Geek Gestalt

Beth Noveck is deputy chief technology officer for the Obama administration. Her path to that role began with putting together the first academic conference on virtual worlds and led her to create what may be the first open social networking project in American government history, a re-working of the U.S. patent review process known as peer-to-patent.

(Credit: Flickr user Joi Ito)

Editor's note: This is the second in a series of articles discussing how people in the tech industry are working with or around federal and state governments.

Can you chart a logical path from a 2003 academic conference on the legal issues surrounding virtual worlds and online games to Barack Obama's first executive action as president?

Beth Noveck can.

If you're not familiar with her--and few outside her specific professional and social circles would be--Noveck, a 38-year-old lawyer originally from Toms River, N.J., is Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government.

Precisely what "open government" means probably depends on whom you ask. But in her official role in the current presidential administration, Noveck framed it as an attempt to make our federal institutions embrace technology in a bid to share information with the public.

"Open government is the effort to create government institutions that are more transparent," Noveck explained, "that work more in the open and that provide information more readily online and in real time--and that are also more participatory."

On January 21, as many in Washington, D.C. were still shaking off hangovers from the inaugural parties the night before, Obama, in his first official action as president, signed the Memorandum on Transparency and Open government, a short document that declared, "We shall work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government."

Noveck (see video below) was a principal contributor to the memorandum, and the first member of the Obama-Biden transition's Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform team, which advised the president-elect on ways to incorporate technology into his larger reform goals. So one could say that the new president's adoption of these concepts was a very high-profile validation of years of Noveck's work on a wide range of issues revolving around technology policy and using technology to help craft policy.

Indeed, her work over the years has won her not just an office in the White House, but the professional admiration and praise of some of the biggest names in technology.

"With a compelling blend of high theory and practical know-how," Google CEO Eric Schmidt wrote in a back-cover review of her 2009 book, "Wiki Government," "Beth Noveck explains how political institutions can directly engage the public to solve complex problems and create a better democracy."

Or, as former Xerox chief scientist John Seely Brown put it in talking about the "constitution" of new technological systems, Noveck "has a very long history of being one of the most advanced thinkers on how...you change institutions to make a big difference."

State of Play
Noveck earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard University and then both a law degree from Yale Law School and a doctoral degree from the University of Innsbruck. Throw in a fellowship at Oxford and it's easy to see that she was headed toward a career in academia. While she worked for a time as a telecommunications and Internet attorney, she eventually settled into a position on the faculty of New York Law School.

It was there that Noveck first began attracting public attention. In 2003, not long after the virtual worlds Second Life and There.com launched, and as massively multiplayer online games like Everquest were becoming established in the mainstream, Noveck put together the first State of Play conference as a place to talk about whether these relatively new digital fun houses might actually be used to help change the world.

"My supposition is that virtual worlds are going to be the best training ground for teaching the practices of democracy, not simply simulations that passively demonstrate something," Noveck said at the time. "They offer a playground for complex social interactions and collaborative decision making, according to a set of rules defined by the game space."

It might have been tempting to laugh, but Noveck's brainchild attracted lawyers and academics from some of the best schools in the country, eager to talk about what they saw as one of the newest and most exciting fields of study.

After all, outside of a few research papers and articles, almost no one had ever bothered to put any real thought into the idea that virtual worlds could foster real society, and all the legal, financial, intellectual, and social opportunities and problems that come along with that.

"It was the first conference that took virtual worlds seriously," said Dan Hunter, today a New York Law School legal studies professor, but back then at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "It felt like the Woodstock moment for all these people and...a catalyst for people to start writing about it and for people like me to start looking at the legal and governance side of it."

Added Hunter, Noveck "managed to realize what no one else had (understood) all that clearly, that there was an opportunity to bring people together, and that there was a nascent movement there....(That) was kind of characteristic of her. She's really fast at picking up on movements and ideas people can come together around."

Peer to patent
For Noveck, being the prime instigator of a burgeoning intellectual field of study was a career boost. But it was likely another big move of hers that got her to the big time.

In 2005, still at New York Law School and still running State of Play, she began thinking about a different, though related, set of issues.

In her Introduction to Intellectual Property course, she put students through a grueling look at the American patent law process. One glaring hole, she knew, was that while the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office employs thousands of trained examiners, few are versed in the cutting edge of technology and scientific research.

"(An examiner) does not necessarily have a Ph.D. in science, and there is little opportunity on the job for continuing education," Noveck wrote in "Wiki Government." "As an expert in patent examination, she is not and is not expected to be a master of all areas of innovation."

This problem clearly bothered Noveck, and it was partly responsible for a huge backlog causing lengthy delays in the patent review process.

Inspired, Noveck crafted a blog post, Peer- to-Patent: A Modest Proposal, in which she argued forcefully that the patent review system was woefully broken and that if social software--a fairly new concept in 2005--was applied to the process, it could make the system work better. Wouldn't it be better for countless experts to weigh in on applications rather than a single examiner, she argued?

The idea, like so many others born in blog posts, might have died there. But, alerted to her groundbreaking idea, a top IBM intellectual property attorney contacted her and asked to talk. This was no small development. IBM is the Patent Office's single biggest client, receiving more than 3,000 patents a year. If Big Blue thought there was something to her idea, she had found the right partner.

A little IBM grant money later, Noveck found herself pursuing the project and, she wrote in her book, "running the government's first open social networking project."

Other corporate titans followed IBM's lead: First Microsoft, then Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, and others. Each offered to submit their patents applications through Peer-to-Patent, and to provide funding. On June 15, 2007, Peer-to-Patent went live as an official U.S. Patent Office pilot project.

