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"The thing about memes is that through repetition, they create a shared language," says Professor Julie Levin Russo, an adjunct assistant professor at Brown's Modern Culture & Media Program. "If you understand the premise of the meme, you can communicate a lot very easily, with whatever twist you're putting on the meme structure."

On Jan 4, the "Shit Girls Say" meme was radically transformed. New York-based graphic designer & video blogger Franchesca Ramsey a.k.a. Chescaleigh unleashed "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls", and it blew up the Internet. In the video, Ramsey plays her blonde-haired white friend who she portrays as curiously confused, and innocently ignorant. "Why isn't there a white entertainment television? The Jews were slaves too, and you don't hear us complaining all the time," Chescaleigh as-white-girl asks the camera. She portrays her friend as at times confused ("Is this racist?") other times annoyed. Overall, her white friend is completely unaware of fundamental cultural and racial differences between her and her black friend. It's these awkward moments that fuel the humor of this viral video.

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When Franchesca appeared on Anderson Cooper a few days after the video blew up, Cooper asked *the question* that mainstream media was dying to know: Is the video racist?

"I don't think that talking about ignorance is racist," Franchesca tells Cooper. "And like I said, I'm not labeling anyone racist because that would infer that the statements were saying someone was better than another race - and that's not what any of the statements are doing." Shortly after her Anderson Cooper appearance, Franchesca produced a sequel, "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls Part 2."

Soon, more "Shit X Says to Y" versions of the meme began to appear. "Shit White Girls Say to Brown (Desi/Indian) Girls" features an Indian woman portraying her white girlfriend, who asks questions like "Do you want to go to 7-11? Oh oops, is that racist?" It is cutting, and points to some of the underlying racism that Indian-Americans experience regularly.

In "Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls," actor/comedian Cindy Fang dresses in drag, playing a white dude and points out some of the obnoxious, arrogant statements that some white guys say to Asian women. "Sorry, I have a hard time telling Asians apart," she says, with a tone that conveys how the white guy she is portraying doesn't feel like trying to educate himself. He is blissful in his ignorance. And then, a blatantly racist statement: "Why do they call it Bangkok? They should call it Bang Pussy!!!" This video speaks to the painful sexism and racism that Asian women experience.

Of course, it's just comedy - and the talented Fang masterfully exaggerates these statements to hammer home the crass, yet serious joke. Moreso than "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls," "Shit White Guys Say to Asian Girls" is doubly as biting, taking swipes at sex and race relations. It's almost as upsetting as "Shit Asian Girls Say", another version of the original "Shit Girls Say" meme.

In Latoya Peterson's blog post "Exploring the Problematic and Subversive Shit People Say [Meme-ology]" on Racialicious, she notes that it isn't until "Shit Black Gays Say" (and part 2) and "Shit Southern Gay Guys Say" that the viewer starts to see the performer's subjective interpretation of themselves.

"It's notable that these videos are the principals representing themselves (as opposed to someone else's interpretation of them), perhaps since these groups are still so invisible in the public eye that no one else but them could speak to their experience," writes Peterson.

How "Shit White Girls Say to Black Girls" Shifted the Conversation

"There's a way in which the meme format allows for a more granular renditions of identity than you often see in mass culture," says Professor Russo.

Chescaleigh's video shifted the focus from the narrator as subject to the narrator as a vehicle for social critique. Now X is saying something to Y. Previously, X was either speaking for themselves, or portraying the stereotypical subject, usually in drag.

"Do you know the guy at the liquor store? I mean, I assume you guys all know each other," says the Arab girl portraying her white friend in "Shit White Girls Say...to Arab Girls". "I've never met one of you before! I mean, I've seen Arabs on TV...on the news. Was 9/11 your fault?"

"Friendly Prejuidice"

Writing for The Guardian, Thea Lim points out that the statements in all of these videos imply a sort of "friendly prejudice":

What's friendly prejudice? The most common defence of racism is: "But I didn't intend to be racist." This response relies on the idea that if we didn't intend to offend someone, then their feelings can't possibly be hurt. The Shit X Says to Y videos are delightfully validating because they show that those with the genuinely lovely intentions of being your friend and seeking commonality with you can still be rude and hurtful.

A commenter on the NPR story that questioned if Franchesca's video was "racist" tried the good ol' "role reversal" trick (that always fails), which attempts to deny the existence of white privilege. "If the roles were reversed...Jesse [Jackson] & [Al] Sharpton, would be involved, lawsuits filed, perhaps riots...". Says Lim:

The reason why relationships between white and non-white people, or straight people and gay people are fraught, is because of our history - long gone, recent or ongoing. Racist, homophobic or simply thoughtless comments are insulting not just in and of themselves, but because they are a bilious reminder of the times when straight, white people have dehumanised and denied other groups their human rights. Of course, non-white and gay people can say nasty or even prejudicial things to white and straight people, but those things don't deliver the sting that comes from decades of being on the wrong end of an unequal relationship. Where Do We Go From Here?

I have watched my friends react to these videos with anger and sadness. I have seen others shout "That's me! That totally happened to me." Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The most important aspect of these videos, however, is that people are actually reacting to them. They're easy conversation starters, a segway into sharing experiences past and present.

Looking at our own biased perspectives and cultural baggage is not easy, but it is necessary. The "Shit X Says to Y" iteration of the "Shit People Say" meme forces viewers to actually think about what they've said to their friends, and what their friends say to them. Humor helps us in those strange, uncomfortable moments.

But are we ready to deal with this?

In her post on Racialicous, Peterson points out that, still, "Shit Girls Say" and "Shit Black Girls Say" received a lot more views than their "Shit X Says to Y" social commentary videos. "Maybe that's because, as a culture, we are accustomed to laughing at stereotypes," writes Peterson, "but we aren't prepared to unpack how we perpetuate them."

After a few weeks of Internet madness, the noise died down. By the end of January, conversations about this meme were starting to feel stale. So the Internet chilled out and went back to its usual, easy humor. I started seeing these videos on my Facebook news feed: "Shit New Yorkers Say," "Shit Chicagoans Say." But it's only a matter of time until the currents shift again.

Image via Chescaleigh's Facebook page.

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This year's Super Bowl will be more social than ever before.

With the rise of social TV and the first-ever 2,800-square-foot social media command center, fans who have trekked down to Indianapolis and people at Super Bowl parties across the country can now opt to have a super-connected experience.

This marks the first time that the NFL has partnered with a Super Bowl host city. Like a Midwestern truck stop that's got a restaurant, convenience store, bathrooms, random coin-operated claw games (that you can't ever win) and gas, the Super Bowl social media command center seeks to be all things to all football fans. Receive mobile updates about navigating the city. The Super Bowl Social Media Command center will answer your Twitter (@superbowl2012) and Facebook questions. Follow the blog here. It's the customer service center of your Friday Night Lights dreams.

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Tons of fans are already busy on social media. According to research from Nielsen and NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, the Patriots' website is beating the Giants' website in terms of unique visitors. Giants fans, however, tend to spend more time on their team's site - and they also view more pages. Giants fans are also talking more on social media about their quarterback, Tom Brady.

The Super Bowl is a Social TV Event

Various social TV apps are already available for Facebook. Entertainment social network GetGlue gives users an opportunity to check-in to sports events. ConnecTV is another free social platform that serves as a "second screen," which means users can talk to friends while watching the Super Bowl. Users can sync shows, and then watch them with their friends while chatting in real-time.

The Super Bowl seems to be making up for the lack of social media at the London 2012 Olympics. In fact, not one of the Olympic volunteers can make a comment about the games without permission, according to Sysomos. At Super Bowl 2012, expect the exact opposite.

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This is old (as in 2007 old). The kid in the video is now seven years old and undoubtably jailbreaks his iPhone and programs Arduino boards. But five years ago he was just a toddler with a bottle, and this was the first time he was on the Web and Fleek-ler!, as he called it, on his own. It was "the moment" - the moment when you first realize that moving the cursor and clicking the trackpad leads to discovery, and that discovery is a whole lot of fun.

