Can Siri Understand the Word "Guilty"? Norman Winarsky and Bill Mark Guilty in the Glorification of Groogle

In their article, "The Future of Virtual Personal Assistants," Norman Winarsky and Bill Mark work very hard to set the world back by another 5-10 years, if not longer.  Much longer.

According to them -- both vice presidents at SRA International -- "Siri was a great achievement for Apple and Steve Jobs, helping to introduce virtual personal assistants to millions of consumers, and changing forever the way we view our smartphones."

Apparently, "using speech instead of keyboards to communicate with computers is an old dream, but it took more than thirty years to achieve the robustness and performance needed to make speech systems practical for consumers."

Those 30 years have been terribly misspent.  In fact, Siri may be the biggest example of Groogle ever concocted.  The idea that we need smart-phones to understand our speech, when we have people who understand speech, sets us down a course completely opposite to everything we've learned about collective intelligence and the power of knowledge trade and exchange.

If you listen closely to Groogle-speakers, examples of applications are invariably culture specific.  Question and Answer systems are always finding good restaurants in San Francisco (does everyone in this world eat out at restaurants?).  Or, another example heard yesterday, iPhone apps should provide the 5-10 minutes worth of entertainment one requires when sitting at Starbucks.  Huh?

Now listen to this example from Winarsky and Mark:

Lisa: “Nina, I need a new purse.”
Nina: “Great! Do you want to buy something from Michael Kors like you did last time?”
Lisa: “Well, I’d like Michael Kors, but I don’t want to spend more than $400.”
Nina: “Last time you bought your Michael Kors purse from Nordstrom. Nordstrom has a Michael Kors sale right now…here are some purses you might like.”
Lisa: “I like the chocolate brown one, at $329. Is that the best price you found?”
Nina: “I saw a couple of offers at $310 from other retailers, but their return policy isn’t as generous as Nordstrom’s.”
Lisa” “Okay, let’s go with Nordstrom”.

Winarsky and Mark claim that VPA (Virtual Personal Assistant) technology is "the most elegant and effective way we have figured out yet for humans and machines to interact." 

The key words here are "we have figured out."  Groogle appears to have affected their ability to think.  In fact, if we had an award for "Groogle Article of the Year," this article would be a top contender.

The Groogle of a Discussion Between Evan Williams, Matt Haughey, Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, Paul Bausch and Others

In a discussion with Anil Dash, Paul Bausch, Meg Hourihan and others about the comment feature on blogs ("How do blogs need to evolve?"), Evan Williams says, "I'm surprised there haven't been more experiments with other modes of participation and collaboration."

Later in the discussion, Matt Haughey writes "I wish there were better tools for feedback [on blogs]."

It can be argued that both things -- experiments and actual tools -- do exist, have existed for some time, but that the noisy symptoms of Groogle (remember, several of the above people were involved in the development of Blogger.com) have kept them from emerging on the Internet.

The long evolution of blogs, then, may present a clear example of how Groogle could well be slowing innovation; that Internet technologies would be much further along, with better blogs, better decision making abilities, clearer rules of ownership and so forth if Groogle-prevention systems were in place.

Infected with Groogle, Hypothes.is Appears to Dumb-Down Collective Intelligence

In a Hypothes.is workshop on identity management, the group claims to have "tackled the problem" of what user identity model should be used.  The group recorded the following principles:

• there should be incentives for newcomers to obtain a positive reputation
• allocating an initial trust by default to every new user is an easy opportunity for abuse
• new users have to "pay their due" in order to prove their value to the community
• there must be mechanisms in place to make it unattractive for a user to start over with a new identity

Unfortunately, these principles are based on Grooglesque assumptions that have arisen around web systems such as StackOverflow, Reddit, Quora, Wikipedia and others.  They are not the guiding principles required to create the kind of peer review that leads to collective intelligence.

The second principle, "allocating an initial trust," presupposes the idea that such a decision -- trust or non-trust -- needs to be made by default from the moment a user joins the community.  Technologies developed outside the Groogle hot zone have shown that this needn't be the case.  Similarly, the third principle, that users must "pay their due" in order to prove their value to the community is absurd.  And again, technologies have been designed which don't require such due-paying, and yet which are able to quickly establish reliable reputation scores.

We believe that by its very organizing, "who-you-know" structure, Hypothes.is is missing the point -- but we'll discuss this further in future posts.

Blinded by Groogle: Quora Begins Addressing Issues Resolved Years Ago by Others

Quora has described a new feature, which it calls "Promote," as the ability "to take any item on Quora and spend credits to increase the number of people who see it in their feed."

