Ben Popper – Culture + Technology

Over the past few months Hashable, a startup focused on networking, has become an addiction among many of the power players in New York’s tech scene. It allows users to track who they meet with and who they introduce, creating a dataset that measures in fine detail the social economy of Silicon Alley. “Once I started, I was hooked,” says Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital. “Now I’m feeling a bit competitive. I really want to be one of the top connectors.”

Big-name investors like O’Donnell and Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson use the service regularly. But on the site’s leaderboard the top three users, not counting Hashable employees, are a CEO of a small dating site, a relatively unknown investor and an NYU senior and Dogpatch Lab’s intern named Trevor Owens. Which begs the question, how exactly does the site quantify social capital?

Check out the rest of the story over at the NY Observer

Plenty of tech companies are making the leap into the business of mobile telephones, but so far that’s mostly involved partnering with one of the giant carriers like Verizon or At&T. But the news that Facebook and Skype are partnering on communications highlights the possibility of a new future, in which web-only services emerge as a powerful new brand of Telco.

I argued that Facebook should resist the temptation to build its own phone. That’s an expensive and difficult process that would take it far outside its expertise in software. But an integration with Skype is another story. Integrating Skype would allow Facebook to capture a percentage of mobile voice calls without delving into hardware at all.

When I bought my new Android phone it automatically synced with my Gmail and Facebook accounts in order to add people to my contact list. Of my roughly 200 contacts, more than one third are simply Facebook friends for whom I have no cell phone number. There have been numerous occasions when I was frustrated with the realization that I couldn’t call these folks. The integration with Skype could change all that.

Imagine a dense urban center ten years from now where WiFi is a constant in homes, offices and public transportation. Facebook and Skype could potentially power a mobile device with no contract and no carrier, powered only by your social network and voice/video over internet calling.

Read the rest of this story over at BNET

For over a decade now, search has been the dominant paradigm on the Web. To Google (GOOG) became a verb meaning to understand the world, and companies began to live and die by their search result rankings.

Yesterday Facebook introduced a new paradigm, a way of understanding the entire Web that is based around the social, not the search.

Google’s triumph was to design a search engine that used the network of connections between different websites to decide what results were relevant. Facebook’s new Open Graph system does the same thing, but instead of using links between sites to measure relevance, it looks at social networks for the connections between people, places and things.

For a full rundown of how the Open Graph system works, check out my post from yesterday. In brief, this new approach allows users to experience the entire Web through the prism of their Facebook profile. If I like a certain book or movie on an outside partner, I can click a button to share that preference on Facebook. If my Facebook page knows that I like Korean food, an outside partner like Yelp can tailor my experience to reflect that. “It means the Web can become a series of personally and semantically meaningful connections,” says CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“The 10 blue links paradigm, popularized by Google, appears to be reaching its limits,” writes Om Malik in a post on why Google should fear the social web. In an Open Graph world, users will turn to their social connections to figure out where to shop, what to watch and when to travel. All this is already happening of course, and Google has even entered into the social game. But Facebook’s size and the depth of its partnerships give it a huge advantage in this arena. In place of search, says Zuckerberg, “The open graph puts people at the center of the web.”

Check out my full post over at BNET

Google’s plan to deliver affordable, super high speed internet access to a few lucky American towns sounds like some 21st century version of Willy Wonka’s golden ticket to the Chocolate Factory. If you thought Snozzberries were crazy, how about internet access of a gigabyte per second — roughly 100 times faster than what most Americans experience and 1000 times faster than AT&T’s basic DSL package? Like Wonka, Google’s aim is to show consumers exactly what they’ve been missing.

Full post over at BNET -

Published my first piece for The Atlantic today about the video gamer version of Dante’s Inferno.

What makes this story work is the tension between staying faithful to the original text and pleasing the gaming community. The game’s developers went out of their way to talk about how they kept many elements of the poem intact, while simultaneously reassuring gamers that they had ditched all the sissy stuff.

The gaming community was actually offended by the marketing campaign for this title. I think it would have been a lot braver, and commercially savvy, to create a game that used Dante’s fear and fragility instead of ditching it for an a stock action hero.

