Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior

I’ll be visiting Disneyland Paris with my wife and kids the next few days. See you all in a few days

The dominant web 2.0 business model is the FREE business model. It comes in many different variants, but the most widely used are the freemium business model (I always thought Fred Wilson came up with that term, but he says it was Jarid Lukin) and the free with ads based business model. With freemium you get a service for fee, but for the real cool features you need to upgrade and pay a subscription. Flickr uses that business model. The free with ads based business model lets you use a service for free, but in return you get advertisement. Facebook is the most obvious example, but many other services use that model as well. For a much more complete overview of the many different forms of the FREE business model I recommend you read the extensive list compiled by Chris Anderson here.

The driving force behind the FREE business model is the (web) technology that enabled us to copy and distribute digital information at almost no cost. Don’t assume something is not valuable just because it’s free. But the effort to copy and distribute have dropped to zero.

Free has a lot of great advantages. It lowers the threshold for a user to try out your service. It lets you distribute easily and helps you create a user community much quicker than with a paid service. Free lets you provide value to a user while the costs for it are paid by someone else, for example an advertiser. Because of this 3-way relationship it becomes easier to distribute your service, making it visible for you potential user groups on all kinds of advertisement networks. And perhaps most important, most entrepreneurs delivers web 2.0 services for free now, so why charge your users for your service?

How does all of this work? On the web there are currently two main value drivers, attention and reputation. Attention is measured in page views, how many people looked at this advertisement, how many clicked on them etc. Reputation is based upon links. The more links the more value, Google Pagerank uses that measure (amongst many others). The on-line FREE business model is often executed in a 3-way relationship. The user, the service provider, and the 3rd party who pays for the costs of the service, in order to get attention.

But FREE comes at a cost too. The sun rises every day for free, but for all the other stuff happening on our planet, someone is paying the bill. In web 2.0 free leads to several related effects which occur due to the way value is calculated right now, attention and reputation.

FREE leads to destination sites with walled gardens

In the FREE business model attention is the most important currency. The focus of the user needs to be on the service. The more attention it gets, the more value is generated. As a result of this a service provider is not likely to let a user leave once he is in. The service is surrounded by large walls ensuring that the user and the data he produces can’t leave the premises. The user needs to go to the service instead of the service coming to him. Attention is measured in pageviews, so if you aren’t there, no value is created. Reputation is also important. That is probably why most web 2.0 services try to attract top tech bloggers on their network. It provides them with credibility for the service.

FREE makes the network more important than the user

Attention is key. You get more attention if you get more users. The focus of most free web services isn’t on user value. It’s on user addition. A service need gazillions of users and if you don’t have at least a few million users on board, you aren’t execution your business model right. But a service that is driven by new users tends to think less about the current user. It isn’t the user that is important, its all of his friends, his social graph, his interactions with others that is important. That is where the value lies. It also leads to API’s, third party development and dilution of the original value proposition of the service. Facebook is an example of that. While the original value of Facebook was to connect to your friends, it has now become a platform that seems to be driven for advertisers and 3^rd party developers. In other words, the network or social graph has become more important than the individual user. I’m not suggesting these services don’t provide the user with value, there has to be some. But the main focus isn’t to improve on that, it’s on user addition.

FREE leads to forced attention on advertisement

FREE can lead to a lot of things (see the overview at the beginning) but it often leads to advertisement. It sounds like a great deal. You get the service for free, and the costs are covered by the advertisers. Although it might work well in some cases I believe that in most cases this type of forced attention doesn’t provide the user or the advertiser any value. The click through rates of advertisement are not that high in social networks. And that is pretty obvious, social networks are for interaction. And when I interact with friends there is simply no room for advertisement. Its trespassing. There is of course one great counterexample to this. Advertisement does work in search. It is what made Google the mightiest company on the web. When I am looking for something advertisement can help. For this very reason Facebook doesn’t perform well on advertisement, while LinkedIn performs much better. Can you spot the difference? The first platform is about interaction, the second is about search, about business. A subtle but in my opinion important difference.

FREE leads to customer lock in instead of customer freedom

If I would have to sum it all up then to me FREE leads to customer lock-in. Instead of setting me free, the business model forces me to come to a destination site, to stay there, to leave my data, to expose my friends to the same mantra. The service isn’t coming to me, I can’t go where I want. FREE locks us in, and often we don’t know about it. I often hear that users don’t care (there are millions of people on Facebook right), but I refuse to believe that. There currently simply isn’t a viable alternative to those FREE walled gardens. If there was and people knew they had a choice, I am betting that a lot would choose a service where the user is more important than the network. A service that is entirely focused on user value and doesn’t enforce walls or attention.

What do you think?

I asked the following question on both Twitter and Friendfeed: “Would you pay for a web service that provides you value?”. It was not the best of questions (too open), but I still got a lot of great responses. The twitter responses were short and to the point. Erwin Blom thought it was a strange question, since he pays for many services (Flickr, Nozbe, Basecamp, Highrise, Mindmeister, Box.net). Many responded that they already pay for services like last.fm, iTunes, Flickr, Dreamhost, Blockbuster. Tokerud would pay for Twitter as much as for a professional Flickr account ($25 a year). MarkDykeman, jcvangent and sndrspk would pay for a web service, but only if it would provide significant value.

On Friendfeed there was a bit more discussion (it allows messages larger than 140 chars). You can find the entire discussion here. Most people are willing to pay for value, but the value needs to be significant. The freemium model seems to dominate thinking here A lot of people also mentioned that once a service with a subscription fee is up, it is likely copied by a free with ads version. Ran has a good point when he says that he would be more demanding if he paid for a service (A twitter outage of a few days would not be acceptable).

Are there possibly viable alternatives to FREE?

Sure there are. Kevin Kelly offers a range of great posts on this subject. I love his 1000 fan post in which he analyzes the long tail and argues that you only need 1000 true fans to make a good living on the web. He later wonders whether or not 1000 fans is enough, but he believes that its possible with a relative small number. If you want to conquer the entire world, you will probably need the FREE approach. But there is a great living to be made that doesn’t involve world domination.

Kevin Kelly provides in a post entitled “Better than Free” 8 generatives to the FREE model, a must read for anyone interested. An summary from his article (but read it, its really good):

Immediacy: Getting a copy of something you want immediately, even though it might be free later. Examples: go to movie theaters to see films on the opening night and pay a premium price for it, access to Beta releases, Hardcover books.

Personalization: A product or service tailored to your personal needs. Examples: A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room — as if it were preformed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot.

Interpretation: The content may be free, but the interpretation of it not. Examples As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000.

Authenticity: You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don’t need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. Graphic reproductions such as photographs and lithographs often come with the artist’s stamp of authenticity — a signature — to raise the price of the copy.

Accessibility: Having access to your possession (data for example), tidy, up-to-date, orderly, backed up, provides us value that we are willing to pay for. The fact that most of this material will be available free, if we want to tend it, back it up, keep adding to it, and organize it, will be less and less appealing as time goes on.

Embodiment: The most obvious example. A book may be for free, but a presentation by the author is expensive.

Patronage: Kevin believes that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators.

Findability — Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable.

Conclusion

It is my believe that in general users are always willing to pay for value. If you can find a proposition that provides true value, then a payed business model is to prefer over a FREE model. Why? because it forces you to think in user value. It forces you to provide the user the best experience he can get. It forces you not just to get new users but to keep providing the users you already have with value. And you don’t have to be affraid of a competitor offering the same service for free. You can use the trust and long-term relationship with the customer to innnovate and create new value that your competitors don’t offer. In other words, the business model makes the user and delivering value to this user much more important than the network.

