Facebook's changes, however, there's at least as much in it for the social network as for its users. Graph Search highlights Facebook's ambitions to move from address book to social planner -- from a repository of contact information and memories to a place that gives us ideas for things to do and people to do them with.
That's particularly crucial for Facebook's efforts to woo ad dollars, as the social network must demonstrate to advertisers that it helps people decide how to spend their money. By serving as a friend-powered tour guide, Facebook aims to position itself as a place to discover not only who's doing what, but what we'll do next with whom or with which company's product.
It remains to be seen what relationships or experiences Graph Search will enable, but, at least so far, the information it surfaces seems best suited to helping Facebook users do what they've always done: peer, unseen, into other peoples' lives. After all, knowing what someone likes to do isn't the same as being able to do it with them.
In a video demonstrating its new search tool, Facebook shows off Graph Search's capabilities with queries like, "my friends who like trail running," "my friends who like road trips" and "my friends who like dancing," then follows each with footage of happy hipsters -- who presumably connected via Graph Search -- dancing on ski slopes or snapping pics from the back of a car. Facebook is where you find fun, the video suggests.
Yet it's hard to imagine Facebook users wouldn't already know such basic details about the people they'd ask to join them for any of those activities. Since when have we invited people to dinner parties because they liked "dinner parties" on Facebook? Or picked road trip companions simply because they joined the "road trip" Facebook group? The utility of Graph Search may bump into social norms that dictate whether it's creepy or weird to invite loose acquaintances to a concert.
"I'm not convinced that [Graph Search] has effects on face-to-face relationships," said Marwick. "These relationships don't exist in a vacuum, and there might be reasons you don't ask someone to do something with you that have nothing to do with whether or not you share an interest. ... Facebook doesn't allow us to skip over that."
Maybe we'll keep our dinner party guests and road trip companions limited to "my friends who don't rely on Facebook to remember what I like."
Twitter Bots Have No Trouble Fooling You, Getting More Influence Than Oprah
According to her Twitter bio, Carina Santos is a blonde, female journalist based in Rio de Janeiro who works with Globo, a 24-hour news channel in Brazil. She sends around 50 tweets per day on the top news of the moment -- from sports scores to celebrity gossip -- to her nearly 700 followers. Twitalyzer, a social media analytics firm, judged her to be nearly as influential an online personality as Ryan Seacrest.
There’s only one problem: Santos, or @Scarina91, is also a bot.
"She" was created in 2011 by a team of researchers in the computer science department at Brazil's Federal University of Ouro Preto, which sought to gauage how easily services that measure influence on Twitter could be manipulated.
They found the services were easily duped, and also discovered that many human beings were tricked into thinking @Scarina91’s newsy updates were coming from an actual person.
Social media marketing firms, such as Klout, promise they can help companies identify influential individuals online who can then be targeted with special offers, discounts or promotions in a bid to help build awareness for a brand’s services. The study’s recently released findings, which support ongoing criticism of influence-rating firms, suggest the social media analytics experts are getting manipulated by bots, which in turn could allow scammers to take advantage of freebies from marketers.
“It’s easy to infiltrate Twitter with a robot and make it influential,” said Fabrício Benevenuto, an associate professor of computer science at the Federal University of Ouro Preto and co-author of the study, titled "You Followed My Bot! Transforming Robots Into Influential Users In Twitter."
“Our trust of these kinds of rankings can be dangerous," he added. "Our paper highlights that it’s important to rethink what are the best metrics to measure influence on Twitter.”
Benevenuto and his collaborators set up two Twitter bots designed to test the accuracy of influence scores calculated by two firms, Twitalyzer and Klout. @Scarina91, the fake journalist, followed 2,000 people, then unfollowed any users who did not follow “her” back. The bot was set up to tweet about the most popular news topics featured on Globo’s site, and the tweets were automatically generated by a system that regurgitated other users’ tweets, ensuring her Twitter stream looked believably human. The second bot, @Fepessoinhas2, merely tried to attract followers by following other accounts at random, until it had reached the then-imposed maximum of 2,000 followed users.
