I love technology. It drives my career, my social life, my consumer habits, my desire to be an engaged citizen, and my need to create and write. Since technology positively influences so many other parts of my life, it should be a boon for finding a mate, right?

Not many people would call me an introvert, but when I like a guy, I can be shy to the point of actually seeming disinterested. So for a while, online dating was great. The stakes are low, the potential seems high, and embarrassment of rejection is lowered to almost zero, making it a nice self-esteem boost. By most metrics, I was successful with it. I was meeting new guys, going out on plenty of dates, having nice conversations, and over the past few years, dated a handful of guys each for a few months.

For a while, I thought taking the pressure off of dating was a good thing. If you lower the emotional consequences of rejection, you make dating easier. But eventually it started to feel hollow, like just a series of interviews, asking and answering the same questions over and over, like the million first dates Dan Slater writes about in The Atlantic. It got me thinking that perhaps that pressure is important. Sure, there was no risk. But was there any reward?

If I just look at a few more profiles, email with a few more guys, have a few more first dates, love is inevitable, right? If we meet enough potential mates, do we eventually end up in a relationship? Can we game the computers, like Amy suggests? And if we can, should we?

If my friends are any indication, one of the most embarrassing things to happen on OKCupid is to be matched with someone you already know. We already value these guys as friends and coworkers, and we often even know they are single, so why is it embarrassing? But over and over, I hear (and have said!) “Oh yeah, I saw him on OKCupid” in a whispered tone.

That should actually be an opportunity, but we’ve become so reliant on looking for someone we haven’t met that we ignore the guys who are already in our lives. Some services actually block your Facebook friends from results. This constant hunt for someone new has convinced me that dating sites are doing us a disservice, so I decided to take a break from using technology to facilitate dating and am taking it old school.

It’s been challenging. I’ve got to be less shy and had to put myself out there more. I’ve been rejected a few times, and that’s never fun. There’s definitely more pressure and the let-downs can be bigger, but it all feels more real. On the plus side, I haven’t had to endure any dates with guys with whom there’s clearly no chemistry. It feels like I’m off the treadmill, and that’s been worth it.

(Of course, the product guy in me thinks – What would a service be like that might solve this problem? Should technology play a role in matching us with people we already know? But that’s another post.) 

Photo by the-riot-machine.

Not cool.Jokes about forking repo’s in a sexual way and “big” dongles.Right behind me #pycon twitter.com/adriarichards/…

— Adria Richards (@adriarichards) March 17, 2013

Here’s where I’m having trouble supporting Adria. This seems like an extreme course of action if you haven’t even asked the guys to cut it out. They shouldn’t be telling sexual jokes in the first place, but there’s value in expressing your displeasure personally, rather than passive aggressively broadcasting it on Twitter.

That said, the temptation to do so is really, really strong, and social networks have made it easier than ever. I did the same thing at SXSWedu earlier this month, and as I did so, part of me thought, “why am I just not turning around and telling these guys to shut up?”

I’ve never seen ruder audience members than the Google/YouTube employees behind me at Bill Gates’ speech this morning. Shame.

— Greg Palmer (@gregpalmer) March 7, 2013

I don’t want to go too far down that path, because it’s a whole ‘nother set of questions (and another post) about the behaviors encouraged by social networks. The real problem in the Pycon controversy is the bigger gender equality problem we have in our industry. There are lots of people trying to fix that, but not enough. Even if you don’t have responsibility for it, it’s everyone’s responsibility to help build a diverse workforce. Here are some simple things I do

1) I ask our recruiting team about it. Recruiting talented women is not as simple as it sounds and does require some additional focus. I wish we did more on that front, but personally I can work to keep the issue front and center. I ask if we reached out to many women, if many showed interest, if any had feedback why they wouldn’t want to work with us, etc. I’m polite but persistent on this front.

2) When I visit one of our offices outside NY and notice a gender imbalance, I say so out loud. When I talk to a team and notice a lack of women, I say so out loud. I’ve learned a lot from this. In some places, the local talent pool is skewed toward men, and we don’t get many women applying for engineering positions. In others, there hasn’t been much turnover or opportunity to create more balance. But keep the issue in the front of your colleagues’ minds.

3) I casually ask hiring managers if there were any qualified women in the applicant pool. If so, why didn’t they make the cut? Did we interview them? Who did the interview? Again, I’m polite but persistent. I don’t want to offend my colleagues or imply they haven’t done their job, but want to make sure they are asking themselves these questions.

Could I do more? Probably. But from my role (which is pretty far from recruiting and hiring), I think it’s a good start.

How many millions have been lost because of this error? How much has Delta had to pay in commissions to Priceline, etc, because customers couldn’t complete their sale?

I put some stuff out on my stoop over the weekend – it’s a common thing in Brooklyn if you have stuff that’s still good but you don’t want. These bags would make that even more fun and lend a community feeling to it.

Graph Search is Facebook’s latest way of leveraging the billions of data points on their social graph, instantly determining the connections between them, and displaying a set of search results that’s far richer than anything you’ve ever seen.

