Why Dieters Fail: A Mission to Find Innovators and Outliers

For most of us, finding a good solid set of statistics confirms what we want to believe. Not for Bob Moesta and the rest of the Re-Wired Group. Take this example of a recent startling discovery about dieters failing to keep off the weight.

When I showed Bob this article and pointed out the part in the article that showed people who don't fail at dieting actually end up subconsciously eating more as a reaction to their own dieting, he urged me to "find the outliers."

Scientists have concluded that the standard practice of restricting a specific number of calories every day is actually not enough for people to lose weight and stay thin. Here's a key point in the article:

The model shows that lasting weight loss takes a long time to achieve and suggests that more effective weight loss programs might be undertaken in two phases: a temporary, more aggressive change in behavior at first, followed by a second phase of a more relaxed but permanent behavioral change that can prevent the weight regain that afflicts so many dieters despite their best intentions.

Bob thought about this and sent back an email:

So where is the innovation and where are the innovators? If human body is the "system" and that is how it works, then what do we do? Nothing? I don't think so.

This is the problem with protocol medicine. everything has to be proven the scientific method and applied across the human species. but what about environmental, history and culture factors? What about situational context? Innovation in medicine has to look beyond the obvious and find the second and third order effects and build simple ways to help everyone compensate not control our way to health. We know what doen't not work on average, but what about the tails - the really successful and the really unsuccessful. what can we learn from them.

The key is that we don't know enough. We believe easily enough in science and the general conclusions it creates to think that an overall statistic is worth its weight. It's most likely not. What Bob and the other innovators at Re-Wired realize is that there are facts, and then there are the human experiences that determine our reception of those facts.

It's how we received, and then act on, the information from our experience with those facts that determines the job that gets done.

What does dieting get done for you? What do you do to get dieting done?

Are Citizens Turning to Newspapers Out of Habit?

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeA new Pew Study on local news reading  habits says local print newspapers account for the top slot in people's news-seeking habits when looking for locally relevant information.


Contrary to popular belief, the most prevalent source for local news is the daily newspaper in someone’s city. Most American information seeks use new and traditional sources to get their information.


This could be good news for a struggling Patch.com, which is built on the premise that the best source for <a href=” http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_new_aol_local_reporters_covering_your_neighbor.php”>hyperlocal information</A> is the web, and preferably on a mobile device.

A dive through the Pew study reveals that most people depend on a hybrid approach to getting information and that it may not actually mean anything at all that 29% of those surveyed turn to local newspapers, suggesting that they may turn to newspapers out of habit. The survey reveals that 69% of American say that if their local newspaper disappeared, it would not have a major impact on their ability to keep up with local events and news.

But then there is this weird caveat at the end: "Yet when one looks at the 79% of Americans who are online, the internet is the first or second most relied-upon source for 15 of the 16 local topics examined. For adults under 40, the web is first for 11 of the top 16 topics—and a close second on four others."

Maybe people are picking up local newspapers for more granular information, not exactly culturally-necessary information. 

#Facebook Privacy Issues You Should Learn, Even if it Doesn't Alarm You

Image by aJ GAZMEN ツ GucciBeaR via FlickrIt is not clear to me whether this issue is what it is being made out to be, but Nik Cubrilovic has taken the time over the past two years to examine the way Facebook places cookies in your browser and your laptop. He's taken enough care that I thought it would be worth posting here the central tenet of his message.

Logging out of Facebook is not enough, the social networking site has privacy issues.

Facebook may be tracking much more than we think they are tracking, for more reasons than we care to imagine. After all, they have a job to do -- get the world to share its information.

If Google is the repository for the world's information, then Facebook is the international airport terminal for all the shipments of data we call our social context. 

Whisperware: Target.com Rumored to Have Switched Over to IBM Smarter Commerce

Image via CrunchBaseWe have not been able to get confirmation of this, but a friend visiting a conference in San Diego tells us that Target.com dropped Amazon EC2 for competitor IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions, allegedly because Target was peeved that the cloud services functionality they were promised failed to perform.

