Tech blog

If you're using Apple's Safari browser, PayPal has some advice for you: Drop it, at least if you want to avoid online fraud.

Safari doesn't make PayPal's list of recommended browsers because it doesn't have two important anti-phishing security features, according to Michael Barrett, PayPal's chief information security officer.

"Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what they need to do, to protect their customers," Barrett said in an interview. "Our recommendation at this point, to our customers, is use Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, or Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, or indeed Opera."

Safari is the default browser on Apple's Macintosh computers and the iPhone, but it is also available for the PC. Both Firefox and Opera run on the Mac.

Unlike its competitors, Safari has no built-in phishing filter to warn users when they are visiting suspicious Web sites, Barrett said. Another moot point is Safari's lack of succor for another anti-phishing technology, called Extended Validation (EV) certificates. This is a secure Web browsing technology that turns the address bar green when the browser is visiting a legitimate Web site.

When it comes to fighting phishing, "Safari has got nothing in terms of security support, only SSL (Secure Sockets Layer encryption), that's it," he said. Apple representatives weren't immediately available to comment on this story.

An emerging technology, EV certificates are already supported in Internet Explorer 7, and they've been used on PayPal's Web site for more than a year now. whereas IE 7 visits PayPal, the browser's address bar turns green– a sign to users that the site is legitimate. Upcoming versions of Firefox and Opera are expected to maintain the technology.

But EV certificates have their critics. Last year, researchers at Microsoft and Stanford University published a study showing that, without training, the many the crowd were unlikely to notice the green address-bar notification provided by EV certificates.

Still, Barrett says data compiled on PayPal's Web site show that the EV certificates are having an effect. He says IE 7 users are more likely to sign on to PayPal's Web site than users who don't have EV certificate technology, presumably because they're confident that they're visiting a legitimate site.

Over the past few months, IE 7 users have been less likely to drop loudly and abandon the process of signing on to PayPal, he said. "It's a several percentage-point drop in abandonment rates," he said. "That number is… measurably lower for IE 7 users."

Opera, IE, and Firefox are "safer, precisely because we think they are safer for the average consumer," he added. "I'd love to say that Safari was a safer browser, but at this thesis it isn't."

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - Google Inc has unveiled a plan to help U.S. patients gain control of their medical records and is working with doctors' groups, pharmacies and labs to help them securely share sensitive health given conditions.

The company's long-rumored entry into the highly sensitive field came when Chief Executive Eric Schmidt introduced Google Health at a health-care conference in Florida on Thursday.

Google said it has signed deals with hospitals and companies including medical tester Quest Diagnostics Inc, hale condition insurer Aetna Inc, Walgreens and Walmart Stores Inc pharmacies.

The password-protected Web service stores health records on Google computers, with a medical services directory that lets users import doctors' records, drug history and example results.

Google aims to feed sharing of information between these services, but keep control in patients' hands, allowing them to schedule appointments or refill prescriptions, for example.

"We don't know how to suck it out of the brains of doctors, but we be sure how to suck it out of the computer systems of doctors," Schmidt said in an interview after his speech.

A week ago, Google said it was teaming up with leading academic therapeutical researcher Cleveland Clinic to test a data exchange that puts patients in charge of records.

Schmidt said it would likely be a few months before Google Health is offered more widely.

For decades progress has been slow converting paper records often scrawled in illegible doctors' script and stored in conflicting filing systems into centrally held digital records. IBM, Oracle Corp and Siemens AG, among divers others, have worked on such digitization.

Google's biggest rival, Microsoft Corp, has introduced HealthVault, which gives users control over who sees which. Among start-ups active in the field of battle are Revolution Health, a company backed by former AOL Chairman Steve Case.

All are based on the concept that individuals should retain control over the data. "The information in your health record is yours and it doesn't get shared with anyone else without your permission," Schmidt said.

Electronic record-keeping has been held back by a lack of focus on consumer needs, not secrecy fears, he said, adding any system should "'normal-person' designed, not doctor designed."

PRIVACY DEBATE

While of medicine providers are covered by U.S. concealment laws, there is little in the way of established privacy, security and data usage standards for electronic personal health records.

