How To Build A Revolutionary Political Social Network

Regardless of your views on our recent election, one thing that we can generally agree on is that our political system is broken. There are myriad contributors to our malaise, not the least of which is the voting system on which it’s all based. But apart from the intractable structural problems, there is one area that we in the web world are tantalizingly close to ameliorating: constituent opinion.

An Old Problem We Take For Granted

In the middle of February in Wisconsin, nearly 100,000 people, some driving hundreds of miles, all converged on the same location at the same time simply to convey information. These people didn’t want to be there, but they felt, rightly, that this extreme effort was the only means available to convey their opinions effectively.
Protests are a unique method of communication, because they combine three essential components of effective civic speech: participants are publicly counted in them; they publicly convey a message; and they give reasonable evidence that participants are constituents. But soon we’ll have better ways of conveying that information without having to brave the Wisconsin winter.
Americans have an embarrassment of sites on which one can voice an opinion. Yet none of them meet the requirements necessary for people to actually voice these opinions in a way that maximizes their political impact.
My startup, Our Ballot Box, spent four years in Madison identifying these requirements, testing their effectiveness, and building a web app that began to satisfy those requirements. We failed as a business, but our product has had some success and someone will pick up our torch. The market is ready and the political value is too great for it to remain unbuilt. Ten years from now an effective constituent communication site will serve as a central component of the political process that none of us can imagine living without.

You’re Doing It Wrong: How Our Startup Failed

Our vision was very well received by regular citizens, activists, politicians, and news organizations, but we still failed as a business. That was my failure. As a first-time entrepreneur and CEO, I’d like to think I at least made some novel mistakes, but the reality is that they were mostly pedestrian.
Our talented developers had little time left to power a startup in addition to their demanding day jobs and young families. I should have expanded our team before launching with insufficient wind under sail. Our business models relied on long-term mass adoption, a big swing and tough sell that relies on more at-bats with investors than usual. And while Madison has a burgeoning web industry, it still lacks the number of investors of Silicon Valley, and I’m the only team member able to relocate.
I should have developed better business models and shaped our product to fit. Lastly, and most personally painful, I restrained my design passion by limiting myself to a first-draft approach to the UX and UI that resulted in a substandard experience. I did this to ensure I stayed focused on the business, marketing and fundraising parts of the startup. Ultimately, I simply didn’t execute well enough.

A Vision To Transform Political Speech

The good news is that there are startups close to successfully building such a space. My goal is to offer a direction to anyone else excited to address one of the most pernicious problems in our society. There are five basic components necessary for a political social network to effectively solve the constituent communication problem:

1. User-generated opinions
2. Single units of opinion
3. User verification
4. Surfacing and sorting
5. Open, demographically indexed data

User-generated opinions. Users must be able to write opinions in their own words, uncensored and unmoderated. Yes, it means dealing with a host of issues such as griefing, hate speech, and duplication. But a site must allow for the full and unrestricted expression of political opinion if it is to reach broad public acceptance. To users, speech must be free, and damn the consequences for developers. The site must allow users to quickly and easily express an opinion that is immediately accessible, so when others are presented with opinions that don’t quite match their own, they can speak for themselves on an issue instead of being pressured to vote on something they are uncomfortable with.
Single units of opinion. It may seem counterintuitive but single units of opinion for users to endorse or oppose are far more persuasive than compounded opinions. Whether it’s something as complex and packaged as “I am pro-life” or as granular as “Williamson St. should have a two-way connection to Winnebago St.” these are the data points that sculpt public policy, shape political platforms and guide the selection of political candidates. The multiple-choice questions on many political opinion sites fail this test because the limited number of answer options necessarily excludes other opinions and pressures people into selecting the least bad option. When single units of opinion are coupled with easy, user-generated opinions, users will have the freedom to fully express themselves through either their own words or an endorsement of another’s words.
User verification. In an age when astroturfing is becoming increasingly sophisticated, proving your identity in a political social network is essential. Many social media products offer different means of user verification. They range from methods as weak as providing a unique email or algorithms that spot fake accounts to methods as strong as requiring driver’s license or credit card information. To balance user acquisition with political strength, the ideal political social network will allow for multiple methods of identity verification across the confidence spectrum.
Surfacing and sorting. Getting the right opinions in front of the right users at the right time for their votes is delicate but essential, not only in terms of user engagement but also for political relevance. If an opinion is only voted on by a particular subset of constituents — such as, say, the followers of a particular radio host — then that opinion won’t reflect the full support or opposition of that constituency. Careful exposure is essential both to ensure opinion conveys a representative picture of overall public support, as well as to ensure that users have the opportunity to easily voice their opinions on the most politically valuable issues. Though partisans will always cry bias of all but their supporters, if the system is entirely algorithmic with no opportunity for organizational bias, it will gradually become accepted and treated as a neutral platform.
Ease of use and speed of creating and voting on existing opinions are also important factors for surfacing and political relevance. When people can vote on 10 issues a minute in a leanback experience that has political value, they’ll never stop.
Open, demographically indexed data. Finally, the potential of the opinion data must be unlocked by indexing it with users’ demographic and location data and making it publicly available. Then the general public, news organizations and all 10 (yes, 10!) political bodies that represent each citizen will be able to fully interpret the clear preferences of each constituency. Researchers and pollsters will also gain even greater insight by analyzing and modeling the data to compensate for the underrepresented constituencies.
Internet users have become more conscious of the amount of personal information they release. While that trend will continue, users will gladly volunteer their information when they realize it will give them greater political power: By aligning themselves with a particular group, they can then speak more effectively on behalf of that group. However, that depth of personal information must be used carefully to allow users to enjoy their desired level of privacy and be confident that their information won’t be misused. Successful political social networks must protect users’ identities while they speak at whichever hue of the anonymity-advocacy spectrum they so choose.