Our friendly source tells us that Target has been wanting to do this for a while. Again, we don't know if this is true, and we have not been able to confirm this with anyone at IBM.

The breaking point seems to have been the failed Missoni launch at Target.com which led to outages.

The source tells us: “Amazon basically failed to deliver as promised a platform to Target. Same issue that Toys R Us faced. Amazon ended up competing with their customers as they shifted strategy from store to provider and back.”

Target.com late last week launched a line of Missoni clothes on its online shop, only to see the server’s crash and thwart angry customers, who clamored for the new release. The Target relationship with IBM is supposedly very good and very positive.

Social Platforms Could Make You Feel Insecure: Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

Individuals and brand identities should not be hosted on a single platform, because platforms like Twitter and Facebook have to watch out for their own business, says Fred Wilson, a managing partner at VC firm Union Square Ventures in New York.

In an intense debate with Silicon Valley tech guru Robert Scoble at the New York City Smash Summit, Wilson told a room of social media marketers that it is a "horrible idea" for people to build their presence on platforms alone without any web real estate of their own.

While saying that he had recently become more impressed with Facebook and their new suggestions for lists, Wilson said he still thinks that it's a bad idea for brands especially to advocate for their identity on platforms. They should build their own freehold on the web.

"Companies that get stuck on one platform, when the platform changes the rules, you get f-----," said Wilson.

Wilson ended by saying that platforms like Facebook are not trying to destroy people with their new iterations, like Timeline, released yesterday. "Most of the time, the people who run product and run the companies are doing they are trying to do the best thing for their product," says Wilson.

But it was still not a good idea for consumers or individuals to rely on platforms as the sole real estate for their identity. "You are advocating your experience of the world with some relationship with a company, never do that, that's a horrible idea!" he said.

Robert Scoble suggested that Google+ was a platform for people's identity. Holding up a handful of green straws, he said that he had rolled up in one of them a $20 bill.

"That's Twitter. You can barely see the signal." he said. He then wrote on a straw and used the same handful of straws to say that labeled experience on the web makes it so much easier to find the money. That was Google+, he said.

#Netflix Acts Disruptively and Launches #Qwikster: Company will rent video games

While everyone was wringing their hands and proclaiming the end of Netflix because of a small drop in subscriber numbers, the company went ahead and split the company into two websites and decided to offer video games.

Netflix was born out of disruption and to disruption it will default in most of its moves.

Netflix launches Qwikster, offers video games.

What Would Make Facebook Lose Relevancy in the Fight Against #Google+

Facebook changed the way its navigation bar operates yesterday, in a capitulation to Google+ and Twitter. it's a sign that Facebook's biggest issue now is relevancy and sorting out signal from noise for its 700 million plus user base.

We saw the Google+ mimicry with the release of the subscribe button and smart lists this week. The scrolling nav bar will keep people updated about their updates and reduce the likelihood they will travel to other sites outside of Facebook.

It should also help people manage the new barrage of information from all the new subscribers as friends, and friends of friends start searching out and connecting to people for new social information.

Barry Schuler, former chairman and CEO of AOL, told me on Twitter today that "Facebook has to deal with Twitter from below and Google+ from above. Their biggest strength, friend-friend, becoming a weakness."

This is exactly right. Some suspect that Facebook will reveal at f8 next week a scrolling news feed, a version of which they rolled out in a test earlier this summer.

The new barrage of increased network information makes relevancy an incredibly important issue for anyone with a Facebook profile, and it has now become Facebook's central issue.

With new subscriptions and subscribers going public, updates will begin to come to these users' feeds at a faster rate. As people have subscribed to my feeds, I have noticed that I am barraged with more and more signals. This has made Facebook management an almost all-day affair.

I feel like I am dealing with the news ticker on the bottom of a cable tv news channel.
This is the problem of news feed relevance, which we have written about before.