I picked up a few new books from the MIT Press bookstore and will be sharing my thoughts and impressions of them as I finish them.

First in the queue this weekend was The Smart Swarm: How Understanding Flocks, Schools, and Colonies Can Make Us Better at Communicating, Decision Making, and Getting Things Done.

Thanks to the subtitle, you’ve got a good grasp of the book’s premise. The author, Peter Miller, is senior editor of National Geographic, and wrote the book very much like a solid long read from the publication. The only thing missing was the vivid photography.

Overall, I enjoyed this book and how Peter weaved together various research findings from the study of ants, bees, starlings, and fish. As I read the book, it triggered insights into the Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street movements, while also making me realize what’s been driving behaviors I’ve seen come from people using online and mobile technologies. Anyone wanting to improve what they’re doing to mobilize people will benefit from these insights, too.

Here is a collection of notes I took while reading this 269-page book:

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Google Forms are great: they’re dead simple to build, and they can be accessed on the web via Google and (through the use of <embed> code) any other website as well.  Support for email publishing is great, and Google Forms work seamlessly with Google Docs spreadsheets.  It’s been my experience that within small and mid-sized businesses that are already using Google Apps, the internal use of Google forms has become routine.

What’s interesting, though, is that you tend to see them being used much less often out there in the wilds of the public internet.

That’s because Google Forms have one major weakness: unlike within the Google Apps ecosystem, public submissions are completely anonymous – so there’s no way check against users submitting multiple responses to the same form.  Granted, it’s not an easy technical problem: browser cookies are one option, but users can always delete them. Comparing the IP address of each submission against those of previous submissions?  That’s not a perfect solution either: consumer ISPs typically issue dynamic IP addresses, multiple legitimate users could be sharing the same internet connection, and lastly, there are, as always, privacy concerns.

And that’s just the technical side of the issue – from a PR perspective, of course Google has to be very careful about being perceived as being in the business of anything remotely resembling the tracking of users out there on the public web.  Still, it’s hard to imagine why Google hasn’t yet implemented a transparent, user opt-in system to prevent multiple public Google Forms submissions (even if it might reduce the number or submissions).

In the meantime, for all the <embed> code and URL access, Google Forms is essentially crippled as a public web service.

OK, so that’s the web – what about Google Forms sent via email to a private finite set of known respondents?  Here, the privacy issues (both real and perceived) are much reduced – and technically speaking, identifying data could easily and securely be embedded within the ‘Submit’ link contained within each email – but yet, even privately emailed Google Forms responses are completely anonymous (and therefore uncontrolled) as well.  As a result, a Google Forms email survey subject could ‘game the system’ by clicking on the ‘Submit’ link in their single email any number of times.

Conclusion   As a public web service, Google Forms has great potential – but addressing the unique/multiple submission issue would involve technical challenges, privacy concerns, and a potential for third party misuse that are clearly beyond Google’s comfort level.  As a result, any serious use of Google Forms remains limited to within the Google Apps platform.

Sure, a nod has been made towards the public use of the service (Google URLs, <embed> codes, email distribution) – but it seems that Google’s comfortable with letting Google Forms remain merely a Google Apps value-add.

In the meantime, here’s a completely anonymous (and therefore completely meaningless!) Google Forms survey for you.

Vote early, vote often!

My friend and fellow disruptor, Brian Reich, has written a very important book, Shift and Reset, which is a MUST READ for anyone who wants to lead an organization in this hyper-connected age.

You can get a flavor for what his book has to offer by viewing these slides he put together outlining 12 Big Ideas for 2012.  And be sure to buy the book – it makes a great holiday gift to yourself or someone you know.

Briefly and simply, Facebook Timeline is amazing!

What launched globally this week, Facebook now affords anyone to post one’s complete life stream in chronological order. With that the ueber-popular social network introduces a powerful new form to feed back and forward one’s entire live story in one fell swoop.

Think your teenage 1978 Miss America picks alongside your favorite cheesy 80s movie flicks side by side your current day Philip Glass CD collection. All neatly timelined in chronological order and interspersed with plenty *foursquared* bars and clubs revealing exactly when, where and who you’ve been hanging out with over the years.

