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

There is a lot of talk these days about the iPhone. You can’t open TechMeme without seeing yet another rumor about the next generation, 3G, whatever version of the iPhone Apple is about to release. As soon as any other mobile initiative is released it has to go through an iPhone comparison. Google is working with developers around the world to create a new mobile platform called Android. As soon as the first demo’s appear the tech blog community measures them up against the iPhone.

Well, sorry to say this, but the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I have seen in quite a while. Now, before you get all excited about that and state that I have gone mental, let me try to explain what I mean by that.

The iPhone, in my opinion, isn’t really a mobile phone. The iPhone is probably the most innovative handheld computer in the world. It has a unique feel to it, a nice operating system, a touch screen (which is old news in Japan and Europe really) and great usability. It provides us with a browsing experience unlike any other mobile device. It has a great display, a mediocre camera, it lets you play music, video, browse the web, anything a gadget lover might need. It just sucks as a phone. You can tell the iPhone was build by a computer manufacturer. It is a handled where someone decided to also add phone capabilities to. And it’s phone capabilities are worse than I had thought.

What are the two most important functions of a mobile phone (and no, I’m not talking to all you smartphone lovers out there)? Calling and SMS. It is as simple as that. This is an estimated 1 Trillion dollar business world wide! While the USA lags behind in SMS, the rest of the world produces 5-10 SMSes on average per user per day. SMS is a $ 100BLN business. A business larger than ALL social media and advertisement business on the entire web! Probably less than 5% of that big pile of revenues goes to data services. It will be growing for sure the coming years. But $ 1000 BLN is a really big number.

When we get all excited about the iPhone I’m sure we aren’t getting excited over it’s phone capabilities. We are excited about it’s ability to browse the web, to act like a small yet powerful handheld computer. And that is great. Apple surely did set a new standard there.

But have you ever tried to make a phone call on it. With all due respect, I could navigate my “old-fashioned” Nokia N95 way better than the iPhone. I’m estimating that using the N95 menu structures I can find and call a contact approximately 50% faster, and more importantly without making any errors. While the contact list on the iPhone looks flashy,  the touch screen controls create a lot of errors for me. I can’t search for a contact (Sorry if I can’t remember all 800 names in my contact list). Scrolling is great, but landing on the right name is difficult. How many times have you found the contact, clicked on it (expecting it to start making the call), clicked on it in the next screen (why for heavens sake), and then only found yourself to be in the “change details” screen instead of the calling screen.

How about SMS? I use that function as least as often as I call. I might type 30-40 SMSes on any given day. But with the touchscreen keyboard of the iPhone this has become a real pain. I touch the wrong letter too often. Not only was typing on my Nokia without an actual keyboard faster, what is more important, it was way less error-prone. And honestly, the pre-iPhone interfaces weren’t that good either, but a hell of a lot more workable than the iPhone now. I have written before about the need to rethink the mobile experience fundamentally. Apple did it, only they forgot the current main use of a phone. They were thinking handheld computer when they designed the iPhone.

I tried using the headset provided with the iPhone. Worked fine for calling. I took it out, left home without the headset. And I found out the hard way that the rest of the day I couldn’t make a phone call because the iPhone for some reason assumed I still had the headset installed. Probably a “bug” or mishap, but not being able to call without using the external speaker all day is a real pain. Never had that happen to me before.

I hope Google’s Android will lead to developments that do not always match the iPhone. It has set a standard in it’s own, we don’t need others cloning that. I hope Android developers will think about a better integrated experience. Not just the “new world” of web browsing and media consumption. But also including being able to call and send messages (sending e-mail has the same obvious problems on the iPhone).

Touch screens are great, but we either need bigger ones, or I need to sharpen my fingers to hit the right letter on the tiny little keyboard. One thing I do like about the iPhone’s SMS capabilities is the way it displays successive SMSes as conversations. Perfect, because that is what they are!

I’ll end this with a small wish I have written about before in a post called “We need a revolution in Mobile U thinking”:

I’ll give away one idea for making things better. Why not get rid of the whole inbox-outbox messaging paradigm. It sucks on a mobile phone. 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 we could easily integrate calling behavior in that same life stream too.

The iPone may be the best handheld mobile computer there is right now, but it’s probably one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used.

Bernard Lunn has written a good post on the (lack of) a social media business model. He writes about the difficulties for social networks to monetize using advertisement. Although he builds his storyline a bit different from me, he is saying a lot of things I believe too. A few days ago I wrote about the same subject in a post called “Advertisement holds web 2.0 in a death grip”. A nice quote from Bernard’s post:

If social media is not funded by advertising, it must be funded by subscriptions or transactions. Neither is easy.