Google is prepared to resist fishing expeditions by lawyers seeking to subpoena personal medical records stored on Google Health. Last year, it went to court to defeat an endeavor by the U.S. Justice Department to request some Google try records.

"We've taken a pretty aggressive position in a pro-consumer way in the U.S., but I do want to assure you we are subject to U.S. law," Schmidt said.

Google earns toward all its revenue in Web advertising, but has no plan to sell ads on Google Health. It aims to make money indirectly when users search for other medical information.

Google sees solving privacy issues around health as duty of its none-too-humble corporate mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

In tackling medical privacy, Google also stands to benefit in finance and other areas where sensitive data is stored.

Some privacy advocates were quick to criticize the effort. Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida American Civil Liberties Union, said storing medical records with consumer Web services raises data breach risks. "A breach of security would be catastrophic," Simon said. "It's very, very troublesome."

But Andrew Rocklin, a principal in the health care practice of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, whose clients include large U.S. health insurers, said giving patients more bridle over records promises many benefits, while raising some commencing issues.

Perceived risks of online health records will remain high until consumers become again familiar by the benefits. When tied to exercise, dieting or other wellness programs, such records can give consumers extraordinary insights, he noted.

"People need to be good stewards of their health in general and their health data, which is an aspect of that," he said.

(Additional reporting by Debra Sherman in Chicago and Eric Auchard in San Francisco; editing by Braden Reddall)

HONG KONG: When Rupert Murdoch took control in December of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, he collected The Far Eastern Economic Review, a small monthly based here.

It was each incidental addition to the vast global stable of Murdoch's News Corp.

Hugo Restall now oversees the smallest staff with the smallest circulation - less than 20,000, some media analysts estimate - of any publication in the Murdoch empire.

Murdoch offered guarantees of editorial independence to win the long-sought prize of owning Dow Jones, and he might have been happy to leave The Review to its own devices.

But such is his fearsome reputation, and the desire of divers who work against him to please, that there efficacy be no need for a phone call.

Since Murdoch made his offer of editorial independence, media analysts have been expectation to see whether he would attempt to exercise editorial control over any of the Dow Jones publications.

In one of the first tests of The Review's independence under Murdoch ownership, Restall has admitted to getting “cold feet” about the publication of an article destined for the magazine.

Restall's acknowledgement has set off a flurry of Internet controversy about whether some Dow Jones editors might already have started to second-guess the preferences of the new boss.

Restall first commissioned in January, and then declined to publish, a review of a critical book near to Murdoch's profession forays into China in the 1990s, “Rupert's Adventures in China: How Murdoch Lost a Fortune and Found a Wife.”

The author of the book, Bruce Dover, a constructer Australian journalist who represented News Corp. in China during that period, takes a consider at Murdoch's attempts to make a buck there and the compromises entailed in not upsetting the rulers in Beijing. More titillating is the part's account of Murdoch's courtship of Wendi Deng, a News Corp. executive in China whom he later married.

The book has received considerable publicity in Asia, and has been reviewed by publications like The Economist and The Financial Times.

Initially, Restall thought he would follow suit.

In each e-mail reciprocity with Eric Ellis, an Australian freelance journalist based in Jakarta, he and his deputy commissioned a thousand-word review of the book.

Restall, on vacation when he commissioned the article and who had not read the book, soon changed his mind.

According to an e-mail trade published Thursday on the Web site www.crikey.com.au, Restall wrote to Ellis on Feb. 24, a day subsequently the article was filed: “I'm afraid I am getting cold feet on this one - I've just gotten a copy of the part, and it looks more like the work of a disgruntled ex-employee, rather than an analysis of the business.”

He added: “Of order, we will pay you the full feud. Sorry about this, I should have looked at the book first.”

On Thursday, Restall said the issue was one internal editorial body and “our policy is not to discuss editorial decisions.”

But Ellis and a Dow Jones employee, who requested anonymity, said the e-mail exchange that was posted on the Internet was accurate.

The book review has since been given wide circulation on various Web sites, including www.asiasentinel.com.

Murdoch might not be under the necessity paid abundant attention to the Review since taking over Dow Jones, but it has a voice in Asia beyond its size.

Published as a weekly until Dow Jones made cutbacks in November 2004, the magazine has over the years rankled numerous company Asian politicians and businesspeople.