The top-rated response to this announcement -- by Jonas M Luster -- objects to the change, saying that it creates:

a two-class society of haves (money, existing rolodexes) and have-nots (knowledgeable people whose blogs weren't SEO optimized and who didn't spend money on Twitter spam tools or Facebook campaigns).  "In here", in Quora, a cook could say something semi-smart and be heard. A rape survivor could ask something or provide insight and be seen and interacted with by all of Quora. A farmer could talk about cows and milk and a life coach about her work with disabled children.

This is a fair comment.  However, the argument itself -- between Quora's upgrade and the sort of objections raised by Luster -- is a bit like arguing if it's possible to build a machine that can carry a couple hundred passengers from New York to Paris in less than 24 hours.

The fact is, it's been done already.  So, too, with the ability to give expertise a voice based on its value to the community (as opposed to simply its "influence score," or its ability to pay) -- and it's been proven to work with large, scalable communities. 

It's just that "Groogle" has made it difficult for Quora and others to understand scientific progress in the field, so that issues arise which could have been resolved long ago.  In fact, based on the above exchange, and the existing science behind "collective intelligence," it's easy to predict the next changes Quora will need to make, and the sort of objections its users will raise.

The Groogle of Gumroad.com

Gumroad, a site for selling knowledge content, is described by TechCrunch as "the buzzy one-man startup launched by Pinterest and Turntable app designer (and 19- year-old college dropout) Sahil Lavingia."

The word "buzzy" alone sets off alarms -- what does that mean?  Buzzy to whom?  Even if it represents a concrete value, such words only perpetuate the likelihood of contracting Groogle, because they are based on who you know, not what you know.

The idea of a "college dropout" being the latest in "cool" appears to be a symptom of Groogle.  TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis, when interviewing Mr. Lavingia says that "everyone should drop out of college."  In truth, she is too young and inexperienced to make such a judgment, and even Mr. Lavingia has the common sense to say he's actually on "leave of absence" from USC. 

"If everything turns to hell", says Lavingia, "I can always go back."  But Ms. Tsotsis -- and, it seems, a growing percent of the Groogle-verse (for example, Peter Thiel's "20 Under 20 Fellowship" program) -- prefer the idea of a "college drop-out," as it seems to raise the value of their young entrepreneur in the minds of the "buzzing" Valley-bees.  Especially if he hopes, as the "buzz" suggests, to create a $1 billion company. 

This would all be so much harmless teenage angst if Lavingia's start-up, Gumroad, hadn't received -- according to yesterday's TechCrunch announcement -- a commitment of $1.1 million in seed funding from investors Accel Partners, Chris Sacca, Max Levchin, SV Angel, Josh Kopelman, Seth Goldstein, Naval Ravikrant, Collaborative Fund and Danny Rimer.

Gumroad's investors appear to ignore decades of research -- and patents -- in the field of content pricing.  The big issue, says Tsotsis, is security.  No, it's not.  Security is a minor issue compared to what's required to allow content buying and selling -- and the ultimate requirement: dynamic pricing.

In fact, dynamic content pricing has already been resolved, and is actively working on the Internet amongst large communitities.  But getting the Groogle-verse to understand this fact, and deploy in a large scale, is difficult when there's so much buzz -- and bucks -- in Silicon Valley drowning out the real achievements in the field, including (yes) the achievements of people who haven't even dropped-out of college.

Internet Entrepreneur Semil Shah, a Self-Described "Big Fan of Quora," Could be Infected with Groogle

"There's a speed issue," writes Semil Shah about Quora, "when credits or cash are involved, and then a quality issue. Right now, the credits are free, but how would my expectations and requirements change if cash was involved? I would not be surprised if, years from now, this functionality is available within Quora and quite effective."

If Quora were to decide to implement a system that provided higher quality or faster responses for higher amounts of cash, Quora would, in effect, be about 10 years behind the times.  Such systems not only exist, and are scalable, and have been tested with hundreds of thousands of users, but have also been patented a decade ago.

Tim Chang Claims that Social Game Mechanics is a Recent Invention

In a recent article in the New York Times, Tim Chang of Mayfield Fund makes a Grooglesque assumption -- about how Twitter, Facebook, Quora and Zynga have invented social and game mechanics for a broad market.

“Twitter, Facebook, Quora and Zynga have invented social and game mechanics for broad markets,” says Tim Chang, a managing director at the Mayfield Fund, one of HealthTap’s venture capital backers. “If you can take the best of those mechanics and apply them to a single vertical, that can be very powerful.”

In fact, these mechanics were not invesnted by the above companies.  Industries in finance, trade and transport services have used game mechanics for decades to lure and retain customers for their products, such as credit cards, reward cards, flight mile rewards and so forth.
 

If anything, game mechanics is becoming passe. The next step is possibly, 'no rewards, no gimmicks. You get what you give'. 

Plus, game mechanics are game mechanics - they are employed to give users certain benefits based on their actions. The idea that it would work better if applied to a single vertical market, as Chang suggests, is not supported by research.