Monthly Archives: October 2012

Stop the Madness: Password Proliferation

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The growth of the internet has been blamed for a good deal: the decline of conversation, an explosion of pornography, and even the re-wiring of the human brain. But perhaps the most egregious crime is the proliferation of passwords required to navigate one’s everyday life. From newspaper subscriptions to checking accounts to all flavors of online retail, we’re relentlessly prompted to create and remember passwords. Each site has its own rules around the length, capitalization, and the number of special characters permitted (or required). Effectively, we’re reinforcing a system that trains people to create passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess. And if you work in an enterprise IT environment, Sharepoint and Peoplesoft will cheerfully remind you to recall and re-enter those passwords again and again as Draconian settings time out within minutes.

And guess what — it’s not working. This week SplashData released the top 25 passwords of 2012 – and once again, “password” topped the list. It’s easy to mock passwords like “123456″ and “abc123″ (although I like the vaguely paranoid “trustno1″) but the fault is with the system, and not the users. The proliferation is unmanageable, and leads to people either using the same password for everything or keeping long lists in Google docs and sticky notes — exactly the kind of data insecurity passwords were designed to prevent. Password management services like LastPass and 1Password address this need, but have yet to see widespread adoption.

So, what’s the answer? Within the enterprise, it means tackling single sign-on, which is challenging in any organization with large legacy systems. Web applications are relying heavily on social network integration before smartcards or retinal scans obviate the need.

And as passwords get harder to manage, Facebook has cleverly capitalized on this pain point ever since it launched Facebook Connect back in 2008. I’d never want Facebook feed to allow Spotify to display my dubious taste in music, but I was damned if I’d create yet another password and defaulted to Facebook login. Innovations like the news feed in 2006 and acquisitions like Instagram in 2012 are often cited as drivers for Facebook’s success. Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong: the creation of Facebook as a seamless password management system with a social network on the side may have been the cleverest innovation of them all.

It’s Time to Find the Women in Tech

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“Where are all the women?” is an irritatingly common refrain in tech circles. Plenty of executives and investors, male and female, are seeking to advance more women in technology. But how?

We need to take a three-pronged approach, bolstering education, opportunity, and visibility for women in technology.

Increasing the pipeline of qualified women is a first step. Improving girls’ access to science, technology, engineering, and math education is vital: organizations like the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are investing heavily in so-called STEM initiatives. Get girls interested in science and math, the thinking goes, and they grow up into women earning 33 percent more than their peers in non-STEM jobs.

Myriad organizations work to advance girls’ interest in technology, from the brand-new Girls Who Code to the Girl Scouts, with long-established programs for “STEM girls.” At the undergraduate level, courses like Harvard’s CS50 are aimed at first-time coders, and their unintimidating, practical approach has encouraged more young women to learn to write software. Similarly, as the need for web technology in all industries increases, the need for mid-level programming will create roles for “blue-collar coders” with fewer formal educational credentials.

Matching qualified female candidates with employment opportunities remains a challenge, however. Just getting qualified women in to meet tech company hiring managers demands that industry insiders broaden their professional networks to include more women.

An organization called CODE 2040 has developed an approach to improving minority representation in the industry. It mentors black and Latino technical students and places them in Silicon Valley startup internships, and has a similar program for young women in the works.

Mentoring is key to expanding opportunities. Young women need to see mid-level and senior tech industry women succeeding. Last year, I attended a networking event where I spotted fewer than a dozen women among several hundred attendees. The “woman in technology” keynoting the event was a celebrity marketing organic baby products, while a male colleague explained the underlying business model on her behalf. It’s discouraging, and a missed opportunity, for young women not to encounter role models to spotlight the path towards leadership in the industry.

Visibility is the third prong. There are many qualified tech industry women out there. They’re hiding in plain sight. The “Where are the women?” refrain often occurs after a male-dominated tech conference where few women were considered to speak and even fewer actually spoke. In such contexts, some women may consider the risks of being outspoken to be disproportionate to the rewards. The experience of women bloggers would seem to bear out their concerns. They experience more ad hominem criticism than men, as well as actual sexual harassment, according to Rebecca Greenfield in her Atlantic Wire article, “The Plight of the Girl Tech Blogger.” And although women outnumber men on Twitter, they are less likely to be followed and less likely to be retweeted. To encourage women to dare to be visible, we have to change how women with opinions and agendas in technology are treated.

Broadening the definition of professional technology roles could also increase women’s visibility in the sector. As important as it is to create more female engineers, it’s equally important to avoid the internecine conflict about “who counts.” Sheryl Sandberg’s commencement address at Harvard Business School this year spurred debates about whether women who get on the rocket ship of a startup instead of building it are setting their sights too low. Let’s instead pitch a bigger tent: embrace digital project managers, technical writers, and female executives as part of the growing women-in-tech community.

Getting these three pieces—education, opportunity, and visibility—in place will go a long way to expanding the presence of women in the tech industry and answering “Where are the women?” once and for all.

This post originally appeared in Techonomy.