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My son discovered Flickr today from Paul Mayne on Vimeo.

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StumbleUpon is one of those sites we've had on our radar for quite sometime. We covered the company's redesign last year, which re-focused the site on topic features. So when StumbleUpon snuck in a strange change the other day without telling anyone, we were shocked. This update made it impossible to get direct links for the pages one is stumbling unless they choose to not sign-in to the service.

The entire point of StumbleUpon, for the user, is to build up a taste graph that will better deliver stories that the user would like. But many sites depend on referral traffic from StumbleUpon, which is something outside of the StumbleUpon user's direct stumbling experience.

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"As part of redesign that spawns user experience that you write about, we look a lot at how users are using our service," said StumbleUpon's VP of Business Development and Marketing Marc Leibowitz. "We have some things in mind to address this concern."

StumbleUpon's response is that, well, they were "just trying to improve the user experience." And besides, they told us, two-thirds of users use the Web bar.

What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user's taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site. "Signed-in users, when they're encountering the Web bar it is about their stumbling," Leibowitz said. "Visitors can easily close the Web bar."

In other words, if you do want to see direct links, just don't sign in.

What a great solution. Truly. Not only will StumbleUpon not be able to get an idea of that user's taste graph, that user will miss out on the entire community aspect of the site.

Leibowitz cited accidental clicks on the "X" button of the Web bar as StumbleUpon's main reason for getting rid of the Web bar entirely.

"People would accidentally click the button - they don't have an extension such as Chrome or Firefox extensions, so they can't go back to their Stumbling unless they go directly to StumbleUpon.com."

This sounds like a complicated solution for a pretty easy problem. It would it have been pretty easy for StumbleUpon to just add a box that pops up when the user clicks "X." It could say something simple like: "Are you sure you want to close this page and leave StumbleUpon?" Instead, StumbleUpon says, it is thinking only of the users - not the people who receive tons of referral traffic from the StumbleUpon discovery engine.

"The trade off is that we have to make some concessions around the way we show the URL," Leibowitz tells us. "There's no way we can change the way the URL is displayed in the address bar, but there are some ways we can make it easier to copy and paste the source code."

For StumbleUpon users who are still looking for a way to see the direct URL, try using a StumbleUpon Firefox add-on or Chrome extension.

What Will Happen to StumbleUpon Referral Traffic? "My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon," writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. "After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further...especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview." Unfortunately for sites who depend on StumbleUpon for referral traffic, there aren't too many alternatives.

"My website used to get 70-80% of referral traffic from StumbleUpon," writes ReadWriteWeb commenter Jeffrey Davis. "After the redesign, that percentage dropped to 40%. I suspect now that it will drop even further...especially since SU is now hijacking the pageview."

Pinterest is now Davis' number two referrer.

This is only one isolated case, but it's telling. Perhaps it's time for marketers to start shifting their strategy from StumbleUpon to Pinterest. Because it doesn't look like StumbleUpon will be backpedaling on its latest decision anytime soon.

Has referral traffic to your site suffered since the StumbleUpon redesign? Tell us about it in the comments.

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If you didn't make it to London for Monki Gras, the follow on conference to Monktoberfest, you missed out on quite a lot of great content and beer.

The conference is organized by RedMonk, an unusual analyst firm. Their conferences, reflecting the analysts at RedMonk, are unusual as well. The Portland, Maine event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady, who resides in Maine. This time around, the event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder James Governor.

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Conference as a Joke

Some industry events have a very serious air about them. Things like VMworld or the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) have a very button-down feel about them, and tend to be highly skewed towards sponsor-driven content. Read: sponsors get speaking slots, and it shows. Many of the talks are little more than extended commercials, and tend to be about as interesting and informative as reading sales brochures.

James Governor paces the stage at Monki Gras

The RedMonk conferences, on the other hand, started as a joke. When the RedMonk folks joked about combining a beer and developer conference, though, they found that people weren't laughing. They were asking "when," "where" and "how much"?

The price for a two-day conference, which included catered lunch and dinner with a generous and interesting selection of beer? The tickets ranged from £99 to £140, depending on when you purchased the tickets. (Disclaimer: As a speaker, I did not pay for a ticket for the event. I did pay my own travel.)

Diversity and Expanded Agenda

Some of the speaking line-up was carried over from Monktoberfest, which is OK since few of the attendees who attended Monktoberfest were likely to attend Monki Gras. Matt LeMay reprised his talk on "kitteh vs. chikin", Greg Avola of Untappd was back (though with a different talk) and Donnie Berkholz (now a RedMonk analyst) gave his "Assholes are Ruining Your Project" talk.

But there quite a few new talks as well, especially since the agenda was expanded to two days at popular demand. I particularly enjoyed the CTO vs. vice-president of engineering talk between Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent. It was not your typical, dry and dull conference fare.

Which brings me to an important point. The RedMonk conferences are a bit more rowdy than other conferences. Nobody had a "perform like a pr0n star" moment, and none of the talks were offensive at all. However, speakers did drop some f-bombs and were generally much more casual than other shows.

One of the things I dinged Monktoberfest on was the lack of diversity. The speaking line up had no women, and there were few women in attendance as well. I spoke to Governor and O'Grady about the line-up and their response was that they were aware of the problem, but had invited a few women to speak but they were not available on the date for Monktoberfest. They did assure me that they'd make an effort to have a diverse line-up for the next event, and were good at their word.

Laura Merling of Alcatel-Lucent, UX guru Leisa Riechelt, and Bocoup's Irene Ros were all on the agenda. Was it equal time? Not quite, with two days of talks Monki Gras had a lot of speakers and most were men. However, it's notoriously difficult to recruit women to speak at tech conferences. I spotted a lot more women in attendance at Monki Gras, as well, so I think that the organizers are doing what they can to provide a solid set of talks with a diverse set of speakers.

Talk Highlights

Kohsuke Kawaguchi of CloudBees had a short slot to talk about building a community around an open source project, based on his experience with Jenkins. Stop me if you've heard this before: A lone developer starts working on something as a hobby, and ultimately creates a project that's used by a huge community. Jenkins may not be quite as ubiquitous as Linux, but for a project that started as a one-man show in 2004, it's grown impressively.

How do you get contributors to your FOSS project? Kawaguchi suggests that developers "think about the conversion funnel." Usually reserved for marketers and sales folks, Kawaguchi reminded the audience that "every developer starts as a visitor." Visitors have to be able to find the resources they need to become users, before they become developers.

Kawaguchi also asks developers to make sure their code is modularized. It's easier for people to hack small pieces than one big blob. Some developers may only care about a small part of a project. And "it's good software engineering anyway." The division of labor is greater than collaboration, says Kawaguchi.

The PhoneGap talk by Andre Charland and Dave Johnson was also interesting. Charland and Johnson went through the history of PhoneGap through its purchase by Adobe. The lesson they learned around PhoneGap? You don't need sales people, you don't need marketing. If you have a really strong FOSS project like PhoneGap "people just start calling you."

If you remember the Apache considered harmful post and O'Grady's "you won't get fired for using Apache" post, then Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse had a talk that was a must-see. Not surprisingly, Milinkovich wasn't in agreement with the anti-foundational messaging in the Apache post, or O'Grady's somewhat weak defense of foundations. He made a pretty strong case for foundations as a vendor neutral place for development that provides governance, IP management, project lifecycles, community oversight and norms, etc. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Monki Gras, a lot of talks were very short. This is good in that it's hard to have a terribly boring talk in 20 minutes. It's bad, though, when someone like Milinkovich probably could have gone longer and had more interesting things to say. All good things come to an end, though.

Day two at Monki Gras

After day one's programming came to an end, the attendees were treated to a catered dinner and a beer tasting contest led by beer expert Melissa Cole. Each table was designated a "team captain" and attendees were taught a bit about beer and then led through a practice round of tasting and trying to identify beers.

