Master of 500 Hats

WTF: US State Department Congratulates Kenya Election "Winner" Kibaki... huh?!?

Does anyone think this is exactly NOT the way the US should be supporting democracy in Africa?

US Congratulates Kenya Presidential Vote Winner, EU Monitors Question Results

"The United States congratulates the winners and is calling for calm, and for Kenyans to abide by the results declared by the election commission. We support the commission's decision," said spokesman Robert McInturff. He reiterated a State Department statement from Saturday that asked Kenyans "to reject violence and respect the rule of law."

I'll admit i've only been following this over the past few days, but the recent Kenya election certainly would appear to be far from a free & fair one. EU monitoring officials expressing significant concerns, initial results showing opposition challenger Odinga winning were overtaken by Kibaki at the last minute, slow election result reporting, the Kenyan government bans national news television broadcasts...

and the US State Department is congratulating the election winner?

What. The. Fuck?!?

Perhaps this was an inaccurate report of our country's representatives in this situation... i sure as hell hope so. Otherwise it sounds like we're passively supporting yet another not-quite-democratically-elected African leader.

Someone please explain to me how we could be screwing up US foreign policy any more than we have in the past 6-7 years. Sigh.

UPDATE: the New York Times has an interesting report of the Kenya election commission's decision to certify the results, rejecting recommendations from Western diplomats (incl. the US ambassador) to recount votes & investigate:

75 of the 210 constituencies — meaning more than one-third of the vote — had serious question marks and that the election chairman initially agreed to investigate. But later on Sunday he changed his mind.

Kenya is a close American ally, and a team of Western diplomats, including the American ambassador, tried for hours to persuade election officials to recount the votes. One Western ambassador said they knew that if the dubious results were certified and the president declared the winner based on them, Kenya would plunge into crisis. But the commission would not budge.

“The government was determined to hold onto power,” said the ambassador, who did not want to be identified because he said he feared reprisals from the Kenyan government.

If the above account is accurate, it seems hard to understand why the State Department would knowingly congratulate the winner of a likely fraudulent election process.

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side note: i'm a supporter of Unitus, and one of the microfinance groups Unitus has funded is Jamii Bora in Nairobi. they've made incredible progress in helping make business, education, and housing microloans to over 100,000 working poor in Kenya.

if you want to make a real difference for someone, i encourage you to support Unitus and other microfinance organizations around the world.

Social Graph Detente? or just Platform Frienemies?

  Social Graph Detente? or just Platform Frienemies? 
  Originally uploaded by davemc500hats

must be the holiday spirit... or a vast social graph conspiracy.

News Feed News Flash: Dave "Platform" Morin & Patrick "Open Social" Chanezon make friends -- or frienemies? -- meanwhile Facebook & Google continue The Social Platform Cold War...

more drama @ Graphing Social Patterns West in San Diego next March (plug)

Registration Open for Graphing Social Patterns WEST (March 3-4, San Diego)

I'm pleased to announce that registration is open for Graphing Social Patterns "West" 2008, now an O'Reilly conference (w00t!).   

GSP West will be held in San Diego on March 3rd-4th, co-located with the O'Reilly ETech conference.  We're also working on GSP East, to be held in the New York City area sometime in June (tbd).  I'll be posting more on both events soon.

Needless to say, I'm both honored & excited to be working with the O'Reilly team again.  Many thanks to Tim, Gina Blaber, Brady Forrest & all the awesome folks there for helping put it together.  It's great to be doing GSP with old friends, and terrific to be part of the extended O'Reilly family :)

Onward & Upward!

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Dave McClure, 500 Hats LLC
Program Chair, Graphing Social Patterns

HELP: what is causing firefox debug alert window? (keywords: XULElement, tbElem, tbItemElem)

  HELP: what is causing this? 
  Originally uploaded by davemc500hats

i've been getting this error message for the past month or so... incredibly annoying & i can't figure out what's causing it.   every time i do a browser action that opens a new window or popup, i get this alert from *something*.

