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Tech-Powered Politics, Part 3: Iran's Youth Twitter and the World Watches

Moldova, Guatemala, Fiji, Madagascar... Iran. 

If ever there was a year that crystallized the power of technology in the hands of average people to disseminate news and force transparency in the face of political suppression, corruption and violence, this is it.

It has been one week since 40 million people in the Islamic Republic of Iran went to the polls to cast ballots in Iran's controversial 10th Presidential election.

Last week, as the early results of the Iranian elections were reported, I emailed two old and distant acquaintances, young Iranian students I had blogged about over two years ago after meeting at a rooftop party in New Delhi.  During our conversation in India, the students had suggested to me that there was continued frustration with the limits on political freedom in Iran, and, in their words, "that the current regime [would] have to open up the political process or face very serious popular unrest within the next five to ten years."

Last Friday night, one of those students, a computer scientist now back in Iran, quickly responded to my email with the following:

"Now it's 2:42 AM here in Tehran when I'm writing these lines for you. As per the state television's live broadcasting from 19 million counted votes Ahmadinejad is leading by 67% and Mousavi is second after him by 30%...Nobody knows if there is a conspiracy going on, but this result (if continued) is not going to be accepted by majority of people.

Stay in touch."

Over the last seven days I have watched from my computer and on my blackberry, videos of hundreds of thousands of young enthusiastic Iranians, marching through the streets of Tehran and risking their reputations and safety in order to demand that their voices be heard and that their votes be counted. 

As a student of middle east politics, and an uncompromising believer in the power of democracy, freedom of speech, and technology, this is one of the most inspirational things I have ever witnessed.  It may not be Tienanmen, but in the middle east, it is indeed something altogether different, and potentially more powerful. 

Just as important as the protesters' actions themselves, however, has been the ability of people around the world to witness these events despite extensive limits on the traditional media by Iranian government officials and violent attempts by government-backed forces to prevent any reporting at all.

In spite of this, or maybe, because of it, we have been privy to a rugged street view of the events in Iran via Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.  And while the past 12 months have shown us flashes of social media journalism from the globe's political hot spots, the last 7 days in Persia have provided the most poignant example.  Young Iranians armed with digital cameras and cell phones have given us unvarnished, if imperfect, images of the most important political struggle inside their country in a generation, all without editorial control, satellite hookup or commercial interruption.

This is citizen journalism, Iranian-style.  And it is my hope that this week's events not only bear political fruit for the masses of frustrated and disenfranchised Iranians, but that other reclusive and suppressive regimes around the world see this and recognize that information wants to be free, and that in the age of the smart phone, the days of centralized media control are over.

The Twitter Post: A Platform, Not a Product

Image from Stef Landowski.

I have been meaning to write a post on Twitter for months now.  Not because it doesn't get enough press, it gets plenty, but because I wanted a way to explain to some of my friends and family why Twitter is so interesting to me and what it means for the web (PC & mobile).

Sometimes people are able to look back at history and see with a clear eye when they finally knew an idea was going to be big, when it became clear that a product or company or candidate was going to take the cake.

For me, that process with Twitter happened in November of last year, with the events of 26/11, as Indians refer to the Mumbai attacks. CNN, Fox and even local Indian news stations were offering very limited, sometimes conflicting, reports of what was happening on the ground in India's financial capital.  Meanwhile, people witnessing the events first hand were twittering.  This was a news feed not even the Drudge Report could scoop.

By January, we had the Miracle on the Hudson, where one of the first photos was captured by a Twitter user and shared via Twitpic, and subsequently picked up by numerous media outlets. 

On February 24, during President Obama's Address to the Nation, Congressmen, Senators and their staff were tweeting away their critiques of the President, each other and Nancy Pelosi, as well as musing about what else was on TV.

I have been a registered user of Twitter since August of 2007 but like my initial experience with Facebook, I didn't initially grasp all of the applications of a platform like this until a critical mass of friends and bloggers I followed began to use it.

That has happened at a rapidly increasing rate over the last six months, culminating in massive media attention following the capital raise Twitter completed in February.

So, for the uninitiated, here's what Twitter does, and why it is a revolutionary platform, not just another social network.