Obviously the Monki Gras attendees were enthusiastic about beer, but are they knowledgeable? Well, certainly moreso now than before. I think we found that a lot of beer fans are experts on what they like, but not necessarily at identifying types of beers.

The selection of beers during dinner was interesting, and featured six British and three Belgian beers. This includes treats like Thornbridge Jaipur, Freedom Pilsner, Oakham JHB and Trappistes Rochefort 8. Note that attendees were served amounts appropriate to tasting during dinner, not nine full pints of beer. After dinner, attendees may have consumed that or more, as the beer was flowing pretty freely and there was apparently an after-party that went until past 4 a.m. In the interests of being prepared and awake for my talk the following day, I didn't make it to that one.

Day two featured a slightly smaller crowd, slightly the worse for wear, at a different venue across town.

Day two's content was just as strong as day one. In fact, I think that Why Most UX is Shite by Reichelt was probably my favorite talk. Why does most UX suck? According to Reichelt:

Leisa Riechelt at Monki Gras

• Organizations don't make decisions. Users have to make them instead. (Too much fear in deciding.)
• You think your opinion counts. Reichelt makes the point that all too often designers are influenced too strongly by the people they work closely with, instead of the people they're designing for. (But don't interact with as often.)
• You don't measure it. Reichelt says that "companies don't have good acquisition metrics or retention metrics or engagement metrics, let alone cohort analysis." The things they track are not ideal for actually making good products.
• You don't really care. Companies talk a good game, but they're not designed around user experience.
• UI is a symptom of organizational culture. "All of these things are hard and most of them start much higher up in the organization than the average UX designer ever gets to. Good UX is cultural. If you want to hire a freelancer to 'do UX' , it's like putting a plaster on gangrenous leg."

Worth the Trip?

Following the shorter agenda on the second day, the attendees adjourned to the bar next to the venue to continue talking and trying beers. It's a testament to the strength of the conference that so many folks hung around to talk to one another afterwards.

As I've said before, the most significant track for any event is the "hallway track," and the RedMonk team have generated a really strong one. Software developers and people that need to work well with developers should seriously consider attending the next event, if it's feasible. Monki Gras is easily one of the best events I've been to for actually connecting with other folks and learning about what's going on in the rest of the industry. Cap that off with good beer and food, and what else could you want from a conference?

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Space sucks. Literally. The void of space is one perpetual vacuum that would suck the brain out of any exposed human through their ears. In space there is also unfiltered radiation, extreme temperatures and a multitude of other ways that humans can be harmed outside of low-Earth orbit. Learning how to mitigate radiation and improve space crews' health are two of 16 recommendations made by the National Research Council to NASA for the agency's technological focus in the next five years.

Researchers announced yesterday that they have discovered a new potential "Goldilocks" planet in a different solar system. A "Goldilocks" planet is one found within the habitable zone in orbit around a star - not too hot, not to cold - that could potentially support life. In hundreds of years, after humanity has exhausted all of Earth's natural resources, we may need to migrate to one of these planets. So, NASA should hurry up and get cracking on the NRC's recommendations. Best to be prepared in the face of an uncertain future.

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Near-Term Space Travel

The NRC's recommendations come in three objectives. See the chart below.

The study was sponsored by NASA. It states, " NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) should establish a rigorous process to select among competing technologies at appropriate milestones in order to ensure that the most promising ones receive sufficient attention and resources."

The study focuses on the near term goals for NASA's space flight program and recommends that the foundation for the goals be implemented in the next five years. NASA works on 20-30 year windows of technological innovation. Within that window, it is hoped, that humans will return to the Moon and maybe make a venture towards Earth's irascible sister planet, Mars. Near and long terms goals in our solar system are to identify alien sources of water and determine if life ever existed outside of our little blue orb.

Goldilocks and A Dwarf

The most recent Goldilocks planet, dubbed GJ 667Cc, is found in the constellation Scorpio, 22 light years away from Earth. It orbits a dwarf star in a system with two other dwarf stars. It has a 28-day solar cycle, meaning its "years" are very quick. The planet is much closer to its star than Earth but researchers believe it receives as much energy from its star because of the weakness of the dwarf.

This is the fourth Goldilocks planet found as scientists become more proficient at finding smaller objects orbiting distant stars. Researchers did not expect to find a planet around the star because the system does not have a lot of metal-based material such as iron in comparison with our own solar system. Yet, the discovery shows that Earth-like planets can exist in a variety of conditions in the universe, greatly increasing the likelihood that another planet much like our own exists somewhere.

"This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets. Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz, in a release. "The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets."

Now that humanity is getting better at identifying extra-solar planets, NASA and the international space community needs to take the steps we will need to eventually reach out to them. The first steps to inter-galactic dominance start with the decisions makers in Washington, D.C.

Top image: UC Santa Cruz

Discuss

Space sucks. Literally. The void of space is one perpetual vacuum that would suck the brain out of any exposed human through their ears. In space there is also unfiltered radiation, extreme temperatures and a multitude of other ways that humans can be harmed outside of low-Earth orbit. Learning how to mitigate radiation and improve space crews' health are two of 16 recommendations made by the National Research Council to NASA for the agency's technological focus in the next five years.

Researchers announced yesterday that they have discovered a new potential "Goldilocks" planet in a different solar system. A "Goldilocks" planet is one found within the habitable zone in orbit around a star - not too hot, not to cold - that could potentially support life. In hundreds of years, after humanity has exhausted all of Earth's natural resources, we may need to migrate to one of these planets. So, NASA should hurry up and get cracking on the NRC's recommendations. Best to be prepared in the face of an uncertain future.

Sponsor

Near-Term Space Travel

The NRC's recommendations come in three objectives. See the chart below.

The study was sponsored by NASA. It states, " NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) should establish a rigorous process to select among competing technologies at appropriate milestones in order to ensure that the most promising ones receive sufficient attention and resources."

The study focuses on the near term goals for NASA's space flight program and recommends that the foundation for the goals be implemented in the next five years. NASA works on 20-30 year windows of technological innovation. Within that window, it is hoped, that humans will return to the Moon and maybe make a venture towards Earth's irascible sister planet, Mars. Near and long terms goals in our solar system are to identify alien sources of water and determine if life ever existed outside of our little blue orb.

Goldilocks and A Dwarf

The most recent Goldilocks planet, dubbed GJ 667Cc, is found in the constellation Scorpio, 22 light years away from Earth. It orbits a dwarf star in a system with two other dwarf stars. It has a 28-day solar cycle, meaning its "years" are very quick. The planet is much closer to its star than Earth but researchers believe it receives as much energy from its star because of the weakness of the dwarf.

This is the fourth Goldilocks planet found as scientists become more proficient at finding smaller objects orbiting distant stars. Researchers did not expect to find a planet around the star because the system does not have a lot of metal-based material such as iron in comparison with our own solar system. Yet, the discovery shows that Earth-like planets can exist in a variety of conditions in the universe, greatly increasing the likelihood that another planet much like our own exists somewhere.

"This was expected to be a rather unlikely star to host planets. Yet there they are, around a very nearby, metal-poor example of the most common type of star in our galaxy," said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz, in a release. "The detection of this planet, this nearby and this soon, implies that our galaxy must be teeming with billions of potentially habitable rocky planets."

Now that humanity is getting better at identifying extra-solar planets, NASA and the international space community needs to take the steps we will need to eventually reach out to them. The first steps to inter-galactic dominance start with the decisions makers in Washington, D.C.

Top image: UC Santa Cruz

Discuss

"Conflict minerals," those mined to support groups conducting armed conflict or engaging in human rights abuses, have been an issue since long before we first wrote about it in July of 2010. The mineral equivalent of blood diamonds, they include tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold, all of which are used to manufacture our electronics.

Nokia, the world's largest manufacturers of mobile phones, today published its policy on conflict minerals.

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Nokia Policy Against Illegal Trade of Natural Resources

In a post on Nokia's "Conversations" blog, Ian Delaney lays out the company's public policy (PDF), which augments their supplier requirements.

Delaney boils the policy down to these four elements.

