Cookies are for Closers: Oren Hurvitz’s Blog

The good people at Atlassian are running an incredible offer: get full versions of Confluence (a wiki) and Jira (a bug tracker) for $5 each, for up to 5 users. These are outstanding products that normally cost $1200 each (but those versions support more users). The offer is valid only until April 24, so act now, while supplies last! At my company we bought both Confluence and Jira, and they’re absolutely indispensable.

I was surprised by this promotion because Confluence and Jira are not second-tier products: they’re leaders in their class. I’m a Wiki fanatic, and a few years ago I performed a comprehensive review of all the Wiki products I could find (about 20). Two wikis were head and shoulders above the competition: Confluence and JotSpot. They both had a very long list of features, such as rich-text editing, comprehensive security, good collaboration tools, etc. Both were highly polished: the features were complete and easy to use. The biggest difference between them was that Confluence was meant to be installed on the user’s server whereas JotSpot was hosted. I prefer to have the Wiki installed on my own server, for fast access from within the company’s LAN, so I chose Confluence. (Nowadays there’s also a hosted version of Confluence, if you’re one of Those People who value access over speed.)

Some time after my Great Wiki Evaluation JotSpot was acquired by Google and shut down, to reappear later as Google Sites. Google Sites is far simpler than JotSpot had been, which means it’s not as feature-rich and no longer in the same class as Confluence and other leading Wikis. Google have turned a Harley Davidson into a pink bicycle with training wheels, and that’s the end of JotSpot.

I also recommend Jira, although to a lesser extent than Confluence. Jira is very powerful and customizable, but I find its workflow to be rather cumbersome. I had used FogBugz before Jira, and it was a smoother experience. They’re both much better than open-source products such as Bugzilla and Trac, however (both of which I have also used).

Preemptive disclaimer: I’m not getting anything from Atlassian for this post; I just really, really like Confluence, and I want to spread the word.

My brother recently started working at SportVU, a company that uses video analysis to track the positions of players in live sport events. It provides real-time statistics about the players’ average speed, distance covered, etc.

We were watching a basketball match tonight between Maccabi Tel-Aviv (Israel) and Barcelona (Spain). During the first quarter, seven Spanish demonstrators ran into the court waving Palestinian flags to protest Israel’s recent Gaza offensive. My brother wasn’t paying attention at the moment, so I pointed out to him that there’s a real-time political demonstration taking place before his eyes. His immediate comment: “this will wreak havoc with the tracking”.

(Photo by themattharris)

Snowclones

A snowclone is a sentence template that can be used to construct many similar phrases. For example, the snowclone “X is the new Y” has been used extensively, e.g.: “White is the new black”, “40 is the new 30″, and “Snowclone is the new Cliché”.

My favorite snowclone is “In Soviet Russia, X Y’s You”. I find these jokes endlessly amusing, and it is my earnest belief that everyone else does, too. For example:

My mom: I’m going to program the VCR to record the news.
Me: In Soviet Russia, VCRs program you!

Neighbor: This bag? It’s dog food.
Me: In Soviet Russia, dogs feed you!

Coworker: Oren, can you help me debug this program? Something’s not right.
Me: In Soviet Russia, programs debug you!
Coworker: Never mind, I’ll ask Larry.

A snowclone is born

Here in Israel a new snowclone was recently coined, courtesy of our upcoming elections. Israel’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, is one of the contenders in the elections but trails behind two more popular politicians. Barak is considered smart and capable, but he’s also viewed as calculating and aloof, and he has a reputation for discarding his allies when he doesn’t need them anymore. Barak’s campaign managers decided to tackle this reputation with a series of ads that, unusually for Israeli politicians, poke fun at the candidate.

The ad campaign began with huge outdoor signs that listed Barak’s well-known flaws: “Not a pal”, “Not trendy”, “Not nice”.

Not a pal

After a few days the signs were replaced. In the new signs, the snowclone was completed: “Not a pal. A leader”.

Not a pal. A leader.

"Not trendy. A leader."; "Not likeable. A leader."

The snowclone spreads

The ad campaign was wildly successful in capturing the public’s attention. Political analysts self-importantly explained how the ads were either clever, or self-defeating. Advertising executives debated whether mentioning a product’s negative attributes is a good idea. Satiric shows riffed on the ad campaign with glee. But the meme didn’t remain confined to the context of Ehud Barak’s election campaign. The phrase “Not X. Y” became instantly recognizable and was adapted to every possible context.

One internet poster, in a forum for copywriters, said that the ad campaign makes Ehud Barak seem like a historical figure that was also known for being a strong leader:

Not nice. Not likeable. Not a pal. A leader.