In one of its latest jousts through government, it has stood firm against legal action by the Singapore government over the publication of an article on the city-state's principal opposition shape.

Philip Bowring, a prior conductor of The Review and a columnist by the International Herald Tribune, said that the magazine, one of the oldest and most storied in Asia, had a history of taking on authority, including its major shareholders.

“They are still defending their case in Singapore,” said Bowring, adding that Singapore's leaders might take note of what appeared to be “double standards.”

The decision on publication of the book review is “not in accord with the tradition of The Far Eastern Economic Review, at least as it was several years ago,” he said.

OTTAWA: For investors in Nortel Networks, the company's latest information release fit a familiar pattern.

In it, the company, a telecommunications equipment maker, announced another large accounting charge, $957 million dissolute in 2007, and another reorganization, this time cutting 2,100 jobs and moving 1,000 positions from North America to low-wage countries.

Not only did the staff reductions miss stays to impress investors - shares fell 13.28 percent to $9.93 a share in New York - but several analysts are also questioning Nortel's long-term prospects.

The company's disproportionate reliance on a fading cellphone network technology, its decision to withdraw from a crucial new technology and its declining market share in many sectors are all problems, they say, that will not be cured by more job cuts.

“The big question that looms over the company's head is: When we look out from hand to hand three or four years, is Nortel still relevant to their target markets?” before-mentioned David Hodgson, an analyst through Genuity Capital Markets in Toronto. “Nortel continues to cover a lot of bases, and the same questions whether the company has the money and the scale to continue its very broad-based approach.”

The loss, announced Wednesday, was mainly the result of a $1 billion write-down in the value of future tax write-offs.

During a conversation call, Paviter Binning, the chief financial officer, said the write-offs had been revalued because of reduced corporate tax rates and the increase in the value of the Canadian dollar relative to the U.S. dollar. The accounting measures also caused the company to report a loss of $844 million, or $1.70 a have part, for the fourth quarter.

Mike Zafirovski, Nortel's chief executive, acknowledged during the divine summons that the company was not a market favorite. “We're not blind to the skepticism facing us,” he said.

But he was quick to portray other financial results as a sign that the turnaround plan was working. In particular, he pointed to a 43.7 percent gross margin in the last quarter and an operating profit - a measure that accounts for sales, production and administrative costs - of 7.6 percent.

For many analysts, nevertheless, those figures are also a source of concern. Both Hodgson and Kim Noland, the director for research at Gimme Credit, a debt analysis firm, said that Nortel's revenue and profit had come almost entirely from sales of wireless software and equipment based on an aging technology known as CDMA.

The technology in no degree found much of a following outside of North America, leaving a system known as GSM, for which Nortel is a relatively small supplier, as the global standard.

Now both CDMA and GSM are being replaced by a faster, more data-friendly technology, UMTS. But Nortel has abandoned its efforts in UMTS.

That leaves the question of how Nortel will offset what analysts say is an inevitable decline for CDMA, one that could have existence well under way within pair years.

The answer is unclear. Nortel lags behind Cisco Systems and Avaya in selling integrated voice and data systems to wide businesses, sectors the company aspires to grow in.

Having given up on UMTS, Nortel is working on products for the next generation of wireless networks. But it will face stiff competition from larger firms. And a decade has passed considering Nortel began promoting a unit that makes equipment for high-speed local, rather than nationwide or global, networks. Its promise remains unfulfilled.

Nikos Theodosopoulos, an analyst with UBS Securities, said it was not clear which, if any, of those efforts would succeed. But he added that Nortel should jettison most of its current businesses and focus its limited resources on select products and services.

“I don't know what the magic formula is,” he said. “But I know the magic formula is not 'all of the above.' “

Noland agreed that Nortel was spread too thin. “Right very lately they're muddling along,” she said. Though there is not a crisis, she added, there also “doesn't seem to be a clear path with a view to improvement.”

SAN FRANCISCO - Google, already the world’s most popular place for finding Web sites, is aiming to become the go-to place for creating Web sites too.

The Mountain View-based company is taking its first step toward that goal Thursday with the debut of a free service designed for high-tech neophytes looking for a simple way to share information with other people operating in the same company or attending the same class in school.