*** Q: anyone have a clue? ***

it happens on both mac & PC, in both Firefox & Safari (not sure about IE but i think so). guessing it's some toolbar or extension i have loaded, but so far haven't been able to disable / isolate to determine which one (facebook, google, 1password, tinyurl?)

nothing turned up googling for keywords above, so i'm appealing to the lazy web for a solution -- perhaps this screen capture & blog post will serve to help others who also suffer from my ignorance.

Happy Holidays & (early) Happy New Year!

  Happy Holidays :) 
  Originally uploaded by davemc500hats

well our Stanford Facebook class just finished up with the Ten Million in Ten Weeks final expo, and now me & saya & the kids are off to Japan to visit the grandparents.  that's layla & dante smiling at ya.

looking forward to lots of miso, sushi, & also psyched to do some awesome stuff in 2008!  (like Graphing Social Patterns West in San Diego in March, and Web 2.0 Expo in SF in April :)

Facebook Opens Up, Licenses Platform: Social Graph Platform Wars are ON!

Hmm. Google / Open Social is gonna have some competition from Facebook.

Facebook just announced they are licensing the Facebook Platform to other social networking sites (likely including Bebo, who just launched their own Bebo platform modeled after FB).

more commentary from AllFacebook, InsideFacebook, CNet, others...

Get ready folks:

The Social Graph Platform Wars are now ON.

my rather insane visualization of this battle is here:

Unitus: Venture Capital for Microfinance -- The Smartest Way to Change the World

Want to make a holiday donation that makes a real difference? 

Give to Unitus.

here's why:

i'm a Unitus board member, and tho it's not a Silicon Valley startup it's one of the most scalable & innovative ventures i'm involved with.

want more info on our impact?  here you go:

• Unitus partners with 16 microfinance institutions around the world
• Unitus reaches 3 million people lifting themselves out of poverty
• Unitus changes people's lives every day... but only with your help.

convinced?  good.   now give it up.

then kick back & feel good about yourself :)

beacon gate. privacy matters. second thoughts.

so no surprise, my Beacon post yesterday struck a nerve with a lot of people.

many strong reactions, some in agreement... lots of others not.  in particular, a few folks i respect quite a bit (Nelson Minar, Fred Wilson, Om Malik) took positions quite contrary to mine.  altho i still feel strongly that Beacon is a pretty innovative concept & has a lot of interesting potential, i'm going to take a step back on this for a bit & re-think my perspective. 

a few quick items:

1) perhaps i'm overestimating the level of comfort / awareness most Facebook users have with sharing information on an opt-out basis.  i'm going to talk to more people about this & see what they think.

2) Om's "mea culpa not enough" and Dare Obasanjo's "beacon is unfixable" are both worth reading.  i'm not sure if Dare's technical / legal assessment is correct, but if so then Om's right this may still not be over.

3) Nelson took me out to the "do no evil" shed, pulled down my "opt-out isn't a sin" pants, and gave me a good old-fashioned "higher moral ground" ass-whipping with this comment:

But I couldn't disagree with you more when you say "so if you're Facebook the real question is: do you want 90% of your users to use Beacon, or 90% of your users to NOT use Beacon?".

The real question should be do 90% of your users want to use Beacon?

touche, nelson.  that one really made me pause & reconsider.

lastly, i was speaking up in Seattle at the Web Community Forum conference on Facebook yesterday, and while moderating the Facebook Curmudgeons panel Jeremy Pepper raised a very good point... outside of BeaconGate entirely, Facebook should be doing more about online privacy education.

i really couldn't agree more with that last one; i wrote a tongue-in-cheek post last summer on facebook privacy settings, but more is needed there... especially in light of recent events.  companies like Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn (and new players like Mint & Spock, companies for which i'm an advisor or investor) all probably need to take a very pro-active stance on education around online privacy & help make sure they don't get screwed. 

as with eBay & PayPal on identity theft / phishing, whether or not the company in question is creating a problem or is simply a big target for black hats, they have a responsibility to help educate their customers about these issues.

so in summary, while i still feel like Facebook is doing a lot of interesting stuff & innovating at a very fast pace, perhaps there should have been more introspection in how Beacon was rolled out.  at the very least, there should definitely have been a universal vendor-wide opt-out at the very beginning, for those who don't want to participate.  with the recent opt-in changes yesterday, hopefully they've moved closer to a solution that works better for users -- without limiting the usefulness.

in any case, this Fanboy is going to shut his trap for a few days & just think about it a little more.

hmmm.

