analysis – Thoughts from "him"

Here’s an interesting Times article that boils down to what was done with the data obtained via a Facebook quiz app. Note that Facebook did not create this app, but a third party consultant. The intent? To distill enough information about a given voting segment to create political messaging designed to influence those voters.

Although the title is quite misleading, it does capture the fact that people willingly gave clues regarding their political-psychological leanings while “taking the quiz”. Seems harmless, right?

Yeah.

However, they didn’t know that the author was also scraping their profile to gather more information about them and that of their friends. The app author was paid more than $800,000 to create the app… so I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they weren’t simply trying to figure out your hair color.

Unfortunately, this article is behind the Times pay wall so you’ll have to use one of your 5 monthly free reads if you don’t have a subscription.

How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions

Full Article: nyti.ms/2GB9dK4

Plancast is a social networking service many expected to become a fixture for those who like to give “friends” opportunities to be where they’ll be and do what they do.

The service has already floundered and is now dying on the vine.

This link leads to a very good analysis of its failure by its CEO, Mark Hendrickson. His timely comments perfectly reflect why I (a very early adopter) couldn’t use the service on a regular basis. As far as I’m aware of this analysis is a first for the social sector.

Also interesting are the comments of people who (as I did) liked/loved the service and honestly tried to use it as much as possible but for various reasons couldn’t. Scoble himself appears to have been the first to comment.

The article: The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast

Why am I sharing this? If nothing else, it provides tangible evidence that “great” ideas must have a viable model and a willing market that will achieve the critical mass necessary for success. Just my 2¢.

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