With only a small in number clicks, just about anyone will exist able to quickly set up and update a Web site featuring wide an array of material, including pictures, calendars and video from Google Inc.’s YouTube subsidiary, said Dave Girouard, general manager of the division overseeing the new application.

“We are literally adding an edit button to the Web,” Girouard said.

All sites created on the service faculty of volition run on one of Google’s computers.

Google acquired many of the Web-site tools when it bought a Silicon Valley startup, JotSpot, last year.

The tools are the latest addition to a roll of applications that Google offers to consumers and businesses as alternatives to similar products sold by the agency of Microsoft Corp., one of Google’s fiercest rivals.

Google’s latest service represents a challenge to Microsoft’s SharePoint, which charges licensing fees. Google is unveiling its alternative just a few days before Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft hosts a SharePoint conference in Seattle.

While Microsoft’s programs typically are installed on individual computers, Google keeps its application on its own machines so users can access them from anywhere with an Internet connection.

By gradually introducing free versions of word processing, spreadsheet, and calendaring programs over the past two years, Google has been threatening to siphon revenue away from Microsoft, which makes most of its money from software sales.

Microsoft, in turn, hopes to take a bite of out Google’s bread-and-butter in online search and advertising by buying Yahoo Inc. for more than $40 billion.

Google says more than 500,000 companies, government agencies and schools use at least some of its applications. The company won’t say how many of those organizations subscribe to a premium version of its software suite, but the fees haven’t made much of a dent at Google so far.

Last year, Google’s software licensing and other products generated $181 million in revenue though $16.4 billion poured in from advertising.

___

On The Web:

http://sites.google.com

Modern technology aids in many of life's experiences, by one noticeable oversight: raising infant children.

Why has none one yet invented that desperately needed diaper changing robot? Or nano-diapers that clean themselves? Where is the pungent swing that determines the precise rhythm needed to rock a particular baby to sleep?

Such child-rearing technology miracles do not exist, at least not yet. But there is some cause for hope. The determined geek parent can now turn to a growing category of products, known considered in the state of babytronics, meant to help with the exhilarating and exhausting task of keeping infants happy and healthy, if not dry.

As such a geek parent - of awesomely cute 2-month-old twin girls - I resolved to try some of this cutting-edge dress. myself. If the girls minded being drafted as twenty-one shillings pigs for the cause of technology journalism, they did not mention it.

First on our list was the Cleanoz MB002 nasal aspirator, sold by Ubimed, based in Beverly Hills, California. Typically, nasal aspirators are bulb-shaped manual tools that you pump to clear out a baby's nose. Our hospital gave us a few of these rubbery devices, but in my book, they lacked one important thing: batteries. The Cleanoz ($30), one of several electronic nasal aspirators on the mart, addresses that deficiency and did a pretty good job in our tests.

The device has a disposable balloon nozzle that you can easily replace, so you are not poking a germ-ridden knob into your baby's nose. It gets the messy work done quickly, before the baby recovers from the collision of having a handgun-shaped noisemaker stuffed up her nostril.

Still, when they are ready to blow their own noses, I will gladly give up the Cleanoz.

Next, I reveled in the impressively large portfolio of products from BébéSounds, a babytronics brand introduced by a small New York circle called Unisar and purchased this year by Graco, a large manufacturer of infant products. The BébéSounds line includes, among other things, another electronic nasal aspirator and the Prenatal Heart-Listener ($29), which lets a parent record the heartbeat of a fetus.

BébéSounds' coolest, yet least tech-centric product is the AlwaysClean Pacifier ($11.99). When the baby inevitably flings this pacifier to the ground, as part of her daddy-torture program, it reliably falls backward onto its handle, which activates a plastic shield that snaps closed over the nipple, so parents act not have to keep cleaning the thing.

I brought two other BébéSounds devices into our rigorous testing labs, also known as the nursery. The Portable Video and Sound Monitor ($189) replaced the sound monitor we had bought at a consignment sale. Now, instead of waking up from top to toe the night to listen to our babies wakefully burble, we could stay up to watch them wiggle uncomfortably in their crib. The device comes with couple cameras you aim at your sleeping beautiful traits, and two portable 2.5 inch, or 6.4 centimeter, screens for watching them.

