Privacy: How we want to share everything, and nothing at the same time.

Privacy concerns are making unprecedented news headlines. Online privacy used be as simple as making sure your credit card information didn't get stolen or merely keeping your email address out of the hands of dubious pill peddling spambots. With the introduction of social networking and always-on computers that fit in our pocket, not only are the issues changing, but how end-users react to them is changing too.

The main contradiction is that people want their personal information out there, but they are nervous and scared about what that might mean. They want the world to know who they are. They want websites to react to them as real human beings, with content that is exciting, personal and relevant. But on the other hand, they are afraid, overwhelmed and confused. I'll break it down into two major categories: What people want from sharing their info, and what they do not want. As some of these points overlap, you'll see where the anxiety sets in.

What People Want:

Many people are now totally addicted to the feedback loop that social networking sites provide. They look forward to the "likes" when they post a picture and to camaraderie when they tweet that their partner is making them watch reality TV, again. They get frustrated when friends don't read their updates or when tweets for advice go unanswered.

2.A customized user experience: When I search for something, it's nice that my search engine knows a little bit about me already. When I look up a new restaurant downtown, it's great to know that my friend Bob just went there and recommends the apple pie. Or, when I'm looking for the Hideout, it knows that I'm in Seattle, near downtown and therefore sends me to the tiny chandelier-adorned bar on Madison, instead of the identically named nightclub in Chicago. If you go to a music website like Rdio, it is reassuring that your friend Kevin (who has the best taste in music) says he likes the band "Gum in my Hair" and that they have a show this Friday, right near you. Want to find something to read? Your friends are already amusing themselves by clicking on tawdry articles in the Washington Post Social reader.

On the other hand, there is What People Do Not Want:

1.Censoring themselves: While it's generally accepted that you shouldn't post anything online you wouldn't want seen by the entire world, that isn't how people want to use the Internet. Indeed it isn't how they actually use it. We've all heard tales of how a Facebook slip up accidentally ruined a faked sick day. Clearly, the desire to share, can overwhelm common sense discretion.

If people do post things in public, it is frustrating to have to water things down. For myself, the vast majority of my posts are private, and whenI do make a few posts public, I assure you that they are the most non-revealing, milquetoast, mundane things I ever say. I'm concerned that if I say something remotely controversial, I'll offend someone and won't get that bank loan or that job offer.

2.Complicated privacy settings: It's estimated that 1 in 4 Facebook users have no idea how Facebook's privacy controls even work. Some estimate that number to be much higher. Carefully navigating the complexities of making Friends Lists, Google+ Circles, or adjusting privacy settings is hard, and confusing.

I guarantee that no matter how tech savvy you are, you don't know how privacy settings on Facebook really work. Here's proof: Did you know that if you tag a friend in a photo, all of their friends can suddenly SEE that photo in your otherwise private photo album? Yep, if you mark a photo "friends only" and then tag a friend in it, your setting gets magically trumped by Facebook's desire to share that image and suddenly that tagged friend's mom, or coworker (which might be your coworker) can now see your private image. I was shocked. And judging by how many embarrassing photos I see tagged of friends, I bet they would shocked too. Equally befuddling, at least as I write this, there is no preference to turn that "feature" off .

3.They don't trust corporations: A lot of the fury over privacy laws centers around fears of the nefarious companies we give our information to. Facebook has lawyer-honed fine print in their privacy policies describing their right to use your shared content for promotional purposes. It's also very suspicious when you visit a website for the first time and it greets you by name and recommends content it seems to have magically selected just for you. Google, for its part, seems to track everything you've ever searched for. Why? "To improve your user experience" they say. In Google's case, they want to show you targeted advertising, and give you more personalized search results.

Clearly, some of the use cases people are clamoring for are empowered by this collection of data, but that leap isn't clear to people. Worse, companies over-collect information in hopes of later introducing new functionality. Everybody knows companies have one goal - to make a profit - and if the service is free (Google, Linked In, Facebook, Twitter...everyone), then they must make money off of user content. It's easy to understand how a user would get spooked by what that might mean.