The researchers monitored the two bots for 90 days between September and December 2011, then measured their respective influence. @Scarina91 and @Fepessoinhas2 earned Klout scores of 41.8 and 18, respectively, and Twitalyzer scores of 86 and 9, respectively. This put the @Scarina91 bot in the company of influential Twitter users like Seacrest (influence score: 86), Conan O’Brien (88), the Dalai Lama (75) and President Barack Obama (83), according to Twitalyzer’s March 2011 rankings of those personalities. Tweeters like Bill Gates (54), Oprah Winfrey (40), New Gingrich (13) and Justin Bieber (67) trailed the bot in influence. (The bots' scores were calculated several months after the well-known figures' scores, during which time Twitalyzer may have adjusted its algorithm to lower or raise some users' scores).
“Our results show that it is possible to become influential using very simple strategies, suggesting that these systems should review their influence score algorithms to avoid accounting with automatic activity," Benevenuto and his co-authors concluded in their paper.
Twitalyzer did not respond to a request for comment. Klout's chief executive, Joe Fernandez, defended his company’s results, noting that Klout correctly assigned the bots a relatively low score and that the company takes into account more than 400 different signals in calculating influence. He also maintained that some bots, like AccuWeather's robot, which posts weather updates, can actually be helpful for people.
“The average Klout Score is in the mid-forties, so I think the fact that these two accounts have low scores shows our system is working,” Fernandez said in an email.
In comparison to its rankings in 2011, Klout currently assigns @Scarina91 and @Fepessoinhas2 influence scores of 38 and 19, respectively. Twitalyzer, which appears to have revised its ranking system, awards both @Scarina91 and @Fepessoinhas2 a score of .1, though Obama’s own score has slid by 53 points to 30.
Perhaps even more surprising than the scores is just how well @Scarina91 seems to have fooled other humans on Twitter -- a sign, perhaps, of the highly formulaic style of many Twitter feeds.
Though some of her followers may have been bots themselves, @Scarina91 appears to have been a hit with her fellow Twitter users, receiving 94 retweets and 109 "@" replies, or mentions, during the 90 days the researchers monitored her activity.
Even a professor seems to have been tricked by the bot: A tweet from @Scarina91 in June of this year elicited a chuckle and reply from a Twitter user identifying himself as president of the teacher’s association at Brazil’s University of Rio Grande do Norte.
“We noted that some [Twitter users] with verified profiles, some real users, retweeted or even said ‘thanks’ to our robot," Benevenuto noted. "Maybe the problem is not with the scores themselves, but with Twitter. It's just so easy to infiltrate."
There’s only one problem: Santos, or @Scarina91, is also a bot.
"She" was created in 2011 by a team of researchers in the computer science department at Brazil's Federal University of Ouro Preto, which sought to gauage how easily services that measure influence on Twitter could be manipulated.
They found the services were easily duped, and also discovered that many human beings were tricked into thinking @Scarina91’s newsy updates were coming from an actual person.
Social media marketing firms, such as Klout, promise they can help companies identify influential individuals online who can then be targeted with special offers, discounts or promotions in a bid to help build awareness for a brand’s services. The study’s recently released findings, which support ongoing criticism of influence-rating firms, suggest the social media analytics experts are getting manipulated by bots, which in turn could allow scammers to take advantage of freebies from marketers.
“It’s easy to infiltrate Twitter with a robot and make it influential,” said Fabrício Benevenuto, an associate professor of computer science at the Federal University of Ouro Preto and co-author of the study, titled "You Followed My Bot! Transforming Robots Into Influential Users In Twitter."
“Our trust of these kinds of rankings can be dangerous," he added. "Our paper highlights that it’s important to rethink what are the best metrics to measure influence on Twitter.”
Benevenuto and his collaborators set up two Twitter bots designed to test the accuracy of influence scores calculated by two firms, Twitalyzer and Klout. @Scarina91, the fake journalist, followed 2,000 people, then unfollowed any users who did not follow “her” back. The bot was set up to tweet about the most popular news topics featured on Globo’s site, and the tweets were automatically generated by a system that regurgitated other users’ tweets, ensuring her Twitter stream looked believably human. The second bot, @Fepessoinhas2, merely tried to attract followers by following other accounts at random, until it had reached the then-imposed maximum of 2,000 followed users.
