Images as linking identifiers

There have been reverse image search engines around for a while, but most of them had indexed just a tiny fraction of online images. Last June Google made its Google Goggles service also available on the web as “Search by Image” (test with your favourite holiday pic to see how powerful it is).

I did a little test with the Twitter profile pic of Airbnb’s marketing person, check out the video (full screen to make it readable):

Turns out that search results for a picture link together all your web presences where you used it, just like it does for a full name – including the places where you actually avoided to use your real name (or where it’s obfuscated, as in Airbnb’s case).

Reverse image search <> Face Recognition

As far as we know, Google Images search results are based on general image similarity, not on face recognition algorithms (that would take into account specific metrics such as relative eye-mouth-nose-cheek distances or hair/skin colour and texture).  Large-scale publicly available reverse face search engines would have far more unsettling consequences – check out the research published last week by Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross and Fred Stutzman (who actually used technology of a company taken over by Google).

You might think the basketball in the example is the defining feature, yet I performed the test with pics of several other (male, female, different picture composition) Airbnb users and got similar results: pics linking Airbnb profile with Twitter, Flickr, weblogs etc³ .

Lessons for Web companies

Think about image indexability when it comes to your users’ privacy.  You can prevent images from being indexed with User-agent and/or folder exclusions in your robots.txt. Airbnb prides itself on its privacy features, so it would make sense to exclude profile pics from search just like it obfuscates your last name (you still will be able to find full names in the user reviews by unwitting guests or hosts though).  Some 100 000 profile pics seem to be indexed right now.

In general, make indexability a deliberate choice for your user (not some option tucked away in the privacy settings)⁴.  A consensus document by the EU Data Protection Authorities actually requires you to do so (the document in itself is not law, but in case of litigation or a conflict with a local DPA, a judge will likely let its argumentation weigh in heavily).

Lessons for you as a user

Images are part of your persona.  Use a different set of images for different contexts. Just like you might already limit your real name to your public persona (professional), and use pseudonyms for hobby, dating, activism, night life or family related stuff.

(As an extra: use a separate email address for these contexts as well, as many services use your email addresses to connect your online activities in the backend – Rapleaf probably the most notorious – or make your profile discoverable via your email address)

1. An online service with social networking features where you can find and offer short-term accommodation – I am a happy user BTW, if you want you can sign up with my referral ID ;-)
2. As I am writing this I notice that you can opt-out in the privacy settings – didn’t notice this before and I assume it was part of last night’s upgrade
3. Obviously I am not going to publicize these as this probably is an unintended and unwanted consequence for them
4. Indexability even still distinct from accessibility without login (in other words: even is a page is publicly accessible, the user must have the option to have noindex tags inserted.

Your private or public file-based wiki with Tiddlywiki

A TiddlyWiki is a self-contained wiki in just one html file. When opened, javascript takes care of pages, versioning, navigation…  Since it is just a file, you can have a running wiki editable by any user you share the containing dropbox (sub)folder with.  If you put it in your Public Dropbox folder, it’s published on the web.

Setup your Shortcut keys just once for all Windows machines you work on

AutoHotkey is a Windows utility that lets you define shortcut key combinations (“hotstrings”) in a .ahk (text) file.  Put it in your Dropbox folder, create a link to the .ahk file in your Startup folder, and voilà: you never have to type that full signature or “Best Regards, X” again…

Publish private screencasts/screenshots

I use Jing on Windows to record my screen or take screenshots and annotate them.  Instead of mailing the movies or screenshots, save them in your Public Dropbox folder, and pass on the link. No need for ftp, email or a video/photo sharing that requires login.

Extra: Dropbox makes your iPhone a pdf e-reader

Getting pdf’s on the iPhone to read is a bit of a hassle (although it seems to have improved on iOS4 with Stanza).  The Dropbox iPhone app has its own pdf reader – so just keep that collection of your ebooks and whitepapers in a “to-read” Dropbox folder and read them in your spare moments on the iPhone (Dropbox, BTW, is also the quickest way I know to get a picture from your phone on a regular computer).