• We prohibit human rights abuses associated with the extraction, transport or trade of minerals.
• We also prohibit any direct or indirect support to non-state armed groups or security forces that illegally control or tax mine sites, transport routes, trade points, or any upstream actors in the supply chain.
• We have no tolerance with regard to corruption, money-laundering and bribery.
• We require the parties in our supply chain to agree to follow the same principles.

The policy delves at some length into Nokia's commitment to human rights "in accordance with accepted international conventions and practices, such as those of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ILO Core Conventions on Labor Standards, UN Global Compact, and OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises."

Under the sub-heading, "Implementation of the Policy with Regards to Conflict Minerals," the document reads:

"We prohibit human rights abuses associated with the extraction, transport or trade of minerals. We also prohibit any direct or indirect support to non-state armed groups or security forces that illegally control or tax mine sites, transport routes, trade points, or any upstream actors in the supply chain. Similarly, Nokia has a no tolerance policy with respect to corruption, money-laundering and bribery. We require the parties in our supply chain to agree to follow the same principles."

The document outlines some of the company's process for oversight of suppliers, including the EICC-GeSI Conflict Minerals Reporting Template. It would be interesting to know how the suppliers will be reviewed, how often and what will happen to errant suppliers who use conflict minerals. We have asked Mr. Delaney exactly that and will update should we receive a response.

Conflict Minerals

Although conflict minerals could theoretically crop up anywhere, practically, East Africa is ground zero. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is certainly the worst-affected by conflict mineral mining. There, the Congolese National Army vie against three different rebel groups to extract and refine the valuable ores.

Here is how the various minerals are used in our electronics, including mobile phones, computers and music players.

• Tantalum: stores electricity in cell phones
• Tungsten: creations vibrations in phones
• Tin: circuit boards
• Gold: used to coat wiring

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock

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In enterprises everywhere, including even the largest ones, the transition to cloud-based architectures has brought a new class of managers into the computing process. Suddenly, personnel managers and folks whose purview had been limited to finance and personnel, are being doubled-up with oversight roles for cloud deployments. The back office is no longer in the back (or the basement), and now these new managers are wondering: What is all this we're dealing with?

Donna Burbank - who's a senior director of product marketing for CA Technologies' long-time data visualization tool, ERwin, has a new phrase for this class of customers: business sponsors. "When I talk to our customers, they tell me it's a whole new... thing, for lack of a more technical word. They've heard of SQL Server, but what is this SQL Azure thing? They don't have the skill sets, and may be nervous about that. These business sponsors might not be moving the information, but they want to see it. And they don't want to look at those database scripts. They want to look at something they can understand."

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So it is that CA Technologies found itself in the business of manufacturing a class of software that a new and growing chunk of its customers might not actually care about all that much: database visualization tools. ERwin has been the market share leader in this category ever since its creation in 1998. Its typical customers have been database architects (DBAs), the people whose jobs are to model the classifications and structures for the relational data that businesses rely upon every day.

Welcome to Your World

But the shift to cloud technologies has partly been fueled by the need for tremendous space for data warehousing - to house the huge data stores generated by millions of Internet customer transactions. It's that shift which is pushing data outside of the constraints of traditional SQL relational databases. That push is forcing businesses to examine, some for the very first time, the structure of their data. And what they're seeing, they don't understand.

"A lot of the move to the cloud is a business decision. The technical people doing the move are probably still the DBAs, but they're challenged," CA's Burbank tells RWW. "There will always be that core group of people who want to use a data model, that's our sweet spot right now: the data architect, the DBA. Those people and more would like to use a Web-based interface."

ERwin's new Web portal, she explains, is a browser-based interface for information that has otherwise been modeled for DBAs by ERwin Data Modeler (which itself moves to version 8.2 this week). This new portal will help both architects and Burbank's "sponsors" to analyze the relationships of data from a business impact standpoint. "If I'm building a data warehouse, I want to see how data moves from the source system to the target warehouse to the reporting tool. Maybe I'm changing a data element; what other parts of the organization are affected? You could sort of get that through ERwin's repository [in Model Manager] with some queries, but it wasn't the tool for that."

The new, more objective breakdown aims to give multiple classes of users a comprehension of the data that they may have never had before. A "sponsor" who wants to search for relationships is going to expect search to behave like Google, Burbank explains. So the Web Portal tool gives that user a text-based search query line (shown above). What that user gets in return will be something that may explain what tables or fields relate to the search criteria, but it might not directly correlate to the model as the original DBA intended.

As Burbank explains, the business user, not getting a complete overview from the initial response, may decide to export the data he's seeing into Excel, and generate some PivotTables from them. The DBA, on the other hand, may use the Portal's new graphical impact analysis tools to drill down further, or perhaps execute a "What If?" experiment. If a column is changed on a table, for instance, the DBA can see how the rest of the schema is impacted. "It's that type of drilldown over the Web that they could never do before," she remarks.

Big data vs. "lots of data"

All this said, ERwin is not quite yet a data warehousing assistance tool. While CA's Donna Burbank says it's something her company is considering, she points out that Hadoop and the restructuring of data it entails, lend themselves to very different situations.

"I've done several presentations where I've explained to people that there's 'big data,' and then there's 'lots of data,'" she relates. "And these are different use cases. Maybe I'm an energy company, and I'm trying to use a Hadoop-type structure to see uses across my different [operating units], and I need to eventually manage that in a warehouse. It's that analysis of that big data that then goes into a data model. One use case [involves] massive volume, real-time, more of a programmatic approach to data. There's a lot of messaging there around, is data modeling going away? Is data warehousing going away? Today, it's two different use cases. You're doing an analysis, and then you use the data model to make sense of that raw data. And if I'm going to use it for a BI report, that's when your data model comes in. I've done my data analysis with the big data; here's my data model to say which pieces of that I used in the warehouse."

Real-time analysis of big data, she goes on, may enable DBAs to add some elements to the relational data model that they may not have seen before.

As for the other use case, Burbank agrees that data modeling may never be appealing to 100% of the "sponsor" audience. But making it appeal to a somewhat greater audience through more intuitive graphics, along with Google-like search, could go a long way toward enabling those tasked with new responsibilities to be able to better understand what they are, and carry them out with a greater sense of confidence.

Discuss

iTunes Match, the cloud music-matching service that Apple launched last year, is a great way to sync one's music library across numerous devices. If your collection happens to contain songs with profane lyrics, however, you may be in for a surprise.

Apparently, iTunes Match has been inadvertently replacing certain tracks with the "clean" version of the same song, Cult of Mac reported.

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iTunes Match differs from Google's and Amazon's music cloud storage lockers in that it doesn't require users to upload their entire collection to Apple's servers. Instead, it scans one's library of music, identifies each track using its metadata and then matches it with a high-quality audio file in the cloud, even if the original was encoded at a lower bit-rate.

It looks like what's happening here is the system is misreading metadata for certain tracks and cross-referencing with radio-friendly edits of the same song. At the very least, this has happened with four hip hop tracks as reported by Cult of Mac.

To some, this may smack of the nothing-dirty-please, prim-and-proper censorship for which Apple has gained a reputation in the iTunes App Store. More likely than not, it's just a bug. The company may not want filthy porno-filled apps populating its App Store, but that's quite different from allowing people to listen to a profanity-laden Jay-Z song that they purchased (or otherwise) acquired on their own accord.

Apple has acknowledged that this is an issue and is reportedly working on a fix.

Discuss

Entrepreneur aficionado extraordinaire Robert Scoble posited a question on his Rackspace blog yesterday asking if there is push back against HTML5 by the top mobile designers in San Francisco. He cited new apps Path, Storify and Foodspotting as prominent examples of great apps with acclaimed UX that were rendered native languages as opposed to HTML5. Are top developers really pushing back against HTML5 or is Scoble once again a little too deep in his fantasy world?

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One thing that often worries me when thinking about the San Francisco-based developer community is the fact that it is one giant echo chamber. It feeds off itself to a crescendo of memes, themes and rumors until no other reasonable arguments can be broached.