4.They don't trust other people: For every 99 people someone is OK with sharing content with, there is ONE person with whom they are not - and that person makes all the difference. Most people don't care if folks know they went out to a show on Friday and partied a little too hard, but they mind if their boss knows. They might feel comfortable telling the world they met a cute guy this weekend... but not if their dad found that out. Or their ex boyfriend. (or current boyfriend?). The net is chock full of stories of the wrong person getting a hold of private information and using it to do bad things. 1 in 9 people have reported being stalked, or otherwise harassed online.

5.They don't trust the government: Laws like SOPA and PIPA ran afoul of Silicon Valley because it put huge liabilities on companies to monitor the usage of websites. Suddenly, a website or ISP became accountable if any of the content on the site was copyrighted. The government was suddenly taking a much more proactive role in monitoring what was going on online and millions of bittorrent user and YouTube content creators sensed that the government was coming for them. First, perhaps only for content violators, but perhaps soon, emboldened by new access to private information, coming for those who posted things that were in any way incriminating. People imagined their digital files at the CIA swelling with personal data.

So What Does it All Mean?

Users can't entirely have it both ways. That is, one can't avoid sharing any personal data and expect to take part in the new personalized targeted ads and web content available on many websites. Companies are going to have to figure out how to walk the line between giving users the tailor-made customized experiences they crave, without appearing to be nefarious and invasive. Even the government is stepping in to offer guidelines for how personal information can be collected and used.

Users, for their part are going to have to find their own balance between what they are comfortable sharing and what needs to stay offline. They should educate themselves about how privacy settings work, on the Internet, and in their phone's mobile applications. Some will opt to share less, and those use cases need to be accounted for as well. Google's new Chrome Browser will have features allowing users to "not be tracked" at all for those users that want a degree of anonymity when they surf at the expense of a customized experience. Once that data is out there, it is nearly impossible to magically reel it all back in. For the Internet, and the new shared user experience, there is no easy way back.

When users are entertained by online content, do they respond to display ads more positively than when they are informed, educated, or engaged by publishers in other ways? And does the entertainment value of a site's content always confer positive impressions to the brands advertised on it? Psychster put these notions to the test in a series of studies conducted for our client Bookrags.com (a site devoted to providing study guides, lesson plans, and educational resources to students and teachers). Read our full whitepaper of these studies here (1MB).

We first assessed the perceptions of online ad buyers, and confirmed that they believe that users of entertainment sites show better responses to ads, higher purchase intent, and better brand retention than do users of other sites. These beliefs were mirrored by the fact that reported ad spend on entertainment sites was about 6 times greater than spend on education sites. In a subsequent study, we showed a sample of college students the ads of 3 different brands (for a bank, soft drink, and computer company) on 2 different types of sites, both of which target college students, but which differ in their goal of providing entertainment versus educational resources. 

Key findings:

● We found no experimental evidence for the hypothesis that brands are perceived more positively when their display ads appear on entertainment sites rather than on education sites. 

● In fact, the bank that was displayed in the ads was perceived as less classy, cool, modern, and honest when its ads appeared on entertainment sites compared to education sites. 

● The same pattern was found for intent to engage with the ads: there was no evidence for the superiority of the entertainment sites, and the bank ads were more likely to be clicked when appearing on the education sites.

● Neither the entertainment nor the education sites produced significantly better brand recall.

         Click here to download PDF file of image (1MB)

These results suggest that, contrary to widespread beliefs among ad buyers, sites whose goal is to entertain do not carry a universal advantage as an advertising platform over sites whose goal is to inform, educate, or meet users' needs in other ways. In fact, users of other sites may be more inclined toward acquiring goods or services by virtue of the site's content, and all the more so when relevant ads are displayed. For complete details of the study, read the full whitepaper here (1MB).

To respond to a growing demand for usability testing of games and applications on mobile devices, Psychster has been researching camera mounts. Here we share what we've learned. Feel free to give us a call if you want one of our prototypes.