This post has become longer than I expected. Thank you all for the willingness to respond to my question. Let me know what you think. Would you be willing to pay for a web service that provides you value?

No, this isn’t about me or my next venture (will tell you about that some other time).

My friend Casper has one of the coolest jobs in the world. Casper is a creative, a concept developer. He uses all sorts of technologies to materialize the stuff he develops. You won’t find him at one of the top marketing or advertisement agencies. But he does really cool things for brands like MTV, Puma, O’Neill, Nike, T-Mobile.

If you are working on a great idea, a cool web service, a design, you should consider getting into touch with him He did some real cool UI designs for me before and I will definitely be working with him again. I love his work and his creativity.

Don’t take my word for it, just take a look at his showreel. Casper is in it, gets slapped somewhere around 1.22 . He created the music for the showreel too. Well worth a watch.

Yesterday I looked at the latest Friendfeed stats using the nice Friendfeedstats tool build by Benjamin Golub. I looked up which feeds are aggregated most in Friendfeed in the last 30 days. In 30 days approximately 1.3 Mln items were shared on Friendfeed.

Turns out there is a clear winner, but it might not be what you think. It isn’t links to sites, blogs, content, video, pictures, or shared Google reader items. It’s Twitter! 54% of all content aggregated on Friendfeed is Twitter (that’s almost 740.000 tweets a month). The second place is taken by Blog posts, leading to 15% of all content aggregation. The top feeds aggregated into Friendfeed now looks like:

1. Twitter (54%)
2. Blogs (15%)
3. Google reader (9%)
4. Tumblr (4%)
5. StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us all score (3%)
6. Flickr, YouTube score (2%)
7. Friendfeed, Gmail/GTalk, Last FM, Jaiku all score (1%)

24 other services score less than 1% of the total content aggregated. The amount of content being generated increased fast after launch. While January and February of 2008 showed less that 50.000 entries being shared, in March the number of shared items reached 1 Mln, and April shows 1.3 Mln entries. I don’t know exactly how many users generated these items.

I went to compete to compare Friendfeed, Twitter and TechMeme and got the following results:

It’s a bit unfair to compare Friendfeed to services that have existed a bit longer. It’s hard to draw conclusions yet, but looking at the number of visits Friendfeed is quickly nearing TechMeme, while Twitter is still in another league. Looking at the attention data however, TechMeme does a lot better than Friedfeed.

I looked at the Friendfeed stats earlier and concluded then that it was an echo chamber of things we already know. Most bloggers seem to like Friendfeed for 2 things:

1. The filtering of information that is done by the people they follow
2. The ability to comment on entries

The statistics seem to suggest that only a marginal number of people comments on entries, as Friendfeed input only makes up 1% of all content aggregation. It’s fair to say that I am not sure how Benjamin calculates the Friendfeed statistics. It could be that comments and likes aren’t part of his analysis (will ask him).

I wrote a post earlier in which I stated that Friendfeed seems capable of becoming a competitor for TechMeme. The main reason for this assumption is that right now Friendfeed compiles mostly blog posts and Google blog reader shared items (if we forget about Twitter). If we assume that Friendfeed is used mostly by the early adaptors, then it shows the most important blog posts for this tech group. Friendfeed has some advantages over TechMeme. It allows anyone to post his or her blog, whereas TechMeme complies only the most popular ones (using some algorithm). Within Friendfeed you can comment on entires, so it provides more interaction than TechMeme does.

At the same time, TechMeme probably reduces the noise level as on a typical day only some 150 posts even make it to TechMeme. Friendfeed aggregates anything that is fed into it, leading to 10000 blog posts per day. TechMeme might be a bit strict, but Friendfeed doesn’t make any distinction. You receive everything the people you follow decide to share.

While the Friendfeed team did an incredible job implementing so many different feed sources that can be imported, it becomes clear from the data that the Tech Elite requires only 3 sources right now. Twitter, blog entries and Google Reader.

The Friendfeed founders had a pretty clear idea what Friendfeed should be (from the Friendfeed site):

FriendFeed enables you to keep up-to-date on the web pages, photos, videos and music that your friends and family are sharing. It offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends.

It becomes obvious that the early adopters are not filling in this promise. To this community, Friendfeed is nothing more than a new distribution platform for blog posts. It is precisely for this reason that I am not so optimistic about Friendfeed being able to deliver on the consumer promise made above. Right now it offers a technical solution for the import of many different feeds into one place. But I believe that the setup offers non-tech people too much functionality. I doubt that consumers are interested in so many different feeds. The fragmentation in web 2.0 is pretty clear within Friendfeed. Just because they can import so many feeds doesn’t mean that people will actually do that. I think Friendfeed could easily become the most important tool for the tech community. I can think of two simple improvements:

• Instead of showing me all duplicate shared entries (echo, echo), why not show or search the statistics (N people have shared this blog post) This allows me to see what is shared most, or is most read right now)
• Same thing for comments. Which entries gets the most comments or likes. Show me the entries that are discussed most right now, that’s the place where a tech blogger wants to be.

With a few minor improvements Friendfeed could become a much better news source than TechMeme, Technorati, etc. But in its current form it won’t easily break out of the tech community into the consumer market.

Friendfeed might be a novel way to aggregate content in one place. But right now it is just Twitter and bookmarks. Nothing more, nothing less.

Kara Swisher created a little storm on TechMeme with a post called “Twitter, where no one knows your name“. In it she noted that no one really nows what Twitter (she asked a few friends). This created the usual river of replies. I liked the replies from Steven Hodson and Frederic at the Last Podcast best. The post isn’t a masterpiece of fundamental research, but Kara hits something that I have been thinking for quite a while now.

The web 2.0 industry, I thin we may call it an industry by now, is becoming a mature and therefore inert industry. The speed of innovation is dropping fast, just look at the number of truly innovating or new services you have seen the past few months. There are thousands of startups working on great idea. But most of these ideas are small improvements or tiny nuances in things that already exist. I tried to compile a list of services that fundamentally changed the way things work right now, but couldn’t make it a long list.

This is a pretty normal phenomenon. Someone starts the cycle with a great idea, starts killing the “old school” market leaders, and then others jump on the bandwagon and a new industry is born. This is a pretty healthy way of working.

The thing that I find interesting about this is that the web 2.0 industry differs a bit from that. I believe there is a web 2.0 industry (the massive amounts of people and companies working on it), but I am not so sure there is an equally large market. There are a few huge players making loads of revenues, but the rest is burning up venture capital. The web 2.0 industry in my opinion is by large a bubble that needs deflation pretty quickly. There are way too many startups working on the same ideas, the same services, the same small problems that need solving. Too many of these initiatives are based mostly upon technological capabilities, not so much on user value. It leads to an incredibly fragmented playing field where everyone tries to survive. And this whole thing is pretty much fueled by the Tech Blogosphere.

There isn’t a single day without “breaking news” or  a “cool” new startup being mentioned on TechMeme, TechCrunch, or any other news source. Everyone, eager to be the first, jumps up to review and write about the next thing, which often turns out to be the same thing. Everyone copies the same stories, brings it as their own. It’s a death grip fueled by traffic, advertisement, personal glory, whatever.

