A Few Followups on Yelp, Amazon, Twitter, and Other Buzzwords
April 15, 2009 :: Joe LoongHere are a few things that have been buzzing around the buzz-o-sphere these past few days.
* I haven’t talked about social review site Yelp for a while. Last week, Yelp announced that they would let business owners respond publicly to user comments, which I can’t see as anything but a good thing. Presumably, this will help cut down on sock puppetry by both reviewers and reviewees — at the very least, it helps restores a sense of symmetry, if not fairness, to social reviews.
* Amazon caught a lot of flack over Easter weekend after reports started circulating that gay and lesbian-themed books were being de-listed. Twitter and blogs went crazy with entries tagged with “#amazonfail” — boycotts were called, pitchforks were waved — it got pretty ugly. Then, things got even more confused when different hackers started taking credit for the changes.
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Amazon blog, company insiders pin the blame on an Amazon employee in France who accidentally flipped a field in a database, causing over 50,000 items to be flagged as “adult” items, which hid them from searches.
The dust is still settling, but it shows how quickly these flareups can occur (birth, boom, to aftermath took about 2.5 days), especially in the absence of an official response (due to the Easter holiday). It also vividly demonstrates how companies need to be constantly monitoring and quicker to respond, but it also shows that maybe people shouldn’t be as quick to outrage — we all like feeding off the fire of righteous indignation, but there is something to be said for some judicious deliberation.
Anyway, blogger, author, and Bacon Cat enabler John Scalzi offers his own perspective on the issue.
* Twitter items: Let’s see — there was a Twitter worm that posted Tweets under your name if you clicked a link. It hit a few tens of thousands of people, and while it didn’t compromise people’s accounts, it did cause a tizzy.
Interestingly, it used a browser exploit, so a workaround was to switch to a third-party Twitter client — even though any serious Twitter user is using a third-party client, anyway, it’s never a good thing when you have to tell people not to use your Web site.
Also, in a story combining both Twitter and outrage, activists in Moldova used Twitter and other social media tools to organize anti-government protests.
* Lastly, a few developments in the Government 2.0 front: On the transparency side, we had another collision at the intersection of transparency and personal privacy, when Maine state employees objected to their names and salary info being posted on an open government Web site.
The article quotes some impassioned — but not very compelling — arguments as to why this kind of public info shouldn’t be public. Personally, I don’t think they have a winner there, and it’s a matter of comfort and culture.
Also, coincidentally, last weekend’s Parade magazine was their annual What People Earn issue.
And, in about as far as you can get from external transparency, Time had an interesting article on how wikis and Web 2.0 tools are being used at the CIA. Internal transparency, in the form of knowledge sharing, is useful, too, and it’s useful to see how social media tools can be adapted to even the most restrictive culture.
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