Now, the Patent Office is studying the pilot's results. And while it's not clear what the outcome will be, it is certain that Noveck continues to have friends in the right places, in this case, the new director of the Patent Office, David Kappos, who had served as the chair of the steering committee for Peer-to-Patent.

Open Government
As someone with a core belief--and the record to prove it--that technology can help re-shape government, Noveck decided to get involved in the 2008 presidential election as a very early volunteer for the Barack Obama campaign. Through a friend, Seth Harris, who was helping the campaign on labor and employment and disabilities issues--and who is now the deputy secretary of labor--Noveck found herself in a position, and with the access, to apply her unique set of skills.

"He knew that I knew a lot about technology and technology in government, in particular," Noveck recalled, "and helped to make the introduction so that I could share (that) expertise both on the issue of how to use technology in the campaign...and also how we think about technology and governance and the open government work that we are doing now to help shape that agenda."

Noveck speaking with Tim O'Reilly at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

(Credit: O'Reilly Conferences)

Clearly, her efforts were appreciated--and rewarded. And the rest is history.

On December 8, 2009, the Obama administration's chief information officer, Vivek Kundra and chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, held a live Web cast to formally announce out the Open Government directive. Stemming from the president's January 21 executive action, the directive spelled out the administration's philosophy on achieving openness, transparency and collaboration.

It called for, among other things, each federal agency making publicly available, within 45 days, three "high-value" data sets; that within 60 days, the White House will launch an online dashboard intended to hold each agency accountable for the contents of the directive; and that within 120 days, each agency will create its own open government plan geared toward meeting the directive's philosophies.

Examples of projects the administration hopes for that are already in the works are an Army program under which its personnel can use wikis to collaboratively recraft the service's field manuals, and a Federal Aviation Administration program which made flight departure data publicly available, enabling a member of the public to build an iPhone app that lets people see the most accurate departure and arrival information.

Though many people worked on the directive, Kundra and Chopra named, and praised, only one: Noveck. To observers of the administration's open government efforts, this doubtless came as no surprise.

"It's clear that they have very firm intentions and that the administration does have a commitment to making very fundamental changes," said John Wonderlich, the policy director at the watchdog organization the Sunlight Foundation. "One of the ways we can see their commitment is that they have brought on someone like Beth to serve as a central point of contact for transparency issues."

Wonderlich also pointed to Noveck's Peer-to-Patent work as proof of her understanding of how to incorporate technology and wide public involvement in at least attempting to make government work better for the people at large.

Out-of-the-Beltway thinking to the Beltway
One reason she may be succeeding in government is that she's seen to be bringing new thinking to stodgy Washington.

"The deal is that she's bringing this...out-of-the-Beltway thinking to the Beltway," said Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who has worked with Noveck since Obama took office on open government issues involving the federal Veterans Administration. "She's one of the hubs of this, people who see how things work in Washington and see how things work in Silicon Valley, and bringing the best of both."

So how does all her work tie together? For Noveck, it begins with the evolution of three-dimensional visual technologies and the question of how to apply technological innovations for the greater public good.

"State of Play was always intended to be a look at whatever the latest tools are that help us to understand how we can collaborate and work together in a peaceful fashion," Noveck said. "And that's really the essence of what our political institutions do: create vehicles for us to work together to solve collective public problems....And for me, it's a very direct path from that set of ideas, that informed the creation of those conferences, to the development of the Peer-to-Patent platform for getting people involved in the patent process, to now, creating a national agenda on open government, and trying to bring together the technology worlds and the world of government institutions to improve the way we make decisions for all of our benefit."

On Tuesday morning, the Obama administration formally unveiled its Open Government directive, an effort aimed at weaving the philosophies of openness, transparency and participation into the DNA of the federal government and its agencies.

That directive comes as a direct result of President Barack Obama's first executive action, on January 21, only hours after the hoopla from his inaugural parade and parties had died down, when the new chief executive issued the so-called Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government.

Beth Noveck, director of the Obama administration's open-government efforts

(Credit: New York Law School)

That document, which began, "My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government," was a forceful opening move by the new president, and one intended to make good on his campaign call for reform and openness.

For Beth Noveck, Obama's deputy chief technology officer for open government and a principal contributor to both the original Open Government memo and Tuesday's formal directive, this is more than just a chance to watch the new administration attempt to reverse decades of ingrained government reticence at letting the public get too close to policy discussions. It is also a chance to take a stab at changing the world.

Noveck, who for years has been a faculty member at New York Law School, had begun volunteering for the Obama campaign in early 2007, offering up her expertise in technology policy and in how to use technology to make policy. And when Obama won the 2008 presidential election, she quickly became the first member of what was known as the Technology, Innovation and Government Reform team, which was focused on thinking about how to actually bring about open government.

She's an accomplished law professor, and someone who gained some notoriety as the organizer of the State of Play conferences, which examined the legal, social, and intellectual issues surrounding virtual worlds and online games. But Noveck may have best secured her place in the Obama campaign and, later, the administration, with her groundbreaking work on the Peer to Patent project. That effort--which began in 2005 and became the subject of Noveck's 2009 book, "Wiki Government"--was aimed at applying the expertise of individual members of the public to the vastly overworked U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Today, Noveck is the director of the administration's open-government efforts, and was the one person that the administration's Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra called out by name during their Tuesday event to unveil the directive. Last week, she spoke with CNET about that role, about what her major goals are while in Washington, and about why transparency, collaboration and participation are so important to government working better for the American people.

Q: Describe, in your own words, what Open Government is, and what the administration's goals are for it?
Beth Noveck: Open Government is the effort to create government institutions that are more transparent--that work more in the open and that provide information more readily online and in real time--and that are also more participatory, engaging people in how government makes decisions and policies, earlier in the process, and with the benefit of input from more and more widespread stakeholders, not just people in Washington. And the role of government becomes more collaborative, working together across government institutions, and then across levels of government.