Social media is fundamentally different - it is few to few, not one to one like telephone or one to many like traditional media. There is also a fundamental problem for advertisers. We are focused on communicating with each other, not looking at content with some hopefully relatively relevant ads attached. Any advertising in that context is an annoying interruption, unless we learn to tune out the ads so effectively that it becomes useless to advertisers.

Bernard analyzes what three major social networking sites could do. They all have 2 options, remain a walled garden, or open up and become a utility. Both paths, or fork in a road as he calls it, could lead to value creation. But if a social network remains closed it will become a niche. Bernard’s preference (as is mine):

The mass-market utility model will win out in the end for 3 reasons:

1. The social graph is so closely linked to communications, which has always been a utility model.
2. The ownership issues around the social graph are murky. A utility skates past that problem, saying “you own, we manage.” AT&T does not own your Rolodex, or insert ads when you are calling Mom because they own your connection to Mom.
3. The social graph has to be monetized in creative ways and the best way to make that happen is make it available to all the entrepreneurs and established businesses, on clear and simple terms.

I believe that Bernard nails it. Social interaction is something of all times. It is the most vital element of our on-line experience. Content creation and consumption isn’t nearly as interesting if there isn’t interaction. The interaction itself shouldn’t be supported by advertisement. Advertisement trespasses when I’m having interaction with my friends. I once, jokingly, said I started a countdown for the downfall of Facebook.  The reason for this countdown is that they are executing a wrong business model. They aren’t near that downfall yet, but if they choose to remain closed then the slow decline as Bernard also calls it will happen. They just don’t own enough of the Internet to make that work. They have a walled garden of 100M users, Google works on a walled garden of the entire Web population. They are different measures.

We have seen already one example of a very successful social interaction utility. Unfortunately this example is not a great example for a successful utility business model. It’s Twitter of course! Twitter has commoditised the 140 char message more effectively than anyone could ever dream of. It has the capability to become mainstream due to its addictiveness, interactiveness, fun. But it also has serious operational problems (which I don’t want to emphasize, they are really hard working on it and I wish them all the best). But to me Twitter is also the example of a missed opportunity for a social utility business model.

Twitter should have taken its popularity and become a social utility service other social networks could implement. By doing that they would not only have become the standard for short social communication messages in any social network, but they would also be able to execute an Amazon-S3 type of business model. There would also be opportunities to charge users for the utility they use. Maybe not in the web domain (although I could see premium and freemium services appear), but definitely in the mobile domain. That is where the growth of Twitter should lie. That is where the money is! And if they can think of a way to stop cluttering the inbox of a GSM, then they could make the crossover to mobile and become one of the most successful paid mobile services. They have taken the immense popular SMS (100 BLN revenues in 2007), and socialized it using the Twitter service. An incredible opportunity, missed by a long shot.

I sure hope that the utility model thinking will gain momentum in VC land. I also hope Twitter will make a turnaround in terms of operations and business model. I would hate to lose that service. I want it to become successful as a social utility business model. It will help us create the User Centric Web.

I’m thinking about Erik Schmidt, CEO of Google, who says that mobile advertisement will be the next thing. Actually, he says it a little different:

First: There is still a lot of revenue in search - as we get the technology better or as we can do more targeted ads. There is no limit for search marketing. People assume that there is a limit, but we have many more ideas about technology. Second: The most obvious large space of advertising is the mobile internet. Every German has a mobile phone. Just take the success of the iPhone: It has the first really powerful web browser on a mobile device - and many more are still coming. Nokia has one coming, Blackberry has one and Motorola has one. They are all supposed to be released this year. By these products, the advertising gets more targeted because phones are personal. So targeted ads are possible. And that means the value of the ads will grow. The next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet.

It’s interesting to see the thinking pattern of Google on this. The first thing Erik says isn’t about the mobile phone being personal. He starts out by saying that there are so many of them (already 3.3 Bln according to this post). I like that. Google seems one of the few companies that never stops thinking in terms of huge. While most web 2.0 companies are trying to claim their own space on the web, Google just takes the entire space for granted (the web) and works on that as their walled garden. Right now, they are the only ones even remotely capable of managing such a large walled garden. Not only do they own important data centers all over the world, but they also own a large part of the infrastructure and data pipes the web runs on.