Scoble is often the mouthpiece for these developers. To be fair, Scoble and I have met and are friendly and I find him to be a fine individual but the classic argument against him is that he is the living personification of the edge case. He knows everybody, talks to everybody and does a respectable job of eating his own dog food. Companies and developers, with good reason, respect his opinion. But, the way he inundates himself with all the great innovations of the ecosystem, he sometimes misses the reality of development and utilization in the rest of the world.

With respect to Scoble, this HTML5 argument is hogwash.

Path won a Crunchie for best design. For those not in the know, a Crunchie is an award show for best startups, design and innovation in the tech community hosted by TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm. It is the yearly culmination of the San Francisco echo chamber and, while interesting, is not really followed by many outside of Silicon Valley. That is not to discount what Path has created. We have noted the splendid design of Path at ReadWriteWeb as well and it is truly a very well made app.

Path is an edge case scenario in the world of mobile app development. It integrates social messaging, location check-ins, photography and music recommendations into a sophisticated timeline (a "path") that is endlessly scrollable and visually appealing. Path is the quintessential native app.

It would also be impossible in HTML5.

The limitations of HTML5 at this point are that it does not allow device access (to objects like the camera and location services), scrolling is often limited and multi-layered sound is very difficult to implement. See our recent coverage of the "HTML5 Developers' Wish List" for a fuller understanding to the limitations of the spec. All developers agree that HTML5 is still a work in progress and there is great hope that the standard will be advanced to a degree in 2012 that many of the problems that inhibit mobile developers will be solved. The key concept to remember with HTML5 is that it takes the one true "killer" app, the browser, and enhances its functionality.

To say that the best mobile developers and designers are pushing back against HTML5 is outrageous. It is like saying that Web developers and designers (by far the most robust group of Internet coders) are turning their backs on the standard that is taking the browser to the next generation. This is simply not true.

Like Scoble, I also talk to top developers on a daily basis. Some of the most talented coders and designers I know are working on creating dynamic experiences in HTML5 for mobile devices. That includes developers from Sencha, appMobi, Zynga and other games makers, mobile cloud developers and third-party Facebook developers. All see HTML5 as a great opportunity and are fully embracing the challenge. Look at Facebook in particular. Nobody would suppose that its developers are not some of the tops in Silicon Valley. The company is working towards progressing HTML5 and the apps ecosystem around it with innovative approaches to what the mobile Web can do.

For me to believe that the "best mobile app designers" are pushing back against HTML5, I am going to need more examples than three edge case native apps that have very specific functions. There is so much more to the mobile Web than a pretty native app.

Discuss

Sunday's Super Bowl is full of betting possibilities, but one line we couldn't find in Vegas is whether or not Twitter will crash because of heavy traffic during the game.

This year's NFL playoffs have already set one record for the most tweeted sports moment in history, when a Tim Tebow pass stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers on the first play of overtime against the Denver Broncos. The 9,420 tweets per second were not enough to cripple Twitter, but on New Year's Eve in Japan 16,197 per second brought the service down. There is speculation that this year's Super Bowl will set new records for both Facebook and Twitter.

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We've asked Twitter if they've made an contingencies for Sunday's game and will update as soon as we hear back from them. Such an incident doesn't just affect users, but also loads of sports apps that let users track chatter about the game using Twitter's API.

Most recent Twitter crashes have occurred as a result of a clearly-defined moment: midnight on New Year's in a part of the world where Twitter is more popular than Facebook was a good candidate. For Twitter to crash on Sunday, we suspect there would have to be a key, game-shattering play like the Tebow pass. With even more people tuning into the game it would most certainly shatter that record, although it's unclear whether it would be enough to bring the site down.

Super Bowl commercials aren't likely to produce a Twitter-crashing moment, either, as most of the commercials have already been leaked online. So many surprises have already been given away already that today marked the first time since 1988 that USA Today did not publish a list of Super Bowl advertisers on the Friday before the game.

Predictions

• A close game will produce a moment that makes it into the Top 10 list of most tweeted events: most likely it's a game-ending play or a referee's announcement after video review of a disputed call.
• That moment makes the Top 10 but does not cause Twitter to crash.
• That moment doesn't come close to breaking the all-time tweets-per-second record of 25,088 set in December when a popular anime film was shown on Japanese television.
• And not that it has anything to do with tech or Twitter, or anything other than geographic bias, but the Patriots win a fourth Super Bowl with a 31-21 win.

Discuss

"I'm not sure if we're the only two on right now or not," says a voice with an American accent. The voice belongs to a man who identifies himself as Bruce, likely an FBI agent, who had just joined a conference call with other law enforcement officials based in the UK.

The irony of hearing Bruce utter those words at the beginning of the call is that, no, they were not the only people listening in. Somehow, members of Anonymous managed to tap into the call, record it and then post it online for all to hear. The subject of the conversation? Tracking and arresting online activists and hackers, such as those who secretly associate with Anonymous.

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After some casual small talk, the call's participants share details about progress they've made tracking various known hackers, some of whose real names are bleeped out of the audio. Members of so-called hacktivist groups like LulzSec and Anonymous are discussed, as updates are given about who's been arrested.

It appears that whoever gained unauthorized access to the call was able to do so because they were privy to an email invitation containing the call-in details. Whether somebody forwarded it to the infiltrator or, more likely, they directly intercepted it themselves, that message was all they needed to join the call and quietly listen to the FBI and UK law enforcement discuss sensitive matters.

Nothing too groundbreaking is revealed in the call, but the mere existence of such a breach suggests that more sensitive information could be exposed, if it hasn't already been.

Not only this is embarrassing for law enforcement, but it ought to send a wake-up call to any other organizations that conduct business via conference call. With many services, all a competitor or other third party would need to get access to the call is a copy of the original email invite.

Discuss

What we today call the "mobile app" could, in a very short period of time, become known as the portable app, or just the "app." It tends to use such a simple and straightforward model of interaction that people are starting to prefer using their smartphones for certain tasks, even when their PCs are right in front of them. By this time next year, portable apps originally designed for use on smartphones and tablets may be running on laptops.

The extent to which this changes everything is a topic that no one, not even ReadWriteWeb, has fully fathomed. The Web as we have come to know it will be impacted significantly. What users have come to know as Web sites will be willingly and eagerly substituted with Web apps. In Part 2 of our interview with the co-author of APIs: A Strategy Guide, Netflix lead API engineer Daniel Jacobson tells us the one huge difference between an app and a site involves the extent to which they rely on an API. It is part of every app's DNA.

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The first, painful steps toward multi-platform

In 2002 - as you learned from part 1 of our RWW interview last week - when Jacobson was with NPR, he helped make a critical decision about its information infrastructure, the implications of which his team had not foreseen: "Literally the first thing that we did," he tells RWW, "is, we built the API and we put the Web site on top of it. So the Web site runs off the API. It's a little bit of a different interaction model; it doesn't have to go through the authentication and whatever else, in the same way that external apps do."

That API later gave NPR the freedom to build apps that run outside the browser, and that use that same API in different ways. So when mobile apps were invented, NPR was among the first publishers to be ready for them. When Netflix saw it needed an architecture that enabled it to reach all its users without it being dependent upon the usage model for any one device - including the Web browser - it hired Jacobson to build it.

A 2005 Netflix demo at a Microsoft convention featured one of that company's program managers at the time, Darryn Dieken, showing then-President Jim Allchin about the prospects of using one underlying technology as the foundation for developing a unified product line across different devices. The technology at the time was code-named "Avalon," and evolved into what we now call Silverlight.

After showing how a Netflix product selector ran outside the browser but through the Web, in a way people had never seen before at that time, Dieken showed essentially the same selector running inside Windows Vista on a tablet PC. From there, he proceeded to show where else folks would eventually find Netflix.

The demo took the audience inside Windows Media Center, which had just been released for Windows XP and was being vastly updated for Vista. The Media Center plug-in used many of the same presentation techniques and concepts as the stand-alone version, demonstrating the benefits of code reuse.

