Despite the ridiculous restrictions on watching the Olympics, there are still plenty of statistics about various events for data nerds to collect and crunch that might provide some useful insights. By studying athletic performance over time, we can tell when technologies like fancy swimsuits are giving too much of an advantage or when a change in training and technique have made vast improvements. Here are just a few projects that are diving deep into Olympic data.

• Various economic figures can be used to try to predict how many medals each country will earn in 2012. The USA is expected to get somewhere between 99 and 113 medals, and China is predicted to come in second place with 67-98 medals. [url]
• The London Eye will be lit up like a mood ring during the Olympics, based on Tweets and a bit of sentimental analysis to gauge positive and negative commentary of the Games. The analysis is sponsored by an energy company, so it'll be watching for words like "Olympics", "London 2012" and the hashtag #energy2012. [url]
• Researchers from the Center for Sports Engineering Research at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK will be studying the 2012 games to look for significant changes in athletic performance. They've developed a "performance improvement index" to quantify things like: how sprinters are running faster than ever before or that javelin throwers are in a performance plateau. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

One of the loudest critics of NBC Universal's awful Olympics coverage was Guy Adams, who certainly wasn't pulling any punches with his Olympics-related tweets. Either way he was a bit surprised to find his account suspended. When he sought to find out why, he discovered it was because he had tweeted the email address of Gary Zenkel, NBC's exec in charge of the Olympics coverage. Twitter claims that this was the revealing of "private information," in violation of Twitter's terms of service.

Adams, quite rightly, found this to be odd, noting that Zenkel's corporate email address is not private at all. As Deadspin shows in the link above, Adams let Twitter's PR folks know it:

I'm of course happy to abide by Twitter's rules, now and forever. But I don't see how I broke them in this case: I didn't publish a private email address. Just a corporate one, which is widely available to anyone with access to Google, and is identical to one that all of the tens of thousands of NBC Universal employees share.

It's no more "private" than the address I'm emailing you from right now.

Either way, quite worrying that NBC, whose parent company are an Olympic sponsor, are apparently trying (and, in this case, succeeding) in shutting down the Twitter accounts of journliasts who are critical of their Olympic coverage.

Adams also wonders if the suspension happened because of complaints from NBC -- a Twitter partner in this Olympics coverage, remember -- who is upset about Adams' constant berating on Twitter as well as in the publication he writes for, The Independent. In fact, NBC has put out a statement confirming that it filed a complaint about Adams' Twitter account, though Twitter did not need to then suspend his account.

And, of course, as tends to happen in these sorts of situations, Gary Zenkel's email address is now much more widely available because tons of press reports are including it.

Is it really that time again? When NBC screws up its coverage of the Olympics by showing people what it thinks they want to see, rather than what they actually want to see? Every two years, the Olympics does two appallingly annoying things: makes it difficult to watch the Olympics online... and refuses to show it live on TV. In the 20th century view of NBC execs like Rick Cotton, the only thing that matters is prime time television. So they hold off and focus everything around that prime time slot... effectively pissing off everyone else. As Erick Schoenfeld noted: "The only Olympics tweets I've seen all day are from people pissed that NBC is not broadcasting the opening ceremony live."

Hell, even when they go on Twitter the Olympics can't do things right. There was a lot of buzz around the fact that NBC and Twitter teamed up to create an "Olympics" hub. Great (though some people are pointing out that NBC's own Twitter feed is now tweeting stories that it refuses to broadcast live). However, as Canada-based reporter Mathew Ingram discovered in trying to look up the Olympics Twitter hub, thanks to NBC Universal restrictions, Twitter is geoblocking access. To check it out, I visited the Olympics hub site from the US and saw this: And, then, through the magic of the internet, "transported" myself (or, at least my connection) to Toronto, where I reloaded the page... and saw this: In the end, I'm not really sure it makes a huge difference. To be honest, I'm not sure I quite understand the point of the Olympics "hub" on Twitter, but it's yet another way in which NBC Universal seems focused on restricting access, rather than enabling access. It's 20th century thinking for a company that is in desperate need of 21st century leadership.

According to Mathew Ingram at GigaOM, there is apparently a raging debate over whether or not Twitter would actually benefit as a service if users had to pay to use it. I'll admit to being a little bit surprised when I saw this, but digging into the details brought what I think is a wonderful conclusion as to why the answer is definitively "no".

This all more or less started (or at least really took off) when Dalton Caldwell, who founded Imeem, announced he wanted to create a for-pay service similar to Twitter. Caldwell states that services like Twitter don't realize their full potential in what he deems an "advertising-supported monoculture".

"All of these services are essentially in the same business: vying for the opportunity to sell you/your clickstream to advertisers. … I have no interest in completely opting out of the social Web. But please, I want a real alternative to advertising hell. I would gladly pay for a service that treats me better."