The researchers monitored the two bots for 90 days between September and December 2011, then measured their respective influence. @Scarina91 and @Fepessoinhas2 earned Klout scores of 41.8 and 18, respectively, and Twitalyzer scores of 86 and 9, respectively. This put the @Scarina91 bot in the company of influential Twitter users like Seacrest (influence score: 86), Conan O’Brien (88), the Dalai Lama (75) and President Barack Obama (83), according to Twitalyzer’s March 2011 rankings of those personalities. Tweeters like Bill Gates (54), Oprah Winfrey (40), New Gingrich (13) and Justin Bieber (67) trailed the bot in influence. (The bots' scores were calculated several months after the well-known figures' scores, during which time Twitalyzer may have adjusted its algorithm to lower or raise some users' scores).
“Our results show that it is possible to become influential using very simple strategies, suggesting that these systems should review their influence score algorithms to avoid accounting with automatic activity," Benevenuto and his co-authors concluded in their paper.
Twitalyzer did not respond to a request for comment. Klout's chief executive, Joe Fernandez, defended his company’s results, noting that Klout correctly assigned the bots a relatively low score and that the company takes into account more than 400 different signals in calculating influence. He also maintained that some bots, like AccuWeather's robot, which posts weather updates, can actually be helpful for people.
“The average Klout Score is in the mid-forties, so I think the fact that these two accounts have low scores shows our system is working,” Fernandez said in an email.
In comparison to its rankings in 2011, Klout currently assigns @Scarina91 and @Fepessoinhas2 influence scores of 38 and 19, respectively. Twitalyzer, which appears to have revised its ranking system, awards both @Scarina91 and @Fepessoinhas2 a score of .1, though Obama’s own score has slid by 53 points to 30.
Perhaps even more surprising than the scores is just how well @Scarina91 seems to have fooled other humans on Twitter -- a sign, perhaps, of the highly formulaic style of many Twitter feeds.
Though some of her followers may have been bots themselves, @Scarina91 appears to have been a hit with her fellow Twitter users, receiving 94 retweets and 109 "@" replies, or mentions, during the 90 days the researchers monitored her activity.
Even a professor seems to have been tricked by the bot: A tweet from @Scarina91 in June of this year elicited a chuckle and reply from a Twitter user identifying himself as president of the teacher’s association at Brazil’s University of Rio Grande do Norte.
“We noted that some [Twitter users] with verified profiles, some real users, retweeted or even said ‘thanks’ to our robot," Benevenuto noted. "Maybe the problem is not with the scores themselves, but with Twitter. It's just so easy to infiltrate."
July 2, 2013
Here's One Of The College Kids Helping Tinder Take Over Campuses
When Nick Aull, a junior at Tufts University, organizes parties for his fraternity, it’s not just his friends and frat brothers he’s worried about keeping happy. He also has to satisfy Tinder, a popular mobile dating service that launched last fall.
On a mission to win over teenage and 20-something users -- a group glued to their smartphones and coveted by Internet firms -- Tinder has hired a roster of undergraduates, including Aull, to promote the app on college campuses, report back on how students perceive the service and throw parties that will boost Tinder downloads.
Aull is one of two Tinder “campus reps” in the college hub of Boston. His job, he explained, is simple: “I’m in charge of bringing new kids to the product.”
Staid Fortune 500 brands, like Microsoft, Target and Hewlett-Packard, have long hired undergraduates to serve as brand ambassadors, while up-and-coming social networking sites could traditionally rely on their novelty and web know-how to help them gain a foothold on campuses, then spread organically from there.
But Tinder, a Los Angeles-based startup that received seed funding from IAC, isn’t taking any chances, and youth marketing experts say the last year has brought an uptick in small startups, like Tinder, seeking college students to plug their services. Uber, an app for hiring car services, also has a campus rep at Tufts, Aull notes.
“When you talk about the college consumer, it’s the most cluttered marketplace with the lowest attention span,” said Vishal Sapra, senior director of brand development at Mr. Youth, a marketing firm. “If you’re not being told by a friend on your campus about an app -- or whatever product it is -- you’re probably not going to get the traction or awareness that you need.”