But when the demo turned its attention to Netflix on a Windows Mobile phone, it became painfully obvious that the benefits of client-side code reuse could only go so far. Yes, there was communication taking place between all these different clients and the server. But the way these interactions were happening were based on leveraging Web site-oriented, forms-based submissions that at one level could be described as an API, but failed to be uniform - one API for many platforms.

The goal of any modern API, Dan Jacobson emphasizes, is "to treat any presentation layer the same. So if you have multiple Web sites, like NPR does (they have NPR Music as well as NPR.org), both of those sites run off of the same interaction model through the API - they're just presentation layers, the same way as mobile app or Google TV or [NPR] Infinite Radio. Users are going to consume new material in any way that they want to, wherever, whenever; and your goal as publisher is to make sure that you have a presentation layer that serves them wherever that is. And in doing so, the easiest way, the most effective way to date is to leverage APIs, and invest a little bit on having the right talent surrounding it."

"Publish everywhere" doesn't have to be homogenous

Because presentation layers are so different from one another, he goes on, a business can and should nurture teams of developers with the exclusive skillsets that each of those layers needs - for example, Objective-C developers for iPhone apps. There's no reason why certain teams can't specialize. Having a single API that addresses each layer in a standard way, he says, provides all your teams with the flexibility they require to take advantage of the platforms on which they're focused.

This allowance for specialization tends to work itself away from the "one Web" way of thinking - the belief that everything will inevitably merge into HTML5. In professing that API design should not be centered around any one single mode of presentation, lest it eventually become obsolete (among other reasons), Jacobson advises that API designers focus on finding ways to symbolize and encode business interactions - the things that businesses do, not the things that Web sites do. Your goal is not to make the browser more efficient or the user experience more immersive. Leave that to the UX designers. As the API engineer, your goal is to enable business.

"That kind of thinking is fundamentally different than, 'How do I want to structure my content? Do I need to think about what resources can be broken up in which ways and made available in different ways?'" says Jacobson. "For NPR, for example, there are stories, there are assets, different kinds of things in that system. For Netflix, there are users, catalog items. How do you want to structure that material, both in terms of the resource level as well as items underneath it? What are the rights management concerns that go into this, legal constraints internally about what can be published? For Netflix, what can I show users in Latin America that I can't show to people in Canada? For NPR, it's, I'm publishing AP photos; whom can't I present that to, and whom can I? Those kinds of things are really business-oriented decisions that you can't just flip a switch and say, 'Make it happen.' You need to be very thoughtful about what you're exposing and to whom, and how you're going to do it so you can get the maximum effectiveness out of it."

It is this concept which may outmode, or render obsolete, the tradition notion of the Web site - the notion that something that's created once and published everywhere (COPE) must always be the same thing. Done properly, Jacobson says, it can and should be integrated with the uniqueness of each device.

"When Web APIs started out, they tended to be more about publishing on all kinds of different platforms. Now I think it's very much about aggregation, and merging others' API experiences," says the Netflix engineer. "One of the interesting things with Netflix, for example: We have branded apps on a wide range of platforms, and if you look at something like AppleTV or Roku or Xbox, or any of these other devices, we're not the only ones there. There is an aggregation of services where Netflix creates an experience on that platform. We actually integrate with their systems, we're creating an experience on that site, and then people can access our experience in the way they expect it to be presented."

Next time: A lesson from the entertainment industry, "Know your audience" Discuss

You would think that a company with 423 million monthly active mobile users would find a way to squeeze some revenue out of them. Easier said than done. The biggest question to come out of Facebook's S-1 filing for IPO was how the company could monetize its robust mobile app ecosystem. How will Facebook do it? Stitching in mobile banner ads is not likely a solution for Facebook. We explore Facebook's opportunities and ask for your opinion in this week's ReadWriteMobile poll.

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From Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's letter to shareholders:

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world's information infrastructure should resemble the social graph - a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

One of the beautiful (or creepy) things about Facebook ads on a desktop browser is that they are targeted straight to the user. Facebook known where you are, what you are sharing, who your friends are and what they are doing. If you "Like" pages, it knows what brands you like, what books you read, what TV and movies you watch. With the Open Graph and Timeline, it also knows other verbs associated with your lifestyle, such as when and how far you run when exercising, what you eat and what music you listen to. All of this, of course, if you choose to share it.

It has been pointed out several times after Facebook filed its S-1 that the key to the company's billions has been the "Like" button. The Like button turned a mammoth but disorganized social graph into a skeletal body that permeates both the front and back end of the Internet. Facebook was then able to correlate users' interest graph and advertising against that. If you think about it, the Like button isthe most brilliant inventions of the Web 2.0 era. The Like button organized the social Web, gave it backbone, structure ... and money.

One of Facebook's challenges will be to take the data it already has through the Like button and burgeoning Open Graph ecosystem and apply it to mobile. What will this look like? Will we see the same banner and targeted ads that we see on our desktop? How does Facebook do this without ruining the mobile user experience and angering its most dedicated users?

On the other hand, targeted advertising actually has larger potential when it is taken off the desktop and put into the pockets of users. Smartphones are sophisticated sensors that recognize the world around them. The capability of knowing where a person is, what they are doing and who they are with will only grow as devices evolve over the next several years. The social Web in the physical world. This is where Facebook's biggest opportunity is. Geo-fenced push notifications, proximity alerts when near something or someone on your interest graph, location-based deals. To a certain extent, you have heard it all before. Startups have been working on how to bring push advertising and messaging to mobile since smartphones became location aware. Yet, none of those startups have the user base that Facebook has.

Google will also likely turn to more of a messaging-based mobile advertising strategy in the future. With an Android in 50% of smartphone users pockets, Google has the potential to know more about you than any other company on Earth. It probably already does.

Facebook could also set up a platform, much like AdMob for Facebook, which serves as a real-time bidding exchange for keywords based on the social and Open Graph. By making it an ad platform, Facebook takes a lot of the work out of building its own internal ad infrastructure. Google has employed the RTB method to great success.

Or, it could be a mixture of all of these avenues.

There is also the idea of payments through the app ecosystem. Mobile Web-based games built on top of the social graph with in-app payments. This harkens to the so-called "Project Spartan" that Facebok was rumored to be working on last year. It does not have to be only games either. Brands could create Facebook Page mobile Web apps and tie incentives and payments through Facebook Credits. The ability to turn Pages into mobile advertising or payment revenue could be a huge vertical for Facebook.

As you can see, there are a lot of opportunities and avenues for Facebook to take when monetizing its mobile user base. What is the likeliest choice? What will be the best money maker for Facebook in the mobile realm? Take the poll below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

What Is Facebook's Best Mobile Monetization Strategy? Discuss

Facebook's IPO filing, released this week, is fascinating for many reasons: We've already covered several angles.

Perhaps the most exciting, though, is the wealth of data about the company that is finally public - from its user statistics to its growth around the world to its finances. I've highlighted and visualized some of the most interesting data in this series of charts.

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One of the most powerful things about Facebook is how many of its users log on every day.

Facebook's IPO filing includes quarterly stats of its Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users, both worldwide and broken down by region. (Also, how about some appreciation for Facebook to sticking with "active" users in its stats, not just total, all-time sign-ups?)

Worldwide, you can see that 57% of the people who use Facebook within a given month also use Facebook on an average day, up from 47% in early 2009.

This varies, of course, by region, which gives an idea of how "sticky" Facebook is in different parts of the world. In the U.S. and Canada, it's 70%. In Asia, where Facebook isn't as established - but is growing fast - it's only about 50%.

Facebook is increasingly a global story. Its user base is now almost equally concentrated in the four regions it breaks out. That's a pretty big change from 2009, when it was primarily focused in the U.S. and Canada.

In 2011, about 30% of Facebook's new users came from Asia, and about 40% in the "rest of world" category. Only about 10% of its new users came from the U.S. and Canada.