Predictably, sports editors were quick to seize on the snowclone to spice up their stories. For example, one article described a basketball team’s new and tough-minded coach as “Not a pal. A coach”:

Not a pal. A coach.

World-affairs stories were next. This story describes Putin’s foray into painting, which contrasts with his well-known tough image. The title is “Not a hunter, a painter: Vladimir Putin’s gentle side”.

Not a hunter. A painter.

Ubiquity

Yesterday the snowclone scored a major coupe, which cements its leading position in Israeli culture. Here is the front page of yesterday’s Yedioth Ahronoth, the most widely-read newspaper in Israel. It prominently displays a teaser for an interview with Gabi Ashkenazi, the current CJCS (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), with the following title: “Not a pal. CJCS.”

Not a pal. CJCS.

In the same issue of Yedioth Ahronoth, there was a story in the entertainment section about the difficulty of having famous actors portray characters that are different from their well-known public image. The story mentioned Brad Pitt’s performance in his new movie, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where he portrays an old man for a large part of the movie. The accompanying photo had the following caption: “Not an icon. An actor.”

Not an icon. An actor.

Two mentions in one issue, including on the front page. Truly, the snowclone has arrived.

The snowclone has also spread to informal communications. The residents of one apartment building had a problem: people were putting trash in a decorative column near the building’s entrance. So they put up a sign: “Not an ashtray. Not a trash can.” Some wit added in handwriting: “A leader”.

Not an ashtray. Not a trash can. A leader.

Google have announced that they’ll reduce the amount of time that they keep individually-identifiable information about searches from 18 months to 9 months. I would like to think that my previous post on this topic played a small part in this decision, but it looks like it was mostly due to pressure from the European Union.

In that post, I showed a request that I had sent to Google, asking them to reduce the amount of time they keep private data to just one month. I asked everyone who read the post to send a similar request to Google, and judging from the comments some people did so. For the record, I did receive a reply from Google, but it was just a standard email that didn’t actually address my points: it just reiterated their position on data retention. In fine Google tradition, it would appear that no human was involved in sending that response.

Although I would like to see Google reduce the retention period further, to one month, this is a big step in the right direction. Google deserves credit for listening to the public and changing their practices. It is therefore unfortunate that they chose to pepper this announcement with vague threats:

• “Back in March 2007, Google became the first leading search engine to announce a policy to anonymize our search server logs in the interests of privacy. [...] Although that was good for privacy, it was a difficult decision because the routine server log data we collect has always been a critical ingredient of innovation.”
• “When we began anonymizing after 18 months, we knew it meant sacrifices in future innovations in all of these areas [search quality, security, fighting fraud and reducing spam]. We believed further reducing the period before anonymizing would degrade the utility of the data too much and outweigh the incremental privacy benefit for users.”
• “While we’re glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we’re also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data.”

What on earth could they mean?

Translation #1: “Ok world, you win, we’ll keep the data for less time. But you’re going to be sorry!”

Translation #2: “We’ve now reduced our retention period as far as humanly possible, and then some. Please don’t make us reduce it any more!”

Google are keeping this discussion (of how long to keep the data) at a superficial level: they throw a number (”18 months”), the European Union throws a number (”6 months”?), I throw a number (”1 month”). You, too, can become a highly respected privacy advocate by coming up with your own number (that no one else has claimed yet) and writing about it!

A more substantive discussion would require Google to reveal some of their cards: how much of a benefit to fraud protection do they derive from keeping this data for 9 months (vs. a shorter length of time)? How do 9 months of individually-identifiable information help them improve their algorithms vs. 1 month of such information, especially given that they will always have an unlimited amount of anonymized data?

Of course, Google will never reveal this information because it would hurt their competitive position. But an experienced programmer, well-versed in the art, can make some reasonable guesses.

Individually-identifiable information is most important for security, fraud prevention, and fighting spam. But since these are time-sensitive tasks, the information quickly loses its value. I believe that the residual value of this information is close to zero after a few weeks have passed.

The other use for this data, improving search quality, can be handled with anonymized data for the most part. One example that Google commonly give is their automatic spell checker. But they don’t need individually-identifiable information in order to figure out that people who search for “brittaney” really mean “britney”. Yes, I can envision some types of search quality improvements that would benefit from studying individually-identifiable information, but they are a minority, and Google can learn how to do that while keeping data for a shorter period of time. I therefore stand by my position that 1 month of private data would strike the right balance between privacy and security/fraud prevention/spam detection/search quality.

(Photo by lesprit_descalier)