I’ve been looking at the Google Chart API recently, its an interesting service, and as far as I can tell, Google really gets nothing at all out of it.  I guess the good-will associated with this kind of service is priceless.  There’s even a PHP object wrapper for the Google Chart API. I guess its too much to ask to get embeddable charts like the ones they use for Google Analytics and Google Finance.

Here’s an example with one of the former slogans for the phdUS Perspectives blog – “Good, Cheap, Fast – pick any two”:

Maybe I’ll use this API to generate some charts for the Facebook Compulsion Inventory quiz results.

I read about a “quiz” by a psychology professional named Paula Pile in this CNN Health article.  Her Facebook Compulsion Inventory is basically a PDF list of questions that folks circle the answers to and add them up to get a score.  Then her prognosis is based on a range of scores.  I had some code for this sort of thing just hanging around in my code drawer, so I decided to put it to good use.  I take no credit for the content of the quiz, its Copyright Paula Pile 2009.  Lets see if I get a statistically interesting sample and break it down by age and gender. Name and Email are optional, I’ll use them to contact folks that leave them if and when a statistically interesting sample is actually analyzed.

Take the Facebook Compulsion Inventory quiz.

Once I’ve got a bunch of results, I’ll post some charts and such.

Martin Zwilling (@startuppro) wrote about opportunities to tackle Internet privacy and I posed a question to him – “how do you authenticate an online something with an offline entity?”  The reason being that I’ve been thinking about privacy on the Internet as well, but from a slightly different perspective.  I’m not so concerned with things like the seemingly infinite lifetime of something said/posted to websites, or identity theft, or the resale of customer information that lots of shady companies and websites are engaged with.  Well, I am personally concerned about my own information of course, but not in the sense of the business problem.  I’m more interested in authenticating actions, statements, uploads and everything else an “offline entity” could do online.  By “offline entity” of course I mean everything from a teenager who’s friends post as him or her when they forget to lock their computer and ruin their reputation – to a public figure or celebrity being impersonated – to a corporate entity like CNN purchasing @CNNbrk (which some people thought was run by CNN in the first place).

Several things have prompted this line of thought for me.  First, a friend of mine asked me how to mitigate negative press about a design brand he runs.  He was asking if it was possible to get things off the first page of a google search about this brand.  Of course, thats not something that can be solved, but an authenticated coherent statement from this brand regarding bad publicity might actually help mitigate the situation.  There’s been several incidents of this type, for instance the Domino’s video prank incident and its effect on the value of the brand for instance.

Second, for a recent project I’ve been thinking about how to authenticate somebody that comes to complete and manage an online listing for an offline company.  In this scenario, listings are created for companies, the initial information is populated from an existing public records database.  These companies have a vested interest in expanding their listing and participating on the website.  However, how do you invite them to participate – who do you email or send a postcard to, and once they come to the site, how can you be sure that somebody appropriate at the company got that postcard and that its not a mail clerk from their building that’s signing up to destroy their reputation on this listing site?

I guess what I’m getting at is this – how do you know that something done by me online is really done by me?  Do we take PGP signing to the next level and set up a company that can authenticate a signed post online based on the assumption that only the real me has my private PGP key?  Do we set up a company that allows mailing of secret information to physical addresses that then authenticate an invitation to a website via this shared secret “token”?  I’m sure there’s opportunities to start a company that would do something interesting in this space.  Perhaps even tackling the problem Martin is talking about in the process – what if we could submit our private data to websites in an encrypted packet that can only be decrypted by entities that we give permission to?  Something that tracks how many times something’s been decrypted and used for instance, perhaps an intermediary or an escrow sort of service for information?

Any ideas? Its hard to resist signing this blog post with my PGP key, but perhaps a Wordpress plugin to authenticate posts that way isn’t that hard to make and maybe that’s a small step I’ll take in this direction sometime soon.

Just today I was told my brother was working on a Twitter project for his company.  They are trying to leverage the recent popularity of the service to have yet another opportunity to announce what otherwise would be newsworthy content – in this case really good deals on really good stuff.  However, from what I heard from him, they’re hindered by the fact that Twitter is a completely public service, with no restrictions on who reads and consumes the information people post to it.  I’ve heard lots of disdain for Twitter’s lack of groups or some other sort of tool to manage access to messages meant for a specific demographic.  However, the real question is, what exactly is Twitter meant to be – a megaphone or a private line to a certain group of people?

The answer of course is that its already a megaphone.  There are competitors or perhaps you could call them “co-habitants” of the same vertical, or whatever you like.  There’s a few companies creating offerings for businesses that allow employees to “tweet” only to the ears of their co-workers.  And Twitter seems content to remain the megaphone desipite this competition.  Honestly, I’d like to say Good For Them.  They’re focused on what they’re trying to accomplish, and despite the complete lack of success in trying to monetize this impetus besides venture capital, at least they’re doing what they like and what they want to do.

The reason people are talking about Twitter so much recently is that they are realizing that its a tool to reach a broad spectrum of loyal listeners.  The reason the listeners are so loyal is the mechanics of the service – you can’t force users to listen the same way you can with an email address.  You can’t send promotial emails to a follower on Twitter – if they don’t want to listen, they can cut off that relationship relatively quickly.  Additionally, the way Twitter works respects the way people want to regulate the bandwidth of their attention span.  If they are getting too much info, they’ll stop following, that’s all there is to it.

So what Twitter has is a megaphone that only people that want to hear have to put up with.  That’s genius.  Facebook has recently tried to achieve the same kind of ubiquitous streaming “Nirvana” if you will.  But thats not what the site is meant for.  A social network is meant to bind friends, aquaintances, and the like together.  Twitter is meant to bind people that say things and people that want to hear those things.  While the two audiences may sometimes overlap, they are probably never the same.  I follow TechCrunch on Twitter, but wouldn’t think of adding anybody that works there as friends on Facebook.  I guess that won’t stop Facebook from trying to employ the same dynamic that Twitter has achieved, and so be it.

Regardless of all that, the reason I am using Twitter now is because I can broadcast to everybody that wants to listen a stream of remarks, links and the like, with relative ease.  Additionally the Twitter Facebook app allows me to do the same to my Facebook friends without any hassle.  And the Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress allows me to store my Tweets in a persistent format of my choosing in my blog.  Best of all worlds so to speak.  I’m sure Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey give a lot of validation to everybody for their attention to Twitter, but the important part is that it serves a need and does it relatively well at this point in time.  I’ll use it till I find something bettter at doing what I want to do. Hopefully they’ll figure out how to monetize their business before then – right now its really swell of them to provide this service without expecting anything in return.

Just read an article on AdAge about Charles Schwab putting their accounts on review.  Omnicom Group’s PHD is who has the business now.  Nice folks over there, I worked on their “perspectives.” corporate blog a couple years ago, which included a couple trips to their office.  I hope they manage to keep the contract. The “Talk to  Chuck” campaign is definitely pretty good, and take a look at this quote:

A number of media agencies are going to get the chance to “Talk to Chuck” about his $100 million media-planning and -buying account in the next few weeks. Charles Schwab, one of the only financial-services companies not to take any federal bailout money, has put its traditional and digital media business up for review.

How about that, here I go and talk about AIG like they’re the devil.  And now there’s some contrast for you - one of the only financial-services companies not to take any federal bailout money – excellent.  So there IS a way to run a financial-services company without needing handouts from the government!  That’s what they should be talking about in their advertising campaigns (unless they also have humility listed as a corporate virtue, in which case they’re pretty much saints).