At the outset, we agree that the need for an external camera mount will disappear as soon as there is a good screen-sharing software solution, where a USB cable connects the device directly to a laptop or PC. But as of this writing, you need to jailbreak the iOS to do this, which is a non-starter for us. True, you can already throw the screen up on the wall pretty easily, but Psychster clients often like to view the sessions remotely, or after the fact. And any time you want to see user's hands as well as the screen, an external camera will be required.

Jumana Al Hashal, a mobile app developer and alumni of the MCDM program at the University of Washington, did a thorough exploration of the software and hardward options if you want to read deeper. We also enjoyed working with Tony Santos from the HCDE program at UW on some early prototypes of the camera mount. He greatly helped us learn what works and doesn't work with the design. 

As scientists and business-minded consultants, our short-list of requirements for camera mounts was as follows:

1. The mount must accomodate a variety of research questions and physical positions without interruption. Some clients will only be concerned with what is on the screen, whereas others will need to see the user's hands or even facial gestures. Sometimes, the device will be held in portrait position, other times in landscape position. Sometimes the user will need to hold the device with one hand and touch it with a finger, other times the user will use two thumbs. It should not be necessary to interrupt the session and re-adjust the camera to switch between these circumstances.
2. The mount must not unduly interfere or alter how a user would physically interact with the device under normal circumstances. During the test, the mount should effectively disappear so the user's behavior is as natural as possible. Another way to put this is the sled must not impair the ecological validity of the test.
3. The mount must maximize the clarity of the recording while minimizing costs and filesizes. Obviously, when you start talking cameras, you can get pretty fancy. But this is research, which is a cheap, quick proxy to reality. So we're going to cap what we would spend on a mount at $200. We still need to capture the screen clearly, even down to a 4-5 point font. And it's always good to avoid unnecessarily large filesizes to be able to share them with clients without spending hours editing, rendering, uploading and downloading.

We did a sweep of the web. How well does what's out there meet our requirements?

Tripods capture users well, but screens poorly. A tripod and a swivel mount is a very reasonable idea. But we're not satisfied by the constraints this puts on the users and research scenarios. In a nutshell, the camera doesn't move, but the device does, and so you have no control over the jostle in the screen image. Thus a tripod only works if users set the device down. When they lift it up (to text or play with thumbs), even if they could stay in frame (maybe with the help of tape you put on the desk), the screen no longer faces the camera directly, impairing the capture. We also don't relish the idea of saying "wait, wait, wait, you're out of frame" or "wait, wait, let me adjust the camera" every few minutes during a session. So we only use a fixed mount when clients care about the user's hands rather than the screen.

Sleds are good, but many are designed only for portait view.  The first advantage of mounting the camera more or less on the device, is that no amount of motion will impair the screen capture. This is important, since many apps use tilting, re-orienting, or even jiggling to use. You can also zoom out and get most of the user's hands while still seeing the screen clearly. So we believe "sleds" are the way to go. But the one below, while cheap, will not work if the user needs to turn the device on the side for landscape view. What happens is they lift it off the platform, which is awkward and ruins the stability.

Watch out for focal distance and lighted webcams.  The other gotcha with the sled above is that if you attach a cheap webcam to it, many of them do not focus on objects nearer than 40cm (16 in). So the device will be too close and out of focus. Also, any light you throw on the device is reflected right back in the form of glare, so webcams with flashlights are to be avoided.  

Long, top-heavy necks are awkward. Your first reaction to solving the focal distance problem might be to lengthen the neck and get a better camera. But this is a blind alley. The sled becomes top-heavy and uncomfortable to use. When we tried prototypes like this with users, they wanted to set it down on the desk, which is a good indicator that it was uncomfortable and interfering with their use of the mobile device.  

A second camera for users' faces should not be mounted on the sled. If your research question requires that you see users' faces, great. Sometimes that is necessary for what you need to learn. But the camera trained on users' faces should not be mounted on the sled. This is even heavier, and it doesn't work. The sled moves with the device, but the user doesn't, so the image of the user is poor. It jiggles and they are often out of frame, especially during emotional moments which is precisely what you want to observe (like when they win a game or forget to save the text they just composed).