It seems venture capitalists don’t know where to invest their money anymore. There is too much and at the same time not enough of it. We get all crazy about the next idea concerning video, pictures, social things, desktop air thingies, aggregators, aggregators of aggregators, which all ad up to the same “freemium” business model. Everyone looks at traffic (wow, Friendfeed just saw a huge spike last month), only to find that it is that same Tech circus creating that traffic. Most innovations don’t get to leave Silicon Valley. They start there, using the tech blogging elite to build up pressure and create the “aura of success”. But very few of them actually get to leave this bubble and conquer the rest of the world. Most of them remain in the bubble, buidling up pressure with traffic created by the Tech Elite. Never making a buck from a real customer outside this bubble.

And who is paying for all of this? To me it seems that the old industry ends up paying for this mess. Venture capital is used to take the risk, to create the pressure. But the main ingredient of most business plans isn’t customer value. It is getting prepared for a take-over. You can’t build an industry on that premise. If a company’s sole purpose is to get investment after investment in order to get sold at the highest bidder, then there isn’t any value created. There is only destruction. And the sucker that buys it last is the one that pays for the mess. Often old industry trying to become hip and cool in the new world, only to discover that they didn’t really understand this new world and bought something quite useless for too much money.

Does that mean that all efforts in this web 2.0 industry are futile, that if you are in a startup there isn’t value being created. Of course not. I’m pretty sure there are lots of great teams out there working their heads off to create the next miracle. But before you think about leveraging the Tech Elite Blogosphere for your own success you might want to think again. Getting into the web 2.0 bubble might be an easy thing to do. But the question is, who is going to let you back out into the real world and real customers? You might see lots of attention in the blogosphere, venture capital poured into you company, traffic spikes. But can you make it outgrow Silicon Valley? Can you break through the barriers of the web 2.0 industry and make the jump to the consumer or business market? Can you resist the tech blogosphere screaming hurray, or demanding new functionalities that any normal person would never need. I hope so. Because in the end, in the outside world is where the real value is being build. The rest of it is just a lot of money and hot air being pumped around the same isolated web 2.0 bubble.

Does anyone have a needle

Friendfeed is on TechMeme again. This time we hear from Hugh Hutch Carpenter that some early adopters are moving towards Friendfeed now. According to Hugh Hutch people are moving away from the social services they have been using towards Friendfeed. While the compete traffic graph does show an increase in traffic for Friendfeed, Steven Hodson nails it by saying that Friendfeed cannot exist without these other services. Besides the possibility to enter text and links or comments into Friendfeed it really can only exist because people are creating content elsewhere feeding it into Friendfeed.

Friendfeed is almost like a virus in that sense, it feeds off other services and aggregates it all into one place. While most bloggers are walking away with the service (didn’t we do that with Twitter too when that came out?), I just can’t get all that warm about the service. I mean, I like it and use it, but I can easily manage without it too. Friendfeed does a great job aggregating feeds into one place. But that isn’t the thing I like about it. I like the commenting system best. Importing feeds into Friendfeed solves a technical puzzle. But being able to comment on the aggregated stuff makes Friendfeed interactive, and therefore useful.

But I still wouldn’t trade Friendfeed for anything else at this point. To me it is just another service I use. It isn’t the one service that binds them all. No way. Let me give you a few reasons why Friendfeed isn’t my favorite service (yet).

My friends aren’t on Friendfeed

Say that again? My friends aren’t on Friendfeed. Right now Friendfeed is a tech elite’s aggregator. It is crowded with early adopters, A-list bloggers (andB- and C- too probably), tech people etc. I follow these people too, just as they follow me. But they aren’t my friends. They are peers, interesting people, experts, whatever. But my friends aren’t there. Friendfeed at best could be an alternative for an aggregator like TechMeme. A better one too since it allows interaction with the commenting system it provides.

Friendfeed is an echo chamber of tech stuff we already know

I looked at the statistics a few weeks ago (friendfeedstat seems to be down, can’t get an update now) and found that the 5 most used feeds were Twitter, Blogs, Google Reader, Tumblr, and youTube. Twitter winning the contest with 51% at the time. So Friendfeed aggregates over 50% Twitter and after that mostly blogs. I realise that aggregation in itself doesn’t produce “new” content. But let’s face it. These feeds are mostly tech people’s feeds. Friendfeed lets us techies sift through the enormous amounts of tech news by letting others (the people we follow) do some of the sifting for us. That is probably why Robert Scoble likes Friendfeed so much. He has taken on more content feeds tan any human can possibily process, so he uses Friendfeed and the friends he follows to do that for him. Which is fine of course, but it is just convenience. It’s stuff we already know or could find on other services.

Friendfeed, or any aggregator for that matter, doesn’t aggregate important stuff, it aggregates everything

In a previous post I said I didn’t like Friendfeed as much as I wanted because it lacks intent. I have gotten a lot of replies on that. People either strongly agreed or disagreed. If Friendfeed allows us to share entire feeds (and many of them) without effort, then we are bound to share stuff that isn’t always interesting or important. We might even forget we are sharing it on Friendfeed after a while. It creates a situation where we do not always use intent to share. And when we share because we can, not because we meant to, the shared stuff becomes less valuable. It is precisely for this reason that the Friendfeed team is now working hard on filtering methods. Since everything is shared, users will quickly need filtering techniques to start finding the stuff that really matters to them. The power of Friendfeed (aggregation) quickly becomes it’s weak point (noise).

Friendfeed doesn’t allow intentional sharing to just a few

What is more valuable to you. A guy named Alexander that creates a Friendfeed entry “Alexander just posted five new images on Flickr”, or your best friend Alexander e-mailing you “Hey dude, here are the pictures of the party last night, what do you think?”. The entries both point to the same 5 pictures. But these pictures will probably have no value to anyone that hasn’t been at the party with Alexander. They do however provide value to Alexander’s best friend. The main reason for this is that Alexander used intent to share this. He didn’t share it with anyone that wanted to hear anything form him. He specifically sent it to his best friend, because he knew that sharing them would provide them both value. I find that the value of aggregation is highly overestimated. It isn’t aggregation what makes things valuable. It is the intentional sharing, often to one or a few people.

Friendfeed is a web 2.0 destination

Despite it’s simple and Google-like appearance, Friendfeed is just another web 2.0 destination site. It forces me to register, to leave a profile behind, to go to the Friendfeed portal and get the stuff I registered for, instead of it coming to me. Hugh Carpenter talks about the sharp increase in traffic to Friendfeed, and he uses that as an indication of its early adopter popularity. The battle for traffic, the destination thinking, it most often leads to the web 2.0 freemium business model. Getting something for free makes the service provider leverage network value, instead of user value. It opens up the door for unwanted advertisement as a compensation for free. The web 2.0 freemium business model doesn’t set us free, it locks us in. I’d rather have a business model that leverages user value, but such a business model would ave to compete with the freemium model, and that isn’t easy. But it will be the next frontier after web 2.0.

Conclusion

I’ll be using Friendfeed, just as I use other services. It’s a nice service, but I doubt it will ever become mainstream in its current form. Most likely it will compete with services like TechMeme for the most important aggregation source of tech news.

Marshall KirkPatrick provides an interesting overview from the Web 2.0 Expo. In his post Marshall talks about the next frontiers after the API. Everyone that turns on a platform these days also delivers an API to allow 3rd party developers create software on top of that.

According to the article the next frontiers in web 2.0 will be:

• Business models: It is easy to build new applications on top of API’s, for example in Facebook, but it isn’t easy to create revenues of them
• Filtering for information overload: aquote from the article:

Student entrepreneur Abhishek Nayak put it well when he called for a future characterized by “better platforms like FriendFeed, to make sense of all the information and noise from your social networks.” Blogger Eric Eldon of VentureBeat felt similarly when asked what comes next. “FriendFeed will rule,” was his three word answer to the question. How incredible is it that such a young startup has gained Twitter-like metaphor power already?