This is something that is pretty much possible today because of the Internet, correct?
Noveck: Absolutely. There have been efforts in every generation to bring about government reform, to create government that works better and more efficiently. But what's really a sea change today is that technology is making available this kind of open collaboration that we've never had before. Now we can get more information up as close to real time as possible and make it available not just on the Internet, but make it available so people can download it, look at that data, mash up that data, and derive greater meaning from it, and hopefully also, hold government more accountable as a result.

What makes you think that the public is ready for this kind of opportunity?
Noveck: Previously, you had only a few ways in which you could engage with government. You could vote in an election. Maybe you could write a comment in response to a rule that a federal agency might put out, like what's the appropriate fuel efficiency for trucks. You could write a letter to your Congressman. Now what we see is the opportunity to do things like get involved in a policy forum, not just by writing a comment that you have to mail to a federal agency in Washington, but by much more easily and quickly responding to a discussion about information technology in health care, and electronic health care records on a Health and Human Services Department blog. You may, for example, have technical skills and take some of the data that's being made available on Data.gov, like the flight record data that the FAA is putting out, and make an iPhone app that allows consumers to track when flights are on time. Which someone did.

The process you're in is not finished yet. What have you achieved so far with the Open Government initiative?
Noveck: We're by no means finished. And what we've been able to achieve is to transition from something that was the work of a handful of White House offices to something that is really the work of every single official across the government. Now, we are moving towards an open-government directive, which will instruct every government agency to be more transparent, participatory, and collaborative according to these specific milestones and instructions. And what we're seeing is that across the government, every department and agency has begun already to undertake initiatives to put more data up online, to begin to consult the public in new ways and to get the public engaged in policymaking in new ways, to use new technology to undertake collaboration, and competitions, and initiatives like, for example, Health and Human Services running a competition to design the best public-safety announcement in connection with the H1N1 flu vaccine.

Do you think that this culture shift will become permanent?
Noveck: This is really core to the president's vision of government. This points to the ability to use new technology to hard-wire this kind of reform and accountability into the culture of government so that it can't be undone in the next administration, so that we're not simply asking for data transparency now and then we're going to go back eight years from now. Really, the idea is when you're using technology to put information up online, it becomes very hard to take it offline without people noticing it.

Your work was pretty evident in the president's memorandum, correct?
Noveck: We had something called the Technology Innovation Reform Team--which was focused on how do we actually think about bringing innovation into government--as one of the core planning groups that was created during the transition in order to focus on such issues as open government. I was the initial member of that team, and that helped to produce a lot of the early work that we've done, including the creation of the role of a chief technology officer, the creation of a whole set of policies and projects that we've been undertaking over the course of the early stage of the administration. We all worked as a team.

On a personal level, can you talk about what it's been like to work in the White House?
Noveck: This is without a doubt the greatest honor and the greatest challenge of my professional career. Even for someone who likes to be busy and likes to multitask, working in the White House is an unbelievable challenge because of the range of issues that we deal with on a daily basis. It means that I'm working on a Health and Human Services issue at 9 o'clock and at 10 o'clock, talking to the Department of Labor, at 11 o'clock, I'm talking to the Department of Education. The advantage to that kind of breadth is the ability to help foster collaboration and knowledge exchange across department and agencies, so we can say to the Department of Education, this is what Health and Human Services is doing to bring innovation to the way they work. Or, Department of Labor, here's what's going on in some other area of government. So that ability to be at kind of the intersection of information exchange is incredibly valuable.

What is the status today of Peer to Patent?
Noveck: The Peer to Patent team did its own assessment after a two-year pilot, and now the Patent Office is studying it. The chair of the steering committee for Peer to Patent, is now the new undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and the director of the Patent Office, David Kappos, so he is very much a friend of the concept of citizen engagement and participation in Patent Office practice, and so now the office just has to assess for itself how they are going to institutionalize the concept of citizen engagement and participation in the work that they do.

Stepping back to earlier in your career, can you talk about the connective tissue between your work with the State of Play conferences and what you're doing now?
Noveck: Over the last decade, we've seen the evolution of three-dimensional visual technologies and the question is how do we take the latest technological innovations and apply them to the betterment and strengthening of our democracy? State of Play was always intended to be a look at whatever the latest tools are that help us to understand how we can collaborate and work together in a peaceful fashion. And that's really the essence of what our political institutions do: Create vehicles for us to work together to solve collective public problems and to do so in peaceful ways and ways informed by the best quality information. And for me, it's a very direct path from that set of ideas, that informed the creation of those conferences, to the development of the Peer to Patent platform for getting people involved in the patent process, to now, creating a national agenda on open government, and trying to bring together the technology worlds and the world of government institutions to improve the way we make decisions for all of our benefit.

A screen shot of the Webcast with Obama administration CTO Aneesh Chopra (left) and CIO Vivek Kundra (center) formally unveiling the Open Government Directive.

(Credit: Whitehouse.gov)

The Obama administration on Tuesday officially unveiled its Open Government directive, a document that charges each federal agency with making high value data publicly available and with quickly coming up with formal open government plans.

The announcement follows up on President Obama's first executive act--the issuing on January 21 of his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government. That document set forth, among other things, that, "We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

The administration's Chief Information Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Technology Officer Vivek Kundra on Tuesday appeared together in a live Webcast to spell out the new directive and to answer questions from the public. The event seemed audience-appropriate in that it was extremely informal and questions were being fed to them from a colleague who pulled them off of Twitter.

Among the major points of the directive (PDF), it:

• Requires federal agencies to make a minimum of three "high-value" data sets available within 45 days. An example, they said, was data that was released on Data.gov earlier this year by the Federal Aviation Administration about the on-time performance of commercial airline flights, and which was subsequently used by a member of the public to create Flyontime.us.