Another gotcha with the 2-camera idea is that if you want the recording to show a "picture in a picture" with the user's face shown with the screen, you'll need to make the leap out of chap recording and editing software (like what comes with Logitech cameras) to more expensive software like Morea or Camtasia. The ability to record PIP is a premium feature.

The mount is only the half of it: gain, exposure, and contrast are key. After we got a mount we were happy with, we concentrated on getting a really great video capture. Turns out this was harder than you think. Most webcams (our preferred device for low cost, low weight, and USB connectivity) are not made to shoot something that itself is a light source shining back at them. And when it comes to making out that 5-point font, it's more about managing the light than the focus. The image below illustrates what we mean: most of the text is blown out and unreadable. Furthermore, we needed to adjust this on the fly without stopping the recording.

Our working prototype: the Psychster "Usability Palette". We settled on a Logitech HD C525 webcam mounted with a gooseneck on a wood palette with a non-slip surface. Because this camera is designed to focus on close objects, it hovers about 8 inches (20 cm) above the palette. Thus it is light, comfortable, and not top-heavy. The image is demonstration-quality, and we can pan, zoom, and even adjust the gain and exposure WITHOUT stopping the recording.

Why the palette? It's a happy medium allowing users to switch between portrait and landscape orientation without being interrupted to change sleds. It's designed to be comfortable whether users interact with their touchscreen with a single finger or with two thumbs.

And what about the user's face? Again, to be prepared for any research question, we're currently using a desk-mounted gooseneck about 24 inches (60cm) long. This allows us to capture users' faces, or turn around and capture them interacting with the device from over their shoulder. We can zoom out and get a whole-room view, or zoom in to a device located in a taped-off area on the desk. Essentially, this design allowed us the greatest flexibility.

The camera is the Logitech HD C510, which must be at least 40cm away from the object to be in focus, but still has a versatile mount and great software controls. It was necessary to modify it to turn the lens upside-down so as to capture devices right-side up.

This video shows a user playing a game by holding the palette and using a single finger.

This video shows a user playing a game by tipping the device. But due to the stability of the palette, you can barely tell.

How big are the recording files? We prefer to shoot in widescreen to have the aspect ratio match the device screen in landscape view. After much testing, we've decided both the sound and the resolution/size can be set pretty low. So we're predicting that 60min recordings will be about 240MB. If necessary, we could compress them for sharing with clients online in post-production editing, but most likely we'll just use conferencing software to share smaller versions of videos online. If clients need a really sharp recording, we're sure they won't mind receiving the files on a USB drive.

Thanks for reading. Have questions? Write us at info@psychster.com .

By Nicholas Martens Ph.D. and David Evans Ph.D.

Psychster Guest Analyst Nicholas Martens recently obtained his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Florida Atlantic University, where he conducted research on the cognitive and motivational determinants of the level of support for proposed public policy changes. Nicholas is currently an analyst for Psychster Inc.

This past March, a YouTube video from third-year UCLA student Alexandra Wallace went viral. Editors note: In a curious form of technical censorship, embedding of the original YouTube video has been "disabled by request." This was YouTube's choice or that of its users; it would not have been our choice. The unflattering video featured Ms. Wallace waxing racist after observing some Asian students talking on their cell phones in the library, which she turned into a general indictment of Asian culture. Ms. Wallace apologized soon after the video went viral, remarking that "I cannot explain what possessed me to approach the subject as I did...", but the damage had already been done and she was pressured into leaving the university. While the attitudes she expressed certainly seem to indicate a thing or two about the type of person that she is, (especially bearing in mind her admission that she's "not the most politically correct person"), it's worth considering whether she could ever have been induced to deliver such a rant in person. She, herself, would have us to believe that she is too "nice" and "polite" to do such a thing.

Is it plausible to suggest that her diatribe was at all facilitated by YouTube?

Internet-based communication has a somewhat different character than communication made in person. Every day, millions of people publish information about themselves on YouTube, Facebook, and countless other social media sites that they would never think of disclosing in the "real" world. Acquaintances and perfect strangers can now see who we become when we let our guards down, because we often lose some of our inhibitions when we interact with others over the web.