Tinder’s meticulous efforts to woo college-age users underscores a prevailing wisdom among startups: attract them, and you'll attract everyone. Undergraduates -- social media-savvy, eager to try new offerings and seen as in-the-know early adopters -- will bring with them their younger siblings, older peers and, eventually, their parents.
“If you think about it, college students live in a highly social environment,” explained Tinder co-founder and chief marketing officer Justin Mateen in an interview earlier this year. “We used them as a starting point to see if the product resonated with them. If it did, then we knew it would work for everyone.”
Tinder's app offers a matchmaking service that connects individuals by having them flip through photos of other singles located nearby, each of whom they must “like” or “pass” in order to see the next potential date. If two users both "like" each other, Tinder lets them know they've made a match, then allows them to message each other via the app.
From the beginning, Tinder has placed an emphasis on targeting and attracting younger users. Tinder’s creators launched the app at the University of Southern California by throwing a birthday party for a co-founder’s college-age brother and his friends. The guests had to show they’d downloaded the app, and downloads jumped from 400 users on the first day to over 4,000 by the end of the first week.
Currently, users between 18 and 24 years old make up 68 percent of all Tinder users. (Tinder declined to share its number of active users but said the app has seen over 75 million matches and over 6 billion profile ratings.)
Tinder wouldn't specify how many campus reps they've hired, but Mateen told The Huffington Post in April that the company seeded the Tinder app at approximately 10 college campuses when it debuted. “We believe in top-down marketing, so we went to highly social people and had them promote it to their friends and it grew from there,” he said.
Aull, an economics major who belongs to the Theta Delta Chi fraternity, said that in the semester he’s been working as a campus representative he’s thrown four Tinder-themed events. A Tinder spokeswoman said Tinder does not pay for its reps' events, though it will in some cases provide Tinder-branded apparel. Aull isn’t being paid to promote Tinder, but he’ll be joining the young company as an intern later this summer and said there are "non-financial benefits" to serving as a rep.
“We had a Valentine’s Day Tinder party at my fraternity,” he recalled. “It was a really large party -- there were probably 200 or 300 people there -– and to get in, you had to have the Tinder app on your phone.”
In addition to hosting parties at his fraternity, Aull has partnered with a Tufts sorority to throw events, and he’s even organized a Tinder mixer at a Boston University sorority with the help of a young woman he met through the app. He says he aims to to attract "opinion leaders/social influencers" who might not have considered an app like Tinder before, then turn them into advocates for the service.
Aull described his Tinder-themed events as “classier” cocktail party affairs, with occasional prizes for people who find matches and free drinks for people over 21. The typical party has certain guidelines for its guests that ensure Tinder gets maximum exposure and, of course, maximum downloads.
"It could be a party where you find your date through Tinder and you have to have that date come," Aull explained. "Or it could be a party where you have to have Tinder just to get in."
Aull maintains his efforts have been paying off: He estimates 40 percent of Tufts undergraduates have downloaded Tinder’s app, and that 80 percent of the school’s Greek population uses the service. He said girls from other schools have used Tinder to invite him to their formals (he declined because he has a girlfriend). And over at Harvard University, people are “really, really into it," he said.
"Fraternities at Harvard would have Tinder parties where they would get all their girls from Tinder,” Aull said. “My guess would be that a lot of Harvard people maybe feel a little isolated from the average student in Boston and Tinder provides a means for people to connect at other schools.”
Aull says the app has spread because it offers an antidote to a “claustrophobic” social scene, where people run into the same friends over and over again. But aren’t there an endless number of social events on college campuses where people can meet, from lectures and seminars to school-sponsored study breaks to room parties?
Tinder makes meeting people more efficient, Aull said. And besides, with Tinder, there’s no fear of rejection: You only know when you've been "liked," not when you've been "passed."
“It’s a way to meet new people without being creepy,” he said. “And it’s a confidence-booster for a lot of people.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Tinder's relationship with IAC. The Internet company gave seed funding to Tinder but does not own the app.
On a mission to win over teenage and 20-something users -- a group glued to their smartphones and coveted by Internet firms -- Tinder has hired a roster of undergraduates, including Aull, to promote the app on college campuses, report back on how students perceive the service and throw parties that will boost Tinder downloads.