Political Social Networks In The Wings

There are a number of companies that competed against Our Ballot Box that are well on their way to providing a truly effective way for constituents to communicate. They have great products that they can expand to execute this vision:

• Votizen was moving in this direction with its publicly endorsable, user created Letters. Lately they seem to have tacked away from constituent communication in favor of political candidate promotion through social pressure, though that could be a momentary change to take advantage of the elections. With the elections now over they may retool again to focus more on problems of governance.
• Change.org has a great petition platform that could increase its political relevance by adding the parts of this vision it lacks, noteably adding open demographics and allowing votes against petitions. If they combined the brute force of large absolute numbers with the tools necessary to show percent support and evidence that their public response is relatively representative of the constituency, they could have a much more politically powerful tool.
• POPVOX is doing a lot right, and while focusing on public opinion for H.R. 2526 Amendment 4 has a lot of value (particularly to Congressional staffers), it’s unlikely to have the popular reach and political strength of stating “70% of Americans believe National Forests shouldn’t host private logging roads.” Their political strength could be tremendous if they had a simple opinion layer on top of their excellent legislative depth, so casual users can easily sound off at a high level while power users can drill down further.
• Votifi is an excellent opinion platform with a promising analytics focus. Plus their “Simplifi, Quantifi, Amplifi” nearly matches our “Verify, Quantify, Amplify!” If they were to successfully incorporate user-generated questions and statements they could go a long way toward becoming a central voice of the people.

Apart from current players in the space, this vision could be produced by a new small startup that grew organically to be recognized as the primary venue for political opinion. It would be easiest to build by a company that already has strong brand identity as a relatively trusted and politically impartial repository of personal profiles such as a Google, Facebook, AOL or Yahoo. Nonpartisan nonprofits (particularly Pew) may be the best home for such a product from the public’s perspective, but even the most responsible use of the data will have business-model potential sufficient to motivate a larger company to compete eventually if not soon (or already, quietly).

Effect Change

To paraphrase T.S. Elliot and Clay Shirky: one of the most momentous things to happen to a culture is that it acquires a new form of arguing. The Internet has already given us a new form of individual argumentation, but it now has the potential for the next, much greater form: collective argumentation. As a society and country, when we can definitively say “this is who we are, and this is what we think,” we will fundamentally reshape the political process by speaking for ourselves in an undeniable voice that is impossible to ignore. When we put the lie to claims from talking heads that they speak for us, we will have more focused and productive public debate.
But the greatest change will come in how politicians operate. The one thing more important than money to a politician is votes, and when politicians know their constituents hold a clear, undeniable position on an issue, they almost always listen. Because their challengers are.
Our small startup took an important step but stumbled. Take the next step in our place and finally realize the dream of indirect democracy.

The Gameplay Is The Gameplay. Always.