1. Yes, the link contains a referral ID

[Update Feb 20: the team is complete – thanks to all of the people who helped spreading the message!]
[Update Feb 24: tools used (some stats and screenshots): 11 hrs of talking over Skype, some 250 msgs over 40 mail conversations, and the blogpost that mainly spread via Twitter and Linkedin]
[Update Feb 24: 6 teams made the final selection, we (Frank Herrman, Koen Pellegrims, Els Heremans,  Andre Keil, Marc Hensmans and I) are one of those teams]

WHAT?

iBootcamp is a crash course in building a viable business out of an initial idea. It is organised by IBBT.be in Ghent and (indirectly) financed by Flemish government – but participation is open for everybody (I myself am a Belgian living in the Netherlands – the language of iBootcamp is English).  Ten ideas have passed a first selection and five of them will make it to the iBootcamp itself:

• 1-day Teambuilding workshop: March 4th or 5th

• Friday + Saturday March 12th-13th

How to develop a successful business plan 
New Venture Creation 
Opportunity Development

• Friday + Saturday March 26th-27th

Entrepreneurial Marketing 
Principles of New Product Growth

• Friday + Saturday April 23rd-24th (Business model)

Entrepreneurial Finance 
Legal Aspects

IDEA?

The idea I submitted to iBootcamp was codenamed "Minds Meetup" (only a working title).

Minds meetup is an online platform (with a real-world service component) that will enable independent trainers (or more in general: domain experts with training skills) to:

- test demand for a draft workshop/training program
- market the workshop/training using online/social media
- handle the logistics of location reservation, subscriptions, evaluation, invoicing

It is based on the assumption that more and more independent knowledge workers have built a reputation on their own via social media (weblogs, Linkedin, Twitter), and are capable of marketing their own rather than relying on the endorsement of well-established training institutes (the pattern of disintermediation that is also known in other industries).

The plan I presented already tackles some obvious hurdles to get to this vision (e.g. the problem of bootstrapping the activity, differentiation from similar ideas etc…)

TEAM?

"Minds Meetup" got selected for the second round.  In that second round, I need to convince the jury that I have been able to build a proper "startup team". The iBootcamp format expects a team of people of complementary personalities and skills (research has shown that this is an almost necessary condition for success).  So I need to have people with these proven skills:

- marketing/sales
- operations/management
- technology
- finance

The team now consists of:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/pascalvanhecke (myself as the "Idea owner")
http://www.linkedin.com/in/frankherrman (tech, dev guy)
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kpellegr (marketing, biz dev)

I am still talking to people for the "Operations" position and should be able to get a positive answer from one of them.

For the financial position however, I ran out of options…  The reason: there were very few financial people in the IBBT network itself.  My own network, on the other hand, consists of mainly technical and online marketing people. Those with business experience I have been talking to in the last few weeks, are in their late thirties or forties and are no longer willing to sacrifice weekends of family life.
Hence this leap forward and this late (!) "open invitation".

YOUR PROFILE?

- You’re able to translate ideas into numbers, you need to have proven financial skills (business school or work experience in financial planning)
- You are free or can keep your agenda free at the dates mentioned above
- You have affinity with web technology and online business models

What’s in it for you:

- you get the opportunity to participate in a valuable intensive and interactive course program set up by Vlerick Business School
- you get to know a good bunch of interesting people, both trainers and people in the other participating teams

You do NOT need to:

- be searching for another job, or commit yourself to something beyond iBootcamp. The end product is a business plan, not a business
- (on the other hand: _if_ you are searching for another job, I can’t promise that.  The idea might be too small-scale to get funding and create employment in the short term)

TIMING

I spent one week talking to people since the IBBT dating event and I’ve got less than one week left now.  Contact me before Saturday noon Feb 20th. I will talk to people (preferably via Skype since I’m in the Netherlands) on Saturday and Sunday.  I need to submit the final list on Monday Feb 22d.
I will post this in the Linkedin Groups of Bizcamp.be, Betagroup.be, Ghent Valley, Westartup and at Westartup.eu.

CONTACT

You can check out my online presence (you’ll probably find people we know in common, ask them for advice):

http://www.linkedin.com/in/pascalvanhecke
http://www.facebook.com/pascalvanhecke
http://twitter.com/pascalvanhecke -> http://whofollowswhom.com/u/pascalvanhecke/ibbt is a good tool here

If you feel this might be something for someone in your own network, please feel free to forward/post/retweet.  Thanks!

Pascal Van Hecke
pascal [at] vanhecke [dot] info
Skype:pascalvanhecke
http://www.linkedin.com/in/pascalvanhecke
http://vanhecke.info

A similar controversial business is being run by Trademarkpublisher.info, sending out invoices to trademark owners.  I received an invoice of €795 (for a  Benelux trademark that I no longer own).

If you read the terms and conditions (pdf), you’ll notice that the actual service they sell for this hefty price is the “publication” of your trademark.  Which is kind of… unnecessary, since your trademark is already published by the Trademark registration office itself.

