
Scott Adams: FaceBook Killer  - cwan
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/facebook_killer/
======
icefox
"Likewise, your credit card company and the phone company have records of what
you did, as opposed to what you plan to do next."

Sorry to bust your bubble, but your CC company has already given talks about
how it knows when you are about to move, when you plan on getting a divorce,
when you are trying to have a baby, when you got actually going to have a baby
and plenty of other personal thing... I can only imagine how fun it would be
to sift CC data for patterns and cash in on what I find. A calendar of things
I WANT to do isn't useful, what is valuable is what I WILL be doing.

I really want to build a factory five GTM super car and will happily put it on
my want to do next year, but in reality unless someone pays me to built one
for them I can't do it for a while. Once my CC starts seeing car parts they
will know that it is actually something I am doing and not something I would
like to do. For now my CC company knows last weekend I rented a truck, bought
some house supplies and changed my address from Chelmsford to Waltham. Now
would be a perfect time to sell that information to local resistants and shops
that are around my new house. Or seeing as the new address is a recently
purchased house now would be the time to sell that info to the home repair
stores which I have not already started going to.

Edit: Anyone in the CC industry allowed to comment further on this topic? No
doubt it would be a neat place to work.

~~~
gacba
I don't work for a CC company, but I did work with predictive analytics
regarding churn in mobile phone and cable companies a decade ago. It's not
hard to back-mine the data to establish certain patterns that happen before
major events. That's how we predicted churn at a major provider (rhymes with
"Blecks-dell") with 90% accuracy. There's no reason that same logic could
apply to a rich data set like CC transactions. The tricky part is defining
what "events" you want to detect, then getting a set of data with those events
for training on the network.

~~~
patrickas
That sounds interesting! I can't think of any types of things to check for to
predict a user is about to churn! Care to give more examples?

The closest I could think of that might work is a neural network that would be
fed data for people who churned and people who didn't but even then I cannot
think of useful types of data to be fed!

~~~
matwood
One of the easiest today is using universal default. If you happen to pay your
water bill late then that tells me that you're having money problems so I can
expect other bills to start to falter. Some CC companies will actually raise
their rates on you proactively assuming you're about to default. I think
that's crap, but it's part of having everything so connected.

Other big ones that we found are simply _changes_ in behavior. The person who
pays their bill late every month is fine, and if they pay late enough to get
the late charge even beneficial. The person who pays on time every month, but
is suddenly late, big red flags. A person who suddenly starts using their CC
card for groceries, but never did before is another example.

People also tend to live near similar people. If you're a company providing a
service to many people you can start to build models of neighborhoods. If both
my neighbors foreclose on their house there is a higher likelihood that I'm
also going to be running into money problems.

------
GavinB
This is what Google does. What you search is becoming a better and better
predictor of what you will do. Most searches are based on future plans,
purchase, or interests. They even know your current and future locations if
you use google maps for directions. If you use gmail, Google can tell that you
just broke up with your girlfriend, or are graduating college.

Sidenote: we don't "give away" this information. We exchange it for the value
of the information we are searching for. Microsoft has even experimented with
paying people (with discounts) to use Bing's product search features.

~~~
Judson
It is almost freaky when I go to type something I thought was obscure into the
google search bar and it predicts what I am going to type after the first
word.

A less obscure example (but the only one I could think of) is when I type is
"How to fix " and it correctly filled in "a leaky faucet". No context, but it
guessed correctly.

~~~
philwelch
It autocompletes the same thing for me. Leaky faucets are a common problem; I
suspect this is a case of confirmation bias.

Far spookier is the autocompletion for "a pair of pl".

~~~
beza1e1
how to fix -> ticking clicking sound in macbook pro unibody

Seems like the faucets are better here, but the macbooks are broken.

No suggestion for "a pair of pl".

~~~
philwelch
Where I am, "a pair of pl" autocompletes to "a pair of pliers and a
blowtorch", not just "a pair of pliers".

~~~
tim_iles
This is a quote from Pulp Fiction.

------
jeromec
I think the concept is good hypothetically, but wouldn't work in practice.
People are not that organized. Knowing beforehand where you are going to go
and what you are going to do at various points in the future is hard enough to
imagine, let alone consistently input into a computer, even if there is a
value proposition as he points out. That's my thinking anyway.

~~~
jasongullickson
You could do something that requires less effort on the part of the user. For
example, extract future intentions from the content of existing "status
update" streams.

"I just bought a used Ford" = "I need a mechanic in six months".

"I'm going rock climbing for the first time this weekend!" = "I need a
chiropractor next week".

Etc...

Jokes aside, seems like this would be a fairly approachable mid-way between
the existing system and the one proposed.

~~~
jeromec
That's a good point. However, as you mention this data already exists on
services like Twitter and Facebook, so I guess it just needs to be mined and
analyzed.

------
portman
Is there a reason why he intentionally mis-capitalizes "Facebook" to
"FaceBook"?

Scott Adams strikes me as a careful and fastidious writer; I'm wondering if
there is an inside joke that I'm not getting.

~~~
m_myers
From the comments:

    
    
      Why for heaven's sake are you writing "FaceBook" instead of "Facebook." I will assume you are not an avid user of this so-called "Book."
    
      [Ha! Busted. Indeed it is not practical for me to be on Facebook. I have corrected the spelling. -- Scott]

~~~
werthog
So I was right. And they downvoted me! FOOLS!