1. Twitter breaks news stories before anyone else - (Mumbai, the Hudson landing, the Amsterdam Plane Crash last week)

2. Twitter allows celebrities and companies to reach their fans and customers in new and intimate ways - (I have re-engaged as a fan of Dave Matthews, following tweets from his travels around Louisiana, after having stopped buying his records years ago).

3. Twitter enables people to share and comment on content in an opt-in, progressive disclosure format, you can get a taste or description of the content without having to read the whole story (I have tweets pushed to me via Digsby and just click through on the links that I am interested in reading or responding to).

4. Twitter enables instant crowd-sourcing of ideas, opinions and recommendations - (in San Francisco's marina? Need a restaurant recommendation? Just ask your followers.)

5. Twitter is a low-friction, low-intensity social network for people to communicate with their existing friends or find new friends that share the same interests in an non-intrusive, non-threatening way.

6. Twitter removes technology barriers to using the Internet and joining the global digital conversation by equally enabling users of both PCs and those with just mobile phones at their disposal.

This to me is one of the most interesting aspects.  Twitter removes as much friction as possible from the process of using social media.  It's easy to join, easy to post on, and easy to consume.  It's asynchronous, and doesn't require a lot of time or effort to maintain or monitor.  And It doesn't involve the social hassles of Myspace and Facebook where friending and tagging can turn your personal life into an online school yard of exposed relationships and unwanted photos.  You can follow or be followed without knowing or caring who's following you, and without any stigma attached to connecting with people you don't already know.

Anyone can use Twitter, and use it very easily, whether you're a techie, a grandmother or a blogger in Madagascar.

And now your moment of Zen: Jon Stewart explains Twitter.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Twitter Frenzy

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Joke of the Day

Tech-Powered Politics, Part 2: Ice Cream Eating As Guerilla Protest

My friend and I were discussing yesterday how antiquated bumper stickers, yard signs and other 20th Century tactics will seem in twenty years to a professional campaigner..."wait, you used to just wear buttons and make TV commercials with no way of measuring effectiveness, and expect to win?  How quaint."

If advertisers are figuring out the power of measured media and audience targeting, you can bet the tech-savvy political leaders of the future will soon follow, in this country and abroad.

There are examples from London to Minsk of how social media is enabling people to physically organize below the nose of the authorities like never before, as in last Friday's Dance Flash Mob in the London Tube organized via Facebook, or Belarus's Ice Cream Eating Flash Mob guerrilla protest in 2006 organized via LiveJournal and sms.

These examples give me me hope that the direction of technological innovation is driving us towards a world where power is increasingly distributed rather than Orwell's 1984 where it is centralized.  It is the young and restless who always adopt technology and mold it faster than their old and complacent counterparts, be they parents, corporates, or governments.

Dare I say it, like the AK-47 before, social media spread via the Web and, by extension, the Mobile Web, is technology that won't just strengthen incumbents, but rather will increasingly empower rebels and protesters anew, to disrupt and challenge anachronistic, and sometimes authoritarian governments around the world.

I've often heard people joke around Sand Hill Road that some of the most revolutionary entrepreneurs are young, angry men in their twenties who want to change the world.  The fact that they share these traits with many of history's political revolutionaries is no coincidence.

Tech-Powered Politics, Part 1: Prop 8 Maps and Pink Chaddis

There are two on-going net-roots political movements I just came across that continue to demonstrate how technology in young and nimble hands can quickly overwhelm non-technical, traditionalist hold-outs.

On Sunday there was a story in India about a few Sri Ram Sena supporters (violent Hindu nationalists) who attacked several young women and their friends who were drinking at a bar in Mangalore, South India.  The group and its allies (who don't believe women belong in bars) also came out and criticized Valentine's Day as immoral and stated that any women in Karnataka found out on a Valentine's date would be forcibly married. Less than a week after the incident a blog-based response emerged asking people to send the Ram Sena leaders pairs of pink panties for Valentine's Day to embarrass them. And since the organizers launched a Facebook group over the weekend, they have had 17,130 members join and their blog has jumped from an Alexa rank of 150,000 down to 90,000 (Yahoo & Google have ranks of 1 & 2 respectively).

Today I found Eight Maps for the first time, a Google Maps interface with a red balloon on the address of every person that made political donations in favor of California's Proposition 8, the law that amended the state's Constitution making it illegal for homosexual couples to marry.  Information on political donations has always been a matter of public record but never before has it been so easily aggregated and search-able. This is powerful stuff, whether it used by politicians for vote mapping or activists for public shaming.