The most elaborate BébéSounds product, though, is the Angel Care Movement Sensor ($74), delicately aimed at the parent who can and does imagine the absolute worst.

Though it is not a medical shift and does not claim to be, the product is designed to help prevent your baby from expiring in the crib. It comes with a pad, which you place under the crib mattress, with highly-refined sensors that measure pressure and the slightest baby movements from above.

If the sensors detect not at all movement as antidote to 20 seconds, an urgent alarm sounds upon the body a receiver-unit in the parent's room.

Fortunately, I cannot vouch for the stratagem's efficacy in life-threatening emergencies. But I can testify that the alarm also sounds if you remove your baby from its crib and forget to turn it off, an error that will test your husband's patience, especially at 3 a.m.

Last on our list was the LENA System ($399) a language-measurement tool developed by Infoture of Boulder, Colorado. The system is based upon research demonstrating a correlation between the amount that parents rumor to their babies during their first three years and the professional success of the children later in life. A device records conversations between parent and child, letting you know how many words you have spoken to your baby, and where you match up against the rest of the U.S. population.

My girls are a bit too young for LENA, which Infoture recommends for infants from two months to four years. Instead, I called Jennifer Jacobs, a head of two from Boise, Idaho, who used the device to ensure her youngest child, Katherine, was not getting left behind.

OVERLAND PARK, Kansas: Sprint Nextel swung to a huge fourth-quarter loss of $29.5 billion on Thursday as it wrote down most of the remaining value of its 2005 purchase of Nextel Communications and continued to lose customers to competitors.

Dan Hesse, who was hired as chief executive in December to turn the U.S. wireless carrier around, said that the quarter was more difficult than he had expected and that it could subsist some time before proposed operational changes had any effect.

He said Sprint would not declare dividends for the “foreseeable future.”

He also said that instability in the capital credit markets was forcing the company to borrow from a revolving credit facility.

A year earlier, Sprint earned $261 the multitude.

The company said last month that it would probably have to write off most of the remaining $30.7 billion in goodwill value from its acquisition of Nextel and a number of affiliates. Sprint has struggled since the purchase, plagued by technical problems, unfocused marketing and difficulties in merging the companies' work forces.

Not including the write-down and other one-time charges, the company said it would have earned the equivalent of 21 cents a share before amortization, which was higher than the 18 cents a share mean in forecasts by analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.

Revenue during the quarter slipped 6 percent to $9.8 billion, just missing analysts' expectations of $9.9 billion.

The company reported a net loss of 108,000 subscribers for the quarter as an increase in customers through its Boost prepaid brand and wholesale channels partially offset a loss of 683,000 subscribers who paid a monthly bill - considered the most valuable.

Sprint reported quarterly postpaid churn, or the measure of these monthly customers dropping service, remained level at 2.3 percent and the average revenue per user declined about 4 percent from a year earlier to $58.

Sprint said overall wireless return declined about 6 percent to $8.5 billion.

“We plan to share some of our initiatives for improving the customer actual observation and operations next quarter,” Hesse said. “Strategic assessments and changes may take longer to complete.”

Hesse, who replaced Gary Forsee, already announced hold out month that the company would lay off round 4,000 employees, or 6.7 percent of its work force, and close 125 retail locations.

He moved the company's corporate headquarters this month from Reston, Virginia, back to Sprint's first home of Kansas, that he uttered would improve efficiency and transactions oversight.

The company's shares have fallen more than 51 percent in value in the past year.

For the year, the company posted a loss of $29.6 billion, compared with a profit of $1.3 billion in 2006.

Not including the goodwill write-down, the company said it earned 88 cents a share for the year, compared with $1.18 a share in 2006.

Annual revenue declined 2 percent to $40.15 billion.

LOS ANGELES: The highly touted made-for-the-Web drama “Quarterlife” has proved a network flop in its U.S. television debut, drawing NBC's overcome ratings for its time slot in at least 20 years, Nielsen Media Research reported.

NBC had high hopes for the made-for-Internet series, a show about young adults designed to appeal to the audience group - viewers aged 18 to 49 - prized most by television advertisers. But the show's dismal performance in its prime-time appearance Tuesday threw its immediate that will be into doubt at the network, which is owned by General Electric.