I’m pretty sure that it is precisely this thinking that has lead Google to start the Android initiative. They saw the impossible and futile platform wars on the mobile devices and realized there wouldn’t be a clear winner. These platform wars are a major cause of the lack of innovation in the field and penetration of mobile services. Google came with Android and they potentially have the power to open up this space filled with technologically disconnected devices. If Android can overtake these platforms and create a major open source platform for development then we will probably see an enormous speed of innovation arise in the mobile world.  It’s pretty smart too, because Google would then hold a similar position in the mobile domain as they do on the web. They are everywhere and it will allow them to continue to think huge and come with advertisement services that will be difficult to compete with.

He goes on by saying that since the mobile phone is personal, the advertisement can get more targeted. And targeted ads lead to more value. This sounds like the new Walhalla for advertisers. What if we could get our message across every mobile phone, the most personal device on the planet? But it always makes me think about the user. What about him. What is in it for him?

Advertisement on mobiles might work, but it is even more difficult to be successful than it is on the web. Remember, the mobile phone is a personal device. It is our remote control to my life. We use it for the most important things in life. Communication with family, friends, co-workers etc. Not only phone calls. According to Toni Ahonen, SMS is used often everywhere in the world with the exception of the USA, who are lagging behind. We use it to make pictures, or sometimes to record a video. We use it to listen to music. And slowly, we are also using it to browse the (mobile) web and for localization services.

Personally I think that before mobile advertisement has a chance of becoming successful we need to fix a few things that inhibit mass adoption of mobile browsing. I wrote a post on that a while back called “The mobile web experience needs fundamental rethinking” For the sake of the argument we will assume that developments such as Google’s Android and the iPhone will deal with most of these issues. We are then left with the mobile operators that run the largest walled gardens in the world!  With their access monopoly, simlock schemes to enforce which device can be used on their network, impossible to comprehend calling, roaming and data plans and worthless custom Mobile Web portals, the user is left with total confusion over the services and costs involved.

Most of these hurdles have inhibited the mass adoption of the mobile device as an Internet device. SMS rules (100 BLN in 2007!), and mobile data revenues are growing at a much slower rate. But the 3.3Bln devices out there form an incredible potential. Not just for advertisement, but for anyone that wants to set up a business  with healthy revenues. In my opinion advertisement on mobile will have to follow similar rules to the web to be successful:

1. Do not get in the way of my interactions with friends. I can’t stress that point enough. When I’m interacting with friends advertisement is trespassing.
2. Don’t even think you can be successful with bannering or display ads. Have you seen the size of a mobile device screen? There is no room for bannering on that. Sure, everyone tries it, but it’ll just be an annoying flashy little thing that clutters a space that is too small to begin with. If you want to get users annoyed, try using banners.
3. The advertisement in itself has to provide the user with value. To me that means the advertisement itself needs to be contextual, localised and personal Example. I’m in a bar with some friends and I’m showing them a picture I took earlier and posted on the web. Showing me an ad that tells me to drink Heineken beer will be more than annoying. Providing me with a bar code that lets me buy a next round of Heineken beer with a discount in this very same bar we are at is pretty cool.
4. The possibilities for advertisement are endless. But the point remains that advertisement works best when I’m either looking for something or planning to buy something (which is just another way of saying I’m looking for something). I might be using a mobile version of search, I might be looking at locations or maps, I might be on some e-commerce site like eBay, those are the moments when advertisement can provide both the user and the advertiser value. For the rest, just leave the user alone and let him interact. BTW I’m not discussing branded activities here, just advertisement.

Mobile advertisement may be the next big thing. But it is probably much harder than advertisement on the web. And we already suck at that (unless you are Google). It’s a pretty big gamble with high investments, high risks, and potentially high revenues. I’m sure there are lot’s of entrepreneurs out there working on it already. It’ll be interesting to see what will happen. What do you think?

Scott Karp has written a good post on why traditional advertisement fails on the web. I am not sure if I agree with all of his observations/explanations, but I do like his take on it. In the end it boils down to something I have written many times too, advertisement just doesn’t provide the user with any value.

The only example where advertisement works right now is in search. The difference there is that the advertisement itself provides the user value. If I’m already looking for something then advertisement can actually serve a purpose. It’s what Google has perfected.  There isn’t a single other example thinkable where advertisement is so effective. It is also the main reason why I believe that the true value of social advertisement lies outside of social networks. Advertisement should never, ever, interfere with social interactions between friends. It doesn’t belong there, it merely trespasses. Or as Scott puts it “Get out of my face!”.