• Directs that within 60 days, the White House will launch a dashboard on Whitehouse.gov that will be used to hold each agency accountable for the contents of the directive.

• Commits each federal agency to launching its own open government Web site.

• Says that within 90 days, agencies will receive guidance from the federal Office of Management and Budget about creating challenges and contests for how best to use publicly available data.

• And mandates that within 120 days, each agency will create an open government plan geared towards ensuring that the philosophies of openness, transparency, and collaboration are permanently "hardwired."

Note: Please click here for an interview with Beth Noveck, the Obama administration's deputy chief technology officer for open government, a principal contributor to the new directive.

In announcing the directive, which was posted Tuesday morning by OMB Director Peter Orszag, Chopra said there were three key themes that everyone involved in putting it together had sought to achieve. First, that the directive reflected Obama's priorities and put the open government initiative into the hands of the executive branch. Second, that those involved have been and will be working together as a team with stakeholders at the federal level, in state and local governments, and with the public. And third, that the directive is focused on results. In other words, he said, Obama has "called on us" to deliver.

For the most part, supporters of open government initiatives seem pleased by the release of the directive. While some had previously expressed concern that the Obama administration was taking too long in issuing the directive, the same people expressed their satisfaction with what Chopra and Kundra talked about Tuesday morning.

"Now that we've seen it, we are very excited," said John Wonderlich, policy director at the Washington, D.C.-based Sunlight Foundation. "They're really taking on a lot of initiatives and doing so in an aggressive fashion. We couldn't have written it better ourselves. It's very ambitious."

Similarly, Patrice McDermott, the director of OpenTheGovernment.org, another Washington, D.C.-based watchdog organization, said she was "pleasantly surprised" by the announcement and the contents of the directive, particularly the elements of it which formally spell out in detail the open government plan each agency has to create and put up on its Web site.

For example, McDermott said she was happy about components of the plan addressing compliance with records management and Freedom of Information Act backlogs. As well, she cited a provision that would require agencies with classified material to post a link to a publicly-available Web page where the public can learn about declassification procedures. "That's quite unusual and quite new," McDermott said.

During their announcement, Chopra and Kundra addressed one of the most common questions about the directive, that of how it would ensure that neither national security nor personal privacy are endangered by the open government efforts.

"Central [to the plan] is that it in no way compromises national security [or privacy]," said Kundra. "It may make sense, for example, to release a data set...[that] when combined with other data, creates a concern about security and privacy. We need to make sure we have proper concerns for privacy, confidentiality, and national security. That's part of the directive itself."

The two also responded enthusiastically to a question about whether the directive will trickle down to state and local government. "We highly encourage state and local [governments] to consider the same [kind of] directives," said Chopra. "This is a key pillar of public sector work and we hope this will be a helpful tool" for state and local governments.

Kundra added that when Data.gov, an earlier Obama administration effort to post federal agency data online, went live, the cities of New York and San Francisco, as well as the state of Massachusetts and even the United Kingdom quickly adopted similar programs.

Concerns about oversight
While McDermott praised the directive, she also voiced some concern that Chopra and Kundra didn't adequately spell out who would have oversight over the agencies' adoption of it, and how it would be enforced.

"The agencies are all each required to put up these open government plans," McDermott said, "but there's no indication of who's going to oversee [them] and oversee [their] implementation and the quality of their implementation. It's as if the OMB is expecting the public to do this."

But Wonderlich said he's not too worried about oversight or enforcement. In fact, he sounded satisfied with the notion that the very public nature of the program, and its specific provisions, would indeed mean that it would be the public that would be overseeing the program.

"I think you can interpret this as a management directive, or a White House directive," said Wonderlich. "There's a big dose of public scrutiny to require them to do it."

Still, Wonderlich was not completely convinced that the directive answers every question and concern his organization has had about the administration's open government plans.

"My main concern," he said, "is whether they're going to live up to everything they're taking on. There will be a lot of agency push back. It's up to all of us. It's not going to be an easy situation, so it's going to take work."

Microsoft on Monday said that millions of Xbox Live members have used the new social-media features that the company pushed live a week ago.

In June, Microsoft announced it would begin offering Xbox Live users access to Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm. And while the manifestation of each of those services is scaled down on Xbox Live, the rollout has been one of the company's big pushes this fall for its hugely popular online system.

According to Microsoft spokesman David Dennis, the first-week figures show that at least 2 million Xbox Live users have logged into Facebook, and that half a million Last.fm accounts were created in the first 24 hours of availability. Dennis didn't address how many Xbox Live users have used the service's Twitter feature, except to say that there have been "tweets from nearly every market where we have Xbox Live."

So, based on the data Dennis provided, the Facebook integration with Xbox Live has had the most adoption. And while 2 million people logging into Facebook is far short of the 20 million total Xbox Live users, it is notable that fully one tenth of the service's users have tried the Facebook feature in just the first week.

Still, there's no way to know if the numbers of members using the social-media features will climb higher. There are those who feel that the Facebook and Twitter implementations lack some of the richness that has led to those services' phenomenal growth, and one has to wonder how many Xbox Live users will choose to spend time with Facebook or Twitter instead of doing things like watching movies or playing games.

As for Last.fm, Dennis said that in the first week, Xbox Live users had streamed 120 million minutes of music. Last.fm is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET.

Lastly, Dennis said that 1.7 million Xbox Live users had gone to the new Zune marketplace--formerly known as the Xbox Live marketplace--and watched video.

Microsoft is getting ready for a November release of new Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, and instant movie and TV show streaming features in Xbox Live.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--At a star-studded E3 press conference last June, Microsoft touted, among other things, a plan to bring Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm to its hit online service, Xbox Live, as well as to begin offering instant streaming of movies and TV shows.