Certain features of YouTube contribute to this loss of inhibition. For instance, communication through YouTube is asynchronous (cf. Suler, 2003). When one person addresses another, face-to-face, the speaker receives real-time feedback from his or her audience, influencing the speaker to disclose information in compliance with social norms. In contrast, YouTube users can upload entire, uninterrupted trains of thought, without receiving another's reaction for minutes, hours, or even days. Such delays reduce the experience of normative pressure. Indeed, Ms. Wallace may not have known she was crossing a line, given her inability to witness our discomfort. If others had been present, she might have felt compelled to have either expressed herself more carefully or else suppressed her thoughts entirely, taking greater care to avoid giving offense.

Turning now to the content of Ms. Wallace's rant, the noteworthy aspect, especially given her candidness, is the type of racism that she exhibits. It's none of the "old-fashioned" or "redneck" racism that identifies certain characteristics as somehow inherent in members of a target group. These beliefs have been in such sharp decline since the 1950's that they, or at least their public expression, have become outrageously anachronistic, and are profoundly rejected by the vast majority of Americans. Instead, Ms. Wallace limits her criticisms to behaviors that have ostensibly non-racial bases. What she would want us to believe is that she objects to the values of the university's Asian population, and not Asians, per se.

This type of argument is perfectly representative of symbolic racism (Kinder & Sears, 1981), in which a person attempts to justify antipathy toward non-Whites with the belief that they violate fundamental American values. Although research into symbolic racism has focused largely on attitudes toward Blacks, the lessons of this research apply particularly well in the present case. For instance, opposition to affirmative action is associated with the beliefs that Blacks lack in individualism and self-reliance (cf. Kinder & Sears, 1981). These also happen to be the same traits for which Ms. Wallace condemns UCLA's Asian community, which she accuses of not being able to "fend for themselves".  She sees these students as being overly dependent on "their moms, and their brothers, and their sisters, and their grandmas, and their grandpas, and their cousins, and everybody that they know that the brought along from Asia with them," in contrast to Americans, whom she implies are better able to take care of themselves. Strangely, she also seems to think of Asians as lacking American good manners.

Note, however, that she never implies that Asians are incapable of becoming upstanding Americans. After all, her rant is ostensibly about values, not race; her comparisons between Asians and Americans, never Asians and Whites. Ms. Wallace may very well profess to hold deeply egalitarian values (and may even mean it), but make no doubt about it, her strong negative evaluation of Asians is fundamentally about race. Her sense of intergroup threat is particularly palpable as she complains about the "hordes of Asian" people flooding UCLA. To be sure, there are real differences between Eastern and Western cultures (e.g. Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Morris & Peng, 1994), but you get the sense that when she invokes these differences, she's actually rationalizing a preexisting antipathy.

This form of racism is particularly pernicious, because it can be difficult to combat directly. People who use values as the basis for condemning certain groups often maintain a level of plausible deniability in their actions because their intentions are ambiguous with regard to race. For example, political campaigns sometimes use racial code words (e.g., "illegals") in an attempt to maintain a certain racial status quo. Similarly, some in the electorate who are troubled by President Barack Obama's race have channeled this sentiment into accusations that he is not a natural-born citizen and raised questions about the legitimacy of his office, even after evidence to the contrary. While we may know or strongly suspect that these tactics are fundamentally about race, it can be difficult to convince voters that they contain hidden meanings, to say nothing of the challenges in simply bringing this discourse out into the open.

To that extent, we might actually thank YouTube for disinhibiting Ms. Wallace to the point of publishing her opinions, which are often left to fester in the privacy of homes, dormrooms, and the quiet corners of public spaces.  With the ascendancy of China economically and the struggle of many US universities to increase their tuition revenue, her reactions to this aspect of globalization can't possibly be isolated and are likely on the rise.

But if this was a teachable moment engineered by the psychological distance of YouTube, then what did we learn?  Unfortunately that not everyone will be able to take the higher ground. 

