Social Media Club Rotterdam invited me to take part in a Google “Hangout” session with Kevin Kelly to discuss “What Technology Wants”.  ”What Technology Wants” is not only an interesting thing to ask oneself, but also the title of the book by Kevin Kelly that has just been released in Dutch. If you pay close attention, you can see my cat co-star in the video near the end…

I’ve been discussing the possibilities for location based surveys already. As especially reviews are tied to a certain place it’s only natural to at least offer surveys with a location component. The new company Qriously is now offering such a thing: short location based surveys. With this offer they hope to set up a new mobile revenue model and ride the ‘quick insights’ hype on mobile devices.

The question to why people would even go to take a survey is solved by them in to ways. First and foremost they offer their questions as inapp advertisements on mobile devices.

Funding

The location based public opinion tool has recently raised 1.6 million US dollars in a funding round and the seem keen on offering app developers a new way to make money on free mobile apps. As the questions will be displayed as in-app advertisements, much like is already custom on for example Android or Apple’s iOS, they’ve got the question how potential respondents would even get to the survey covered. The actual ‘survey’ consists of a question that can be answered on a slider scale. When answering, they naturally don’t have the leave the application, so this shouldn’t be too much of an extra step in answering questions. As an extra incentive to answer a question Qriously also offers an insight in how others have answered compared to yourself.

the Qriously in-app content

If the questions that people get to answer will remain fairly location based this would give answering some extra relevance to the respondent. We could say that this is the second solution Qriously has found to the engagement problem. Offering relevant surveys to people does good things for the response rate and if they manage to keep questions not only location-dependent but also really relevant to that location this could seriously help completion rates and deliver quick insights. Perhaps the only remaining question is how many people will really want to answer a question while they are in the midst of playing a game or checking their email. The short, easy, format of the questions could be the right way to go at this problem, though especially if they would integrate ways of interacting with the actual game or other type of application, for example in the form of credits. This is both to the benefit of the respondent, who gains an extra reward as well as to the developer who makes his revenue model more usable. Of course Qriously would gain from more integration as well, as completion rates could rise, they would have to weigh this against downside: the extra efforts such an extended app would take.

(image taken from the Qriously website)

One of the problems with the labelling system I suggested a while ago is the fact that it might give a false sense of security.  Even when customers know what they can expect from the local setup of the WiFi network, this doesn’t mean the network is secure.

Since I wrote about the security hazards of a WiFi network, a plugin for Firefox has made sure that eavesdropping on these networks has now received wider attention than it ever had before. The FireSheep plugin let’s you log in onto anyone’s account as soon as they use an insecure website. Or more precisely: whenever a user on a wireless network logs in to services like Twitter, Facebook and others via a normal (insecure!) http connection, Firesheep users on that network can immediately log in as that user.

Apparently these new developments have urged specialty coffee chain Coffee Company to display a warning message on the login page of their HotSpots. It might not be much, but maybe this is the best thing to do: inform your customers about the risks involved of using a wireless network.

(hat-tip to Alexander for the link/picture)

With this short article I don’t mean to tell you what you can do with location applications like Foursquare or Gowalla, I’d like to show you that there is really something going on. Whether you ‘believe’ in services like these or not, the fact remains that these services are growing and generating data. But what is that data, how can we grasp the fact that people seem to be moving around and registering their movement? The obvious solution lies in visualisation, so this is exactly what I’d like to show you.

Where are people going?

It’s actually not all that easy to see how people are moving through their towns even though the data is readily available. One will need to process the history of checkins and/or process new checkins on a real time basis. Fortunately, examples of services doing this are starting to rise up. First and foremost there is google maps. If you’re using foursquare you can go directly to their feeds section and copy the KML feed directly in the ‘search maps’ bar in Google Maps. This will display an overview of your recent checkin history mapped onto the Google Maps map.

A similar service is offered by 4mapper, which both maps your checkins on a Google map via a nice interface and it displays some additional statistics as well. You can see other people’s checkins here and check out the extra activity data it displays for each user.