Facebook's IPO filing also brings us new access to its finances. Here, we can see one reason why Facebook's revenue growth (88% in 2011) is outpacing its user growth (39% in 2011) - because Facebook is bringing in more revenue per user than it did in the past.

How did that happen? Significant growth in both Facebook's ad business (85% of its revenue) and its payments business (part of the 15% of "other" revenue).

Facebook's future success, of course, relies on both its ability to attract new users and its ability to generate more revenue per user.

Discuss

Picture this: You're at a party, and your good friend introduces you to one of their friends. You two hit it off, and boom - a new friend! You've just become friends with a friend of a friend. In real life, this is a common occurrence. On Facebook, a friend of a friend isn't necessarily an actual friend.

A new study from Pew Internet discovered this and an array of other interesting facts about peoples' Facebook friendships. The researchers found that most peoples' friend lists were not very interconnected. In a friend list with a density of 1, everyone knows everyone. On Facebook the density is quite low at .12 with a maximum density of .42, which means that your chances of knowing a friend of a friend on Facebook fall between 12% and 42%. In its its S-1 filing on Wednesday, Facebook toted 100 billion friendships. What it probably meant to say was 100 billion connections, many of which are dormant.

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To understand the friend ties idea, here's an example. Say you have 10 friends; this means that the number of possible friendship ties among everyone in network is 45. The average Facebook user has 245 friends, which means there are 29,890 possible friendship ties in the network. With an average density of .12 and a total number of 245 friends, that means there are only 12% of 29,890 friendship linkages between "friends." A 1992 study from Pew found that offline social ties had a density of .36, or three times the density size of Facebook's.

"We suspect that Facebook networks are of lower density because of their ability to allow ties that might otherwise have gone dormant to remain persistent over time," the study says. Those ties that should have gone dormant are the people who you've Facebook friended from grade school, middle school, high school and other pubescent times in life. These are the people whose friend requests you naïvely and curiously accepted. This is where the Facebook "drama" potentially begins. "Facebook is a giant emotional locker," writes Andy Kessler on the Wall Street Journal.

"We expect that new Facebook users typically start with a core group of close, interconnected friends," the study says."But over time their friend list becomes larger and less intertwined, particularly as they discover (and are discovered by) more distant friends from different parts and different times in their lives."

The study also reports a curious finding: People are more likely to be friends with people who have more friends than they do. They are less likely to become friends with people who have less friends than them. Hence, the popular kid syndrome: Everyone wants to be friends with the popular kid, and few willingly try to buddy up with the loner who sits alone at lunch.

Tagging friends in Facebook photos is the only activity that the study says is associated with having more close ties. These people tend to be friends who the user interacts with both online and offline. This does not account for those awkward photo taggings that happen on the fly, without a user's permission. Lifehacker's Jason Chen argues that no, you shouldn't tag someone in a photo without their permission. For if someone is truly your friend on- and offline, they'll show some rexpect by first asking if you'd like to be tagged in the photo they're about to upload. When it comes to more innocuous taggings, such as a status update or photo, permission isn't completely necessary, but it's still quite welcome.

The study reinforces findings from past research, which suggest that heavy Facebook users are more trusting than others.

Images via Nikki Lynette's Facebook page and Shutterstock.

Discuss

"This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it." HAL; 2001: A Space Odyssey

Editor's note: this is a longer version of ReadWriteWeb Editor-in-chief Richard MacManus' article for the SAY Media newsletter. The newsletter is delivered weekly and features SAY Media's take on media, culture, venn diagrams and the occasional Kubrick homage. You can sign up for it here.

Over half of all devices at this year's CES, the world's largest consumer electronics trade show, were Internet connected. Nearly 60% of those were non-traditional computing devices such as TVs, cars, refrigerators and washing machines. Connected devices are proliferating throughout our homes and the world around us. Which means consumers are about to become a whole lot more connected to the world.

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According to the GSMA, a worldwide association of mobile operators and related companies, there are 9 billion connected devices in the world today. By 2020, there will be 24 billion and over half of them will be non-mobile devices such as household appliances. The GSMA estimates that connected devices will be a US$1.2 trillion market by 2020. So marketers and publishers better get ready for this new world too.

Reaching Consumers in Their Connected Cars

Connected devices will be a US$1.2 trillion market by 2020. So marketers and publishers better get ready for this new world too.Consumers now expect to have a personalized media experience wherever they go. Look at how online music services have ramped up over the past year, in particular Pandora, Spotify, Rdio and MOG. With these services consumers can personalize their music listening on their computers, smartphones, tablets - and now their cars. The implication is that you'll need to reassess how people discover and keep informed about your product or service. People will listen to the car radio less now, for example, because they can access a personalized music stream in their car via services like Spotify and Rdio.

At this year's CES, car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz, Ford and Audi were touting new media and communications features. Commonly referred to as a connected car, the prevailing trend is to integrate smartphone apps into the car's dashboard. This enables drivers and passengers to listen to online music, access news and other content, stream video and more.

Because media is so much more personalized now, you will be able to target your message more precisely to the audience you want to reach.The bad news for marketers is that this narrows the range of broadcast media where you can reach consumers even more. The car radio will soon be usurped by online content, whether it be for music or news. The good news is that because media is so much more personalized now, you will be able to target your message more precisely to the audience you want to reach. That's because streaming media inside cars and throughout the home dramatically increases the amount of interest data collected about users. For example every song listened to on Spotify - no matter if it's played on a computer or inside a car - is logged by Spotify (and increasingly Facebook) into a database with the rest of that user's music preferences. It will all be anonymized, because privacy will become the biggest hot topic for users in this new era, but it'll still be very valuable demographic and interest data for marketers.

To give you an indication of how pervasive the trend of connected cars is becoming, look at the evolution of Ford.

The American firm first introduced Internet technology inside its cars with Sync, launched in 2007. Sync is voice-activated technology which connects your smartphone and MP3 player to your car's dashboard and steering wheel. There are currently 4 million Ford cars in North America that have Sync running. The latest evolution of Sync is called MyFord Touch, an in-car communications and entertainment system which makes it even easier for drivers to consume Internet content.

In short, the connected car is going mainstream. In Ford's newest hybrid car, the 2013 Fusion, one of the main features is its connection to the Internet.

Connected cars are set to ramp up rapidly in the coming years. The GSMA predicts that the automotive sector will account for 1.4 billion (nearly 6%) of the world's 24 billion connected devices by 2020. If you're a marketer or publisher, that's a platform you'll want to be on!

Internet TVs & Personalized Media

For the consumer, it's all about personalizing one's media experience. The TV is another device where this trend is playing out.

Formats will evolve. We'll see TV stars and brands creating their own YouTube channels and releasing short bursts of content to the Web.Traditional TV networks have already been disrupted by time-shifting devices, which enable consumers to fast forward through ads. The next step is bypassing TV networks altogether, as consumers increasingly access TV content via the Web. YouTube is undergoing a transformation as we speak: from a place to watch cat videos on a PC, to a place to watch high quality professional video content on a TV set.

While popular TV network shows such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad will continue to reach a large swath of people, Internet TV opens up opportunities for new types of video content to emerge and become popular too. Formats will evolve. We'll see TV stars and brands creating their own YouTube channels and releasing short bursts of content to the Web. But also, we'll see web applications arise that mix TV content with Internet programming. This is fertile ground for publishers to innovate and for marketers to latch onto to reach niche audiences.

The rise of Internet TV was evidenced at this year's CES by Samsung's announcements.

Samsung is the world's number 1 TV brand and it launched significant upgrades to its Smart TV product line. Samsung's 2012 model TVs will enable users to consume a mix of traditional TV programming and Web apps. The devices are ready, now it's time for new types of content and apps to bloom.

The next big thing in computing isn't a new model smartphone or laptop. It's the Internet empowering everything else around us.Another trend to watch is the increasing interactivity of TV. A key part of Internet TVs is moving beyond the remote control and into other forms of user interface. With a new feature that Samsung calls "Smart Interaction," viewers will be able to control their TV using gesture and voice controls, as well as face recognition. This is similar to how Microsoft's Kinect works on XBox. It will be an increasingly common form of user interface, as 24 billion devices go online over the next 8 years. Publishers and marketers will need to adapt to these new forms of interaction.