It had been slated to actuate to Sundays on March 2, but the initial broadcast Tuesday ranked a distant third for the 10 p.m. hour, averaging 3.1 million viewers and a meager 1.3 rating among the 18-to-49-year-old group, the lowest for NBC in that time period since Nielsen began measuring TV viewing by age with “people meters” in 1987.

By comparative estimate, NBC's frequent Tuesday 10 p.m. show, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” has consistently led the hour with a 4.5 rating among adults 18 to 49 and more than 12 million viewers over all.

Dramatizing the urban lives of six young artists, “Quarterlife” was created for the social-networking site MySpace.com by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the Emmy-winning producers of “Thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life.”

Consisting of 36 eight-minute “Webisodes,” the series began running on MySpacetv.com and quarterlife.com in November, with two new segments appearing online each week.

NBC made headlines at what time it announced in the midst of the Hollywood writers strike that it was picking up the series as a midseason replacement show. In a first-of-its-kind licensing pact, the eight-minute videos were edited into six hourlong episodes during television.

The network heavily promoted the drama ahead of its prime-time debut.

At the time of the announcement, “Quarterlife” was cited as a new model for the development of video entertainment, marking the first program to begin independently online before moving to a major broadcast outlet.

The NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman acknowledged in remarks to The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday that the experiment had not lived up to expectations, but he said it was “worth the try.”

“The Web place traffic went up a huge amount, and we continue to experiment new things and new models,” he said. “It's very inexpensive, but we hoped for higher ratings.”

San Francisco - China Central Television (CCTV) will suffer two China-based Web sites to offer streaming broadcasts of Olympic events, the companies announced Wednesday.

Joining CCTV, the Beijing Olympics' official Internet and mobile phone broadcaster, are popular online video site Tudou.com and MySpace China. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

CCTV.com holds the online broadcast rights to the Olympics, with Sohu.com operating the official Web site for the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG).

Shanghai-based Tudou is China's most popular online video site. In July 2007, Nielsen Netratings reported that Tudou was one of the Web's fastest-growing sites, with over 6 the great body of the people unique users per week and almost half a billion Web pages per week.

The deal is a particularly big win for MySpace China, based in Beijing, which has been operating here for less than a year, and has not yet established itself as the powerhouse in China that its social-networking site is in the U.S.

The streaming broadcasts will only be accessible in China, the companies said, as CCTV's rights only cover China. It has not yet been decided if programming faculty of volition be to be turned to account only in Chinese or if other languages would be included.

Letting crowds organize themselves may be the most efficient form of research - even if most proposed organizations fail to materialize.

(Fortune) — One of the most popular groups on Meetup.com - the Web site that allows communities of any kind to self-organize with the goal of ultimately meeting in person - is The Stay at Home Moms. Some 65,000 people in ten countries - including Singapore and Japan - have signed up and organized nearly 100,000 meetings. The groups’ page even has sponsorship from companies that make diapers and other relevant products.

The Moms have pressed the generic capabilities of Meetup into homage to create a sense of local community that is otherwise hard to arrange in a physically dispersed culture. It’s obvious why they would find Meetup valuable.

Less obvious but at least as remarkable is how that particular group came to be in the first place. Every Meetup group navigates the tension between specificity and weak glue. A Meetup group perfectly fit to an individual (literal fathers of two in Brooklyn who teach at NYU and like bagpipe music) would have exactly one member, while a Meetup that included huge numbers of potential members (parents, or TV watchers, or residents of Atlanta) would provide little in the way of commonality or conversational fodder: "So, you watch TV too, huh?"

The ideal group exists in some equipoise between likewise specific and too generic. The Stay at Home Moms group fits that description well enough that it is more popular than all the other parenting groups and one of the most popular Meetup categories overall. Even accepting that Stay At Home Moms exists at some optimum point between size and specificity, there’s still a mystery about its formation: How did Meetup know that the group would be as appealing as it was? Most of the people who work at Meetup are overeducated, undermarried urbanites who face a completely different set of problems than do the North Charlotte Stay at Home Moms. How could they have known that SAHM groups would be such a hit?