A quote from Scott’s post:

Why do traditional advertising formats fail on the web? Because people have no patience for them, as they did in traditional media, where we were habituated to looking at print ads or watching TV commercials.

What strikes me most about the comparison between advertisement in the “traditional” media and on the web is that the behavior of users really hasn’t changed much. Just think about that for a second. What do you do when there are commercials on TV or in a newspaper? Right, you ignore them or even take action to avoid them. It is one of the most common uses of the remote control for a TV. It isn’t really to switch channels, it is used to get away from commercial breaks.  The same thing goes fro printed advertisement, I can easily read a newspaper and not notice a single advertisement within it. My brain just doesn’t register them anymore. It isn’t any different on the web. Just like on TV or in a newspaper, I’m in control. When I surfe the web I decide what is important for me. I never register advertisement. It might be there, but my brain filters it out for me. Technology helps too. I use Firefox with two of my all-time favorite add-ons: AdBlock+ and FlashBlock. These two block probably 90% of all advertisement on the web for me, with the additinonal bonus that my browser becomes faster. It doesn’t need to load the useless stuff anymore.

What I just don’t get is why we keep this dreaded web 2.0 free but ads based business model alive. It’s probably the biggest advertisement scam on-line. Over $ 16 Bln is spent on-line trough advertisement networks and there isn’t a single user interested in them. There have been a few reports of on-line advertisement boosting off-line sales, but I doubt the numbers are that positive across the web. It is pretty amazing that web entrepreneurs and investors have the balls to stuff $16 Bln in harassment down the throats of the user. It is by far the worst business model you can choose. BTW over 75% off all advertisement spent goes to Google! That leave only 25% to be divided across the thousands of web 2.0 services out there. You can easily calculate that that is not nearly enough to keep all of these services profitable. There are so many flaws in the business model that I could go on for a while. Just read my post entitled  “Would you be willing to pay for a web 2.0 service that provides you value?” . It’ll tell you about the flaws but also about possible alternatives.

The free but ads based business model holds web 2.0 in a death grip. If you want to be successful, you need lots of users. If you want lots of users, you need to provide a free service. If you provide a free service you need someone else to pay for your server costs. If you don’t have an investor that gets you ready to be bought by another company (that’s a web 2.0 business model too), you need another sucker to pay for your costs. And that would be the advertiser. And he would be harassing your own users, the people you really, really need to become successful in the first place. See the flaws in such a business model?

Off course marketeers are idiots. They won’t get this and will pour gazillions of dollars into this hole without actually creating any value with it. BTW, I didn’t mean you by that, I meant that other guy

Does all of this mean there isn’t an room for advertisers on the web? Sure there is. But in the current state of the web, when it comes to traditional advertisement keep it with search. That is the only place where advertisement makes sense. The rest of the web should be off limits for advertisement. Just think of this simple rule when you are thinking about deploying advertisement. If the advertisement itself provides value within the context of the user then it’s ok. If it doesn’t, then don’t do it. Instead, try a business model that leverages user value. BTW, I’m not talking about branding activities here, just bannering, display advertisements etc.

Tim O’Reilly is already looking one step further than the current web. He writes very smart stuff about the web 2.0 operating system. It is the system that combines all web 2.0 applications. It is the place where the next search battle will take place. Google is the king of search of the current web, but the question will be if they can become the king of search within the web 2.0 operating system.

Facebook wants to be the next king, and so do all the other services that try to get a grip on user interactions and user content (take Friendfeed for example). But the dilemma that each of these services has to face is how to commercialise all that user data and interactions without violating the trust of that very same user. It’s a Catch 22 that they all have to solve. The only viable solution to this is that they make sure the commercialisation doesn’t take place  within their own application. In that way they could keep the trust of the user and still exploit him. It wold mean taking down all advertisement on social networks like Facebook and making sure the value gets created outside that network.

But I doubt any of them will or can do that. They are all in a death grip forced upon them by advertisement.

Yesterday I wrote down my thoughts on what the next generation might do on the web compared to our generation. My main point was that I felt they would find the public interaction that this generation is now discovering less important. As a result the interactions within a next evolution of the web might become more local and within smaller communities. The post started discussions both in the comments section and on Friendfeed and it inspired both Colin Walker and Mark Dykeman to write lengthy, in-depth replies. I would urge you to read both posts. They took the time to write it and deserve the attention. Let me recap the three posts a bit and then I will try to develop these thoughts a bit further.