See people moving

Displaying checkins on a map gives you a nice overview already, but it brings up an additional question: how are people moving over time? This question is partly answered by Weeplaces, an excellent service that will map your checkins as well but it also displays your movement over time. Check out their website for an example; for each user they will create an animation that displays checkins over time and it enlarges places that you frequently visit. A service that tries to put the notion of ‘hot places’ to use is Buzzd. Unfortunately not available for me, Buzzd will tell you what the hot places to go are in your nearby area. This way Buzzd actually combines the visualisation of checkins with an actual ‘use’ of location based services: it determines which are the places to be at the moment and feeds this aggregated information back to its users.

The notion of ‘hot’ is also used in the ‘Hot in the city’ project by the Digital Methods Initiative. Instead of a website this project involves actual LED’s on a map of the city of Amsterdam. Although designed for real-time use the example they show on their website uses Foursquare data gathered over 24 hours for dramatic effect. Have a look here for a movie of the visualisation in a project that truly displays the movement of people through a city.

Why are people moving?

The next step in visualization and data analysis would be to see why people are moving. Read this article on Location-Based Linkage on Serial Consign for some thoughts on new directions we can take from here. As they point out, the challenge is to broaden the visualisations and thus give new meanings to these checkins. Especially when you can process this data real time, interesting things come to mind. New things to learn are for example the place where people do not move to (or do not check in to) either always or on certain times during the day. Or imagine trying to display sudden rises in checkins to new hot spots like traffic accidents or concerts. This way we can take a new step in giving meaning to the data that people generate as they check in to places.

Thanks to Anne Helmond for giving me some additional links. Be sure to check out her website if you are interested in visualisations of online data.

Image taken from weeplaces.com

CrunchBase Information on Foursquare

CrunchBase Information on Gowalla

I’m excited to tell you that already twice this month I’ve been on Dutch Radio 1 with a column about news, tips and tricks on the internet. New Dutch broadcasting organization PowNed has invited me to make a column for the weekly late-night radio-show ‘Echte Jannen‘.

For those of you who understand Dutch:you can tune in every Sunday night between 24:00 and 02:00 hours or listen to the past show here at radio 1. (Pick 0:00h on Mondays at the ‘terugluisteren op tijd’ option.) PowNed is a broadcasting organization that wants to make programs aimed at the ‘network generation’, a generation that by the way does not let itself describe by a single age-group or other demographic. It’s television and radio programs as well as it’s website hope to fulfill the need for quick, fast and raw information. I’m very happy that they’ve offered me the chance to get on the radio and tell my story about what I believe has been important online in the past week or so.

More information, again in Dutch, can be found at Wikipedia about PowNed in general and the show ‘Echte Jannen‘ in particular. (I figure you understand that my column is named ‘Ctrl Alt Delete’.) Or follow the twitter account here.

Following the recent acquisitions in the research industry, think about Toluna buying Greenfield Online/Ciao Surveys, one would expect a response from other players in the market. And to be a bit more specific; what would smaller players in the market do with their panels? There are several obvious solutions to the troubles of maintaining smaller panel(s), one could thing about an advanced sharing system or outsourcing panels.

As all of these seem to be happening there is the other obvious solution to which I’ve been pointing several times in the past; several companies ‘chipping in’ together and combine their panel efforts.

And indeed; now several European research agencies have committed themselves to pooling their panels together and create a new fieldwork business called Panelteam. Founding members are Multiscope, Mo’web Research, M3 Research, Panelbase, Directpanel Research and SWG according to Research-Live. Peter-Paul Laumans, now working at Multiscope, will be heading this new company, no doubt having to navigate it to the hard times of crafting a single structure out of the separate panel entities. It will be interesting to see how fast they can set up a smooth working new organization out of these separate resources.

Even more, it will be interesting to see what kind of influence this pooling has on the market. No doubt Panelteam would like to establish itself as an important player in the field, but they will feel the competition of both existing larger multi-country players as well as others pooling together their resources in a similar way. My guess would be that a next step might well be consultancy firms combining some of their research efforts in a similar vein.

Maybe you are familiar with the fact that a webserver can see which browser version you’re using and for example also how big the window is you’re using to view that website. In itself that is interesting enough for some statistics on the visitors of your website.

But there is more, way more and that is where thoughts of privacy, but also of marketing and research potential come in to play. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has made a website to show a bit of what is possible. (Go support them here, by the way.)