• Standards and interoperability: Can we make ubiquitous APIs work together?
• Outsourcing API services: The main issue here is scalability.
• Backlash: some predict that the next step might be backwards and away from the “Me too” APIs and platform announcements.

Looking at new business models is very important. I have written a lot about the current “freemium” business model , as Fred Wilson calls it. I don’t like it very much. The pro for it is of course that we all get free services. And that is great. But the con to it is that free always leads to monetizing something other than user value. In most cases “freemium” has the side effect of walled gardens and advertisement. There are only few that have executed this model well making revenues out of it. Google of course is king.

In most cases it sounds great but leads to nothing. Or as Wired puts it, the “I hate Facebook” club is growing fast. It leads to customer lock-in, and network value instead of user value. Customer lock in sounds great for the gardener, but obviously customer freedom sounds much better to me. Business models that leverage customer value are always to prefer. The problem with this concept is that most web entrepreneurs and investors are always looking at a business plan to see if it can become the next Facebook or Google. That means that it needs the ambition to rule the world. As a consequence getting lots of users on board is more important than delivering user value. What do you do when you want lots of users. You start by providing free services and later harassing the user with lock-in and advertisement. It sucks as a business model. Everyone is holding each other in this dead-lock advertisement trap. Why not try something different. Why not see if you can get 1000 people to actually pay for the value you provide them. 1000 is enough to make a living. And the great thing about this model is that if forces the entrepreneur to think in terms of customer value and customer freedom. No lock-in there! The question we are all afraid to answer is he following. “Would you be willing to pay a few bucks a month to use a web service that provides you true user value?”. I bet the answer to that is yes. But we don’t because everyone is currently locked into “freemium”.

The Filtering for information overload theme is interesting, but at the same time it is mainly a tech elite’s problem. The information overload comes from two things. First we Tech bloggers are afraid not to be there when it happens, instead of looking at the information as a river that you can tap in and leave when you are done. Second, underlying all that is the incredible fragmentation of services providing content. Web 2.0 has brought us democracy, anyone can build and launch a service, but that doesn’t mean it brings us quality or user value. I don’t know a single non-tech person (this isn’t sound statistically) that has more than a few sources of content that he needs to look at every minute of the day. But underlying is a more important aspect that makes this less of an issue for consumers. The dominant sharing technology for the tech world is RSS. RSS is great, but it leads to automatic and unintentional sharing. That is why I don’t like Friendfeed as much as I wanted.

But consumers do not share that way (yet). They tend to share intentionally. It means that they see a specific piece of content that they like, they pick it up, and they mail it to a friend. Or they post it on Facebook. Or they SMS a message to a specific person. Or they take a picture and show it physically to a friend. Or they call someone and talk. It doesn’t matter how they do it, they do it with intent. To me RSS is the democracy of publishing. But right now it is non-specific, it targets anyone that is willing to listen to it. Consumers share mostly with intent, and that is more valuable. They don’t have the need to become publishers. They want to share precious moments with others.

Sharing precious moments in life (image taken from Flickr)

I’m not worried about information overload. I’m more concerned that sharing with intent is not supported very well right now. That is an area where we need innovation. RSS might become part of that innovation as a technology that lowers the threshold to share. But I’m betting on other things as well.

In my opinion the next frontier will be to create alternative business models for “freemium”. If anyone can break through that barrier and become successful in generating revenues out of user value, then we could leave the era of web 2.0 behind. It would be nearly impossible, a daredevils trip, but hey, that’s what entrepreneurship is all about isn’t it? Web 2.0 will end when the user and his needs becomes more important than the the technology, the content, the destination site or the walled garden. If that is the case, we’ll be at web 3.0, but I still prefer the user centric web

BTW. I signed up for the web 2.0 expo with a paper that reflects many of the thoughts I mentioned here and in other posts. Didn’t make it through the cut though. Maybe I’m not “mainstream” enough, or I’m all wrong about it. What do you think? Let me know!

If you are a tech person than it is a bit hard not to notice that Microsoft has just released Microsoft Live Mesh. TechMeme and many tech bloggers are excited about it. There are numerous posts out there that explain what Live Mesh can do technically. I think I like Robert Scoble’s post best, because he automatically tries to find implications and uses of the technology for users.

I believe it is a pretty bold move of Microsoft. Instead of fighting a battle on just the desktop, or the browser, they are now challenging everyone in both the desktop and on line world by providing a platform that syncs a users devices, applications and data in one place. What strikes me most is not the technical solution they have chosen, but the fact that the technology is “open”. By “open”I mean that it isn’t necessarily limited to Windows devices, or even worse, Microsoft products. If this technology will be adopted quickly then Microsoft might just dominate the world once again. This time not by forcing a software system down every computer owners throat. But by providing a valuable platform that can tie all the user’s technology together in one place.

I have a technical background and have worked many times with complex technologies. I have build software in different languages, and worked in teams on complex technological implementations. But I am always amazed at the enthousiasm of tech bloggers when an announchement as this is made. Everyone gets all excited about the technological capabilities, but I haven’t found much on the usage of it. The question to be answered is, how will the user benefit? Let’s face it. Most people don’t know how or could care less about synchronizing folders or data. Having a “newsfeed” is nice, but it seems any service that launches without one is old-school “web 2.0″ (we moved on to 3.x I guess). Running software from any device or any place is a cool tech solution, but there aren’t many non-tech people out there yet that have a need for it.

Does that mean that the launch of Microsoft Live Mesh isn’t a big deal? Sure it is. But I’m not getting excited of the technology announcement. I’m interested in the announcements of companies building great user services over this platform!

I will be thinking a bit about this the coming days. And I sure hope the development community will do that too. Let’s not talk about the technology. Let’s get into the user experience, the services, the drivers that make me want to use it. The first thing that comes to mind is that this technology could be leveraged to create a user centric web, a web in which the Internet, the interactions, the devices evolve around the user, instead of a portal. Being able to get and share the important stuff with friends without having to go somewhere first would be a great improvement over current web 2.0 thinking. But it needs ot be non-technical. And that might just be the biggest challenge of this impressive technology launch.

After working for 10 years with the largest Dutch telecommunications operator I am leaving KPN.

I have had an incredible time there. KPN took me in after I finished my PhD. My first job was a research position. Looking at technology, trying to figure out how to make it useful for customers. Speech technology, Intelligent Agents, web applications, we did some wicked things with the technologies.

Then I went over to KPN Mobile where I was part of the team that launched UMTS services in the Netherlands. Not just the technology, but the application of the technology. I did a few incredible pilot projects where UMTS technology helped pilots manouvre large container ships into the harbor of Rotterdam, where engineers could access technology databases on the job, where schoolchildren were reliving Amsterdam in the year of 1550 in an educational history game.

From KPN mobile I switched to the Fixed and Internet division where I was asked to set up community development for KPN. Learning to communicate with customers again, making use of the technology that’s available. Developing new services for specific communities. Creating alternative distribution methods specifically tailored instead of trying to fit everything through the same mass process. Making use of new media, of web and mobile.

I’m leaving a company that allowed me to grow in many ways. I’m leaving behind people that taught me things, colleagues and friends. I had a great time there, but it is time for something new.

