Read The Woman Who Stopped Traffic for Free Online Page A

in-between the senior management team and the program managers. It gave her a view of everyone in the room. She pulled out a felt pen and note pad from her bag. Still feeling very much like the new girl, she flipped to a clean page.
    Two things struck her immediately. One, there would be no discussion of the Friday investor debacle. That discussion had either already happened ‘off line’, or would not be happening at all. Two, for a company founded on the premise of connecting people, this was a decidedly unhappy family.
    She sketched the table and everything she could remember about people’s names and roles, keeping her handwriting just messy enough to confound prying eyes.
    Nancy asked the head of the table whether he wanted to say a few introductory words and Wisnold casually called the meeting to order.
    “So, this stuff is like, real important, if we’re gonna build this company to last. Really, we shouldn’t even be thinking about it in terms of a one year product roadmap,” and he thumbed his copy of Nancy’s presentation, which he’d clearly had access to before the meeting. It was so striking, the come down in his energy from two days prior. Like an addict bottoming post-high.
    “What we should be thinking about –” and he paused for an unnaturally long moment “– is how we’re gonna build Clamor.us for the next hundred years, or so. Or more .”
    “Thank you Dwayne,” Nancy said. “Well hopefully it won’t be a hundred year war!”
    The attempt at humor fell flat. Everyone looked too exhausted to laugh. Nancy proceeded to hand out hard copies of her presentation. Mike Marantz flipped to the back page and stared blankly at the final recommendation. It was one of Natalie’s pet peeves: give the poor presenter a chance to make her case!
    The first slide was headed:
    ‘m.ID. e – status update’
    – and over the next few slides, Natalie caught the gist of what the Multi-Identity Engine, or m.ID. e , was all about. The Clamor team had sought to recreate online the complex topography of our real world relationships – those subtle, subconscious ways in which people present themselves differently in differing social circumstances.
    Certainly it was a step forward from the ‘autistic’ software defining user experiences of sites such as Friendster: ‘Are you my friend? YES or NO ?’ The Clamor engineers had come up with a series of algorithms that dynamically reformatted a user’s profile page, according to the level of familiarity with each viewer. No longer would a user have to refuse the request of a boss, or ‘un-friend’ a lover upon breakup. The user tagged each of their contacts – ‘work stuff’, ‘ex-file’, etc. – and the engine edited the profile elements into an always-plausible result. All the user had to do was upload their photos and self-description and then label or re-label each contact from an impressive array of choices: ‘acquaintance’, ‘top friend’, ‘ top top friend…’ From there, the engine would do the rest, learning from user behavior as it went.
    The next slide unveiled the question that had really been exercising Nancy and team:      
    ‘What causes people to reveal the very most about themselves?’
    The null hypothesis, or starting assumption, had been ‘familiarity’. We tell our families more than we tell work colleagues. We tell a close sibling more than we’d tell a distant cousin. Apparently, it was a founding premise of the Multi-Identity engine, that the more trusted the connection, the more profile elements should be viewable. But the experiments had in fact revealed something that the team suspected all along, which ran entirely counter. That people disclosed the most about themselves to those they barely knew at all . The statistically inferred conclusion ran along the bottom of the slide like some fortune cookie message:
    ‘Anonymity tends to amplify inner tendencies.’
    In a sense, it had been apparent since the dawn