The blog posts I found about Trademarkpublisher.info all seem to be Australian.  Apparently they have now expanded their “market” and bought an old (it’s already 5 years since I transferred ownership) database of Benelux trademark owners…  The letter (pdf page 1, 2 and envelope) looks like a (perfectly bilingual) Belgian invoice, and they have a Belgian Bank acount (while registered in Vienna, Austria).  If you or your company received one of these, just be aware that this is not an invoice for renewing your trademark registration…

1 Register at Youtube and subscribe to video channels

2 Go to the "YouTube 2 iTunes" Yahoo Pipe and fill out your Youtube username

3 Run the pipe, and click the "Get as RSS button"

4 Copy that link, go to iTunes, "Advanced", "Subscribe to podcast" and paste

5 You’re done!

Aroundme

An easy one to introduce the idea of location-based searching (really useful in the last-minute Christmas present hunting before the shops close down): go through the menu to find services nearby or type in what you’re looking for (such as “toys” or rather the Dutch equivalent “speelgoed” as in the screenshot) and find how to get to that shop from where you are standing.  The app is nothing but a layer around Google maps but provides a more gentle, step-by-step interface.

Google

Why type? Fire the Google app, bring the phone to your ear and say “pizza“. Then have a look at the screen again and decide which pizzeria you want to call or get directions with the next tap of your finger.  Note: “pizza” is a very safe choice, not only because there are pizzas for everybody’s taste (yes, really useful in last-minute cooking stress) but also because this app is in fact an exercise in imitating American English.  That kind of limits your options, so make sure your guests do not have any outrageous culinary desires.

Snaptell

Want to know more about  that present you just unwrapped?  Take a snapshot with Snaptell and get online prices and background info – see it in action on the first screenshots on the left.  If you’re a bit underwhelmed (“hey, haven’t we been OCR-ing pictures to text for ages?“), consider the example in third screenshot: Snaptell came up with a photographer’s biography when I tried to test it with an anonymous background pic decorating some printwork.  Next time I come across some artwork that looks vaguely familiar but impossible to pinpoint to a name or artist, I know who I can ask…

Midomi

When the Iphone was released, the Shazam app (screenshots left) got a lot of attention: just let it record a sample of music, it ‘ll recognize the track and point you to Youtube versions, discography and biography of the performers, etc…

I found the competitor Midomi (screenshots on the right side) is a lot more fun however…

Apart from having actual music analysed, you can sing/hum the songs or recite some lyrics.  Surprisingly flexible with different (linguistic/cultural) variants of e.g. children’s songs: the screenshot shows the results for a sung/hummed “Flemish” “Broeder Jacob” with the “Dutch” and English-language versions. (In other tests with friends it did perform badly on Czech folk songs though!)

Facemelter

Another source of endless finger-photo fun with children is FaceMelter… need I say more?

(Features animation as well!)

As a bonus: The Internet

How about this Christmas dinner scenario: your brother in law gets fed up with your geekery and throws you a pile of napkins (“Make yourself useful for once!“). Google video search on “napkin fold” will save the day: gather around the iPhone with the entire family and follow as shown…

Your favourite apps?

So how do you convince your tech-sceptical relatives and friends?  Leave your own experience in the comments…

Strangely enough, the bookmarklet has gone since long (you won’t find it on Flickr.com and most search hits elsewhere point to a vanished page), but the same code still functions perfectly if you had saved it in your browser.  Because I was unable to find a copy of it on the web when I needed it on a new machine, I’ve put it online for those people who are scouring Google like I was:

Get the Bookmarklet

1. Have a look at the embedded one-minute screencast to see what it does
2. Go and add it to your favourites/bookmarks from this mini-page((I was unable to get it in this post, WordPress has trouble understanding javascript or iframes…)) – if you’re not familiar with bookmarklets, have a look how to get it in your browser

Screencast: what does the bookmarklet do?

[VIDEO]: Cannot display the embedded video &#8211; if you are reading this through an RSS reader, click throough to the original post

Screencast: how to install the bookmarklet?

[VIDEO]: Cannot display the embedded video &#8211; if you are reading this through an RSS reader, click through to the original post

The IE8 extension does something similar as the Firefox Operator plugin, but all of it is implemented in Javascript (using the Jquery library).  In fact, all the extension does, is make the browser insert 2 lines of javascript into the source code of any page it visits to perform the magic.  Jon Udell made a demo page with the javascript already included so you can check its effect with any browser without installing anything (more at Jon’s posting on Oomph).

