On the heels of my TechCrunch post on why Foursquare users check in off the grid, HuffPo intern Jake Bialer turned me on to some work being done at Carnegie Mellon about mobile social services. From CMU Associate Professor Jason Hong:


1) Rethinking Location Sharing: Exploring the Implications of Social-Driven vs. Purpose-Driven Location Sharing
// Compares Purpose-Driven Location Sharing (eg to coordinate plans) vs Social-Driven (sharing because it’s fun, not because others need to know).
// “social-driven location sharing favored semantic location names, blurring of location information, and using location information to attract attention and boost self-presentation.”
// “In one-to-one location sharing, the user’s decision is simple: is the user comfortable telling this specific person her location. For one-to-many sharing, the decision is more complex: what may have been okay sharing with one person may not be okay sharing with many people. There are three reasons why large-group sharing might differ: (1) there is a larger variance in who receives the information, (2) there is a different motivation for sharing, and (3) there is a different expectation of plausible deniability.”
// “The success of Facebook is indicative that users are relatively comfortable sharing the same status information with everyone in their online social network (i.e., people of varying tie strength), but it is unclear if the same holds true for location sharing.”


2) Modeling People’s Place Naming Preferences in Location Sharing
// “Most location sharing applications display people’s locations on a map. However, people use a rich variety of terms to refer to their locations, such as “home,” “Starbucks,” or “the bus stop near my house.” Our longterm goal is to create a system that can automatically generate appropriate place names based on real-time context and user preferences.”
// “We also present a machine learning model for predicting how people name places. Using our data, this model is able to predict the place naming method people choose with an average accuracy higher than 85%.”
// When location was shared with more intimate social groups like family members or close friends, the portion of using geographic naming method was small (<15%) and the average granularity was finer (between street level and building level). However, when the location information was shared with less intimate social groups, such as
strangers, the usage of geographic naming was much higher but the average granularity drops dramatically (i.e. as coarse as city level granularity). This observation also confirmed people’s location blurring intentions get stronger when sharing with less intimate social groups.”


3) Bridging the Gap Between Physical Location and Online Social Networks
// Can co-location result in the next social graph? “We introduce a novel set of locationbased features for analyzing the social context of a geographic region, including location entropy, which measures the diversity of unique visitors of a location. Using these features, we provide a model for predicting friendship between two users by analyzing their location trails.”
// “The co-location network has roughly 3 times the number of edges as the social network, yet the social network is better connected. The co-location network has many small disconnected components, but it has a single large and highly connected subcomponent. Despite these differences, we have shown that the co-location graph contains important information that can be used to reconstruct a portion of the social network.”
// “Social network designers may find our methodology useful for designing social applications, such as location-aware information sharing platforms, privacy control mechanisms, and friend suggestion systems.”


4) Empirical Models of Privacy in Location Sharing
// “Our results show that users appear more comfortable sharing their presence at locations visited by a large and diverse set of people. Our study also indicates that people who visit a wider number of places tend to also be the subject of a greater number of requests for their locations. Over time these same people tend to also evolve more sophisticated privacy preferences, reflected by an increase in time- and location-based restrictions.”

Just published on TechCrunch re: Off the Grid private check ins on Foursquare. 

If you run a company with an office of >10 people and aren’t spending time thinking about how your office space helps or hinders productivity then you’re missing a huge opportunity to impact performance. A 2008 survey suggested that less than five percent of US corporations “tie the workplace to corporate strategy or see it as a tool for improving organizational performance.” For shame!

Smart people have said that the consumer shouldn’t see your org structure in your product. Well, i don’t think they should see your business development team in it either. I’m amazed that Sprint has made it nearly impossible for the average consumer to uninstall the large amounts of crapware that come pre-loaded on their Evo device. Want to rid yourself of Sprint Nascar, Sprint Football, etc? If so, you need to edit at the root level! Seriously WTF? Also, in the Android App Store, there’s an additional tab labeled Sprint that just promotes apps they “like” (aka paid?). This replaces the helpful “downloads” tab which allows you to see and update the apps you’ve installed (it’s now hidden behind a menu).

NYTimes reports that wealthy people don’t give as much to charity as lower classes because they’ve lost ability to relate to others’ needs as a result of prioritizing their own. 


However there’s hope and it comes in the form of a hack:


“if higher-income people were instructed to imagine themselves as lower class, they became more charitable. If they were primed by, say, watching a sympathy-eliciting video, they became more helpful to others — so much so, in fact, that the difference between their behavior and that of the low-income subjects disappeared. And fascinatingly, the inverse was true as well: when lower-income people were led to think of themselves as upper class, they actually became less altruistic.”


How can this be used to close the empathy gap? It sounds like simply asking someone to project and imagine what it might feel like to be a situation different that their own produces immediate results. So make sure your campaign outreach to donors doesn’t just tell a story but instead asks the target to feel what it would be like.


Overall pretty consistent with the research in Cialdini’s Influence (the book you should buy and read monthly) re: self-identity and behavior.

Are you scared of your job? If not, perhaps it’s time for a change. Noticed that within the last month, three close friends all found themselves in new roles that are – in all cases – the biggest job they’ve had to date. All of them admitted to, at various points, being scared by the idea.

Are they stressed? No, more excited than ever. Are they failing? No, all three are doing the best work of their lives.

So maybe it’s time for you to ask yourself – are you scared of your job? If not, perhaps it’s time for a change.

(oh, and we’ve got plenty of jobs at YouTube that should scare you 🙂 )

News broke this week about The Giving Pledge’s initial commitment from 40 billionaire’s to donate at least 50% of their wealth to philanthropy. An incredibly exciting endeavor to make “giving it away” part of the standard expectation for the most fortunate few (Fortune first featured the effort back in June).

So how to make this stick and spread? Well, what if we all promoted philanthropic commitments to a first order piece of information when reporting on the world’s wealthiest and most successful individuals?

Could the media agree to add an asterisk (or other symbolic attribution) to the name of every Giving Pledge donor when it appears in print? Margin or footer could note that “[named] committed to The Giving Pledge.” Each time we hear about a person it would be reinforced that they are substantially involved in improving the world. The absence of said attribution for the world’s richest people would speak volumes and provide social pressure.

Can we start this with just a few small steps – would Forbes add this to their list of The Richest People in America and The World’s Billionaires? Would Fortune note this on their CEO list?

What are other ways to honor and celebrate this movement on a daily basis?

[i don’t know how we’d handle those who wish to join anonymously since they would be perceived to be “non-joiners”]