At the time, all Microsoft would say is that it hoped to roll out these new features to the public in the fall.

Well, it's now the fall. And on Wednesday, my colleague Josh Lowensohn and I got a first-hand look at the pre-release Xbox Live implementation of Facebook, Twitter, Last.fm, and video streaming, and had a chance to talk to Xbox Live General Manager Ron Pessner about it all.

Photos: Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm almost ready for Xbox Live

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Microsoft is still not ready to let the public in on the fun yet, and today is only willing to give the launch a November timeframe--with no actual date announced. Further, since E3, the so-called InstantOn streaming feature has been rolled up into a larger Zune branding effort, something that I think is a big mistake, given the cool reception the Zune name--at least as it applies to Microsoft's music player--has received in the marketplace.

Regardless, it's clear that Microsoft is nearly ready to start letting the Xbox Live community get its hands on the Facebook, Twitter, and Last.fm features, and to begin streaming video content rather than waiting for it to download, which has been a slow, frustrating process by all accounts.

Pessner began by talking about Facebook. Clearly, Microsoft's interest is in getting the feature up and running and letting Xbox Live users begin to access the popular social network on their TVs sooner, rather than later, even though some fundamental elements of Facebook haven't been included.

According to Pessner, a chief goal of the implementation was to make it easy for users to make photo slideshows and watch them on their TVs. A quick demo revealed that much of the Xbox Live Facebook tool is built around looking at photo albums, scrolling between friends' albums and seeing who on a user's friends list has added photos to their account.

But one of Facebook's most fundamental offerings is photos and allowing users to upload them. And Microsoft has chosen, for now at least, not to let users do that. Pessner says the decision was made that Facebook on Xbox Live is about viewing images, and that anyone who wants to upload them to the social network will do so via the Web. It's a fair point, but it does seem like a major omission, and it would seem like something Microsoft will have to address soon.

Pessner also pointed to what he called Friend Linker, which is designed to help Facebook users see which of their friends are Xbox Live members, and vice versa. Among other things, it makes for an easy way for Facebook users to discover friends' gamertags and to invite them to be friends on Xbox Live.

All in all, while it's likely that many Xbox Live users will find themselves switching over to the Facebook application frequently--why move over to a computer if it's not necessary?--it's clear that there is a lot of room for more. The interface is consistent with everything else on Xbox Live, something that may please some. But frequent Facebookers might find it confusing to have to use Facebook in an entirely different format. Only time will tell.

Twitter on Xbox Live
Pessner then showed off the Xbox Live Twitter application. Like its Facebook counterpart, the interface will look very familiar to Xbox Live users. Pessner said the idea was to design a Twitter experience for the living room.

That means, of course, a fairly scaled down Twitter app. Users can post their own tweets, view friends' tweets, re-tweet them, favorite them, look at profiles, @ reply to others, and do Twitter searches. And that's about it.

To be sure, there aren't that many more features available to Twitter users elsewhere, but there are some. Again, Pessner made the argument that the idea was to optimize the experience for a living room TV and that to access a full range of features, users will happily turn to their computers.

One thing missing from both the Facebook and Twitter applications, however, is the ability to click on URLs, something that is a major piece of the social-networking puzzle these days.

Asked why not, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "That's not something we support right now. Today we're focused on delivering a great Twitter and Facebook experience which connects the Xbox Live community to friends in new and unique ways...This is just the beginning, and the great thing about Xbox Live is that we can evolve and update features based on the community's feedback."

Last.fm
The third piece of the new Xbox Live puzzle is its Last.fm application. Last.fm (which is owned by CNET News parent CBS Interactive) is a music service aimed at helping users discover new songs and artists--something Microsoft is hoping will add to users' overall Xbox Live experience.

Pessner said that adding Last.fm gives users access to a wide range of new music and music-related tools, much as adding Netflix to Xbox Live last year did for movies.

As with the Facebook and Twitter tools, Xbox Live users will find a scaled down version of Last.fm, one that Pessner said is focused mainly on music consumption, "but also on discovery."

Again, the tool has the familiar Xbox Live look and feel, and appears to be something that will expand some users' musical horizons. But it's also clear that what this is a simpler version of a service that's been optimized for a TV, and those who want the full experience will return to their computers.

And that's fine. No one is expecting Microsoft to replace their computer with Xbox Live, though I'm sure Microsoft would like to do so someday. If, for example, it ever put a full-featured Web browser inside Xbox Live, some of the missing features mentioned above could be addressed. But that's a conversation for another day.

InstantOn
The last new feature is the InstantOn streaming service that Xbox Live users will have access to. The idea is to give those buying or renting TV shows or movies through the Zune video marketplace (formerly known as the Xbox Live video marketplace) instant gratification instead of making them wait for their content to download.

The service will offer full 1080p high-definition movies and TV shows, and will let those who purchase content watch it right away or download it to their Xbox, a Zune player, or a PC. Those who rent content will be able to stream it and will have 24 hours to finish watching it once they press "play."

Pessner pointed to the fact that the service is designed to auto-detect a user's bandwidth level in order to play back the content in an appropriate quality. The idea there is to ensure that a user gets to watch what they want right away, regardless of how fast their connection is.

From Microsoft's perspective, this new set of offerings will make the Xbox an even stronger entertainment option than it has been in the past. But Pessner said there is still much more that can be added to the platform.

He wouldn't say what the next steps would be, of course, but did paint a broad picture, suggesting that users can draw their own conclusions of how Project Natal, Microsoft's forthcoming gesture-based control system for Xbox and PC "can light this up."