Just as YouTube helped to disinhibit Ms. Wallace, it helped to disinhibit her detractors, further shaping the conversation. In both comments and response videos, critics called for violence against Ms. Wallace, including death threats, which became especially significant after her exam schedule was leaked online. For many of the commenters, these reactions were made possible by the anonymity afforded by internet communication. People wanting to conceal their identity could easily do so, thereby minimizing their exposure to adverse consequences for their actions. But just as Alexandra Wallace didn't post her video anonymously, some of the most egregious responses have come from users whose identities are known or easily discovered. For them, the absence of immediate feedback led them to say things that they would likely consider unacceptable under other circumstances. To the extent that Ms. Wallace's rant presented an opportunity to have a constructive dialogue about race, online disinhibition may have derailed such an effort by causing some to respond with hate-filled racial provocations of their own.

Moving across the spectrum a bit, YouTube responder DavidSoComedy drew honestly on his offense from Ms. Wallace's attack, but chose to respond to her symbolic racism with self-confessed overt racism. To Ms. Wallace's assertion that "American" culture is superior to Asian culture, Mr. So asserted the opposite. After Ms. Wallace mockingly imitates the way Asians speak, Mr. So returns the favor. And anyone who ever gave a hoot about feminism will find it tough to swallow Mr. So's frequent salutations of "Bitch" and "Biotch." But the edgiest moments of his rejoinder are his references to violent revenge. Understandably, he was determined to wage a satirical comedic defense of himself, his family, and his culture, and his correction of Ms. Wallace's geographic errors needed to be made by someone (she imitates Chinese language but sends condolences to victims of the tsunami - in Japan) but by implicating Ms. Wallace's race, and by pitting group against group, he pollutes the discourse with almost as much hateful rhetoric as she did. We would do well to learn from the endless loop of offense, revenge, and re-offense that protracts intergroup conflicts and prevents real reconciliation, as among Serbs and Croats or Palestinians and Israelis.

But others took a different, potentially more constructive approach. User jimmy, a.k.a. Jimmy Wong of Seattle, composed an original comedic song in which he pretends to try and seduce Ms. Wallace. The fact that his response takes the form of a love song draws a stark contrast with Ms. Wallace and Mr. So who both seem intent on divisiveness and emphasizing the things that separate us (to say nothing of the richly stereotype-violating Lothario persona that Mr. Wong adopts).  But the best aspects of his response are his outing Ms. Wallace's personal ignorance, rather than trying to paint her as representative of either her race or her culture. For example, after splicing in Ms. Wallace's mocking imitation of Asians speaking "ching chong, ling long, ting tong" on cell phones in the library, Mr. Wong sings "ching chong means I love you / ling long I really want you / ting tong I really don't know what that means." To Ms. Wallace's assertion that said Asian library rule-breakers interrupt the "epiphany" she has while studying, Mr. Wong sings again in his complex mix of criticism and embrace, "If you have an epiphany every single time you study that means you're probably doing something wrong - but I like it when you're wrong." Make no mistake, Mr. Wong does level personal attacks because he's a person not a professor (e.g. "underneath the pounds of makeup"). But the point again is that these jabs are personal, not collective, and as such, he navigates around the usual trappings of intergroup conflict. Rather than alienating potential allies, as Mr. So had done, Mr. Wong puts Ms. Wallace into a spotlight of logic, universal rights, and basic decency that welcomes far more people to evaluate their own sense of right and wrong. This is encouraging.

We shouldn't be surprised if similar videos by other users turn up in the future, and there are undoubtedly many more like them available already. No doubt, considerable damage is done to American multiculturalism in that over a million viewers have now been exposed to Alexandra Wallace's symbolic-racist arguments. To be sure, her diatribe resonates with many, innoculates others against stronger forms of racism, and enobles a radical few to take discriminatory or even violent action. However, nearly three times as many people have viewed the rejoinders to her video, which at a minimum demonstrate an unwillingness to passively accept such attacks, and at their best begin to describe a path out ignorance and toward forgiveness and multiculturalism. YouTube doesn't have to strip users of their decency, and user-generated videos can reflect the personal values of their authors.

But if YouTube is to contribute positively to the dialogue on race, users going forward will need to ask themselves whether their uploads reveal the goodness in themselves or reflect the badness in others.

The site is dead. Long live the site.