The next big thing in computing isn't a new model smartphone or laptop. It's the Internet empowering everything else around us. Our cars, TVs and many other devices. Which means we all need to think about engaging digital Internet experiences for the car, TV and every device imaginable - because that's where audiences are heading.

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Convergence. Remember that word from the dot com era? Well, it's back and this time it actually has substance. Convergence in the 90s meant combining old media with new media, a.k.a. the Internet. The 2000 merger of AOL and Time Warner was a failed $200 billion attempt at convergence. But fast forward to 2012 and convergence is happening for real this time, thanks to Internet-connected devices in the house and a rapidly growing app ecosystem. Entertainment now flows freely through home networks, to multiple devices such as PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones and television sets.

According to one research firm, 2012 will be when convergence really hits its stride. A new report by IMS Research states that 2012 will be when the consumer electronics industry "finally realizes the promise of multi-screen content consumption."

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This trend is primarily being driven by the rise in Internet-enabled portable consumer electronics (CE), such as smartphones and tablets (the green bars in the graph below). But also IP-enabled TVs and other entertainment devices (the light blue bars).

It's not just Web connected hardware which is proliferating. Software is also finally fulfilling the long-held promise of convergence. We saw a great example earlier today, with version 3.0 of the video aggregator app Showyou being released. ReadWriteWeb's Jon Mitchell described it as "the remote control for web video."

The beauty of Showyou is that you can watch videos on a variety of devices: PC, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire, Apple TV. While I was eating my lunch today, I sat down in the living room and opened both my iPad and TV. I surfed to a music video on Showyou that I like and pressed the Apple "airplay" button on the iPad to transfer the video to my TV (via Apple TV).

I'm not entirely convinced that 2012 will be the year when this multi-screen promise is realized. During my lunchtime, I fiddled around a bit with Airplay before I got it working. Also home networks are not particularly user friendly for non-technical people. 2012 may well be a tipping point, when convergence within the home begins to take off. But we're not at the point of great user experiences yet.

In its report, IMS Research noted that an apps ecosystem for devices like the TV will be a key enabler of convergence in home entertainment. It also pointed to the growing amount of digital content available to consumers and "the changing habits of consumers regarding accessing, consuming and sharing digital content."

IMS Research predicts that the market for IP-enabled CE devices will grow from 2.2 billion devices shipped in 2011 to 3.5 billion in 2016. Note that this is just for home entertainment and portable consumer electronic devices. We reported last week that mobile industry group GSMA is predicting growth from 9 billion to 24 billion Internet-connected devices worldwide. The GSMA's figures include things like connected cars and IP-enabled washing machines.

Have you begun to consume entertainment in your home across multiple screens? If so, let us know in the comments what your current favorite household apps are.

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If it's a feature your customers are asking for, it's difficult not to want to provide it. Although one of the benefits of public cloud computing is the ability to provision computing and storage resources from anywhere in the world on-demand, enterprises in Europe are wary that if their cloud-based assets are migrated to servers residing in the U.S., then they could (even if they never have yet) be subject to inspection by U.S. law enforcement authorities, even though the assets themselves are not American.

It's still the most controversial provision of the U.S. Patriot Act, signed into law in October 2001. Because of this, European cloud customers specifically request that their service providers (CSPs) block any live migration to U.S. servers. And because it's such a frequent request, CSPs including Zurich-based CloudSigma are offering what they call "Patriot-proof" clouds as a feature.

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"I think it's largely a theoretical risk. I don't believe the U.S. Government is rampantly going around, getting data off of U.S. subsidiary-operated clouds," admits Robert Jenkins, CloudSigma's chief technology officer, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. "But also, I think people do have a genuine concern, because the penalties are quite strict."

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There's now raw data to verify the suspicion that European CSPs restricting all or some of their cloud services to geographies outside the U.S. - or even just to Europe - is costing Europe valuable investments and prestige. Last year, according to data from U.K.-based telecom analyst firm Informa, the Middle East/Africa region nearly pulled even with Western Europe in the number of operators offering viable cloud services. The rate of growth for European cloud services is among the lowest on the planet.
Prior to the Informa data's release, European Commission Vice President Viviane Reding asked her country's CSPs to refrain from making these offers, saying the free flow of data between nations is essential to healthy trade and a vibrant economy. But as CloudSigma's Jenkins tells us, some European CSPs actually don't have a choice. In Germany, for example, cloud customers may be subject to criminal sanctions if their cloud deployments expose personally identifiable data (PID) to any agency outside Germany.

"The reality is, there's a disconnect between the U.S. position and the European position at the moment," remarks Jenkins. "And the problem is that companies are in a position where essentially they comply with European law, but then they would break U.S. law if they work with a U.S. company, or vice versa. It's a big mess, and for sure, it needs clarifying."

Despite Comm. Reding's calls for CSPs to open up, Jenkins says the E.U. already has very clear laws mandating them to protect citizens' personal data - laws which are unlikely to ever be changed. Those laws state service providers must notify users and seek their permission before transferring their PID to any third party. This is the case, he says, not only for cloud service providers but conventional co-location providers as well.

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Jenkins says CloudSigma has designed its IaaS servers to be separable by the customer when necessary. Although CloudSigma does have a U.S. subsidiary, there is not a free flow of data between its American and European servers. "We've done that deliberately to allow customers in Europe to say, 'I'm only using a European cloud, therefore I'm not exposing myself to U.S. jurisdiction.' Likewise, the U.S. company can [choose to] only use the U.S. cloud, and only expose themselves to U.S. jurisdiction because we're a U.S. company in the U.S... Our aim is to make it easy for the customer to understand what jurisdiction they are exposing themselves to."

For CSPs that provide PaaS and SaaS, the CloudSigma CTO points out, this level of compartmentalization is not so easy to achieve. Data replication is common in order to ensure resilience and service reliability, so it's conceivable that replicated data may cross jurisdictional boundaries. There will be no way, he predicts, for Google to be able to guarantee its Gmail or Google Apps customers that their data will never fall under some particular, questionable jurisdiction - say, China.

But how CloudSigma lets its IaaS customers approach the jurisdiction problem is during the account creation phase. This way, a customer who may need to operate services in Shanghai can easily be informed as to the possibilities of oversight by Chinese authorities. "It's not an anti-U.S. or pro-Europe question, 'Can I control who has access to my data?'" Jenkins says. "Our job is to try to make it as transparent and as controllable as possible, so a company can go open an account in a specific location, and that's their home jurisdiction. Then they can opt into other cloud locations as they see fit."

As an example, Jenkins offered the case of a Zurich-based customer who wants to add failover and geographic load-balancing in the U.S. That customer will see a warning saying that her customer records will be replicated in the U.S. as well, and explaining the implications of that data falling under U.S. jurisdiction. If both jurisdictions are linked together as one service, the explanation will also add that authorities in either location may have access to customer data from the other. A multi-national company which has offices across the globe, he adds, may actually not have the luxury of choosing an IaaS service that's centered in Zurich.

This opt-in approach, he believes, gives his company an advantage insofar as Europe is concerned. The flip side is that it may be a disadvantage for CloudSigma in the U.S.

"For us, it would be a very advantageous thing to have a consistent approach, as well as for the cloud in general. I think overall, we're a net winner because we're on the European side and we could potentially benefit. But [on the other hand], in Switzerland we don't because it puts people off of the cloud in general, and that's a bad thing. It's something that's in the interest of European cloud providers to resolve... I think finding some middle ground would be beneficial, maybe some sort of framework that goes between the U.S. and Europe. Maybe there's a way to provide some oversight in Europe that would make the E.U. people happy, and then the U.S. would feel like they have some level of access to prevent terrorism. There needs to be some sort of balance... [that] doesn't break either system fundamentally."

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