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He said: “I have now had a chance to play around with Facebook Places and it’s not that great or interesting. It’s a pretty boring service, with barely any incentives for users to keep coming back and telling their friends where they are.

“The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world… but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins.” Read more at www.telegraph.co.uk

As they announced last week, Twitter is in the process of testing their new Streaming API with a feature called User Streams. Basically, this is a realtime data push for desktop applications. This means almost all tweets flow to apps in realtime: friend tweets, reply tweets, DMs, search queries — you name it. There is no more refresh needed. I’ve been testing User Streams out this past weekend with the latest beta build of TweetDeck (one of two desktop apps the feature is being tested with — Echofon is the other). It’s amazing.

The User Streams feature reminds me a bit of FriendFeed right before the acquisition by Facebook. It was my go-to app mainly because it pulled in tweets in realtime — and you could do searches in realtime too. At first, a number of users felt the realtime updating was too fast — and made the service unusable. But FriendFeed had a way to pause the stream and also filter it nicely. A lot of third-party apps are going to pop up around Twitter User Streams that do that as well.

If you follow thousands of people, the realtime friend stream may be overwhelming. But I follow about 750 people, and I find it pretty manageable, even at peak times. Read more at techcrunch.com

Using sites like Craigslist, Twitter and YouTube, the researchers were able to cross-reference information contained within publicly available online content to determine the exact home addresses of potential victims, even those who had posted the content anonymously. The experiments didn’t take weeks, days or even hours of research either - the addresses were pinpointed with GPS-level accuracy within minutes.

To demonstrate the ease involved in determining a stranger’s precise location, Friedland and Sommer first “cybercased” Craigslist, a classified ads website often used to post items for sale. Here they found geo-tagged photos which they compared with Google Street View, allowing them to determine the postal addresses belonging to the item’s sellers. Even more helpful (if the researchers were, in fact, thieves), was that several ads included a “best time to call” - implying the hours the sellers were not at home.

In further tests, the researchers cybercased Twitter, which allows mobile users to geo-tag their updates. Third-party applications - like TwitPic, for example, used for posting images to Twitter - also include locational data. Using a Firefox Web browser plugin called Exif Viewer, it was only a matter of right-clicking on an image to reveal location of the Twitter post, plotted on a map.

A third experiment, and perhaps the most devious yet, showed the ease with which this form of cyberstalking could be automated. While the above examples revealed users’ location within minutes, manual effort was still involved. For YouTube, however, the researchers wrote a simple script that automatically recognized when videos were recorded a certain distance away from a primary location, that being the potential victims’ home addresses. When the “vacation distance,” as it was called, was set to 100 KM, the script returned 106 hits revealing who was out-of-town in the test location of Berkeley, CA. After briefly perusing the results, the researchers came across a video from someone who was clearly on a Caribbean vacation and would have made an ideal victim. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com

After Apple’s iPhone 4 press conference last week, Szymon Weglarski and Jon Dorfman, two designers from Brooklyn, decided they would have a little fun with the iPhone 4’s antenna problem.

They designed tiny bandages that fit perfectly around the edge of the iPhone, opened a store on the marketplace site Etsy, and named their new product Antenn-aid. Now the two partners are rushing to keep up with orders.

The two designers are clearly having a little fun with the product. The Antenn-aid Web site says the stickers “work like magical,” poking fun at Apple’s description of the iPad as a “magical and revolutionary product.”

“It’s a lot of satire, it’s kind of a gag product, it’s poking fun at the whole idea of how overblown the whole antenna solution has been,” Mr. Weglarski said. Read more at bits.blogs.nytimes.com

The Bad: Relying Too Heavily On Perfection

Not everyone agrees, however, that A/B testing is a wise practice. Just this morning, Jeff Atwood, author of the blog Coding Horror, expressed his idea that this kind of testing is a lot like the movie Groundhog Day. In the movie, Bill Murray - stuck in an infinite loop reliving the same day over and over again - attempts to win the love of a woman, Rita, by learning as much as he can about her each day and pretending to share all of her interests.

Atwood says that this is exactly what startups and designers are doing by relying too heavily on A/B testing. While romantic relationships are certainly different than business relationships, the parallels are interesting. Even though Murray’s character says presumably “all the rights things,” Rita can still tell there is something odd about it. Startups should be wary of testing too many of their decisions and should instead focus on just a few key elements at a time.

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz warned a few weeks ago against falling into the “trap of A/B testing minutiae.” He says many are “tantalized” by the idea that a small change can go a long way, when in reality this is far from the norm.

“In all of these, some simple change accounted for big increases in click-through or conversion rate, leading to widespread praise and sharing,” says Fishkin. “The problem is - they’re the exception, not the rule. In fact, that’s precisely why they’re newsworthy and get so many mentions.”

Fishkin also says for the small changes A/B testing often produces, the time and energy is too high. He suggests that startups focus more on testing larger changes - like a sight redesign - rather than smaller ones - like button colors. Read more at www.readwriteweb.com

When outsourcing, you can’t manage through the contract, you have to manage through the people. Delegating to a vendor is no different, on a day-by-day basis, than delegating internally. You have to stay close in the beginning to ensure that objectives and success measurements are well understood, the approach makes sense, accountabilities and roles are clarified and the team jells. Then you have to stay close enough throughout the project to see what others aren’t seeing, catalyze the right conversations, and ensure that the right mid-course corrections occur.

In the project above, internal leadership believed that their work was done when the vendor walked in the door. They assumed that the vendor knew what they didn’t know — about how the business and IT operated, the legacy systems, the packaged software, and the new technology platforms. And they were completely dumbfounded when the users revolted against the software.

When internal leaders outsourced the work, they made the mistake of outsourcing the leadership of the work as well.

This is a common outsourcing fallacy, but a crucial one to recognize, because it has led many to believe that there’s little need for senior leadership expertise within IT. That is, since IT is outsourced, leadership can be, too. While it’s true that IT organizations that operate with an extensive network of outsourcing relationships have fewer employees, those that remain have to be much more sophisticated in their ability to exert indirect — versus direct — influence. Read more at blogs.hbr.org