Inserting lines of javascript automatically in any page?  That sounds like a Greasemonkey job, doesn’t it?  Strangely enough, a search for Oomph and Greasemonkey didn’t result in anything useful.  So that’s why I put this simple Greasemonkey userscript online² that does for Firefox what the IE extension does: alerting you for hCalendar and hCard microformats and making it easy to download or export them.  Install it and head over to Jon Udell’s second version of his demo page that doesn’t have the script yet, to check whether the effect is identical.

Note: as mentioned on the userscript’s page, Microsoft can theoretically follow your clickstream if you install the script (by logging http referer headers on load requests for the script). If you are not comfortable with that, host the Javascript libraries on your own server and replace the path “http://visitmix.com/labs/oomph/1.0/client/” by the new location.

1. although several people have argued that the webslices that came with IE8, are in fact a somewhat different implementation of the hAtom microformat
2. it is in fact based on a similar del.icio.us script I discussed in a posting 2 years ago

Replies tab

You’ll find all of the @replies to you at your replies tab when logged in. All of your replies, meaning: also from people you do not follow – they don’t even have to follow you. That’s different from the @replies in your twitterstream on the front page where you only see tweets (including @-replies) from people you follow¹.

Potentially, the @replies tab is a source for spam, but I haven’t seen any so far – and blocking the account solves the problem. Especially if you want to limit the number of people you follow, but still want to track replies from your followers, the replies tab is your friend.

But: there should be better ways than to check it regularly on the web, not?

Clients that integrate the @replies nicely

As Kris Hoet wrote:

• The client people use can tell you more about how much conversation people are willing to get into. [...]
• The client people use can tell you how fast (or not) people will see your replies, [...].

Like Kris, I really like Twhirl, because it integrates all of the @replies (and direct messages) in a nice and visually distinctive way in your timeline. Switch the display to the last 20 @replies just to check for those that may have dropped from your timeline already. (Next to that, Twhirl is a really modest client, fading in the background automatically and just popping up discretely for a few seconds in your peripheral vision when new tweets arrive.)

However: this will probably work if you’re behind your own computer regularly, not for people on the road or on computers they don’t control.

Authenticated @replies feed

For a more asynchronous way of tracking your @replies, there’s the corresponding feed at http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss. However: you’ll need a desktop feed reader, since not a single (as far as I know) web-based feed reader supports http-authentication (Update: Netvibes does – of course you need to trust them).

If you have your own web space, you could de-authenticate the feed with a php script I wrote and host that on a “secret” place². That is in fact how most services who publish personalised, private feeds, do it: they provide you with some “secret, non-guessable url”.

The risk then is that these feeds pop up in other people’s searches if you use them with a web-based feedreader, so the script features an access/privacy restriction. Introduced by Bloglines, it seems to be supported by other web-based feedreaders as well (on the feed-publishing side, only a few services include the element though!).

Still: not a solution for the non-technical and/or web-based user.

Using the Twitter “tracking” feature

Twitters tracking feature is a great way to get notifications when a word or phrase is mentioned, so you could as well use it to track “@your_username”. If you’re brand- or ego-aware than you will probably want to have a lot more words tracked, on top of the ego- and brandname-search feeds you already have running on Technorati and other blog search engines…

As an extra advantage, you also get the name-dropping tweets where “@your_username” is in the middle of the sentence – those are not captured by the @replies feed. Try “track twitter” to test the feature and experience the self-referential nature of the service :-). If you understand Dutch, check out the excellent screencast by Pierre Gorissen).

Two huge disadvantages:

• only works on Instant Messaging or on your phone (make sure notifications are ON), there’s no web-based way to use the tracking feature (you can have them archived in Google Talk/Gmail’s chat folder as a workaround)
• only works for public tweets. People who have their account protected aren’t tracked, not even when you follow them.

Twitter search services

When twitter doesn’t provide a feature, third parties jump in – both:

• Tweetscan: example (feed)
• TerraMinds: example (feed)

seem to provided excellent searches and searchfeeds. Tweetscan doesn’t distinguish between @username and username though, Terraminds does and has a longer history.

But again: only for public tweets!

Sidenote on silos…

If you have a closer look at the above list, there’s a multitude of ways (3d party services) to scan public Tweets for replies, or phrases and keywords in general. It’s a lot harder have that done for private accounts you follow – and you need username and password for it³ – something you shouldn’t trust a 3d party with. In fact, when it comes to non-public information, all content platforms and social networks still are closed silos.

But there’s change in the air: Twitter is one of the services pioneering with OAuth, a generic open specification on how to give access to your private stuff to 3d parties without giving username and password (you give them a unique “access token” you can revoke at any moment).