Journalists like to talk about Obama's web strategy, and Read/Write Web had a good summary Monday on how Obama's campaign made masterful use of social media.  But I think these things are all just the beginning.

More on this topic tomorrow.

The Next 3 Billion Internet Users

I haven't talked much about emerging markets recently but I have increasingly become convinced that the Internet for the next 3 billion, that is, the 3 billion people in the world today who have mobile devices but not PCs (mobile global ph. users will be 4 billion soon), is just around the corner, 3-5 years at most, and it will represent the most massive global expansion of content generation and consumption since the late 1990s, far more than what we have seen so far in terms of the shear number of users involved, though probably less in terms of rich data.

Gartner reports from late last year talked about the volume of smart phones as a % of total new phone shipments approaching 40-45% this year in many markets around the world.

Everyday I talk to another mobile content aggregation or VAS (value-added services) company in Israel or Brazil or India that is growing rapidly and generating millions of dollars of ad rev or even better, service and download fees, on the back of what are relatively easy simple technology services like sms news feeds, wap page creation, ringtones, song downloads, casual games, and mobile social networks.

The stuff that's really hard in this arena so far, and still an opaque shade of charcoal gray, are user analytics: Knowing who is consuming what and where, but companies like AdMob are already hard at work at that problem and making great progress.

But not only are people consuming more, tools like Twitter and mobile social networks like Mig33 and Mocospace (and even Facebook and MySpace apps) give them the ability to speak up and join the global digital conversation in ways never possible before.  The real digital divide between the Global South (places like Africa, Asia and Latin America) and the Developed World won't be bridged by broadband lines and cheap PCs, they'll be crossed by Wimax or LTE towers serving $20 smart phones that can download mobile apps, surf mobile wap pages, and pay for it all with carrier-independent pre-paid charge cards.

And when 3 billion people in the developing world who have never spoken a bit(e) before all start talking in 140 character microblogs or mobile chat rooms or jump into MMO"M"Gs (massively multi-player online "mobile" games), the party gets much bigger.

It's going to be a whole new world.

Of course, I'm not the only one who knows this.

The Power of Youth? Or the Tools of Youth.

Beyond all the stories of Barack Obama retaking the oath today, the second half of the electronic fold seemed to be shots of the various Inaugural Balls, and what they represented.  Clearly of unique, and deserved, prominence this year was the Neighborhood Ball, open to public (for the first time since Andy Jackson apparently??) and made up of "ordinary folks" from around the country, but in particular, from the District of Columbia. 

But the Ball getting the most page space seems to be the Youth Ball, which many journalists are casting as a symbol of the forces that brought Obama to victory.  While I agree that younger people were instrumental in enabling Obama's success, I think that there are three parts to that suggestion, only two of which can geniunely be credited to the power of "young Americans" and the last of which has more to do with technology.  The first two are easier to isolate.

First, Obama had a disproportianate number of young people volunteer for his campaign.  Whether it was his words or his policies, he was able to amass an army of footsoldiers, phone-dialers and dollar donors that augmented his campaign staff and traditional fundraising methods substantially. 

Second, Obama's "only-in-America" personal story made him distinctly representative of younger generations of Americans, who, increasingly, are growing up in mobile, multi-cultural, cross-border, single-parent households.

But the real trick of Obama's campaign, that represented innovation in my mind, was his, and his supporters extensive use of connected social media and social networks for recruitment, organizing, fundraising, and crowd-sourcing, that is to say, use of engaged, connected populations for idea generation and consensus building.

Obama's election had as much to do with YouTube, Will.I.AM, and SNL as it did young volunteers and multicultural families.

In justice to the NYTimes, who commented on the 'Youth' phenonemon, here's a cool clip with some video from the Youth Balls of 2009 and 1993.

Widgets! And the Distributed Web

I added several things to my blog this weekend in keeping with the increasing trend of distributed content and applications, the simplest version of which being widgets, which I think will continue to define how people use the web and how advertisers find their targets. In the future, which website you are on may not matter as much as which content or application you are engaging with, because any piece of content or application might be spread seamlessly across the web so that you can find it, or it can find you, no matter where you are.