It's a concept that I think many people might first agree with...but only if they don't think about it for more than thirty seconds. The first flaw in this line of thinking is that users paying for the service is somehow a firm requirement to avoid what Caldwell calls "advertising hell". I don't think they do; rather, I think that each new service that comes out can be built upon and each innovation can make each service better, including in the way users are impacted by advertisements. As an example, Caldwell could have penned something similar in the 90's, bemoaning a Myspace that had clearly become a musical and bloated hell, so obviously we need to make a social media site that is paid for by users.

Except that's not what we needed. We needed Facebook which, contrary to all the status updates you may have read, does not charge users.

The second flaw in Caldwell's statement is the assumption that advertising does now and always will make us want to bang our heads against the walls in frustration. Certainly advertisements can be annoying, but we've talked repeatedly about how advertising is simply more content, and it can be good or bad. As digital ads continue to get better and better, this "advertising hell" may become an "advertising heaven." Or at least an "advertising purgatory," where the annoyance factor is minimal. In any case, if ads were wanted, then Caldwell's service loses out.

But perhaps that most articulate reason why a service like Twitter should not charge users to join in is made by venture capitalist Fred Wilson:

"Wilson maintains that a free model is the only way to get the kind of network effects necessary for a large consumer business. He also argues that charging users is contrary to the rationale behind such services, since the content being monetized is coming from those same users:

'When scale matters, when network effects matter, when your users are creating the content and the value, free is the business model of choice. And I don’t think anything has changed to make that less true today. If anything, it is more true.'"

What Wilson notes about the content being created by the users is the key point to me. Twitter is a great stage, but those of us that use it are the stars (to varying degrees). To charge the people who are creating the content on your platform seems completely backwards, particularly considering the effect that will have on how your service scales. 

Consider the recent story we ran about how an Irish rail operator used Twitter to reunite a person and their dog: does that happen if you have to pay for the service, reducing its user base? I don't think it does.

Social networks are clearly a very fashionable field of study right now because they provide an unprecedented volume of records for human interactions that can be mined for trends and correlations... and marketing strategies. Figuring out how viral messages spread could teach us how to educate our peers or to notify people about emergencies or to advertise caffeinated beverages. Here are just a few studies on how people behave in online communities.

• If you're looking to create the next Facebook, it might help to know that it's not the absolute number of friends on a social network that encourages new users to join, but the types of friends who are already signed up. A user who gets an invitation to join Facebook is more than twice as likely to join if he/she sees more than 4 of separate groups of friends are already signed up. That's real peer pressure at work. [url]
• Twitter bots can influence the behavior of online communities and help speed up human-to-human communications. These bots don't have to pass a rigorous Turing test to fool people into following and tweeting more frequently. [url]
• [PDF link:] Another research abstract discusses work on identifying influential and susceptible people on Facebook by looking at how viral messages spread. Influentials are thought to be critical people in disseminating information, but where would they be without their susceptible audiences? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

We've been impressed with Google's ongoing transparency report efforts, and it appears that the folks at Twitter agree. The company recently released its own Transparency Report (and gave a hat tip to Google in the process). Like Google's report, Twitter's looks at how many requests for information it has received, as well as how many copyright takedown requests. The first chart it showed highlights how nearly all of the government requests for user info it receives comes from the US: As you can see, the US had 679 requests for info, dwarfing second-place Japan, who had 98 requests. After that, the highest you got was the UK and Canada with 11 requests each. There may be a lot more American Twitter users, but still, that's quite a spread. Perhaps more interesting is that Twitter appears to have resisted an awful lot of the requests (especially coming from other countries). However, in the US it did end up abiding by 75% of requests. This isn't a huge surprise, as there have been a few court cases that have shown that Twitter can be compelled to cough up such info here. At the very least, Twitter has been very good about letting its users know that their information is being sought, whenever it can (though there may be cases where it's legally restricted from doing so).

Next up, Twitter showed how often it gets requests not to provide info, but to flat out remove Tweets (outside of copyright takedowns, apparently): Here you see that there aren't really that many requests -- and thankfully none from the US. What's most interesting here, of course, is the fact that Twitter has refused to remove such info each and every time. Considering how many companies just roll over when they receive an official government correspondence or court order, this is really nice to see (and, yes, a bit surprising). As the company notes, it will remove content for "rules violations" (and for copyright infringement, as we're about to see), but these requests fall into a different category -- likely just information that governments didn't want to exist.

And, finally, they discuss copyright takedowns. This is actually an area where we've felt that Twitter doesn't always do a very good job, as there have been multiple stories of questionable DMCA-based takedowns. Given our earlier stories, I'll admit that I'm a bit surprised to see that Twitter seems to actively resist questionable DMCA takedowns -- to the point that only 38% of requests resulted in material being removed. The company admits that it gets a ton of bogus complaints and is careful to review them:

We also receive a large number of misfiled, non-copyright complaints through our web form. We carefully review each report received, and follow-up with the reporter as appropriate.

There may be room for improvement here, but it does appear that (unlike many companies), Twitter doesn't just roll over on every DMCA request.