Some thoughts, without my usual degree of research and annotation...as a social psychologist who learned a lot about how social media should and should not work during my two fascinating years there.

I remember sitting next to participants in usability interviews as they found their city, school, and friends' names. Their emotion was real when they said, "Wow they're in here?" referring to either a person or school that had once meant a lot to them. That emotion is critical to the success of an online venture. It's similar to what game developers have to see in their playtests...what they call "fiero" the Italian word for fist-pumping triumph. For Classmates, it was the flush of time travel, the rush of memories activated. Without that emotion, no social media or gaming venture can succeed.

Randy Conrads felt that emotion in 1995 when he found his first friend through an organic online search, prompting him to develop an app so others could too. Scour the version history on Wikipedia's entry on social networking sites, and you'll see that it's not completely clear whether Classmates was the first, or just made the same year as the first.

Other people I interviewed while working there grew up in rural areas whose graduating classes of no more than 20 had scattered to the wind, or more accurately, migrated to the cities. Lost. Or would be except for this site. Those participants called Classmates an "essential service" in helping them to stitch together their frayed communities, if for only a couple of weekends in their lifetimes known as Reunions.

At a time when we were realizing that the internet eliminates the distance between points on the globe, Classmates showed us it could also eliminate the gap between past and present. There was an emotional power in your adolescent friends now seeing the grown-up you, and vice versa. A joy, self-focused yes, and not without a cost, but on the balance a joy many people paid for with countless newsletters to their inboxes, and more membership money than any other site was earning at the time. Fact check this: how much was the New York Times site making in memberships around 1999?

Conrads' idea worked, allowing him to leave Boeing and do it full time. (As my startup clients say, he left his Clark Kent job to go be Superman.) But did he set out to make a mega-brand? Not likely. It's just that he had already found a social psychological value proposition that people paid him for (the chance to send a message to an old friend) by the time the first internet bubble burst and ad placements became available for a song. So with the cash he had, he bought some ads. Lots of ads. If you never saw a Classmates ad between, say, 1997 and 2003, you weren't on the internet. I wonder how many ad-supported ventures survived the lean years at that time because of Classmates' ad spend.

And in those years, the adoption curve for Classmates looked like it did for Facebook. For MySpace. For Friendster. For AOL.

The real question is, will Facebook's adoption curve at some point look like Classmates' does today?

Back at Classmates, we thought a lot about that. I worked with strong market researchers, actually the best empiricists I'd met outside academia. I worked with creative product developers. The graphics popped, the database was snappy. In the darkened back room during usability tests, we spun out great ideas. We aligned the site with people. Like Conrads, we dawned on things people wanted, social things, like that original ability to write an old friend.

But here we are. Our failure to persuade the Classmates leadership is just that a failure - one we share with the company that had the building blocks and the capital to become...ok why the hell didn't Classmates become Facebook?

I won't answer from a business point of view. I'll speak to what I know (and by the way, I've seen nary a page of Classmates since 2007). But in my humble opinion it comes down to these:

1. They never built a feature with random refreshing content. Psychologists have known since the 1950s that people will check something a lot if they don't know how long it will be until new reinforcing content appears (you never know when something new will appear on your Facebook feed, so you check all the time). And we know people click a lot if they don't know how many clicks it takes to see new reinforcing content (you never how many hands of Hold Em poker you have to play to win big). Nope. I saw none of that. As a result, Classmates' stickiness at this time was a few minutes per month whereas Facebooks' was over an hour.

2. The emotional burst of nostalgia, though powerful, is short lived. Psychologists have also long known about the "oldie but goodie effect." Goes like this: yes, when you are exposed to something nostalgic that you haven't seen for a long time, you do love it - you show a "spontaneous recovery" of your old associations and emotions. But following soon after is "re-extinction."  Point is, you stopped talking to the high school friends you found on Classmates once, and you'll stop talking to them a second time even faster. The main hook of the site was over quick. Draw your own conclusions about what this means for the viability of MemoryLane unless they add other hooks.