Aull is one of two Tinder “campus reps” in the college hub of Boston. His job, he explained, is simple: “I’m in charge of bringing new kids to the product.”
Staid Fortune 500 brands, like Microsoft, Target and Hewlett-Packard, have long hired undergraduates to serve as brand ambassadors, while up-and-coming social networking sites could traditionally rely on their novelty and web know-how to help them gain a foothold on campuses, then spread organically from there.
But Tinder, a Los Angeles-based startup that received seed funding from IAC, isn’t taking any chances, and youth marketing experts say the last year has brought an uptick in small startups, like Tinder, seeking college students to plug their services. Uber, an app for hiring car services, also has a campus rep at Tufts, Aull notes.
“When you talk about the college consumer, it’s the most cluttered marketplace with the lowest attention span,” said Vishal Sapra, senior director of brand development at Mr. Youth, a marketing firm. “If you’re not being told by a friend on your campus about an app -- or whatever product it is -- you’re probably not going to get the traction or awareness that you need.”
Tinder’s meticulous efforts to woo college-age users underscores a prevailing wisdom among startups: attract them, and you'll attract everyone. Undergraduates -- social media-savvy, eager to try new offerings and seen as in-the-know early adopters -- will bring with them their younger siblings, older peers and, eventually, their parents.
“If you think about it, college students live in a highly social environment,” explained Tinder co-founder and chief marketing officer Justin Mateen in an interview earlier this year. “We used them as a starting point to see if the product resonated with them. If it did, then we knew it would work for everyone.”
Tinder's app offers a matchmaking service that connects individuals by having them flip through photos of other singles located nearby, each of whom they must “like” or “pass” in order to see the next potential date. If two users both "like" each other, Tinder lets them know they've made a match, then allows them to message each other via the app.
From the beginning, Tinder has placed an emphasis on targeting and attracting younger users. Tinder’s creators launched the app at the University of Southern California by throwing a birthday party for a co-founder’s college-age brother and his friends. The guests had to show they’d downloaded the app, and downloads jumped from 400 users on the first day to over 4,000 by the end of the first week.
Currently, users between 18 and 24 years old make up 68 percent of all Tinder users. (Tinder declined to share its number of active users but said the app has seen over 75 million matches and over 6 billion profile ratings.)
Tinder wouldn't specify how many campus reps they've hired, but Mateen told The Huffington Post in April that the company seeded the Tinder app at approximately 10 college campuses when it debuted. “We believe in top-down marketing, so we went to highly social people and had them promote it to their friends and it grew from there,” he said.
Aull, an economics major who belongs to the Theta Delta Chi fraternity, said that in the semester he’s been working as a campus representative he’s thrown four Tinder-themed events. A Tinder spokeswoman said Tinder does not pay for its reps' events, though it will in some cases provide Tinder-branded apparel. Aull isn’t being paid to promote Tinder, but he’ll be joining the young company as an intern later this summer and said there are "non-financial benefits" to serving as a rep.
“We had a Valentine’s Day Tinder party at my fraternity,” he recalled. “It was a really large party -- there were probably 200 or 300 people there -– and to get in, you had to have the Tinder app on your phone.”
In addition to hosting parties at his fraternity, Aull has partnered with a Tufts sorority to throw events, and he’s even organized a Tinder mixer at a Boston University sorority with the help of a young woman he met through the app. He says he aims to to attract "opinion leaders/social influencers" who might not have considered an app like Tinder before, then turn them into advocates for the service.
Aull described his Tinder-themed events as “classier” cocktail party affairs, with occasional prizes for people who find matches and free drinks for people over 21. The typical party has certain guidelines for its guests that ensure Tinder gets maximum exposure and, of course, maximum downloads.
"It could be a party where you find your date through Tinder and you have to have that date come," Aull explained. "Or it could be a party where you have to have Tinder just to get in."
Aull maintains his efforts have been paying off: He estimates 40 percent of Tufts undergraduates have downloaded Tinder’s app, and that 80 percent of the school’s Greek population uses the service. He said girls from other schools have used Tinder to invite him to their formals (he declined because he has a girlfriend). And over at Harvard University, people are “really, really into it," he said.