For years, Will Wright has been just about the biggest name in video game development. It's hardly necessary to recite his resume, but just in case you haven't been paying attention, he's the creator of SimCity and its many direct spinoffs, The Sims franchise--which long ago surpassed 100 million units sold--and most, recently, Spore.

But last spring, not long after Spore's much-anticipated release, Wright announced he was leaving Electronic Arts, the game's publisher, for the greener pastures of a start-up called Stupid Fun Club. Though the new venture is backed by EA, it is independent. And Wright, for the first time since he sold Maxis (the developer of Spore, The Sims, and SimCity) to EA, is out on his own.

Will Wright recently left EA for his start-up, Stupid Fun Club. He is now talking for the first time about what the new company will be working on.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

For months, Stupid Fun Club's mission as a company has been all but a mystery. And only now are details emerging about what the small company, most of whose employees have worked with Wright for years, is up to.

However, as Wright told CNET News' sister site GameSpot in April, "This started many years ago actually, with friends I met doing Robot Wars together. That's when we originally coined the name, because it's kind of ridiculous to invest hundreds of hours building these things and then destroy them. But it's great fun, and it's really stupid."

On its Web site, the 12-person company is still cryptic, saying only that, "The Stupid Fun Club is an entertainment development studio. The ideas developed here can be manifested in video games, online environments, storytelling media, and fine home care products."

But it is becoming clear that Wright is looking to branch out beyond games. For example, in a press release that went out Wednesday morning, it was announced that Wright will be in New York keynoting next February at the online games-oriented conference, the Engage Expo, which will run concurrently with the world famous Toy Fair. Indeed, Wright's presentation will be titled, "The Evolution of Entertainment, A Toy's Place," and is expected to examine "toys, play, and the product development process from a new perspective."

On Tuesday, over at VentureBeat, Dean Takahashi caught up with Wright for a Q&A, and got the master designer to spill some of the beans about the company's projects, at least two of which Wright said will be games.

VentureBeat: How do you like getting out on your own?

Will Wright: It's fun. I'm able to work on projects that are much broader than I could at Electronic Arts.

VB: What have you said about them so far. Are they toy related?

WW: One of them is toy related. The others aren't. We are looking at a lot of different industries. There's the web. Toys. We're not restricted to one type of entertainment. We're kind of looking for ideas that cross a lot of different boundaries.

VB: Are you thinking of products like Webkinz, where there's a plush toy and then a code to go to a Web site?

WW: Every product that we are working on has a web component. The web is like the connective tissue in entertainment today....

...VB: What are some examples of things you like now that point in this direction of a new kind of entertainment? I've mentioned Webkinz. What appeals to you?

WW: It's interesting to look at media. I have my Tivo at home. I have my Amazon account. I download video on demand. At the same time, there are all of these huge interesting web communities forming around traditional properties. I am interested in the online communities around popular TV shows. The stuff the participants are doing are very extraordinary. The community around The Lost show on TV is one of my favorites. It's awe inspiring.

If you've ever been driving down the highway and looked at the Google Maps application on an iPhone to see what traffic is like ahead, you may have wondered where the data behind the green, yellow, and red lines indicating real-time vehicle flow come from.

In fact, the data are coming from people just like you: users of smartphones with GPS who, by the very act of driving down the highway, are feeding back information about how fast they're going to Google, which in turn is sending it back to users of its mobile map apps.

Users of the Google Maps iPhone app can get real-time traffic flow data that is based on the passive participation of other users. This is an example of mobile crowdsourcing, something that is a growing trend, especially on iPhones.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Which means, of course, that the application itself is crowdsourced--that is, based on the mutual contributions of many users, all of whom are participating in the product, and without whom, the product would be worthless.

These days, the concept of crowdsourcing--defined by Jeff Howe, who literally wrote the book on the subject, as, "the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call"--is all the rage, and there are no end of well-known examples, especially on the Web: the Netflix prize; Twitter search; public tagging of Library of Congress archival photos; even Wikipedia. Indeed, much of the concept of user-generated content is really about crowdsourcing.

But until now, much of the discussion about the subject has focused on what people are doing on their computers. Yet today, more than ever before, crowdsourcing has gone mobile. As more smart phones have brought ubiquitous Internet connectivity to the masses, more people have been feeding back into the system. And for now at least, nowhere is that more true than on the the iPhone.

"Why do I love my iPhone, which I do," Howe said in an interview. "Because I'm suddenly doing interesting things with my cognitive surplus. All these times (on public transportation)...are great times to contribute to these group efforts. It's crowdsourcing at its most root definition. Crowdsourcing is a perfect coupling of that downtime, of the very fuel that the crowdsourcing engine needs to run."

Today, the iPhone is not the most popular smartphone but it certainly is gaining steam. According to Gartner, during the second quarter of 2009, the iPhone's share of the global smart phone market had soared to 13.3 percent from 2.8 percent a year earlier. To be sure, the BlackBerry--with 18.7 percent share--and Nokia's offerings--with 45 percent share--still lead in total sales, but it's hard to argue with Apple's growth, or with its dominance in the community-developed application market.

"As Apple has so often done," Howe said, "they did it better sooner...crowdsourcing is only as effective as one's reach allows, because it does require either mass participation or at least mass viewership."

The iPhone app by The Extraordinaries allows users to volunteer small amounts of their time for the collective good.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Which is why there is a growing number of iPhone apps--both those that seek to make money and those that are nonprofit--that are based entirely on crowdsourcing, and which without the buy-in by a critical mass of users would be meaningless.

Some, like the traffic feature in the Google Maps app, are subtle about it. But others shout it out: Their developers know that the public has a thirst for this and have specifically made crowd participation a selling point.