Here’s an illustrative example – I’ve never been to Santa Barbara, and don’t have any friends who live there. So I typed “Restaurants in Santa Barbara that my friends have been to” and got some good results.

Graph Search takes your query and traverses Facebook’s massive social graph to find search results that meet all of your criteria and are personalized to you. Just try that with Google – the results aren’t nearly as useful.

My query to Google produced the same old stale results, while my query to Facebook produced two highly relavent hits that I’d be very likely to try. Google is just Google, but Facebook’s solution means I don’t need Foursquare, Yelp, Google, and a number of other services. Graph Search is in its infancy, but in the near term it’ll change how you search in two key ways:

Natural Language Search will become the default. Users will expect every search bar, from the article search on the NY Times to your enterprise Intranet, to accept and properly parse natural language queries. “Bob from Account Management’s phone number, at our DC office.” “Nate Silver’s blog posts about Baseball during 2011.” Siri brought this concept mainstream, but Graph Search executed it in a way that will make it a default expectation.

We’ll assume that all of our available data points will (and should) inform search results. When I search Google for “Hotels in Austin,” I’ll expect that it knows I have higher elite status with Hilton than I do at Marriott, prefer full service hotels, and won’t buy hotel wifi if there’s good LTE coverage in the area. So rather than show me a list of hotels, a good response might be “The Austin Hilton Downtown is a good choice and is known for having fast internet available. Plus there are five other similar choices nearby.” Search engines will draw from not only every query you’ve executed, but everything else that company and service knows about you, and will produce highly personalized results.

As Facebook continues to develop Graph Search, I expect that what others have been saying will also come true – it could be a viable competitor to OKCupid, Match, and corporate recruitment tools. But regardless of which products Graph Search ends up competing with, it’ll change the way we think of search for the next 5+ years.

]]> http://gregpalmer.me/2013/01/whats-intel-media-and-how-can-it-disrupt-the-cable-industry/feed/ 0 http://gregpalmer.me/2012/12/ways-i-didnt-jump-the-shark/ http://gregpalmer.me/2012/12/ways-i-didnt-jump-the-shark/#comments Fri, 28 Dec 2012 17:34:32 +0000 Greg http://gregpalmer.me/?p=1059 Here are some ways I didn’t jump the shark this year:

• I didn’t make jokes about Doomsday.
• I didn’t talk about Festivus.
• I didn’t make a reference to Baby It’s Cold Outside being about date rape.
• I haven’t posted or retweeted any “Top X of 2012″ lists.

You’re welcome, internet.

While the royals prepare for battle, we’re becoming mired in a state of digital serfdom, unable to “own” anything in the traditional sense, instead being granted a limited license to the books we read, the music we listen to, the photos we take, the words we write, and often even the files we create.

If I want to read digital books, I have to buy into Amazon’s kingdom. If I want to watch movies, I have to buy into Apple’s iTunes world. These technological advances have not been agnostic to your ability to choose, nor are they harmless to the competition we value so much as a society.

By bypassing traditional publishers in software and books, Apple and Amazon are opening up the market to new players and individuals, which is something we should celebrate. But in doing so, they’ve significantly weakened the negotiating position of everyone in the market. After all, Joe Coder can’t negotiate a better rate in the App Store, and Tracy Author can’t negotiate a better rate on Amazon. So while they have access to the market, they are passive subjects to the terms dictated by Amazon and Apple.

But open technologies and open markets don’t have the same adoption rate as their closed peers. You can sell on the Google Play store, but it’s harder to make money than on the Apple store, so accept their terms. You can sell a digital book independently, but you’ll probably make more on Amazon, so accept their terms.

For consumers, the situation is worse. Using closed technologies creates enormous switching costs that most consumers won’t bear, and eliminates the secondary market that often exists for physical goods. Do you want a Barnes and Noble Nook? Say goodbye to the years books you’ve “purchased” on Kindle, or be prepared to repurchase them from B&N. Want to try Amazon Instant Video? Don’t try it on your Apple TV, and don’t expect to take your iTunes video library with you.

Remember when you’d sell your old DVDs, books, and software at a garage or stoop sale? Try doing that with a Kindle book. No, seriously. Try transferring your license to read that book to a third party. You can’t. Try it with a movie from iTunes. Also impossible. Because you don’t own anything physical, that content has no value beyond what you derive from it. The photos you uploaded to Facebook/Instagram? Hope you made another copy, because that low fidelity version is all they keep, and it’s a royal pain to download a copy for yourself.

I’m an avid user of all the technologies mentioned above, and I think that “the cloud” has served to advance our lives in a lot of ways. But it didn’t come without drawbacks, and those drawbacks may start to outweigh the benefits.

Do you want your life of consumption and creation to be limited by the business prerogatives of the giants who control the Internet?

Me either. So what can we do about it?

Problem is that I’m already a subscriber. And they know that. And this is the guy who helped advance micro-targeting. C’mon!