I realised that when the discussion started I failed to write down my thoughts in such a way that the reader could pick up the main aspects from it. Colin pointed this out first when he said:

I can agree with Alexander’s ideas to a point but I can see the focus in the social web splitting and going two ways - there will be a bipolar existence but the extremes will not necessarily be mutually exclusive.

I agree with Colin, I didn’t mean to suggest the youngsters of today will not participate in public interactions tomorrow. Of course they will, in both the physical world and the web. Coin ends his post with:

In the local sphere I imagine public appearance to become of even greater importance but not in the exhibitionist way we are currently used to. Instead, the emphasis will shift to the ‘public‘ further encouraging us to take our online relationships offline and increase the actual face to face interaction almost as a backlash to the virtual world we are currently inhabiting.

The shift to more focused, smaller communities will allow this to happen as you will only be trying to organise meetings with a finite group improving the relationships within it, but it will not be at the expense of the global conversation.

Mark picked it further up and reacted to different aspects of my post. I said at one point:

“This ability to become a public figure has also fueled the idea that we can all become our own personal brand….but most of (this younger generation) aren’t building a personal brand, they aren’t part of every public conversation.”

And Mark responded:

Alexander’s right about this, but also a bit wrong. True, most of the people who are active in social media and who are branding happily along are not students, but professionals or otherwise active in the workforce. Personal branding is a big part of career mobility and advancement – that’s one of the most difficult lessons that I’ve learned in my 17 years in the workforce. The Web allows us ways to extend our personal branding activities to a larger audience.

People in entry level or junior positions are generally busier with acquiring the technical knowledge and expertise with their chosen careers to work much on personal branding. Later, if they decide to explore leadership roles within organizations, their focus may change. In fact, it will probably have to change. Public social media interaction will become more attractive at a different stage of life.

I agree with Mark that in different stages in life people behave differently. As a youngster building a personal brand is extremely important, but only within the (small) group of friends. Later, when a professional career starts, this will extend to a more public stage. Hutch Carpenter made a similar comment on my post.

I like the example Mark provides that sort of supported the point I was trying to make:

Let me describe a theoretical example of the type of application that I think Alexander might be talking about. Let’s say that a group of young people are planning a vacation trip to a foreign country. They might want to have private discussion groups to plan the event and talk about it. They might want to have a Wiki-like resource to provide reference information about the trip. They might want to have a joint file-sharing site to house pictures, audio, and video related to the trip. They might want to have dedicated microblogging and instant messaging about the trip as it occurs. And, finally, they would want to have the ability to keep all of this information exclusive to their group - forever.

Lets see if I can rephrase some of my thoughts a bit. Tudor asked be to provide one example where I based all of these thoughts on. One of the sources that has inspired me to write about this is the excellent blog by Zephoria. While I’m no expert on the subject, she writes often about teens and social behavior. She pointed me to a study a while back that analysed the behavior of teens with social media. One of the findings of the research was that although teens participate in all forms of social media, a large percentage of them restricts access to their content to friends only. It seems that they are more concerned with privacy than this generation is (even though they use social networks like Facebook etc.).

I believe that a next generation will not be as excited about the ability of public interaction as this generation is for at least 3 reasons:

1. Their parents discovered it, and they don’t want to look like their dad who is a cranky old fart. Sorry about that Steven Hodson, I don’t mean you by that of course
2. They are already showing behavior that they are more concerned with privacy than this generation
3. Unlike this generation, they will have tools available that will enrich their on-line interactions in a much smaller community. More local, more personal, much more mobile, and more immersed within the physical environment. This will provide them more value than the value this current generation gets out of the public interaction tools of web 2.0.

Wrt the first point, Josh a 17 yr old said in the comments of my earlier post:

“email is the new snail mail”

As a 17 yr old I’d say you’re spot on here Alex, in fact if I need to ask someone something I’m more likely to sit on MSN and wait for them to come online then shoot off an email.

I think the only email conversations I’ve ever had are with adults, not peers.

Also the observations about Teenagers being interested in keeping up to date with their friends, not with social networks in general are very true too. Teenagers have always just used the best tool available, 30 years ago that was the phone, now its myspace or text msgs etc.

Of the people I know who sit on Myspace or Facebook all day, none of them are even remotely interested in “social media” itself.

So the public conversation will never disappear. If anything, it will become more intense and be held in ways we can’t right now. But at the same time, in a next evolution of the web I believe we will see technology that enables the users to obtain more value out of smaller communities, personal, localized, familiar, private, targeted on the user and his friends. The technology to support it is already worked on right now.