I can’t tell you yet what I’ll do next. If you have been reading my blog with any frequency then you know of the things that I get excited about. I love trying to make technology work for the user, instead of making the user work for the technology. I’m fascinated by the user centric web, making the Internet evolve around the user. In my humble opinion the next wave of developments will focus on that (call it web 3.0 if you want, but I like user centric web better). My adventure will be in that area. There are so many possibilities, but I haven’t decided yet what to do. I might start something on my own, or join a roller coaster that is gaining speed fast. And that’s fine, sometimes you just have to go with the flow and see what happens. It will be an exciting time for me.

And for this blog? Well, if it’s ok with you then I’m going to continue just the way I have been doing so far. Writing about new technologies and their effects on human behavior. I am surprised at the number of people that are willing to read my posts (their often a bit lengthy ), take the time to react with a thoughtful comment or another blog post. For some reason the number of people that have subscribed to this blog, the number of daily views have increased in short time from nothing to more than I would have ever imagined. A few days ago that was topped off with a day record for one of my posts, boosting it to the top of Techmeme for a while, and even making it the 14th most popular post on WordPress. It also hit a record of over 50 comments, which is truly great.

Thank you all for that, and I hope that I will be able to live up to the expectations that come along with that.

The story continues……..

I read a few different posts this morning and they inspired me for this one. First there was a post by Betsy Schiffman writing about the Web 2.0 Expo. She writes:

Now that the first burst of enthusiasm for social networking has died, people are realizing that web 2.0 is actually a huge time sink.

Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Plaxo may have helped foster community and communication, but they’ve also added immensely to the flow of often-interruptive messages that their users receive, leading to information overload and possibly a nasty internet addiction.

To underline this argument she uses a picture that I have used myself a few times already, but in a different context.

This is a set of logos of web 2.0 services, you can find many more of them here.

Another post that drew my attention was one by my favorite Pattern Houd, Rolf Skyberg. He writes about the principles of design and challenges us to rethink the way user interfaces are designed:

Is the ease with which we copy-paste both elements and information, forgetting the necessary influences of natural growth, decay, and selection?

If we forced ourselves to design only with pen and paper, would it necessarily create a more understandable interface? Pushing complexity away from the user, exactly where it should be?

Try this experiment for yourself, either in your next design, or your next powerpoint.

If you aren’t willing to take the time to draw each one of those fields and links, I can guarantee that your users don’t want to fill them in.

And he tops it off with a link to a cartoon that says it all.

What do these two posts have in common? To me they address a similar theme, using different approaches. Web 2.0 has brought democracy to web development. Underlying the web 2.0 developments lies a technology wave that has brought us near-zero service development cost. Anyone with an idea (it doesn’t have to be good) can become a web entrepreneur and build that idea into a tool. Anyone can launch that tool without distribution costs and use blogging platforms and social networks to make potential users notice the newly developed service. Anyone can affort to launch a Beta or concept service that isn’t finished because it can then be further developed with the user community. Anyone can build a service and forget about scalability, because it can always be done afterwards. Anyone can follow the ‘American’ dream and hopefully become successful and rich.

There is a clear upside to this democracy process. The speed of development and innovation is higher than ever. New ideas are born every day, but now new ideas can be materialized in the same tempo as they are conceived. There is also a downside to this. Lowering the thresholds to create new services doesn’t make the process of creating a great service ANY easier. If anything, the image above shows that clearly. There are literally thousands of “web 2.0″ services and brands out there. The web 2.0 wave is fragmented into uncountable small, niche, often cloned services. While Betsy talks about the information overload pressure on the user, I would say that the pressure is mostly on the web entrepreneur trying to get his niche ahead of the rest of the pack.

What strikes me most about it is that we tend to forget that building a great service, a great brand, the best usability, is actually all about craftsmanship. It isn’t a craft we all possess just because the technology has lowered the thresholds. Just because I can on-line create and edit images for free and with a few clicks it doesn’t make me a good designer. I can use Ruby on rails and have a web application up and running within the hour. But that doesn’t make me a great programmer or architect. I can easily come up with a web 2.0 brand name, just look at the web 2.0 directory. But that doesn’t make me a brand expert or a brand marketeer. And with the customer running around, constantly trying things out (hey it’s all free right), getting confused or bored easily, making something useful, actually creating user value is incredibly difficult.

Web 2.0 has brought us entrepreneurship and web development for all. But it doesn’t bring us craftsmanship. You either have it, or you don’t. But I know one thing. If you are thinking about becoming the next Facebook, Google, MySpace or whatever, begin your quest with finding talented people. It always starts there. Don’t be fooled by the ease of web development and distribution. Find talented people and create something that is designed, developed, implemented, branded and distributed with user value in mind. That will be the sured way to success.

Paul Buchheit wrote an interesting post a few days ago called “Facebook knows who you are, and that is worth more than you think”. As an ex-Google employee and now one of the founders of FriendFeed, he knows what he is talking about.

It’s very fashionable to declare that Facebook is an over-hyped fad and will never make any real money, certainly not enough to justify it’s insane $15 billion dollar valuation. At first glance, it’s easy to understand why some people might think it’s a toy — most of the activity there seems to involve biting, poking, and joining groups with funny names.

However, I think that assessment misses out on something very interesting: Facebook is capturing everyone’s identity and relationships. Of course there’s some noise caused by random friending, but by examining the larger graph as well as other details such as location, affiliations, interactions, and of course explicitly entered relationship details (”how do you know Paul?”), they can get a pretty good idea of which people are actual friends and acquaintances.

He goes on and writes that people that rant about Facebook and its business model aren’t using enough imagination.

Perhaps a people directory doesn’t seem terribly valuable, but if you can’t imagine how to make money from knowing everyone’s identity and trust networks, then you aren’t being very imaginative.

I believe that this last sentence is important. It not only discusses opportunity, but it also shows how incredibly vulnerable such a business model is (will get to that in a second).

Facebook stores one of the largest social graphs in the world. With their incredible user base, and their viral methods to gain more insight in users and their relationships they are building an unprecedented people’s directory. Facebook asks users that add friends about their relationships, it has viral applications that only work if you “infect” your friends with it too, and it seems to be moving in the direction of interaction, providing its users with chat functionality. Every action of every user on the Facebook platform is stored, analyzed and added tot the social graph they are building.

The database must be immense by now and growing every minute. From the perspective of Facebook this database with identities and relationships forms the value that is to be leveraged. The Facebook business model depends entirely on that leverage.

The information stored in the Facebook databases must be a marketeers wet dream. Instead of working with “old-fashioned” demographic information to reach customers, Facebook provides the marketeer with a platform that allows almost any kind of dissection of user groups into specific customer types. Talk about possibilities to target customers (what a terrible phrase that is). Marketeers are idiots of course (no I didn’t mean you ), so they won’t really be able to leverage the possible value.

There are a gazillion ways to use the information and create value from the Facebook database. Targeted advertisement, brand campaigns, specific customer interactions, targeting specific customer types, “social” search, “friend referrals” (Beacon was a very poorly implementation of this), etc. etc. But having all of this data does come at a cost. Facebook has created a perfect conceiled advertisement trap, but it’s a trap they had better not fall into themselves. The trap is formed because Facebook has chosen to make the social graph the most important aspect of their business model. Instead of directly leveraging customer value, they are leveraging network value.

The problem with this choice is trust of course. You have to be extremely careful that you aren’t leveraging too much of the data you collect for commercial purposes. The users, often unaware of the data collection and purpose of it, will not see the added value in that. They will most likely lose trust in the service that hosts their user profile and friend network if it turns out to collect data for commercial purposes. Facebook already has to deal with this problem with the increased friend spamming that is taking place, for example with 3rd party developed applications trying to collect their own social graph data.