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I’ll admit it: I’ve never uploaded a video to YouTube, I’ve never subscribed to a YouTube Channel, I’ve never (ok hardly ever) used it to discover video (vimeo is more to my taste for long-tail/user-generated online video).  In short, I was never a big YouTube user  (it turns out YouTube is a big Brian Ales user, but that’s another story).

Then a few days ago, I received an email from Google regarding my seldom-used YouTube account:  I had until December 20th to log on and upgrade to the new YouTube, or my account would be deleted.

Deleted?  That’s one aggressive upgrade policy.  But when das Google sends you an email with a link to click on, you click on it, right?

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#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:

Leaders in Port-au-Prince are hosting the #OpenHaiti Camp on Monday and welcome your online attendance to help them define a Project Worth Doing using open technology.

A More Detailed Exploration:

During my recent trip to Haiti, our group had the opportunity to meet with the organizers of this coming Monday’s #OpenHaiti Camp. This ideas came out of the recent TEDxPortauPrince event and will be hosted at the same venue, EPIH.

Do you have an interest in open technology and open systems? Can you spare 15-30 minutes or more to join in via Twitter and their wiki?  Be sure to RSVP on their Eventbrite page.

Here’s the full event description from the organizers:

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I made this list over on Foursquare to help folks who are visiting and want to have an easy-to-follow plan. This is inspired by the number of times friends and family from my hometown upstate have done one of the day-trip-to-the-city packages, and I’ve taken them around. There’s a million other things to add (taking suggestions in the comments!), but this generally works for the timeframe allotted.

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It’s interesting how online banking in Germany differs from online banking in the US…

Arguably, they’ve been at this electronic banking thing over here longer than we have in the states – in fact, the routine writing of personal checks ended in Germany sometime well before the end of the last century.  But while the move away from paper has progressed much further here, funnily enough you can’t do any personal online banking at all in Germany without one very important sheet of paper: a TAN list.

A TAN list is a numbered list of unique codes (usually 50 per sheet).  Each time you make a transaction online, your bank’s website prompts you for a random code from the list (i.e. “Please enter code number 43“).  The idea is not only to present the user with an additional authentication challenge – a simple “What is your first pet’s name?” type of question  accomplishes that – but to also make that additional challenge unique to the transaction.

Why is a transaction-specific authentication challenge important?  It’s a way way to fight keystroke logging software – malicious code capable of quietly recording each and every keystroke you type (including, of course, passwords).  Until recently, my US bank had been addressing the key logging issue a bit differently, requiring that I enter an additional “Security Key” by clicking on the keys of a virtual onscreen keyboard.  That avoided the physical keyboard (and thus key-logging), but the problem remained that my single Security Key was static rather than unique to each transaction.  As a consequence, if just one of my transactions was overseen (or screen-recorded), I could still be compromised.

…which is why they just changed over to the system shown below:

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It was my birthday this weekend. Thanks everyone for your kind and warm wishes.

Turns out, it was actually my first truly Facebook-centric celebration – a social media-powered birthday if you will.

This might not necessarily be anything new to you, but I had never had a birthday were Facebook wall posts took center stage.

Be that personal calls, emails, or postcards arriving in the mail (remember those?), wall posts from Facebook friends way outnumbered any other forms of traditional greetings I received this time around.

From New York to Berlin back to LA, friends apparently pay notice to Facebook’s able birthday alert system. True to social media’s promise, incoming wall posts even made for a bit of a reunion with some of the folks I hadn’t been in touch with in years.

Old fashioned me, I did respond to each and every post. Not even sure if that’s the proper etiquette and instead a single *bulk* mille grazie reply post would have done?

Who knows? Despite its success – social media is still relatively new. So is Facebook’s personal wall concept. (Hey, my car is older than that). And as the social powerhouse continues to introduce new features and capabilities, rules around Facebook usage will likely stay equally in flux.

So, let’s see what shape and form Facebook will take in years to come, as it continues to grow into what seems to have already turned into our central e-greetings hub.