Editor’s note: Tadhg Kelly is a game designer with 20 years experience. He is the creator of leading blog What Games Are, and consults for many companies on game design and development. You can follow him on Twitter here.
Most of the talk around games tends to focus on climate. It’s about finding the right customers, funding, platform, business model, partnerships, metric and discovery solutions, technology, route to market and so on. How we play the Game of Games, as it were.
In this context, we often think of the product as something that needs to fit into a mold. We think of them as television executives think of shows: They need to fill certain slots, address certain markets, encourage specific behaviours, and so on. To borrow a TV term, we think of them in terms of format first and content second.
By format I mean that the game has to conform to some conventions. Perhaps it needs to be free-to-play and support dual currencies because that works in many other games. Perhaps a session needs to be playable in two minutes because research has shown that many mobile games work better when they can be played in this way. Perhaps it needs to be filled with friendly graphics because the target market of yummy mummies (has that phrase gone stateside yet?) is generally believed to find realism, violence, and gore turnoffs.
There are two sides to this format argument. The nays say that these kinds of restriction prevent innovation and creativity. In part this might explain why indie game developers have mostly not engaged with new platforms like the iPad and Facebook, preferring the more awkward but liberal canvas of the PC. The yays, on the other hand, say that innovation and creativity are important, but at the end of the day games is a business. And metrics show that the market behaves in semi-predictable patterns, so the job of game development is to match those patterns.
Of course, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If you reject format thinking entirely, you may make something fantastically creative (such as Proteus) but which may not be viable in the long term. On the other hand if format is entirely your master then you’ll become trapped in that commoditised space where your games look and act the same as everyone else’s (such as the bulk of casual, social, and casino games). Then scale will be your master.
What’s interesting is that those from both sides of the aisle will almost always say that the first rule of making games is to make sure that the game is fun. Without a fun game there’s no rule two. What neither side will do, however, is elaborate on that statement.
This is because “fun” is traditionally thought to be difficult to define. It is a very general term that can mean enjoyment, excitement, delight, learning, amusement, adventure, the thrill of the new, the mastery of things or just simply laughter. It is also easily co-opted, such as when studios “prove” that the energy mechanic in their game is “fun” because it drives a lot of repeat visits (which is a bit like saying that because people watch television shows with breaks, this must mean they love commercials).
Some game designers have attempted to square this circle by sub-dividing fun. Nicole Lazarro developed a popular model which separates fun into four “keys” (hard, soft, people and serious fun) as a way of explaining different ways to approach game design. Others (such as one by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek) break fun down into eight or more types, such as fantasy, discovery, expression, etc.
The problem with such systems is that they become justification tools. If fun is breakable into various sub-types, then it follows that you could mix-and-match those types with equal success. This is just not true. Games that do this often show large drops in users, generate reviews where players will say the story was enjoyable, but the game wasn’t fun, and so on. Successful game design always eventually comes back to realising that one of the kinds of fun is more important than the others. In Lazarro’s system it would be “hard fun.” In Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek’s, it would be “challenge.” The others are joys which emerge when the fun factor is sound.
So, fun is: the joy of winning while mastering fair game dynamics. And if we accept that the first rule is that a game must be fun, then it’s a hard limit. For many innovative game developers who want to push boundaries, this is very difficult to admit or accept. Nonetheless, it’s a universal law (a “creative constant“), which applies to all games. Whether you are in social, casino, gamification, casual, console or indie the gameplay is the gameplay, and it’s always driven by fun. It has been so ever since the first sports and Senet (the oldest known board game) were invented.
But the good news is that understanding that fun is a constant frees us up from thinking that format is, too. In fact the rules of format change all the time. We are all very busy trying to understand what shape the games business will have in any given year, what devices people will play on, and where the money can be made. Many games conferences are filled with talks and panels that are all about market opportunities, distribution and all those other climatological concerns. And yet none of that matters as much as it appears to.
Format wisdom has a short shelf life and is often over-interpreted. The recent success of Supercell is one example. Right now that studio is in the same blessed space that Rovio occupied a couple of years ago, where analysts are whirring around them trying to decode the magic of their success. Many other studios are picking Clash of Clans apart as we speak and trying to figure out the magic of its business model or distribution. There will be some  valuable insights derived from so doing, but in the main it’s just a fixed data point in a dynamic system. Clash of Clans is fun, and its release is well timed. Its success is not likely to be any more mystical to understand than that.
Just because players wilfully engaged in a format one year does not mean that pattern will repeat for all time (as Zynga has discovered to its cost). Just because it seems as though they will buy Christmas trees in games does not mean that every game needs them. As with interpreting the movements of the real-world climate, the pro-format types are over inclined to over-interpret the significance of runes and draw too-narrow conclusions. This inevitably leads them to making clones of successful games and be unable to think creatively.
Those indies who understand that fun is more important than format invent successful new games every year. Those iPad developers who are willing to experiment with format to create fun are the ones who catch Apple’s attention and become successful. The guy who invented Minecraft (Markus “Notch” Persson) didn’t just create a giant virtual world in which you could make stuff, he made it challenging. When Will Wright created the Sims, he didn’t just make a game about living in a virtual house. He made it difficult to live successfully. That’s why both of those franchises have sold millions of copies.
The fun factor is about more than making a game is amusing or full of pretty rewards. If your game is a dynamic system to be mastered and won, then you can go nuts. If you can give the player real fun then you can afford to break some of those format rules, and that’s how you get to lead rather than follow the market. If not then be prepared to pay through the nose to acquire and retain players. Your format strategy won’t matter as your game will lose users regardless of what you do.
And the climate is only going to get hotter.