More importantly, it will mean new business models that partially replace the mainstream web 2.0 business mode, which leverages the value of a large walled garden network. Business models that scale down to these smaller communities and leverage user or community value instead of network value. Business models that aren’t focused on storing large amounts of data in a single database, but are focused on the here and now, the interaction that is taking place within that smaller community.

It’ll definitely be interesting to see the future unfold. A next evolution of the web is bound to appear. I couldn’t say if it will look remotely what we discussed. But I learned a lot the past few days from writing down my thoughts and seeing so many reactions to it. Thanks to all of you that took the time to respond and if you have more thoughts on the subject, leave a reply!

I want to end with a great quote I found yesterday by Doc Searl. Fits the subject perfectly.

Now is history, get over it!

One of the things that pops into my mind when I look at what most of us call web 2.0 is that this era can be marked as an era where every user can be a public figure. In the old days (pre-web 2.0 ) people would connect on-line with each other using e-mail or chat. But the connection was only possible if you know each others e-mail address or chat name. The number of contacts a person could have would be limited to the number of e-mail addresses you were able to exchange with family, friends, colleagues and people you meet. This seemed to work fine for most of us, until technology enabled us to become public figures.

The era of web 2.0 gave us technology to start producing our own content, instead of having to look at “professional” content. More important though, web 2.0 gave us the power to distribute both ourselves, our messages and other content we create. Web 2.0 gave us all the power to create our own public presence. The ability to distribute was key to the success of the technology. Video would not have become so popular if someone hadn’t thought of building a YouTube service. We wouldn’t be preparing for everything to become social (web 3.0?) if some college kid hadn’t thought to build a Facebook (-like) social network.

And where the pre-web 2.0 era was marked by static and mostly private conversations, the web 2.0 era is a dynamic never ending public conversation. We used to have people physically together to be able to show off our expertise. Now, everyone ventilates an opinion whenever we feel like it. Not just because we have expertise on the matter, but because we can. We used to have 10 friends available via e-mail, now we have thousands via different social networks.

This ability to become a public figure has also fueled the idea that we can all become our own personal brand. It’s not the major companies anymore that can define a brand. Anyone can, simply because the distribution power we have access to allows us to build that brand at virtually no cost. We can communicate our brand across many different channels reaching many different people. A few years ago people would most likely subscribe to a physical copy of Wired magazine to get informed of the latest in technology. Now people subscribe to Robert Scoble. Not just because he as effectively build a technology evangelist brand for himself. But he was able to distribute that brand to the tech community using the technology web 2.0 provided him.

In my opinion society seems to be divided into groups of people that cope with this differently. There is the people that saw the web 2.0 era arise and participated in it from the start. These people adopted the technology and made a public appearance for themselves. They are the ones on every social network, blog, content aggregation site etc. They see the web as the never ending conversation and participate 24hrs a day in this conversation.

Then there is a group of people that sort of missed the arrival of the web 2.0 era. Maybe because they were older, but just as likely because they weren’t interested in computer (technology). These are the people that have difficulty understanding the basic workings of computers or the Internet. They will use it to the best of their ability, but they can’t and won’t understand the attractiveness of having a public appearance. These people haven’t missed out on the technology, but simply never became part of the public conversation.

And there is the new generation. These are the people that might not have been aware of the start of the web 2.0 era, but they are part of it, simply because it’s there. It’s the high school and college kids of this time. They don’t know about the pre-web 2.0 era. Most of them don’t know e-mail or associate it with something their parents do (boring). They use the technology as a way of life but don’t care about it’s inner workings.

I find this last group the most interesting. I haven’t any statistics to justify what I’m about to say, but they seem to think different about public appearance. Where the web 2.0 generation almost frantically wants to be a public part of the conversation, these young people are more concerned about their privacy. Sure they are on Facebook or other social networking sites. They use the tools. But most of them aren’t building a personal brand, they aren’t part of every public conversation. They have adopted the technology and use it for what it originally was meant for, interaction with their friends. You won’t find them on Twitter- or Friendfeed-like services. Not because these services aren’t mainstream enough, but more because these people aren’t that interested in a public conversation. They want to have instant access to their friends, but they don’t need access to a world of unknown people. For them web 2.0 is just the web as they know it. Nothing new about it, it’s like e-mail in the old days.

And it is this group that we should focus on when we think about a next web era. Web 2.0 isn’t the end point of development, it is merely a playing ground for something new. And if we take a closer look at the needs of this group then I would say that the next generation web services will be very different from the ones we have right now.