3. They failed to take it offline. The only way to stave off the re-extinction of digital-only social content (like photos) is to form new associations and feel new emotions. Seeing your thumbnail is only powerful to me because I once saw your face, heard your jokes, and suffered with you through your painful and painfully funny adolescent moments. Unless I make new memories, the thumbnail goes flat. The path to new memories within the Classmates brand was the reunion. A truly successful site would have set up an oscillation between online interaction and offline reunions, moving people back and forth from the site to the gathering in a repeatable way, all the while generating truly intersting UGC that people wanted to see and share. And for a while there, Classmates could have formed a partnership with the K-12 school system in this country by casting themselves as "trustworthy establishment" and Facebook as "unknown entity." But of course, that window closed. 

4. They never left the schoolyard. Maybe our suggestion that we do the same for churches that we did for schools was a non-starter because we were locked into a brand name everyone knew (the downside of buying all those cheap ads). No doubt, users responded to suggestion after suggestion on our surveys and interviews about what we could make with "I wouldn't come to Classmates to do that." But here it is, the new brand name, MemoryLane. Did I say churches? Well, I don't see Facebook linking the massive faith network in the US. Who is? Maybe that idea wasn't sexy enough for us thirty-somethings. But looking at it as a consultant in digitally facilitating human relations and feelings...it may be a Conrads idea.

Sadly, without this stuff, I heard people compare Classmates to a bucket with no bottom. The ads brought in a ton of folks. But the site never kept them long. Some are still there, if you take a snapshot, somewhere between "clicking the first letter of your state" and requesting they not be autorenewed, and they're still paying their hard earned cash to travel to an earlier time, but many more have and will move on.

We moved on too. I went there as a student of social media. And I graduated. So did many of those colleagues I worked with. Wandered off to other online ventures in Seattle and parts distant, hoping to fulfill the promise of the social web somewhere, for the users we always advocated for, for ourselves. Funny enough, you can't develop a network if people don't move on - you all just stay standing on the same point in the social graph. So Classmates is a good place to be from.

Truth: the weekend after I left Classmates, I got on a plane to go to my 20th reunion of the 1987 class of Loveland High School in Loveland Colorado. I was 37, exactly the same as the average age of Classmates users.

I had learned in my surveys that the most well-attended reunions have 3 events: One is a formal dinner for people who want a reason to put on a nice dress or a suit and go out to celebrate who they've become. Two is a happy hour for people who want to come out and say hello but can't afford the dinner (best held before the dinner to break the ice). Three is a picnic in a park for folks who want to show off their under-21 kids who aren't welcome in bars and ballrooms. If you fail to have one of these events, your attendance is down (this is the main metric of the success of a reunion) but worse, you alienated some people out of demographics that you would have liked to have seen there. I'm happy to say the Loveland High reunion had all 3 events.

Make no mistake: reunions are magical. And powerful. For those of you curling your lip in disgust, I read that as evidence in favor of my view (you curled your lip the first time you drank scotch and ate bleu cheese too). I know you. I used mad peer pressure to get you to fly in and appear for that class photo. I didn't give a damn who you wanted to see or not see, I wanted to see you. And all of you admitted you were glad you came.

That's because you would be hard pressed to name more stirring opportunities to measure the change in your identity over time, your increased wisdom, forbearance, persepective, and all the other things you pay for with aging, weight gain, and hair loss. And after that tense 10-year anniversary when you're still competing, as humans do, you find yourself at the 20th sincerely cheering the same "becoming" in your childhood peers that you've fought so hard for in yourself. Good on ya. You got the degree. You had a mess of kids. I am truly happy to learn this. I am happy for you. I am happy you're here.

Randy Conrads increased attendance at reunions for 20 years and in an existential way that almost makes up for the sketchy business practices done under the Classmates name after he sold it.

Classmates, like the internet in general, made space small and past present. But people want to do more than connect. They also want to mark time, mature, and make new memories. Facebook is several layers more aligned with human nature, to be sure. But if that gap between human needs (like privacy?) and their digital utilities grows too large, we'll move on from there too.

Bye Classmates. You grew. You faded. Sold some joy. Pulled some shenanigans. Don't fault us for leaving - nobody stays in school forever.  

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