To make it easier to find blog posts with specific topics there is now a category bubble-list at the top of the page, where you can click on specific categories with which I've tagged individual posts. The larger categories have received more clicks from readers.

I've also included a search bar from Lijit so you can search my site instantly, along with links to my StumbleUpon content, my del.icio.us tags, and my facebook profile.

I've added an updated map so readers can see how many people are visiting each day and where they're coming from.

And finally, I've republished the posts from my bankerInIndia blog here on the graylightning site under archives, so now you can click on the months from before January 2008 to find and read those old posts, rather than having to go to the bankerinindia page.

I hope it's easier to enjoy the content now, scattered as it may be across this domain. And feel free to give suggestions on how to make it better or easier to find.

The TV is On, but Who's Watching?

Another trend that's been obvious to most venture capitalists for over a year, but seems to be taking advertisers a long time to figure out, is just how many people (especially young people) are tuning in to the TV versus the Internet these days, relative to the ad dollars spent on each medium.

I write this of course while I'm sitting in front of my TV watching John Adams on HBO.

But that's just it, except to watch live sports and a few HBO shows, I never turn on the tube.

I estimate that I spend an average of 10 hours a day in front of my computer screen or mobile device, and 0-1 hours a day in front of my TV. And I'm apparently not the only one.

E-Marketer estimated US online ad spend at $21B last year, 7.5% of all US ad spend, and forecasts this year at $27.5B, or 9% of total US ad spend, and while this is significant growth, faster in fact than ad spend migrated to from traditional TV into Cable in its first ten years, its not fast enough!

Just take a look at the chart below...this is publicly available information, I might add.

Free-ness, Privacy, Ads and the Web

There are three separate themes that hit me today from three different news stories. These three themes are becoming interconnected on the web, as anyone who works in technology can tell you, but what I think most people don't know is that they will increasingly define the way in which we live our lives, beginning with the Internet.

But first, what were the three news items that caused me to write about this trend?

- A question posed to Mark Zuckerberg during his interview on Sunday,
- Chris Anderson's new column in Wired, "Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business"
- The MySpace page, and subsequent news stories, of the former NY Governor's high-priced call girl

The themes are: free services, personal expression and targeted advertising. And what they are doing on the web today looks a little something like this:

Not that a cycle like this is anything new - Free-to-air TV programs have always been given away in exchange for advertising, and Google gives away its search bar in exchange for contextual ads on the corners of your screen - so what's different about today's ad-supported services? Simply, the injection into the cycle of lots and lots of deeply personal information.

The first part of this pattern - the trend of companies giving free web-based software and services is well detailed in Chris Anderson's new Wired column, where he explains that the future of business is giving away the initial good for free, and paying for it by charging more for the premium good, or the services that enhance the enjoyment of the free good. The classic example? Gillete's initial handing out of free razor sticks in 1904 to get more people to buy the blades. And how does Anderson see that working in today's world? Give away free movie tickets, but charge extra for the pop-corn.

This is what every contextual ad-supported start-up today tries to achieve - give away the "crack" to get users hooked, and pay for it with advertising. And it's the same trend that Facebook tried to capitalize on with its Beacon launch last fall. People love Facebook, they pour their tastes and preferences into their FB profiles and allow it to drop cookies on their computers. But when Facebook started tracking their shopping behavior on other sites and reporting their purchases to all their friends via a newsfeed, users started to revolt.

What happened? Haven't people already made clear that they'll trade privacy for free stuff?

I'm not sure. My generation (the Post Gen-X crowd) is really the first to have the ability to share the intricate and intimate details of their lives immediately and globally with little or no effort. And until they reach a certain age - they also share this information with little or no consequences. In fact, the consequences they do incur are initially positive: making new friends, experiencing self-realization, and learning to use technology.  But what happens when your MySpace page turns into a goldmine for reporters tracking your involvement in a national political sex scandal?   Well - "Kristen" aka Ashley Alexandra Dupré found out today as the circus that has engulfed Elliot Spitzer for three days descended on and dissected her web-presence. I can only imagine what the political campaigns of tomorrow will look like - there are some incriminating college photos out there of a lot of aspiring young politicians I know.

Which is not to say that the web changes the notions of personal responsibility - people are still ultimately responsible for their actions - it's just that free ad-supported social networks, and other free web-services enable people to post much more about themselves, and when they do catch the public's eye, the resulting attention is overwhelming.