I believe that we will see new tools that won’t be designed around one database holding and exploiting the information of millions of users. Instead we will see tools arise that support the interactions of a few. Highly localised (not just in the physical sense) and focused to support the needs of smaller groups of people. Maybe with less ability to find and connect to people around the world, but more tailored to fit the need of people that are already know or are in the vicinity of each other. Smaller communities, but more intense interactions. Not just with each other, but also with the physical world surrounding the community. Not focused on building a data history of every user on the system, but focused on the here and now, the real-time support of actions and needs. Profiling a user of your service will be less interesting, understanding and supporting him and his friends just in time will be more important. Becoming a destination site is pointless, joining the user is the only thing that matters.

This also implies that new business models will be needed. Not the web 2.0 FREE business model that is based upon the value of a large network or community. Instead we need business models that leverage user value. Business models that don’t force the service provider executing it to build walled gardens or conquer the entire world. We need business models that can scale down instead of up. That are profitable for smaller groups of people and can support an entire ecology in a more local manner. That doesn’t mean next generation services won’t have millions of users. It just means that they will need to be highly contextual for smaller groups and be profitable by providing these smaller groups with value.

In a sense web 2.0 has brought us technology to open up the entire Internet into one global village. The next wave of technology will counter this effect and make the web look small again. Not small in the sense of little, but small in the sense of personal, localised, familiar, private, targeted on the user and his friends. You can see it coming already if you look at the technology that is arriving right now. Cloud computing, distributed databases, the call for portability of user data through developments like OpenID and other microformats, the semantic web, etc. But the technology is just enabling something the user wants. Just look at the behavior of the coming generation. That is where you will find the start of an answer to the question how to become the next Google or Facebook.

What do you think will happen?

Yesterday John Furrier and Robert Scoble dominated tech discussions when they wrote about the possibility of Microsoft buying Facebook and then locking Google out of part of the web (the Facebook Walhalla that is). It seems like a possible scenario. Facebook has an incredible amount of users and is one of the largest walled gardens in the world (MySpace would be the other and bigger one). Microsoft can’t beat Google in advertisement or search, but they really want to be a serious competitor. That is why Microsoft wants to buy (part) of Yahoo now.  And if they were to buy Facebook they could possibly have access to a holy grail with 100Mln users and their interactions with their friends (e.g the Facebook social graph). They could then build search on that social graph and possibly become the “next-generation” Google. That is a search and advertisement giant on social networks. These take-over rumors have already been denied by Facebook but that really doesn’t matter much. I’m not interested in such a deal, but I am interested in the thought that some might be delusional enough to think they can lock down millions of users and confine them to a small part of the web.

There are some serious flaws in such a scheme. I named the most obvious and important one already yesterday and it’s that human nature doesn’t like to be confined (within a specific area of the web). We don’t like walled gardens and we are bound to find a way out. The argument against this (Facebook is a walled garden and has already 100Mln users) is weak as there currently isn’t a viable alternative. But there will be one once the web is divided into an open and a closed section.

But underlying this customer freedom there is another big issue at hand. The current fight between the big Web companies isn’t really about users or web. You might think its data, but that is only a trigger for something else. The fight is about control. Most web 2.0 company, with the social networks leading the pack, think they can control part of the web (and therefore part of the revenues) if they can control the data that flows through it. That is the main reason for building walled gardens, its about control.

Facebook now controls the data of 100Mln people. With that control they can decide who gets a share in the pie and who doesn’t. Scraping attempt (e.g. data removal from Facebook) gets the penalty of removal. The argument provided is that the user’s privacy is at risk, but that is a ridiculous argument. They might even believe it a bit, but underneath that argument is always the fear of loss of control.

There isn’t a single web 2.0 company that can guard the user’s privacy. It just doesn’t fit the business model they are executing (unless your main product is privacy, but then you don’t need the web 2.0 FREE business model. You can get users to pay for it the old fashioned way). In the end there can be only one responsible for data and privacy, and that is the user.

The ability to control data is highly overrated by social networks. Every network hogs the data of its users as if it were pure gold, but the real value of a social network doesn’t lie in the data. You can’t map me into a profile by hogging my data. On the web you only get to see a fraction of the real me, a public persiflage. I might even have multi facet identities, or a different identities for different things. If you are going to map advertisement to me it won’t take into account my mood of today, the things I experienced yesterday, the things that interest me right now.  You could take away my data from me, but how are you going to take away my interactions? Do you think that if I’m banned from your service or a network I can’t interact with my friends any more? There isn’t any control, just an illusion of it.