Still I applaud the developers for trying something this ambitious and for bringing attention to such a great work of classic literature.

Just wrote my first blog post for CBS on the real issue Google has with China. Google has managed to frame this as a matter of principles and politics, a smart move that helps them win back some of the support they lost for compromising with the Chinese on censorship.

But the truth is that Google’s was willing   to compromise on “being evil” if it meant winning a share of the fastest growing internet market in the world. What they weren’t willing to gamble with was the heart of their global business, customer trust.

I remember playing Sim City as a kid I would leave the game on for hours, even when I wasn’t playing, and return to find my metropolis in flames. Then I would have to scramble to get everything back in working order, at which point the game would become boring, and I would abandon it again. For me, a city in crisis was more appealing than a stable one.

Still the game taught me to think about cities in ways I never had before. I was still in middle school at the time, and my conception of transportation and urban planning was next to nothing. Seeing the impact a well designed network of roads had on my digital domain did awaken a larger awareness of what makes a great city.

The military seems to have latched on to the idea that video games are good teaching tools. A new piece in the Atlantic details the development of a sort of Sim Iraq, where battalion commanders have to pacify an insurgent city by learning the social, cultural, economic and geographic needs of a diverse population.

I doubt any digital city can accurately predict the complex web of interactions that make up a real war zone. But as a thought exercise I believe the game could have real value. Apparently the game works off of real world data, and can be programmed to run “stories” tailored to fit different conflicts.

Over at Danger Room this topic has been bouncing around since 2007. The general consensus there seems to be while the concept is interesting, there’s not much value to these games, and anyone who thinks this will prepare our troops to understand an insurgency is just a couch commander with a hard on for control.

“John Nagl, who helped write the Army’s manual on defusing insurgencies, told Danger Room in 2007. “They are smoking something they shouldn’t be,” retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper quipped to Science magazine. ‘Only those who don’t know how the real world works will be suckers for this stuff.’”

I don’t think these games are anything more than a mental primer for the real experience. But as a means of getting commanders to think intelligently about the multiple factors that influence an urban insurgency, I would wager these games have real value.

I have a new piece up today at Slate about why some many engineers end up as terrorists.

The most astonishing thing I learned while doing this research was just how wrong my perception of terrorists and suicide bombers was. The idea that high level leaders in complex terrorist organizations are better educated doesn’t give me pause. But according to this article by Alan Kruger, a former Princeton economist now with the treasury, even suicide bombers in places like Gaza are likely to be wealthier and better educated than their peers.

Kruger says that crime makes a poor analogy for terrorism. A better comparison would be to voting. It’s the folks who are invested in ideas, politics and the future of the nation who bother to get out and vote, or who make the ultimate statement with their lives.

I’ve got a new piece up today on the Daily Beast looking at the relationship between social media and suicide.

There is a prevailing sense among people of a certain age that kids who are sitting alone in front of their computers all the time are failing to build social skills.

But the experts in public health I talked with saw it differently. “Kids today are experts in their friends moods,” was how Christopher Le put it. Le helped write the suicide protocols for Myspace and Facebook and now runs his own company, Emotion Technology, that works on public health in the new media sphere.

I think Le’s point is important. There is definitely a sensation on services like Facebook and Twitter of constant contact. This is no substitute for deep friendships. But when a person puts out a cry for help, friends, onlookers, even strangers now respond.

Much of the subway’s complexity stems from the fact that it originated as two competing companies. There was the Manhattan based IRT and the Brooklyn based BMT, who not only laid their tracks without heed to each other, but sometimes worked at cross purposes. The end result is that the NYC subway is one of the more convoluted underground transit systems in the world.

1924 IRT

The two companies produced separate maps that focused on their own lines, often providing sketchy detail for the competition. This IRT map from 1924 shows all the boroughs, but doesn’t include any BMT lines. Often the maps would portray the company’s lines as straight and the competition’s as crooked. “The idea was simple,” writes Andrew Dow in Telling the Passenger Where to Get Off. “The straighter the line, the faster the trip would look to a customer.”