But even more important than the personal or political consequences of information sharing are the commercial ones.

Imagine what better picture an advertiser has of you when you broadcast your likes and dislikes to the world, in all their subtleties. I do it right here in my blog - but it's not in an aggregated and standardized format. However, MySpace and Facebook are, and although all the news stories suggest Facebook is struggling to monetize their ad inventory, I would imagine that the real value in a platform like Facebook, is not the ad space on Facebook's own pages, but rather the ability for Facebook to take very specific combinations of user preferences and behavior and sell that information to behavioral advertisers who are capable of targeting at the individual level.

One of the best (and few) audience questions Mark Zuckerberg got asked during his infamous interview at South by South West last weekend was about user privacy and information sharing.

The questioner essentially asked, "What are you doing to empower users to better control their own information?" Zuckerberg's response suggested that he did indeed understand the issue, "We need to figure out how to give people as much granular control as possible" over "which information they share with which people," and, I would add, in what manner they do it.

I believe that Zuckerberg wants to do this - make advertising minimally intrusive and potentially beneficial to the user, and allow users to control their own information. But the potential value in platforms like FB and MySpace would seem to be diametrically opposed to that approach.

Can Facebook walk the fine line and figure out how much targeted advertising is too much?

Will Internet users continue to pour their personal lives on to the web as each new generation arises?

If so, will these trends make what we think of as privacy a thing of the past?

I once had someone tell me that what we're experiencing is a return from our urban and suburban environments to a village-like setting, where people give up expectations of real privacy because there is no true anonymity.

I think we might be headed towards something like that, and I'm curious what impacts, for better or worse, it will have on human society.

Pakistan vs. YouTube

Who'da thought a group of generals, religious police and technocrats in what was almost a failed state could knock one of the most popular websites in the world off the Internet?

Well that's exactly what happened for two hours on Sunday, as the Pakistani state-owned telecommunications company sent a false domain name broadcast out over the web telling ISPs (Internet Service providers) around the world that its servers, and not the Google-owned ones in California, held the actual IP addresses of YouTube.

CNet has a great write-up of exactly what happened, but here are a few paragraphs that give a brief, layman's explanation.

"A spokesman for the Pakistani embassy said on Monday that the order to block access to YouTube came from the highest levels of the government. It would have been passed along to Pakistan's Electronic Media Regulatory Authority and then to Pakistan's telecom authority, the spokesman said, which in turn would have issued the formal order to the Internet providers.

Pakistan Telecom responded by broadcasting the false claim that it was the correct route for 256 addresses in YouTube's 208.65.153.0 network space. Because that was a more specific destination than the true broadcast from YouTube saying it was home to 1,024 computers, within a few minutes traffic started flowing to the wrong place.

A timeline created by Renesys, which provides real-time monitoring services, says that it took about 15 seconds for large Pacific-rim providers to direct YouTube.com traffic to the Pakistan ISP, and about 45 seconds for the central routers on much of the rest of the Internet to follow suit.

YouTube took countermeasures within minutes, first trying to reclaim its network by narrowing its 1,024 broadcast to 256 addresses. Eleven minutes later, YouTube added an even more specific additional broadcast claiming just 64 addresses--which, under the Border Gateway Protocol, is more specific and therefore should overrule the Pakistani one. Over two hours after the initial false broadcast, Pakistan Telecom finally stopped."

Pakistan gets a tough rap in the West. We heard much about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and of the continuing violence and extremism in the Northwest Frontier Province, but the actual elections last week, which were by almost all accounts peaceful, free and fare, got very little airtime.

However, when I read about stuff like this, I can understand the media bias. If Pakistani officials wanted to ban YouTube from users in their own country, their telecommunications officials could have accomplished the task by just blocking YouTube's IP addresses rather than broadcasting a message to the world claiming to be those addresses. Whether they did this on purpose or by accident isn't clear from the government order (here's a copy courtesy of CNet), but regardless, it shows either maliciousness or incompetence.

We can only hope following last week's elections in Pakistan, that the moderate and democratic parties that emerged victorious over Musharraf and the MMA Mullahs on February 20th will stop the government from interfering not only with Pakistanis consumption of their own media, but also with the world's use of its Internet.