A great example of a friend spamming application I received. I have to forward it to other friends to see its content (didn’t do it BTW).

So what can Facebook do to leverage their social graph data? How can they turn Facebook not only into a success in terms of nr of users and traffic, but also in terms of revenues? Here are my 5 tips how to make Facebook more valuable to its users and more profitable at the same time:

1. Focus on user value first, then leverage the data, no the other way around. It means getting rid of advertisement in user interactions on the Facebook platform. It doesn’t add value to the interaction and it often hurts the trust relationship Facebook has with its users. Alan Stern writes about the poor quality of the ads in Facebook. Its sits in the way of interaction. It also means getting rid of the 3rd party applications that have the purpose of collecting user data. Especially stop the friend spamming apps.
2. Focus on interaction. Social networking isn’t about user profiles or social graph data, it’s about interaction. Stimulate interaction, provide services that allow users to interact in ways they couldn’t before. That’s user value. And advertisers have no purpose or any value in interactions between friends. They aren’t part of the conversation, they are trespassing.
3. Think mobile. What is the single most successful business model that is entirely based upon interaction and user value? It’s mobile of course. People love to interact. They use their mobile many times a day to call and send SMSes to each other. And they are obviously willing to pay a lot of money for it. I can’t understand that a service with such web presence isn’t capable of mobilizing its users. The applications are there, but they aren’t being used. Facebook lacks focus on mobile, a possible revenue generator.
4. Open up the walled garden. Even though a lot of users aren’t aware of it, there are bound to arrive new competitors that provide valuable social interaction services without locking the customer in. Human nature will always find a way out. We don’t like to be trapped. Opening up has two important upsides. It forces you to think in terms of user value, because now you have to deliver a better service than any competitor. And it makes you have to trust your customer, and not ruin that trust by doing something evil. Opening up is also needed to be successful at point 5.
5. Leverage the social graph data outside of the Facebook platform. The future of Social Advertisement lies outside of the network. There is no value in trying to become commercial within Facebook. Facebook should be about interaction, remember. But outside of the Facebook platform these users will perform actions where the social graph data becomes handy. Think about it for a moment. The real value comes only within the context of a user searching or buying something on-line. That is where the data becomes valuable. Why? Because it helps the marketeer to provide me with advertisement that, in itself, has value within my context. I don’t want advertisement in my social interactions. But I do want them when I’m searching or buying stuff. It’s a knife cutting both ways. The user gets value, and Facebook can maintain it’s trust relationship with its user base. I’m not so sure automatic friends recommendations will work the way everyone hopes it will. if I need a recommendation from a friend, I’ll ask. No automation needed there, unless I can find it at the place I’m buying (e.g. finding a bookreview at Amazon written by someone I know). The newsfeed and beacon implementations of it do not even get close to real life recommendations. We need conversations, not Orwellian messages telling us about the shopping behavior of a friend.

I agree with Paul Buchheit that with imagination there is a lot of value to be gained from knowing the identity and relationships of people. But I also believe that leveraging that value is pretty difficult and requires a constant balancing act. Facebook has the users the traffic, the data. But it remains to be seen if they will be able to convert that into enough revenues to justify a $ 15 bln valuation.

I’m sure there are many other ways possible too. Let me know what you think.

Erick Schonfeld has a funny article today on TechCrunch in which he predicts/hopes that web 3.0 is about removing the noise. We all recognize the problem he describes. He is in so many different networks with so many followers that he can’t keep up with the messages that pass by. It made Robert Scoble stop automatically follow other people on Twitter (he has 20.000 followers and 1 tweet per second by now).

The cry out of Erick made me laugh a bit. Let’s face it. It’s a Tech Elite’s problem. Yes, I consider myself part of that, and probably most of the readers of this blog post too ;-). If anything the current web 2.0 trend is fragmentation. There are thousands of social networking sites out there, each fighting a battle to get users. There are a whole lot of services that let you interact, publish, follow or be followed. There are aggregating sites that aggregate it all for you. There are aggregators that aggregate all the content from the sites that already aggregate content for you. And if that wasn’t enough we now need to take it away from the browser and move each of these services into tiny little desktop applications. I can already predict the next wave in desktop application development. Someone is bound to get the idea to integrate Twhirl and all those other desktop applications into one big aggregator on the desktop. A Netvibes or iGoogle, but right there on the desktop instead of on a portal. And after that, who knows

Tech people, including myself, seem to be running away with all these different capabilities. Every time TechCrunch “breaks the news” for yet another web 2.0 service or desktop application people jump on it. Within minutes I see Twitter conversations that talk about the new application. People run around providing the developers with suggestions on how to improve the service.  It’s called user feedback I believe. The problem with it is that the “user” in this case is a tech person. Which is fine if that is the target audience. But if you want to become big, if you want to be the next Google or Facebook, then you will have to remember that any non-tech consumer out there will not have the same desires as us techies do. How many people do you know outside your tech community that want to have 25 desktop applications live, running Firefox alongside with 10 tabs open, twittering 100 times a day, reading and commenting articles on Friendfeed, writing a blog post about it, starting riots to get traffic going, AND still have a normal day job and a life after that? I don’t know anyone that fancies that kind of life. It is the life of the tech hero. We need to be out there, be there first. We are all affraid of not being there when it happens.

The cure for it? Not web 3.0, I certainly hope not. The receipe is quite simple (isn’t it always), but the execution much harder. Let go. Let me repeat that. Just let it go. I see Twitter, Friendfeed, and all these other sites as rivers of information, anekdotes, posts, friends. I tap in whenever I feel like it, join the conversation. But I leave when I need to get back to real life. I know the river won’t dry out. There will always be a next scoop, another funy remark, a great blog post. Life doens’t stop simply because I choose not to be drwoning myself into this cyber river of information. I don’t need 20.000 followers, nor do I want to follow 20.000.

If anything, web 3.0 should be about the user, about user value, about letting the Internet evolve around you, instead of around some destination site or walled garden. Web 3.0 should set us free, letting the important things come to us, instead of us having to go to the important things. It’s about freedom of data. And yes, noise reduction or filtering will be nice. But that isn’t really what web 3.0 should be about. Until it is here I’ll be dreaming of a user centric web.

Glenn Derene suggests that Social Networks might replace search giant Google as a place where people will start their search. He bases this on a conversation he has had with a VC. A quote from his post:

So what is my VC friend talking about? The larger the Web grows, the more important search becomes, right? That’s probably so, and as a note of clarification, he changed his statement slightly to say, “Search, as we know it, is dead.” What he means is that, with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?

I have written about this idea before too. Google and other search engines index an incredible amount of information, but it it often up to the experience of the search engine user to get a good result. If I ask the right question Google delivers quicker than anything else. If I ask the wrong question I’m forced to scroll though millions of search results to find what I need.

There are different possibilities to tackle that problem. We could replace the Google bot indexing by human indexing, like Mahaloo does. Humans can interpret information better than computers, but the downside is off course that they can process much less information too. We can create large encyclopedias on-line which are updated by anyone (Wikipedia), or by experts in the field (KNOL). We could analyze surfing behavior, social interaction and social graphs of people and use that information to provide the user with more targeted information (which for now is used more often in advertisement). This is where the VC friend is pointing too. If Facebook, or any other social networking site knows more about you, and your friends it might be able to do a better job at search. While I can agree with that up to a certain point (I’ll get to that), the article takes a false turn in my opinion. Glenn provies he following example:

But what may turn out to be the strongest signal of all is the footprint you make with your online identity. Consider how much information you voluntarily provide on your Facebook profile. Now imagine if you could combine that with your Netflix renting and Amazon buying habits. Then throw in the suggestions of your friends and the pages you visit the most often. All those various sources of information about you are currently stored in different locations—on your computer’s browser history, on your Facebook page, on the servers for Netflix and Amazon—but just imagine how accurate a search could be if every time you had a query, the mass of data about you that exists on the Internet could inform the results. (Google and Yahoo already do this to a limited extent by tracking your search history to refine results, and surely startups will try.)