Panopticlick is of course a very clever name in itself, but what does it do? It tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. as it turns out, that is often very unique! So someone with access to multiple, if not a lot, websites could, at the cost of quite some server load, potentially track you on your merry way across the internet. This might be heaven for marketeers in some way, but even in this industry tracking to this extend seems to be frowned upon. Cross site tracking cookies have been the topic of much debate, even amongst not so ‘privacy focused’ people, although their existence might prove there is still quite some demand.

Installing a lot of fonts of my system might not have helped for me; when testing it turned out I am very unique. (That is bad if you dislike being traced or tracked, good if you like targeted ads.)

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 222,512 tested so far.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 17.76 bits of identifying information.

This is one of those things that you know about, somewhere in the back of your mind, but may have never really considered as an option. You know about browsers being able to detect if you have a certain font on your computer etc. but how could that all fit together with other statistics? That is one of those things you might not always think about.

Thus the topic might well be; are people aware of the (theoretical) possibilities and are they going to be used? Of course the question still remains; how effective can this type of tracking be? This is exactly one of the reasons for starting this project. The EFF wants to try to get your information and add it to their database. That sounds evil enough, though fortunately we might want to believe the EFF about that “anonymous” thing and them not tracking us, of course. Hopefully, this will help evaluate the capabilities of Internet tracking and advertising companies, a goal which in the end can be beneficial regardless of which side you’re on.

Have you ever taken a survey recently, or maybe several surveys? If so you might have wondered about several things. And maybe those things are exactly those things that bother me about surveys. One could have, of course, something against surveys altogether, but they remain a powerful research tool, that is one thing that’s for sure. Even though I’m personally calling for a broader way of doing research, I don’t think we should abandon it.

I do think we should look more into some of the things that come to mind when you look at a survey. These things are often related to a certain tradition that lies in doing survey based research and indeed in a sort of tradition that is created per tracker survey as well. Not changing things for tradition’s sake, is one of the worst things a researcher could do and still this seems to happen all too often. Survey methodology in general is one thing, but a lot of me wondering about survey research is the lack of changes, of innovation.

Tradition

If any objections about wording, questions, long surveys and tradition sound familiar to you, you may have read Jan Hofmeyr’s (Synovate) Research Magazine interview where he comes up with similar notions. He describes in an honest and clear way how tradition seems to hold the Research Industry hostage some times. An excellent example is about brand tracking; surveys in these studies seem to be way too long, which makes response and dropout rates suffer and will of course cost the researcher way too much money. Still companies seem reluctant to step forward and possibly lose half of their income and clients seem to be reluctant because the ever present danger of losing the budget for your department if you seem to be able to spend less this year! Quite a classic way of holding on to traditions for little more than some sort of business continuity reasons.

To these observations I would add that an other reason is often because one likes to compare studies. This, of course, mainly concerns tracker-like studies. Questions can sometimes be added, but clients could be very reluctant to remove any, or even improve the wording because of reasons like “this has been running like this already” or “we want to compare this with 2001”. In these cases, the question of course is whether comparing “bad” data (defective, in the sense that Jan is using it.) with new bad data makes sense at all!

Can we add to survey research?

On other point is the research itself; I mean: come on, survey research? Can’t we come up with some nice additions to that? Well, of course we can, and I believe that we can even strengthen survey based research with additions like these. Still, very little seems under way to do this, even with the “2.0” hype going on like crazy. Now of course I do see the point in no jumping on any bandwagon, but the way clients and others seem to hold to just surveys some times seem to be a bit odd, to say the least. When one looks at comments made by Hofmeyr like

“it’s very hard to get people to change. We’re supposed to be researchers; we’re supposed to care about truth and new knowledge”

and

“Our industry is one of the most conservative you will come across. Look at IT – look how keen they are to throw out the old and adopt the new.”

it’s maybe not that hard to see why a “knowledge” industry seems very reluctant to use any improvements, let alone new ways of doing things.

Being this knowledge based industry I think the ideas, the knowledge, is there, what we have to do now is to use it! This will not happen tomorrow, but if we can come up with a good way of doing “new research” tomorrow, present it next week, clients may follow and demand these things next month, if you catch my drift. I think this is a train we cannot afford to miss or else we might never arrive in the future while others who did “get it” are catching up and do get there in the end. So, of course, proceed with caution, but be sure to catch that mediatrain that will departure very soon or has perhaps left the station already.