Google Makes A Pre-Holiday Marketing Push For Chromebooks With New Online, Times Square And Best Buy Ad Campaigns

We don’t know much about how successful Google’s Chromebooks really are. Outside of talking about their adoption in schools and businesses, Google has never released any detailed sales figures. Most analysts assume they aren’t exactly a run-away hit. That hasn’t stopped Google from pushing forward with this initiative in the past, though, and this holiday season is no exception. Not only is Google running a massive campaign on Times Square and online, it also looks as if it has secured some prime real estate on Best Buy’s storefront windows.
Google’s “For Everyone” campaign includes an online component at galleryforeveryone.com, where users can upload their own images with a short message about who Chromebooks are for. A selection of these images and texts is then shown online and on billboards on Times Square, which is becoming an increasingly popular venue to highlight new tech products. Just like Google, Microsoft featured a Windows 8 booth in the middle of Times Square earlier this month and also rented out a number of billboards. Only Google, however, got somebody to propose to his girlfriend using its hybrid online/offline campaign.
Google’s intent here is clearly to make Chromebooks more of a mainstream product and it makes sense that it is also enlisting the help of Best Buy, the U.S.’s last major brick and mortar electronics retailer. Best Buy has been featuring various Chromebook displays for a while now, but as Google+ user Clayton Pritchard noted earlier this morning, some Best Buy’s now also feature massive “For Everyone” Chromebook ads on their storefront windows.
Specifically, Google is highlighting the new $249 ARM-based Samsung Chromebook in these ads. Despite mostly positive reviews, it’s not clear that mainstream users are all that interested in Google’s Chrome OS-based laptops. The company clearly believes in the product, though, and isn’t likely to pull the plug in this experiment anytime soon. Most kids, however, would rather get an iPad for Christmas than a Chromebook.

Black Friday: PayPal Sees Mobile Payments Jump 193 Percent; eBay Up 153 Percent

Black Friday numbers are strong across the board, according to initial reports coming in today from retailers and payments companies. As IBM reported earlier today, total online sales saw a surge of 20.7 percent in spending from last year. eBay-owned PayPal is reporting that Black Friday global mobile payments volume was up 193 percent from last year.
eBay is also reporting a major increase in transactions; total mobile volume in the U.S. was up 153 percent, and GSI Commerce saw a 198 percent jump in mobile sales.
PayPal spokesperson Anuj Nayar says that the payments giant believes that this is the year where holiday shopping on mobile devices has gone mainstream. Yesterday, shoppers in Houston made the most purchases via PayPal using mobile phones. For the previous three years, New York City has taken the top spot.

For Thanksgiving, eBay saw a 133 percent increase in mobile volume transacted; and PayPal saw a 173 percent increase. While more shoppers are hitting their phones and tablets for sales on Thanksgiving, it’s also apparent that consumers are perhaps forgoing the malls and stores for mobile shopping on Black Friday, as well.
IBM says department stores saw online sales grow by 16.8 percent over Black Friday 2011. And mobile sales reached 16.3 percent of total sales for Black Friday. Design-focused e-commerce site Fab says that sales were up 300% yesterday vs 2011. And mobile sales tripled vs. last year.
Next up is Cyber Monday, which is also expected to see strong growth in mobile as more consumers use their phones at work to purchase items.