This is the Walhalla of search, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A Social Network owners wet dream. But it’s just too good to be true. I don’t buy it. I’m not saying that knowing things about a person might help a service provider provide more targeted results, but I don’t know of a single example where this has been implemented successfully. Every social network site is hogging data to accomplish just this. Whether it is to target ads or to provide the user with search capabilities. But it is likely to fail at least as often as it will succeed. Google provides me in 80-90% of the time with the answer I’m looking for. If a search engine that knows about my profile fails half of the time, I wouldn’t bother using it.

Why would such an attempt fail half of the times (or something in that order)? Because it doesn’t take human behavior into account. There are at least two barriers that can hardly be overcome by any computer algorithm or data hog system. First of all, on-line I’m not who I really am off-line. On-line people can have multiple identities, lie about themselves, provide us with profiles that look better than real life. I wrote about that earlier in an article called “The Future of advertisement lies outside of Social Networks“. I wrote:

I’m hiding behind thousands of friends, only showing you the public me, a persiflage of real life. You might think that this universal social network will provide you better information than demography does now. Yes, I am 39 years old, married to a lovely wife, I have four kids and I live in the Netherlands. But that really is just a small, public part of me.

Here I am

Secondly, a computer algorithm can hardly interpret my mood of the day. Depending on how I feel, what I have experienced earlier, what I’m about to do in the future, the coffee I had for breakfast, etc, etc, I might be looking for different things when I type “I am looking for a car” in the search bar. Chances are that by taking into account my profile information, social graph, interactions on Facebook or any other social network, the “social search” algorithm will be way off.

Depending on the question you need answered, people will start using different search algorithms. If you want to know the phone number or address of a doctor you rarely visit, you will use Google. If you want to buy a new espresso machine, chances are that you will read all kinds of reviews on the Internet (which always contradict each other and are often biased) but will end up in a store tasting the espresso right there (nothing beats that experience). But if you need answers to complex questions, then the best way to go is to ask your family, friends, colleagues, Twitter followers. You will get the best answers there. Finding information is great, interacting about it is even better. No search engine or social search algorithm can beat that.

Social search algorithms will definitely have their place in search the coming years. But I doubt they’ll perform much better than Google does right now. Adding social information into a search query might work really well, but not always. And when it’s off, it’s likely to be way off.

I wouldn’t just write off Google yet.

So Facebook allows its users to import content into their newsfeeds now? Competing with aggregators like Friendfeed? Big deal. The service is already loaded with features that provide no value, so adding a new one isn’t going to make it any better. Let me provide you with five reasons I personally don’t like Facebook very much (hey, it’s just my opinion).

Facebook is a large walled garden that allows users in but never, ever let’s them out.

Even after deletion fo an account your data is still within the Facebook databases. Moving to another service with your data is impossible. Getting your data out leads to account deletion (not data deletion, that remains with Facebook). I don’t like customer lock-in, I want customer freedom.

Facebook is based upon a flawed business model.

They use the free but ad-based business model which is fine when you are a giant search company, but really sucks when your main objective should be allowing your users to interact. There is no place for ads in interaction. It’s merely trespassing in conversations between friends.
Facebook newsfeeds are highly overrated.

They might have been the first to implement them, but the newsfeed sucks. I recently took a picture of my own newsfeed and it has learned me that one of my friends is playing Scrabble, three people added an application, someone had changed his profile picture (which was sort of obvious as I could already see that it had changed), and some advertisement for large Facebook groups I should be in. I’m not interested to read ‘Alexander went to movie X”. I’m interested in personal message like “Hey, I went to movie X last night. Had a great time, you should go see it too”. The first message was an Orwellian Facebook Big Brother is watching you headline. The second one was a personal message from a friend. Pick the one you like best.

Facebook is spam.

Can’t say it any clearer. While a lot of Facebook’s intentions (and those that create Facebook applications), might be to provide the user a good time, it is spammy as hell. I get a lot of requests to look at things my friends send me, only to find out I need to forward it to other friends too. Often even before I get to see the content. I don’t want to harass my friends with that. Which reminds me that I need to talk to the person sending me that stuff too

Facebook is about data hogging, not about user value

Facebook isn’t there to provide its users with value. It is there to collect all the data it can get out of you, your social graph, your actions inside and outside the walled garden. It needs to do this in order to fuel it’s business model (that is why the business model is wrong). Facebook shouldn’t be hogging data, they should be providing user value. Instead of customer lock-in, they should be thinking about customer freedom. Instead of importing feeds from other sites, they should be opening up themselves to third parties. Instead of locking me down they should allow me to leave if I want to and taking my friends and data wherever I want to go. But they don’t, and you already know why.

I read a blog post by Russell Beattie this morning in which he announced the end of Mowser, a mobile web browser Russel has developed. He talks in a very personal way about his experiences witht he mobile web. According to Russell, the mobile web has never existed:

The argument up to now has been simply that there are roughly 3 billion phones out there, and that when these phones get on the Internet, their vast numbers will outweigh PCs and tilt the market towards mobile as the primary web device. The problem is that these billions of users *haven’t* gotten on the Internet, and they won’t until the experience is better and access to the web is barrier-free - and that means better devices and “full browsers”. Let’s face it, you really aren’t going to spend any real time or effort browsing the web on your mobile phone unless you’re using Opera Mini, or have a smart phone with a decent browser - as any other option is a waste of time, effort and money. Users recognize this, and have made it very clear they won’t be using the “Mobile Web” as a substitute for better browsers, rather they’ll just stay away completely.

And to top that off he says:

Let me say that again clearly, the mobile traffic just isn’t there. It’s not there now, and it won’t be.

In his opinion services need a web presence in order to become succesful on mobile. You need better devices and full browsers. Read the article, Russell has taken the time to write a personal story, it’s good reading.

Russell isn’t the first one that had to stop efforts to become successful in the mobile web. I wrote a post a while back, called “The Mobile Web Experience needs fundamental rethinking”. The trigger of that post was an article by a mobile expert Michael Mace, who declared mobile web applications dead.

I have never really believed in a mobile web. But I also believe that current mobile thinking is often dominated by two things, technical capabilities and bringing web services to the mobile. But these things aren’t of any value to me. I currently use a Nokia N95 as my mobile phone. It has tremendous technical capabilities, Wifi, GPRS, UMTS, HSDPA (unlike the iPhone). So it has the speed to surf comfortably and it also allows full web browsing. But I don’t use it for web browsing that often. the reason for that is simple. When it comes to using a mobile phone I have different needs. Needs that aren’t exactly the same as I have on the web, sitting behind a computer.

The mobile phone is by all means my remote control of life. It is primarily an interaction device. I call and SMS with it. I also take pictures, upload them, and sometimes I use it for e-mail. The only time I use it for web browsing is when I need to pass some time, waiting for a meeting, doctors appointment, at the airport, whatever. The experience always sucks. Sites load to slow, full site browsing is cumbersome, inputting information is a hell of an experience. And lets not discuss the cost of browsing. Mobile operators run the most successful walled garden services worldwide. They make a great living out of it and because of the walls being so high it costs us users a fortune to fire up that HSDPA connection and start surfing.