Traffic apps, it turns out, are a natural for mobile crowdsourcing. Because of the iPhone's built-in GPS--on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, at least--and the fact that many owners won't go anywhere without their precious device, it makes perfect sense to build tools that rely on user-submitted data.

Some examples are Waze, which relies on users to inform others about traffic conditions, about road construction and about the existence of angry drivers; Trapster, which lets users report speed traps so that other drivers will be aware of them, in real-time; Aha, which mixes both live traffic flow information with location-based identification of things like cafes, bathrooms, and restaurants; and others.

"I think what it comes down to is what this device right now excels at," said Jacob Colker, the co-founder of a company called The Extraordinaries that is leveraging crowdsourcing. "And that is really to use GPS, a camera, and the phone itself."

Yet there are a growing number of other examples, as well.

One is an app from The Extraordinaries itself. Already well-known for work harnessing the collective power of large numbers of Internet users for the common good, the organization has now put out an iPhone app that lets any user participate in a wide range of causes, right from the device.

For example, users can add tags to photos from the Smithsonian to bring more collective context to that museum's huge archives; help create a huge map of kid-friendly places by finding a "playspace" and snapping a photo of it; or help the city of San Diego cut down on water wastage by reporting any city agency watering during the day or ignoring obvious leaks.

Crowdsourcing can be silly, too. Take the famous Ocarina iPhone app. With that, countless people have used the device to play a kind of flute-like instrument. In and of itself, that's fun but not crowdsourced. But what takes it to the next level is that users can look at a 3D rendering of the globe and see and hear the notes that are being played by other Ocarina users.

That's crowdsourcing in action.

And then there's Yelp, which by definition is crowdsourced. With its iPhone app, the popular tool for letting people rate and comment on businesses, is bringing the power of the collective experience to merchants and retailers anywhere, anytime.

Smule's Ocarina iPhone app lets users play a flute-like instrument and automatically submit their play so that others anywhere in the world can hear it.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

So is the iPhone speeding up the process of taking crowdsourcing mobile?

"I think it's creating conditions for new ideas to flourish," said Colker, "and that's really important. Showing that it is possible, that, yes, I can demand YouTube in my pocket, and I'm going to pull up this app and play flute into it and I'm going to listen to someone playing the Ocarina app in South Africa. It's powerful. It allows people to think in new ways, and to create the kernel for those new ideas to exist, and the conditions for those new innovations to exist."

Every day, Apple is adding more apps to its App Store. And while most do not involve crowdsourcing, an increasing number do. And that seems like a trend that there's little that anyone could do to stop. Nor would anyone want to.

For now, it's hard to say exactly what the next crowdsourced apps will be to come down the pike, but it seems certain there will be an exponentially growing number of them over time. Games will be built that rely on users to locate items in a virtual world; Poetry apps will rely on users submitting their own stanzas; Lolcat sites will depend on iPhone users snapping pictures of cats, slapping funny captions on them, and sending them in; and much more.

In essence, as with the larger app ecosystem, the sky's the limit for crowdsourced apps. And while other smart phones will also have an increasing number of applications that rely on user submissions, the iPhone is likely to stay at the head of the field.

"I think the iPhone itself has done tremendous good for moving technology forward, and as a byproduct, paving the way for new forms of crowdsourcing to exist," Colker said. "And that's what really excites me about the iPhone."

Corrected at 10:16 a.m.: This story originally reported that The Extraordinaries is a non-profit. In fact, it is a for-profit company.

Each year, the Discovery Channel show shoots an episode for the network's Shark Week. The results of one of its shark shows, this articulated beast, hangs on the wall at the show's headquarters, M5 Industries, in San Francisco.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

SAN FRANCISCO--For some of the nearly 100,000 followers of "MythBusters" star Adam Savage's Twitter feed, communicating with him has proven to be more than just your average back-and-forth. For some, it's been a way to submit ideas that he and his Discovery Channel show costars have used for actual episodes.

On October 7, Discovery will begin airing its fall collection of new "MythBusters" episodes, and Savage said that he and costar Jamie Hyneman have taken at least four ideas that have come directly from Twitter users and implemented them on the show.

Among them are exploring the myth that dirty cars are more fuel efficient than clean ones; one that addresses the reality of a YouTube video in which a man shoots high off a huge water slide and lands, far in the distance, in a small inflatable pool; and one about insects.

Photos: 'MythBusters' takes aim at new episodes

To Savage, Twitter has become a terrific way for him to have a dialogue with the show's fans, especially since he says that the highly negative tone of the comments in the show's official forums turns him off and distracts him from doing his job.

By comparison, he said that because his Twitter followers know that he reads all of the tweets sent to him, there's somewhat of a "social contract" involved that improves the conversation. "I still have disagreements with people on Twitter," Savage said. "But it's much more civilized, and for me as a person who wants to give more value to the fans, I think about what I would want to read of someone who I admired, so I post funny things from behind the set" and lots of personal anecdotes.

For Hyneman, by contrast, Twitter, or any other social network, for that matter, isn't useful, and has actually become a bit of a distraction at work.

"I do notice that it's increasingly difficult to get Adam's attention when we're trying to work," Hyneman said, "because (if) you give him an instant of inactivity...it's like, okay," and he starts to use his iPhone.

Adam Savage often takes every available moment during the work day to communicate with people on his iPhone.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Asked why he has an iPhone, Savage said only that he is "an Apple Kool-Aid drinker from way back...and I love everything they produce."

Duct tape and much more
This fall, just as has been the case since "MythBusters" first got started, Savage and Hyneman have been scouring the world for things that pique their curiosity. Indeed, the show has taken the two--plus the show's other team of co-stars, Kari Byron, Grant Imahara and Tory Belleci--on an unending quest for myths to bust that present them with a sense of adventure.