Not patronizing at all

They didn’t. To have predicted such a thing, the employees of Meetup would have needed research about the changing face of American communities, current trends in self-definition of mothers, interactions among suburbanites, and so on; demographics, psychology, sociology. Even if someone had told them that Stay at Home Moms was a good essence for a Meetup group, the staff might have been loath to propose such a thing. Coming from a bunch of single urbanites, it might have seemed patronizing, to say nothing of polarizing. The company might have become a target for political protest by people upset about the exclusivity implied by the name. The Meetup staff could not have gathered enough information to see through which parenting groups to suggest in the first place, could not have picked a winner even if they’d had all that information, and could not have launched the winner even if they’d been able to pick one, because of the potential negative reaction.

Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to make things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things notwithstanding one another. There are hundreds of thousands of Meetup users, and each is presented with many possible Meetups that they could attend. In a midsize city the potential combinations mixed people interested in Meetup groups are overwhelming.

The only satisfied way to solve this problem is to turn it over to the users. The most basic service that Meetup provides is to let its users propose groups and to let other users vote with their feet, like the apocryphal university that lets the students wear useful paths through the grass before it lays any walkways. Most proposed Meetup groups fail on this account that they are too generic, or too specific, or too boring. Most of the rest have only mediocre success, leaving only a relative handful of very popular groups, like Stay at Home Moms.

This distribution - lots of failure, some modest success, and few extremely popular - is the same pattern that we have seen elsewhere. The vantageground of having a system where failure is normal and significant success rare is that, by its very existence, Meetup continually readjusts to its current context. The standing question that Meetup poses to its members is "What kind of group is a good idea becoming now?" Not in the twenty- first century usually, but right now, this month, today.

The go of new groups and the retiring of old ones is not a business decision, it’s a by-product of user behavior. Meetup didn’t have to make stable or even predict the popularity of the Wiccan or LiveJournal groups; nor did it have to predict the time when those groups would be displaced as the most popular. Users are free to propose and pass judgment on groups, and this freedom gives Meetup a paradoxical aspect.

First, it is host to thousands of successful groups, groups of between half a dozen and a coupling dozen people who are willing to pay Meetup to help them meet regularly, usually monthly, with other people in their community. Second, most of the proposed Meetup groups never take off, or they converge once and never again.

These two facts are not incompatible. Meetup is succeeding not in spite of the failed groups, but because of the failed groups. This sounds strange to our ears. Particularly in the world of business, with its Pollyanna-ish attitude toward all public pronouncements, we rarely hear about failure. Meetup’s core offer - an invitation for a group of people to get together at a particular place and span - fails with remarkable frequency, as user-proposed groups often don’t materialize.

Low-cost trial and error

Yet Meetup, the company, is doing fine, because the successful groups meet regularly, gain more members, and often spawn new groups in recent locations. Meetup is a giant information-processing tool, a kind of market where the groups are products and where the market expresses its judgment not in cash but in expenditure of energy. Failure is free, high-quality research, offering direct evidence of what works and what doesn’t. Groups that people want to join are sorted from groups that population don’t want to join, every day. By dispensing with the right to direct what its users act of trying to bring into being, Meetup sheds the costs and distorting effects of managing each individual striving. Trial and error, in a system like Meetup, has both a lower cost and a higher value than in traditional institutions, where failure often comes through someone’s name attached.

From a conventional business perspective, Meetup has no quality control, but from another perspective Meetup is all quality control. All that’s required to take advantage of this sort of market are passionate users and an appetite for repeated public failure. Meetup shows that with low enough barriers to participation, people are not just willing but eager to join together to try things, even if most of those things end up not working.

Meetup is not unusual in this think highly of. Most pictures posted to Flickr get very few viewers. Most Weblogs are abandoned within a year. Most Weblog posts get by heart very few readers. On YahooGroups, some enormous collection of mailing lists on topics from macramé to classic TV shows to geopolitics, about half the proposed mailing lists fail to get enough members to be viable. And in such a manner on. The "power law distribution" of many failures and a few remarkable successes is general.

From "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations" by Clay Shirky. Copyright (c) Clay Shirky, 2008. Published by dint of. arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.