Now you could argue that the iPhone has changed all of that. I have a few doubts about that. the iPhone has done a great job in setting new standards for usability. Studies show that iPhone users are web browsing more often than other mobile users. While that is true the iPhone’s major improvement is the touch screen and some really cool UI inventions. But the iPhone isn’t fundamentally changing the mobile web experience. It’s a cool device with a great UI. It has been designed to provide us with a web experience that might become close to the experience we have sitting behind a laptop.

But I don’t want that experience. If I do, I’ll fire up my laptop. I want to be able to get the maximum out of my mobile as an interaction device. That the thing that needs fundamental rethinking. People don’t want to sur f the web, they want to interact. Just count the number of calls and SMS’s from mobile phones. There is no web surfing traffic that could ever match that in terms of revenues, minutes of use, or nr of messages.

In a previous article I summed up my wishes:

But I do need every innovative service that allows me to interact with my family and friends. It contains my most important address book. It allows me to send and receive messages, I can call and talk to people, and in the future I can see other people on it too. I can capture images and video with it and I might want to share those immediately with my family and friends. I want to know what the people I follow closely are doing and I want to be able to reach one or many of them without any effort on my side. I want to see all messages addressed to me or messages the people I follow find important enough to share, no matter if it is SMS, e-mail, a Tweet, IM, whatever. Sure, I listen to music on it, I surf the web every once in a while, and I even sometimes watch some video or TV on it. But not nearly as often as I interact with others on it! Once we get the interaction right, we might start thinking about other services like identification or buying and selling of stuff. But interaction comes first, always.

In my opinion we need a revolution in mobile phone UI thinking. A revolution that puts the user and his intentions central in user interface development. We need to understand what users do with their mobile phones. We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of releasing technical functionalities with nice graphical interfaces. We need to think in terms of the remote control of life, supporting the user in his interaction needs. If we let go of the current UI and browsing paradigms who knows what becomes possible. Let’s not rebuild the entire web to make it mobile, let’s not even come up with even better alternatives for the iPhone touch screen. Let’s first think about what the user wants to do with his phone, and then come up with an interface and a mobile web concept that supports his actions, regardless of the technology.

One suggestion to start this rethinking. Please, please, get rid of the inbox, outbox principe on a mobile phone. It sucks. Ever tried to use Twitter by turning on it’s SMS interface. You know what I mean! Instead convert the entire paradigm into a life stream, similar to the way Twitter and Jaiku work. It fits human behavior much better. We don’t always want to look into or respond to every message we receive. Showing these messages as a constant stream allows me to look at it whenever I want to. It doesn’t call for my attention whenever a message arrives, but I get to decide when I wish to give the message my attention. It allows me to pick up things that are important, and it also provides me easy ways to respond to on ore more people. And it lets me ramble my thoughts to whoever is willing to listen to them. And the best thing about it. I don;t have to surf the web to find things. If I want to, I’ll just ask it to the folks I’m connected to.

Forget about the mobile web. Rethink fro a user perspective and someone is bound to build us the best interaction device in the world!

This weekend an interesting discussion arose around the new RSS service Shyftr. Louis Gray started the discussion with a post , Robert Scoble,  Tony Hung, Mark Evans and many others, including myself chipped in our 2 cts. From there on I could the conversation moving around Twitter, Friendfeed and many different blog posts and blog comments. It’s been at the top of TechMeme for quite a while.

In my post I argued that once an idea has been written down in public it’s impossible to control the conversation around it r even know if there is a conversation taking place. One of the unwanted side-effects of these new RSS services is that they essentially live of the traffic that could have gone to the original blog poster. This is especially frustrating if a blogger is trying to make a living out of his passion. I recommend reading a very thoughtful, personal, honest post written by Steven Hodson on that issue.

After reading through all the different inputs in all the different places (and I’m sure I’ve missed a whole bunch of them) I started wondering about the effects of conversations exploding in all directions, places, platforms. A lot of bloggers asked themselves the question if it would be possible to centralize all these comments/blog posts/conversations, so that nothing would be missed (see here for example). While it would certainly be nice for the original blog poster to see what the spin off effects of his blog post were, I am convinced that it would be a bad idea to try and centralize these type of conversations.

One of the most important reasons for me to blog is to be able to inspire people. To write something down I’m passionate about, and then seeing others willing to invest the time to read it, and even react with a comment, blog post or tweet. It is truly great of be aware and part of a conversation that kick started because of something I have written down. Interaction leads to better understanding, opposing/similar views, deepening of the issue, or plain old fun. It therefore sounds like a great idea to centralize these discussions.

Tony Hung replied to my blog post with a great comment (he wasn’t agreeing with me, which is fine!). One of the things he said was:

Not many people will be happy to put in the time if the most humblest of things — the conversation — is happening away from their blog, without them even *knowing* where it might be happening.

And he is right. We want to know about the conversation that takes place. If we know about it we can become part of it. So why not centralize it? I’m sure the technical capabilities to do so are there. Someone is bound to think of and build something that tracks down reactions/comments/trackbacks/discussions to blog posts and centralize them in one place. A bit like the Disqus comments centralization, but taking it much further than just comments.

I believe that there are two reasons for not wanting to centralize conversation, control and diversity. While the argument of being able to follow and participate in conversations is valid, I cannot help but feel that there is also an underlying behavior of wanting to be able to control the discussion that follows from a blog post. It provides the blogger with a sense of power or control to have everything centralized. Being able to follow everything being said, being able to react/counteract/take part in the discussion gives us the illusion that we can influence or control its outcome. It also feeds our pride (look what I’ve started), which is a perfectly human reaction. Being able to control, or even have the illusion that a conversation can be controlled, is not a good idea. It means that we are putting boundaries around it, that the outcome is limited to some extend, because we are trying to control or influence it. It’s like a walled garden social network. Once you are trapped inside it’s nearly impossible to get out. If anything it will provide limitations to the social interaction and that is not right.

Having the conversation centralized doesn’t  necessarily make it better either. That is where the diversity comes in. If a blog post, or any content for that matter, ignites interaction in many different places with many different people, then the outcome of this interaction is unpredictable for sure. My goal in blogging is to inspire people to think and form their own opinion about something I am passionate about. The best thing for me as a blogger is to be able to unleash discussion, even to places I don’t know about. Knowing that I might have started thinking, creativity, discussion is what makes it a great experience for me.

I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that I might never know about the effects. The conversation will find its way to people who can form their own opinion about it. It might be a much better opinion, might lead to a blog post that is way smarter than mine. It might lead to new ideas I hadn’t thought about. It might also lead to copy behavior, or even theft. It might lead to new businesses being started, people becoming rich, or it might even lead to nothing at all. But I believe that this chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable process in the end always leads to something better.

A good idea doesn’t become better because the people you already know talk about it. It doesn’t necessarily get better when like-minded people respond to it. It gets better through diversity. Diversity in people, in thinking, in opinions. Centralization will most likely lead to like-minded people coming together “controlling” the outcome, mostly unintended. Fragmentation leads to ignition, new ideas, new insights, new people taking it further than you could have imagined. In most cases I’m probably not even aware of that. But in those rare occasions that I am, it gives me a great feeling to be a part of that.

So for once, let’s not try to get a grip on the conversations taking place. Let’s not try to central