But this fall, viewers will see more on the show about duct tape, probably, than they ever thought possible. In fact, what started as a path towards a single segment on the popular adhesive ended up resulting in an entire duct tape special.

Both teams of "MythBusters" actually did two or three duct tape stories, Savage explained. "Some spectacular stuff came out of that," he said, "and if we could, we'd just move on to more duct tape stuff. But we've got to space it out so we don't over-duct tape the audience."

And while they wouldn't reveal too many details of what they'd done with the famous grey tape, Hyneman did allow that, in one situation, "We were on our way out the Golden Gate Bridge and had to turn back because the camera crew was complaining that they were getting too wet from the rough seas."

Whether that explains the boat covered in duct tape that is now hanging from the ceiling at M5 Industries, the San Francisco studio space where Hyneman and Savage do their work, is hard to say. But the boat is clearly from the duct tape special.

And while the two are cagey about much of what's coming up in the fall's episodes, they did share some information about one or two myths they attempted to bust.

One is the idea that a prisoner could use thousands of antacid tablets to create enough pressure to bust out of his or her cell. The two wouldn't say what the outcome of their experiment with more than 20,000 antacid tablets was, but they did admit that they were able to bust through a scale model of a jail cell made out of glass.

"It comes down to how well is the cell built," joked Hyneman.

The two were also willing to talk about the segment they did for one of the upcoming episodes on the aerodynamics of dirty cars, one of the myths that came from Twitter.

The myth, explained Savage, is that a dirty car is more fuel efficient than a clean one due to the "golf ball effect" caused by the dirt. The idea, he said, is that the dirt creates something of a "boundary layer that allows the car to be more aerodynamic."

Neither Savage nor Hyneman would say what the results of their investigation was, but Hyneman did say that they were both "very, very surprised (by) the results" and that what they found will be "of quite a lot of interest to the automotive industry."

Still another future episode has to do with the physics of bullet ricochets and whether it is possible for a shooter to hit him or herself with a bullet shot in an enclosed space. The results of that experiment also took the two by surprise, particularly because, as Hyneman said, "there are some basic flaws in the concept that you see in the movies with this 'ding-ding-ding and down you go.'"

At a much higher level now
"MythBusters" has now completed production on 134 episodes, and to Hyneman, that much experience has allowed him and Savage to be much more advanced in their approach to busting myths than they were at the beginning.

"The kinds of insights that we're seeing as far as the physics and the chemistry (and) all the dynamics of what's going on there," Hyneman said, "we're starting out at a much higher level now, and so the results that we're getting are not quite as basic as they were when we started."

More to the point, he said, he and Savage attack their work with greater clarity now, and have a better sense of what the best process is for attacking a myth. Oddly, instead of doing better science, or making things stronger or taking more risks, it all begins with the very concepts for each myth.

"The most important thing to get straight is the question you're trying to ask in the first place," Hyneman said. "It seems like a simple thing, but it's hard to get to that point and, a lot of times now, we're spending much more time defining that question before we do anything else."

For years, outgoing Demo managing director Chris Shipley has had an on-stage dance. On Wednesday, in celebration of her handing off the reins of the event to VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall, Shipley led Demo owner IDG founder and CEO Pat McGovern in a version of the jig.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

SAN DIEGO--The Demo community--an august group of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and technology reporters--gave a fond farewell Wednesday afternoon here to longtime Demo managing director Chris Shipley.

As is well known, Shipley is leaving the helm of Demo, having now officially handed off the reins to VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall.

But as just about the last official act of DemoFall 09, Pat McGovern, the founder and chairman of IDG, which owns the Demo conferences, led the audience in a standing ovation for Shipley.

The DemoFall 09 crowd gave Shipley a standing ovation for her 13 years of work.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Prior to that sentimental moment, meanwhile, seven Demo God winners were announced, as well as the two winners of IDG's media prize.

The seven Demo God winners were:

• Emo Labs, for its Edge Motion speaker technology
• Intelius, for its DateCheck service
• Zorap
• Hevva, for its Local Dirt service
• Twirl TV
• Pinyadda
• ShareGrove

The last two companies were selected from among the 14 "AlphaPitch" presenters, which had just 90 seconds to make their case, rather than the six minutes given to each of the nearly 60 regular Demo companies.

IDG also awarded its two media prizes, one to a consumer product, and the other to an enterprise play. Each winner will receive up to $500,000 worth of free advertising across IDG properties.

Incoming Demo managing director Matt Marshall (left) and Shipley congratulate the founders of Demo God and IDG media prize winner Emo Labs.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

The consumer winner was Emo Labs, whose Edge Motion technology may well change the way the public experiences speakers. The enterprise winner was Liaise, whose software is meant to help companies with "the capture and management of KeyPoints--tasks, issues, dates, and priorities--buried inside e-mails, IMs, and other communications."

As is generally the case, the acceptance speeches were a bit teary-eyed, especially by Demo God and media prize winner Emo Labs' CEO Jason Carlson, who noted that his company had only come to Demo after being convinced by Shipley that he and his team could put together a coherent six-minute presentation.

Earlier, Shipley gave out a series of Lifetime Achievement awards to tech luminaries like Palm co-founder Donna Dubinsky, Diane Greene, a co-founder of VMware, Better Place founder and CEO Shai Agassi, and (in absentia) Marc Benioff.

In his own defiant and emotional moment, Barry James Folsom, CEO of Demo God winner Twirl TV urged the entrepreneurs in the room to carry on, despite any roadblocks they might encounter along their path to success. "If you do not have an obstacle, or someone telling you it's not a good idea, or someone telling you it will never work, and you believe them, you're not an entrepreneur," Folsom said. "(The) Lifetime Achievement award winners...They did it in spite of everyone telling them they couldn't."