------
steveklabnik
PlanCast?

I couldn't ever get into PlanCast, though. It just never got integrated into
my daily habits. I still like the idea, though...

~~~
flogic
Haven't actually tried it but it looks like it doesn't allow for nebulous
plans. Lots of plans start out only half formed at best. Say you want to go to
the beach. Your only time constraint may be some weekend soon. However your
friend might want to tag along and he's only available on a certain Sunday.
Purchase plans can be even more nebulous. You could want to purchase a new
laptop but you friend tells you that Apple has a big announcement coming up so
you decide to wait until after that.

------
jiganti
Telling the world what you did and are doing assumes the world cares. This is
a stretch, but people do it.

Not only telling the world what you are planning on doing, but expecting
guidance from peers even more optimistic. I don't see this often in facebook
status updates, or at least not things that people can really expect help from
like Adams envisions. Displaying your intentions puts all your cards on the
table; it's biologically discouraged. I don't think this will work.

~~~
drblast
But people _love_ to give advice. Look at the topics here. The ones that get
huge responses ask a question that allows anyone with even limited experience
to weigh in.

Want to see pages and pages of comments? Post to a forum where parents are
members that you're having a baby and are thinking about different approaches
to parenting. A firestorm will ensue; nobody has to care about you and your
baby at all.

How about "I'm going to buy a laptop, should I get a Mac or not?" This sort of
thing causes server owners to consider liquid cooling systems.

------
retroafroman
This is quite a simple and compelling idea. I see friends asking for product
reviews and recommendations in their status messages all the time.

------
helium
Facebook doesn't just know about your past. I recently got engaged, and all
the Facebook ads I see are about weddings, honeymoons, etc...

------
scrrr
What should kill Facebook is an open, distributed system. It should be more
like email. That's why frid.ge stands no chance, because it is basically the
same as Facebook. I have hopes for Diaspora.

Openness and profits don't have to be exclusive. Any successful email marketer
probably can testify to this. And Google most definitely can.

Just for the sake of professional pride, talented developers and entrepreneurs
should be able to make something that can compete with FB. I have little
sympathy for top-people like the Google Maps creator joining Facebook. They
should be better than that.

But who knows, maybe I'm just a liberal crackhead living in a dream-world and
people really do need a walled system where they can get rid of that pesky
privacy, the overwhelming choices of open systems and the boring speeches of
arrogant intellectuals.

</yadayada>

------
janj
I'm trying to do a very specific subset of this within my app. The plan is ask
users when they would like to take a cruise, where they're leaving from, about
how much to spend, how to contact etc. Store this in a database and give
cruise vendors access to this information where they can send out what they
have available that matches the users criteria through the app.

Obviously this is much less general than what Adams is describing but makes
more sense to me. I've never liked all the spammy aspects of social technology
and hope I can be profitable sending info only when the user requests it. Of
course this is just one of the many ways I'll be trying to monetize my app.

------
jpwagner
Should be titled:

    
    
      Scott Adams: FaceBook Complementer

~~~
DanHulton
Yeah, why can't this be a Facebook app?

A whole lot of Facebook's value is the social graph, which is hard to re-
create. Add this app into Facebook's already-existing graph, and you might
have a winner.

------
dominostars
"You're worried that this system allows the stalkers and mooches in your
network to ruin your future plans. But remember, you are only broadcasting
your plans to people you specify. If you choose to tell a stalker where you'll
be, don't blame the application when you get stabbed."

Getting stabbed would be my own fault, but being afraid to post plans in fear
of getting stabbed is certainly the application's fault.

------
petersalka
Perfect timing.

Coincidentally, we have just launched an early version of a microblogging site
called idlike.to which lets its users share their wishes, plans and goals.

We are working on a bunch of new features and our roadmap is quite similar to
Scott's vision.

We don't see idlike.to as a Facebook killer (we'd like to take a different
direction) but this post is definitely very encouraging.

<http://www.idlike.to>

------
nico
It sounds a little like Needish or Redbeacon. You ask for what you want/need
and then people/companies make you offers for it. Sort of a reverse eBay.

I don't know how Redbeacon is doing, but I know Needish didn't do very well,
maybe because of the market they targeted, but they ended doing a clone of
Groupon and then selling it to Groupon to build Groupon Latam.

------
Tycho
I think he's got the right idea: most web surfing right now is a waste of
time, the wave of the future will be getting practical benefits from the
internet. (I kniw online shopping and email and stuff is really useful in
theory, but I just mean most of the time normal people actually spend online
is frittered away on Facebook etc)

------
jkin
Content is value, a lot of wall statuses are spontaneous, video links, cute
articles, what is happening. That makes people come and stick around. The plan
is useful, but not that sticky for people to see any changes.

------
lawfulfalafel
I think the biggest problem is only sharing information with specific people.
Everyone is too lazy to do it manually and I don't think we are anywhere near
creating a working suggestion method.

------
shoy
Tim Harford wrote about something similar to this in 2006.
<http://timharford.com/2006/06/lets-get-personal/>

------
johngalt
Isn't CarWoo effectively doing this now on a small scale?

------
jasongullickson
We should have a programming contest based on this :)

------
badri
doesn't twitter do this? broadcasting whatever I do.