"Fraternities at Harvard would have Tinder parties where they would get all their girls from Tinder,” Aull said. “My guess would be that a lot of Harvard people maybe feel a little isolated from the average student in Boston and Tinder provides a means for people to connect at other schools.”
Aull says the app has spread because it offers an antidote to a “claustrophobic” social scene, where people run into the same friends over and over again. But aren’t there an endless number of social events on college campuses where people can meet, from lectures and seminars to school-sponsored study breaks to room parties?
Tinder makes meeting people more efficient, Aull said. And besides, with Tinder, there’s no fear of rejection: You only know when you've been "liked," not when you've been "passed."
“It’s a way to meet new people without being creepy,” he said. “And it’s a confidence-booster for a lot of people.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article mischaracterized Tinder's relationship with IAC. The Internet company gave seed funding to Tinder but does not own the app.
June 28, 2013
Facebook Android App Collects Phone Numbers Without Permission -- Even From Non-Members
Facebook has been inadvertently collecting phone numbers belonging to people who download the site’s Android application -- even if they aren’t members of the social network, don’t ever sign into the app or don’t explicitly share their cell phone number.
The bug was reported by a security software provider Wednesday and has been confirmed by Facebook, which noted the problem will be addressed in the forthcoming version of the app. A Facebook spokesman said the company believes the technical flaw was introduced in February of this year.
Symantec, the software provider, announced in a blog post that its mobile security software, which looks for apps that could pose privacy risks, found that Facebook’s Android app had been “leaking” the phone number of Android devices on which it was installed. A Symantec spokesman told The Huffington Post that any Android smartphone running the buggy Facebook app was affected by the flaw and could have had its phone number uploaded to Facebook's servers.
“The first time you launch the Facebook application, even before logging in, your phone number will be sent over the Internet to Facebook servers,” Symantec's blog post said. “You do not need to provide your phone number, log in, initiate a specific action, or even need a Facebook account for this to happen.”
Facebook's spokesman told The Huffington Post that the social network did not "use or process the numbers in any way," and said they had been deleted from Facebook’s servers.
“This was a bug in the Facebook for Android app, and we thank Symantec for bringing it to our attention,” Facebook spokesman Derick Mains told The Huffington Post in an email. “We've fixed it in the next version of the app, which is available for anyone to download as a beta today."
Symantec estimated in its blog post that a "significant portion" of the "hundreds of millions of devices" on which Facebook's Android app have been installed were affected by the bug. Mains said that because Facebook deleted the collected phone numbers after being notified of the bug, it could not estimate how many people were affected or numbers were collected.
This article has been updated to include additional information from Symantec and comment from a Facebook spokesman.
The bug was reported by a security software provider Wednesday and has been confirmed by Facebook, which noted the problem will be addressed in the forthcoming version of the app. A Facebook spokesman said the company believes the technical flaw was introduced in February of this year.
Symantec, the software provider, announced in a blog post that its mobile security software, which looks for apps that could pose privacy risks, found that Facebook’s Android app had been “leaking” the phone number of Android devices on which it was installed. A Symantec spokesman told The Huffington Post that any Android smartphone running the buggy Facebook app was affected by the flaw and could have had its phone number uploaded to Facebook's servers.
“The first time you launch the Facebook application, even before logging in, your phone number will be sent over the Internet to Facebook servers,” Symantec's blog post said. “You do not need to provide your phone number, log in, initiate a specific action, or even need a Facebook account for this to happen.”
Facebook's spokesman told The Huffington Post that the social network did not "use or process the numbers in any way," and said they had been deleted from Facebook’s servers.
“This was a bug in the Facebook for Android app, and we thank Symantec for bringing it to our attention,” Facebook spokesman Derick Mains told The Huffington Post in an email. “We've fixed it in the next version of the app, which is available for anyone to download as a beta today."
Symantec estimated in its blog post that a "significant portion" of the "hundreds of millions of devices" on which Facebook's Android app have been installed were affected by the bug. Mains said that because Facebook deleted the collected phone numbers after being notified of the bug, it could not estimate how many people were affected or numbers were collected.
This article has been updated to include additional information from Symantec and comment from a Facebook spokesman.