Psy’s “Gangnam Style” Passes Justin Bieber’s “Baby” To Become The Most Popular YouTube Video Ever With Over 805 Million Views

It was only a matter of time, and we’re happy this happened on a slow news day over the weekend: Psy’s viral music video hit “Gangnam Style” just passed Justin Bieber’s “Baby” to become the most popular video in the history of YouTube. The video has now been watched over 805 million times.
The video made its YouTube debut on July 15 and currently has over 5.3 million likes and about 320,000 dislikes. Bieber’s “Baby” – which had a nice run at the top of YouTube’s charts since its debut in February 2010 – only has about 1.4 million likes and a whopping 3.2 million dislikes. At least Bieber’s corporate parents won’t be too unhappy about this development: since September, Psy and Bieber work for the same music label.
Thanks to Psy’s (and his management’s) relatively hands-off approach to fan-made remakes and parodies, the song itself has likely been heard quite a bit more often on YouTube. According to one metric, these fan remakes have garnered over 220 million views. The first live performance of the song on Korean TV also has a full 152 million views.
With the exception of “Charlie bit my finger – again,” every single video in the YouTube top 30 is now a music video and sadly, this list also includes the “Tootin’ Bathtub Baby Cousins” with 251 million views and “The Gummy Bear Song” with 265 million views. We’ll leave it up to future anthropologists to decide what this all means…

Google Launches Groups Migration API To Help Businesses Move Their Shared Mailboxes To Google Apps

Many businesses use shared mailboxes, public folders and discussion databases that, over the years, accumulate a lot of institutional knowledge. Most cloud-based email services don’t offer this feature, though, making it hard for some companies to move away from their legacy systems. But Google’s new Google Apps Groups Migration API now allows developers to create tools to move shared emails from any data source to their internal Google Groups discussion archives.
Setting up this migration process is likely a bit too involved for a small business without in-house developers, but it is very flexible and, as Google notes, “provides a simple and easy way to ‘tag’ the migrated emails into manageable groups that can be easily accessed by users with group membership.”
The Migration API is limited to 10 queries per second per account and half a million API request per day. The maximum size of a single email, including attachments, is 16MB.
This new API is mostly a complement to the existing Google Apps Provisioning API, which helps businesses create, retrieve and update their users’ accounts on the service, as well as the Google Apps Groups Settings API. The Provisioning API also includes a number of methods to work with Google Groups, but doesn’t currently feature any tools for migrating existing emails and accounts to the service.

Black Friday Online Sales Surged 21 Percent Thanks To Mobile Shopping, More Retailer Promotions And Personalized Deals

After a particularly strong Thanksgiving for online sales, shoppers continued to look for e-commerce deals on Black Friday. IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark is reporting the final tally for Black Friday online sales: a surge of 20.7 percent in spending from last year. The biggest surge on Friday came from mobile consumers, with sales reaching 16.3 percent, led by the iPad.
Overall, mobile purchases soared over the holiday with 24 percent of consumers using a mobile device to visit a retailer’s site, up from 14.3 percent in 2011. Mobile sales exceeded 16 percent, up from 9.8 percent in 2011. Unsurprisingly, the iPad contributed to more traffic than any other smartphone or tablet, taking 10 percent of online shopping. This was followed by iPhone at 8.7 percent and Android at 5.5 percent.
The iPad also dominated tablet traffic at 88.3 percent followed by the Barnes & Noble Nook at 3.1 percent, Amazon Kindle at 2.4 percent and the Samsung Galaxy at 1.8 percent. Overall 58 percent of consumers used smartphones compared to 41 percent who used tablets to surf for bargains on Black Friday.
IBM says that average order value dropped by 4.7 percent to $181.22. In addition, the average number of items per order decreased 12 percent to 5.6.
Shoppers referred from social networks generated .34 percent of all online sales on Black Friday, a decrease of more than 35 percent from 2011.
IBM says the surge in sales this year was likely due to earlier promotions, more personalized deals and mobile shopping increases. By sector, department stores online continued to see sales grow by 16.8 percent over Black Friday 2011. Health and Beauty sales increased 11 percent year over year; home goods saw a 28.2 percent increase in sales and apparel sales saw an increase of 17.5 percent over 2011.
IBM doesn’t actually release a dollar amount spent, but we’ll see this number from comScore soon.