 

Facebook Beacon: Privacy Disaster or PR Blip on the Road to World Domination? Let's look at the data.

Facebook Beacon: Privacy Disaster or PR Blip? 
Let's look at the data. (source: Compete.com) 

thanks to Jay Meattle at Compete for some data & a reality check.

note: i *still* think Facebook should have have stuck to their "Beacon is opt-out" guns, but they also should rollout a universal Beacon opt-out -- if only to satisfy the whiners & privacy geeks (UPDATE: they just announced this, courtesy of Zuck himself.. along with the requisite 'i'm really really sorry'.  Beacon univeral opt-out screenshot by Todd Sawicki.  good moves both).  it probably won't get adopted by more than 2% of audience, but it's a much better way to go than suggesting Beacon is opt-in when it really isn't. 

the big PR mistake was that Facebook caved on opt-in (or tried to) when they really didn't need to.  opt-out isn't a cardinal sin, and opt-in isn't holy... but trying to position yourself as opt-in when you're still mostly opt-out was probably not the right call.  and that's the PR issue they're dealing with right now, not that opt-out was the default.

JUST CAUSE IT'S OPT-OUT DOESN'T MEAN YOU DON'T HAVE PRIVACY CONTROL.

here's the net-net on opt-out vs opt-in -- whichever default setting you choose, you should realize that 90% of userbase (or more) is never going to change that setting.  so if you're Facebook the real question is: do you want 90% of your users to use Beacon, or 90% of your users to NOT use Beacon?  i think the answer is pretty obvious. ultimately, News Feed / Beacon isn't very useful for anyone (Facebook, users, advertisers) if a) there isn't enough story inventory, and b) if people aren't clicking on the stories.  while b) may still be up for discussion, if Beacon isn't opt-out then a) is dead in the water from the get-go.

now certainly you DO need to provide privacy tools & management for people to manage what they do and don't want other people to see... but those tools are already available on Facebook privacy settings (except for the universal Beacon opt-out, currently).  if i don't want stuff to be published, i just change the settings on what kind of data & stories are displayed.  or, on a case-by-case basis, i can hide stories in the Mini-Feed that i don't want people to see.

people who are going bananas over Beacon should understand that most people on Facebook are used to the default being opt-out (ie, lifestyle transparency), not opt-in (selective sharing). 

that may not work for some folks and that's fine -- as with abortion:

don't like it?  don't have one.

fact of the matter: most of this shit just doesn't matter to most FB users.  it might be a PR screwup, but as long as the userbase doesn't have a negative reaction, eventually the advertisers won't give a damn.

Facebook RIP? You've got to be joking.

Facebook RIP?  

seriously Josh... wtf are you smoking lately?

i know Beacon is having a pretty rough time, but i think you're way off base on this one:

The market is fickle, something better is in the wings, and as soon as it arrives, the alienated and angry mob will race to it.

methinks the reports of Facebook's untimely death are a bit exaggerated. 

let's review the upside on Facebook:

• 50M+ users
• half of them login daily
• growing ~100% every 6-9 months
  
• $300M in fresh capital
• probably running break-even or slightly profitable
• innovations in Platform, APIs, Apps, News Feed
• FB app developers going gonzo building new stuff
• everyone else chasing those developments

and the downside:

• long-term monetization still unproven
• upcoming competition from OpenSocial et al
• tougher to justify new hire stock options with a $15B valuation
• Beacon rollout pretty much DOA, at least from PR perspective

if i do the Ben Franklin math on this story, still smells like a pretty damn good bet to me.

hey Josh: let's come back & take a look at your column in 12 months, and see where things stand.

in the meantime... if Mark Zuckerberg wants to trade places with any of us mere mortals, sign me up.

for a $15B valuation and $300M in cash, i can deal with a shitload of tomatoes.