December 11, 2009

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) released 10 red weather balloons across the country and offered $40,000 to the first group to locate them all. Riley Crane, of MIT, explains how his team bagged the prize by locating the balloons in fewer than nine hours.

This week's Science Friday covered the recent DARPA Network Challenge, which celebrates the 40th anniversary of a little thing called the Internet (which DARPA helped create). The interview is a little over 10-minutes long, and definitely worth a listen. MIT's Riley Crane explained how his team won the contest by creating a "recursive incentive" – what amounts to a social media affiliate program. As he explains it,

We offered a recursive incentive, which allowed us not only to reward the people who actually found balloons, but we could also reward the people who helped us find those people.

The first question you might ask yourself is this, "Why did DARPA fund this, and how is this even remotely useful?" Well, as Mr. Crane goes on to explain,

… imagine that a building collapses during a natural disaster and you need to rapidly find 10 people who can operate heavy machinery in a certain location. I think these are a lot of the challenges that are facing society that nobody really knows yet how to mobilize people on a large scale, and I think that's what our team was able to demonstrate, that these things are possible and that we've built the technology to try to do it.

I can't wait to see what the results of Mr. Crane's analysis. Hidden in this experiement, they may be some data points that help reveal exactly what the thresholds are (and the incentives need to be) in order to cause people to take an action.

Today, when you present an advertising concept to a client, you will inevitably launch into a discussion on how your experience, application or content spreads virally, and what your strategy is for making sure that something "goes viral." Doubly so if it's a digital concept. And while you can't guarantee that anything goes viral, I've long thought about the idea of incentivizing sharing. A monetary incentive, in most cases, is the best incentive. But in the digital realm, virtual currencies may be just as good.

This is a topic I intend to explore with more depth in a later post. Hopefully, after I get my hands on MIT's official report.

Facebook games — Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Restaurant City — have become surprisingly effective at diverting time wasters among the social-networking crowd. More than 63 million people alone play FarmVille. But now accusations have surfaced that the games can lead some more gullible players, including children, into Internet scams, especially if they have a cell phone.

I've seen this coming for a long time now. More and more, the solution to monetizing things like Twitter and Facebook are pyramid schemes, affiliate marketing scams, and lead-gen trickery. The recent Facebook/Zygna/Offerpal debacle is simple the most wide-spread and nefarious to date. I don't know what the solution is, but I have a feeling it's only going to get worse before it gets better. Much worse.

I remember when email inboxes used to be littered with spam. That was back in the dark times, before Gmail. This little company called Google came out with Gmail and changed email forever. Gmail's spam filter was breakthrough in its effectiveness and accuracy in stopping spam. Google forced everyone else to step up their game and make spam filtering a feature worth switching your email address for.

Today, email spam isn't even an issue. I probably average less than one piece of spam a month. When I can't figure out how to unsubscribe from a newsletter I someone ended up on, I just add it to spam and it's gone forever. Gmail goes the extra mile and now lets you know which pieces of junk mail are asscoiated with phising schemes. This is the kind of control we need now on Facebook before it gets too late.

I want to block most applications on Facebook. FarmVille needs to be classified as spam. When you click on anything having to do with a Zynga application you should get a giant warning that tells you other users have reported it as a possible phishing scheme. I wish there was a setting to block all applications that weren't on a special "allow" list. I don't want to see every update or newsfeed injection created by every game played and ever quiz ever made. And Twitter... well, Twitter is a whole different bucket of worms.

Twitter is a sea filled with spammers trying to sell you porn, affiliate programs, and links from clickbanks and link exchanges. It’s a scammers paradise, full of gullible people who have no idea what they are getting into. Trending Topics is damn near useless. 90% of what ends up trending is a result of bots hitting the API like mad.

If you want to know how to “monetize social media” just have a look at everything that the scamsters out are there doing today. They've figured it out. Sure, you’ll end up on everyone’s block list, but you’ll end up with a bucket of hard earned money made from pissing everyone off. Just make sure you don’t use your real picture on all those social profiles, or someone might run up to you on the street and beat you with their iPhone. Don't you know? There's a special badge for that on Foursquare.