OAuth doesn’t solve “that other problem” Twitter has though: the constant polling for new updates (via the API and via feeds: 20 times more than “normal” web usage!) tears the service down regularly.

An exciting effort that is going on right now is: moving from polling (or pull) to secure and authenticated push between services, with Jabber, OpenID and Oauth as building blocks. On this side of the Atlantic, it’s Mediamatic in Amsterdam that is bringing people together: check out the project blog on Federating Social Networks – a meeting is planned this very weekend.

More Twitter musings

1. You could ask yourself: why do people use Twitter, that’s supposed to be all about non-critical information, for direct remarks or questions? Isn’t email or private instant messaging more reliable? I tend to think⁴ we use it as a form of social blackmail. By taking your followers as witness, you kind of force the addressee to reply because – “hey, people might think I don’t know the answer or can’t come up with a witty riposte“.

2. In a previous post on Twitter usage, I kind of speculated that after the quick uptake by “IM-Bobs” (the heavy digerati, users that are behind their computer most of the time) a broader, slower uptake would follow by “Sms-Alices” who use it for what Twitter was probably meant for: keeping friends and close relatives up to date on your whereabouts with text messages. This funny New-York Times column seems to contradict that:

“The people who I see using it are [...] people in marketing or P.R. or advertising, who use it for work, to present themselves as particular types of people. They’ll twitter, ‘I’m traveling,’ or ‘I’m going to interesting restaurants.’ They’re using it to do identity work.”

So it’s all marketeers and egomaniacs after all :-) … Whether you feel you fit in either category (or both of them) or not, you nog longer haven an excuse for missing your @replies!

1. you can still fine-tune: either following no conversations at all, or just between them and people you follow as well (the default), or listen to their conversations with “strangers” – the latter is a good way to get to know new people
2. since you do not want to expose tweets from people who keep their tweets protected, right?
3. Update: Twittermail provides this service
4. in fact it was Ine who pointed it out to me :-)

Since you give up privacy to people with whom you share the same physical space in real life anyway, the default option of having your profile visible to members of the same network seems logical. This however goes awfully wrong with regional networks – maybe even more so with the non-US regional networks where they lumped together entire countries or parts of the world where Facebook membership is still scarce.

Regional networks and privacy settings

Joining your regional network is the default step after filling out your location:

Joining a regional network is also a natural thing to do: as soon as people join a global community, the first thing they long for is affirming their local identity. So joining a regional network is for most people just a statement about themselves, just like joining one or more of the gazillion groups on Facebook, whose purpose is nothing but expressing an opinion or idea in the group title.

Facebook however takes its mission of “modeling the social graph” seriously, and joining a network isn’t just a light-hearted expression of a passing emotion: not only is it made hard to switch regional networks…

… joining a network has drastic consequences: it makes your profile, and the applications your install, by default viewable to all of your networks, including your regional network:

In countries like Sweden and Norway (resp. 1 in 9 and 1 in 5 on Facebook!) where the entire 15-35 demographic is on Facebook, joining the “regional network” amounts to making your profile public… Two weeks ago, I spent some time browsing through profiles of members of the network “Belgium” (127.000 members back then, 148.000 at the time of writing) and I am pretty sure a lot of the profile information was definitely not meant for total strangers to see.

What to do?

If you take Facebook seriously (i.e. really consider it a safe environment to communicate and connect with people you care about), you might do the following:

• set profile and (most of your) applications‘ visibility to “friends only” or just allow networks you really have an idea who the members are
• be extra thoughtful with applications where you interact with other people: do you think they want their comments, postings, preferences to be visible via your profile/newsfeed?
• determine for yourself what your “boundary of trust” will be and refuse friend requests from people who don’t fall within these lines
• ask yourself whether you want to be found on Facebook by people searching your name (because you might lack the courage to refuse them)
• weed out decaying relationships systematically

Don’t think you have the guts and/or discipline to stick to those rules? Don’t worry, most people haven’t (if any). Which is the reason why quite a few smart people think Facebook, like its predecessors, is doomed to fail its grand ambition.

So here’s another approach:

• determine for yourself what your “public membrane” is – you should feel comfortable with all information outside the membrane potentially being known to everyone (including parents, colleagues and neighbours) – it doesn’t mean you want them to know, it means you accept the risk of them getting to know
• if you have a weblog, you already have defined that membrane for yourself…
• as long as you play outside the membrane, go and lead a carelessly info-promiscuous Facebook (and other social network) life

(Inspired by a conversation with Clo, and this one with Peter Vandenabeele. You might want to post this to Facebook?)