Either way, it's great to see these kinds of transparency reports that really reveal some detailed info on just how often companies like Google and Twitter are asked to remove content or reveal info on users.

I was recently at a "tech" conference that focused on entrepreneurs, and I watched a panel discussion on "legal issues" where the first speaker went on at length about why startups absolutely needed to apply for patents as soon as possible. He argued that so much of a company's value was "tied up" in its "intellectual property" and you absolutely needed to "protect" it or the company could just be copied. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of true value. The idea, by itself, is somewhat meaningless. The real issue is the execution -- and no matter what you know about the idea, the actual execution is always a lot more difficult. Focusing on "protecting" rather than executing can actually be the death of a startup.

Thankfully, it looks like more and more startups in the "soft technology" realm are recognizing this, and are getting fewer and fewer patents. TechCrunch has a post by patent lawyer Leonid Kravets who did a study of patents and funded companies, and found that each year over the past few years, startups seem to be getting fewer patents. It may be tough to tell from the chart, but basically, each year shows fewer patent applications from startups. There's a ton of other interesting data at the link above, including some differences between certain investors. Not surprisingly, corporate VC wings seem to like companies with patents (a very big company mentality). Whereas VCs that have been investing in some of the most successful startups today (like Accel, which funded Facebook, and Union Square, which funded Twitter, Kickstarter, FourSquare, Tumblr and many others) have a much lower number of startups they invest in that have patents. Those VCs seem to recognize that it's not the patents that matter, and the general success of both of those firms' portfolios suggests they may be on to something.

We recently wrote about Twitter standing up for a user, Malcolm Harris, who had participated in the Occupy Wall St. protests, and whose info was sought by the government under a 2703(d) order (which has fewer protections than an ordinary warrant). Twitter told Harris about the order, and Harris sought to have it blocked -- but the court claimed he had no standing to do so, as it was just an issue between the government and Twitter. Twitter pushed back, noting that individuals control the content of their own account, so Harris should have standing. Unfortunately, a NYC judge has told Twitter to give up Harris' info, though it did say that the government would need to get a warrant for the last day's worth of info, due to a technicality on timing. The court basically punts on the larger issues, focusing on the fact that most of the information requested, Harris' tweets, are already public, and thus there's little to be concerned about. Of course, if that's the case, it's unclear why the government needs to request info from Twitter in the first place...

Twitter is usually pretty good about protecting people's right to do parodies, but apparently someone there got a little sensitive about a parody account called CascadedBug, after the supposed cascade bug that caused quite a bit of downtime. Apparently Twitter suspended the account. Then unsuspended it. Then suspended it again. Then unsuspended it again. No matter what, it seems ridiculous that the account was ever suspended. Twitter, whose execs normally have a decent sense of humor, would have won a lot more points with the public by just tweeting at the account, rather than suspending it...

It would appear that lawyer Charles Carreon is not taking the advice of Matthew Inman to take some time off and calm down. He's still going at it. His latest move is a claimed plan to subpoena both Twitter and Ars Technica to find out who created a fake Charles Carreon Twitter account which parodied Carreon's... um... over the top approach to dealing with people making fun of him online. Twitter will get the subpoena, of course, because that's where the account was. Ars' subpoena is because someone signed up for an account on the site claiming to be the guy who ran the fake twitter account. Ars' Nate Anderson contacted that guy by email who said (1) he lives in Sweden, so good luck, Charles and (2) that he stopped parodying Carreon because Carreon's actual statements were so outrageous they didn't need any parody:

"It became clear to me at one point that I could not keep up with Charles," Modelista wrote. "His comments to the press were more damaging to his reputation than any Twitter parody account could ever be. You cannot mock someone who has such a low regard for his own reputation. Before the @Charles_Carreon account was suspended, I was simply linking to his interviews. Satire was not necessary at that point as Charles was providing it."

One wonders what Carreon must think of the parody blog that has been set up to mock him even more mercilessly at Charles-Carreon.com. That one clearly notes that it's a satire account. In the meantime, plenty of people have pointed out that Charles himself seems to have done many of the kinds of things he's now accusing others of doing. Take, for example, his call to waterboard Ben Bernanke. It's clearly satire (though, not particularly good satire in my opinion), but seems just as over the top as anything that Inman or the anonymous Twitter user did to Carreon. Actually, Carreon's piece seems like much more direct incitement. And, seriously, if Carreon should be worried about anyone doing damage to his reputation, he might want to look at the person commenting up a storm on our site (and elsewhere) claiming to be Charles' wife Tara Carreon. She's been much more nasty and angry than anything that was directed at Charles.

On the legal front, the EFF has signed up to help with Inman's defense. I'm wondering if Carreon is even going to be able to find any lawyers to help him out on his case. Once again, we'd suggest that Carreon take a step back, cool off, and think through the massive mistake he's making. If he continues, the term the Carreon Effect might just catch on for real.