Jason Hong's Confabulations

Like many others, my NCAA bracket went terribly awry this year and I have no teams in the Final Four. However, it did make me think that this is a really interesting failure of wisdom of crowds. According to ESPN : More than 5.9 million brackets were filled out for ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge, but exactly two went 4-for-4 in picking Final Four teams. Only 1,093 brackets had three of the Final Four correct, while 2.1 percent had two right. A total of 27.6 percent had one Final Four team, while the vast majority of you -- 70.3 percent -- don't have a single team left.

NYTimes reports on a rather nasty Facebook glitch that reveals personal info : On Wednesday, users discovered a glitch that gave them access to supposedly private information in the accounts of their Facebook friends, like chat conversations. I wonder what kinds of processes and procedures Facebook will put into place to prevent these kinds of things from happening in the future. Facebook is already facing a lot of heat from consumer groups regarding privacy. The worst case scenario for them is to have legislation passed dictating what they can and cannot do. Not knowing anything about their system architecture and procedures, I'd suggest adding a significant number of regression tests for privacy, checking hundreds of scenarios to make sure that information that isn't supposed to be disclosed won't be disclosed.

I like this idea of "open-source crime solving", as it reminds me a lot of PhishTank and CastleCops . It is, however, an idea that is fraught with issues of trust, reliability, and vigilantism. Online auto forums have helped unravel crimes before. Two years ago, a detective in Los Angeles used the forum on FreshAlloy.com, a Nissan enthusiast site, to track down victims of an elaborate fraud scheme. (That case, too, involved Nissan Skylines.) The Beyond.ca site had also played a role in earlier cases of what might be called open-source crime solving. A year ago one of its members saw a hit-and-run accident a block in front of him, said Shelton Kwan, who co-founded the site with his cousin Ken Chan in 2002. “He took pictures. And the guy who got hit was another member of ours.” NYTimes Link

Many of you have probably heard about this new OpenSocial platform that Google has released, which is basically an open form of FaceBook that various other social network platforms (like Orkut, Ning, LinkedIn, Hi5, Friendster, Salesforce.com, Oracle, iLike, Flixster, RockYou, and Slide) will conform to. What's interesting here is that we actually covered this topic in our Social Web course (with some help from Information Rules ), discussing why leaders tend to opt for closed platforms (primarily because they can force a lock-in and ensure customers) while a common strategy for those not in the lead to band together under an open platform to try and beat the leader. History may not repeat itself, but it does have themes. Some of the questions in class included what Google's strategy would be (keep in mind that this was before the OpenSocial announcement), whether it would fit into their long-term goals ("take over the world", as one student said), and whether they cou...

This is new: companies used to release products and label them as alpha or beta. Then, web sites rolled out the perpetual beta . Now, Google Docs has a search and replace feature that is labeled alpha. I hope this is something that will not catch on, but as Software-as-a-Service becomes more pervasive, I'm afraid it will. (FYI this screenshot also shows a working version of the syllabus for The Social Web course that I will be co-teaching this fall)