Getting to scale: advancing platforms for online content

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These days Software as a Service (SaaS) is ubiquitous. Project management? Got Basecamp for that. Bulk email at scale? See Constant Contact or Mailchimp. And say goodbye to your server logs — Google Analytics has been widely adopted for understanding website performance. The move to SaaS has long been the case for bloggers, who from the early days migrated to solutions like TypePad. Today, many would rather have a Tumblr instance or a site on WordPress.com than be in the business of building and updating an application.

Currently I’m involved in two projects, one as part of a team implementing and promoting a multi-tenant Drupal instance, and the other as a client for migrating the server side of an open source mobile application to a SaaS platform. In both cases, moving to a platform will enable updating and scale at lower cost — but it’s highly instructive to sit on both sides of the table simultaneously and see transition pain points. A few observations on ways to drive platform adoption:

  • Give people control of their pixels. Enabling admin users to make small tweaks for brand or preference make an organization feel more ownership of the process and the CMS.
  • Invest in admin UX. The boring “killer app” behind adoption is often a clean admin user interface. If the person charged with updating the content doesn’t feel confident in the user interface, updates occur less frequently.
  • Create systems that enable adaptive content. Karen McGrane speaks persuasively about why we need to stop the madness of systems that cram print layouts into ever-smaller screens. Systems that enable authoring the right content types and metadata are essential — they help publishers reach users on the proliferation of devices today, as well as the ones not even created yet.
  • Meet the need for speed. Content publishers, especially for news sites, live in the admin interface. A system that lags on the backend will fail to impress, especially in today’s environment where 400 milliseconds (the blink of an eye) is now considered too long to wait.
  • Be explicit about ways platforms remove pain points. Custom online publishing platforms for web or mobile rarely calculate total cost of ownership at a level that includes both feature enhancements and maintenance updates. Open source systems update frequently, and even in a cleanly-coded site where the Drupal core is untouched, these updates require time and testing.
  • Expose and sell the roadmap. Platforms need a product roadmap informed by both articulated user needs and emerging trends. Too much on the former, and you lose a coherent product. Too much of the latter and you slow adoption. Find the right blend collaboratively with content creators and designers, and iterate.
  • Integrate social services. We’re no longer building independent publishing systems, we’re integrating them into an ecosystem of always-on channels of social applications like Facebook. Make sure the content types enable compelling and clean sharing to social.

For those making a move to a platform, remember that feature set alone is rarely the differentiator for a great online presence. A thoughtful investment in content and social strategy drives effective digital communications, particularly for those in the information business — whether that’s an educational institution, a news organization, or a consulting firm. Find the right platform to provide a solid underpinning, and focus on a strategy that delivers what matters for your online audiences.

Unpacking the algorithms behind online experiences

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Relinquishing human free will to the machines generally gets a bad rap. In the media, all kinds of scientists are nefarious in their data-driven ways — even well-intentioned science yields Frankenstein’s monster far more often than the reasonable paleontologist in Jurassic Park. The Terminator franchise in the 1980s was among the first to introduce the concept of the Singularity to mass media — what happens to humans when their systems become self aware? — with predictable dire results. (According to futurist Ray Kurzweil the Singularity is now only 17 years away — so look busy.)

And yet in our online lives, we cede more and more to algorithms and machine learning. Eli Pariser highlighted the risks of our collective inattention to the use of algorithms in his 2011 The Filter Bubble. He pointed out that applications like Facebook show us only a curated subset of our friends, just as Google in 2009 began to filter our searches for us — even when we’re logged out. Apart from intermittent outrage in front page stories (“Target knew my teen daughter was pregnant before I did!”), we don’t often question the convenience that all these behaviorally-fueled algorithms offer us. We may cringe at ads that re-target us around the web, but as long as we use the conveniently-timed coupons offered to us, we are encouraging rather than curtailing that behavior.

Recently I’ve been reading more about Echonest, the technology that sits behind music discovery applications like Spotify and Vevo. In many ways this feels like a highest and best use of an algorithm. Who has time to manually curate playlists for everything from a workout to a night out? The algorithms go further to infer musical compatibility among friends, and have even taken a swing at how musical tastes align with political leanings – handy for those throwing national conventions or debate watch parties. The risks seem low compared to algorithmically-led access to one’s friends, but of course there’s the opportunity to skew music discovery to industry-backed new artists à la Clear Channel. While some analysts are bullish on Pandora’s music genome approach (similar to Art.sy’s attempt to map the art genome – h/t Cesar Brea), other investors are betting heavily on Echonest. A few weeks ago Echonest made public their Discovery playlist, which updates each week with emerging music from around the globe. Algorithms find out what people are listening to and taking about, and offer a great way to find new music around the world in a ways most humans can’t scale — well before it’s piped to you in the mall.

In the end, it’s all the same acknowledgement of the impossibility of the big data in our lives. It requires admitting the information overload is too great, and a degree of outsourcing selection to the machines. So maybe algorithms are less creepy when we know they’re out there working for us, and when they are finding needles from the broadest possible haystack — music we might like, seeing friends through the lens of musical compatibility – rather than surreptitiously defining the status updates we get to see.