That is why a User Centric Web will be more valuable. In a User Centric Web the roles are switched. In a User Centric Web the user controls his data and the service provider does what it needs to do, provide service. No battles over data, users, social graphs, networks or walled gardens. Only battle over what matters most, user value. The service provider that provides the best service will win.

Can you feel the power of such a paradigm switch? Put the user in control means letting go of the false illusion that you as a service provider had control in the first place. It forces any service provider to think about user value, about how to be more attractive to the user than any competitor ever could be. The paradigm switch would immediately break down walled gardens and create an open space where the user can travel anywhere he wants to and take his friends and data with him.

And the great thing about it is that you really don’t need all that data to service me in the best possible way. You can provide me value without controlling my data.  If you provide me value I will even hand you the data that is needed for you to provide me value. You don’t have to guess what I’m about, I’ll tell you if it helps you to help me. Does that mean that having data has no value. Of course not. But hogging data from users and trying to control the user through that data doesn’t make sense. Context, interactions, actions, needs, emotions, experience. They are all much more important than data. I like what Fred Wilson says about this.

Social web services need not fear data portability. They need to fear others providing a better experience. Because when others do that, the flow of data moves and they aren’t in the middle anymore. They might still have your data but they won’t have you. And that’s where the value is.

And remember, just when you think you have control, a new generation of users arise and they’ll want revolution. Dear Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook. You don’t have to control my data to provide me value.

Update

Bruce Schneier just wrote a really good essay on the issue of data and privacy. Ties in nicely with this post.

I don’t usually respond so quickly to news. If you are familiar with my blog, it’s not a breaking news kind of blog. But the rumors that Microsoft might be buying Facebook are now quickly taking over TechMeme. Robert Scoble just wrote a response to these rumors. He is turning it into the battle of the century where giants Google and Microsoft are fighting each other over total control of the web. He says:

This has created HUGE value for Microsoft and has handed Steve Ballmer an Internet strategy which brings Microsoft from last place to first in less than a week.

Boom!

Now Microsoft/Yahoo search will have access to HUGE SWATHS of Internet info that Google will NOT have access to.

Data portability is dead on arrival.

Microsoft just bought itself a search strategy that sure looks like a winner to me.

If all this is true there is no way in hell that Facebook will open up now.

It’s Facebook and Microsoft vs. the open public Web.

I don’t know if Robert is right about this. But I’m sure that both Microsoft and Facebook are capable of trying this. If they do, and really try to close of part of the Internet, then it will be a very expensive experiment that will be dead on arrival. There is no way that Facebook will be able to close off the Internet that way. Sure they can do it technically. I’m not even thinking about what about web developers will do. Already they are finding ways to punch holes in the Facebook walls. Google’s web crawlers might not get in there, but there will be other ways. But that isn’t what I’m betting on. I’m betting on something much more powerful. I’m betting on human nature.

In the end we don’t like to be held captive. We don’t like walled gardens. At first nothing might change. Some of the users that aren’t aware of the walls that are drawn up around them will figure it out. And they won’t like it a bit. And if they start a protest on Facebook itself, what can Facebook do? It is their strength (the community) that will defeat them at the end. You can only confign users within a walled garden service if the walls cannot (physically) be broken down. The mobile operators run one of the largest and most succesfull walled garden, it is called the mobile network. That can’t be easily broken down. But on the web I can’t think of a single walled garden that can’t be avoided or broken down.

So I’m not so worried about it. If Microsoft and Facebook want to close off part of the web, just let them. They can have it. But they will have to realise soemthing about that strategy. They don’t OWN the customer. They can try to lock them in, but in the end all they will be left with is one big walled garden with old data. The users will have moved on to something better.

I would rather hope that Microsoft would embrace the User Centric Web. Instead of locking users in, they should consider to set them free. The best business model any company can ever execute is the one that leverages user value. A business model based that locks users in is bound to fail.

PS. Robert loves Friendfeed and claims that will be the alternative to the Microsoft - Facebook content. That’ll be the day

Rolf Skyberg of eBay has an interesting post up called “Skype: proof that Voice is not the killer app”. Rolf is an excellent pattern hound and he has come with another interesting pattern after he looked at Skype. Skype was bought by eBay because eBay thought Voice would be the killer app. Read his post for all the details.

As we trudge on into the future, we need to question whether the old way of doing things is necessarily the best. Will your future mobile phone, even support voice calling?

Let’s take a look at lessons learned from Skype. eBay purchased Skype a few years ago for an admitted outrageous sum of money, betting on the fact that voice is, in fact, the killer app.

He goes on and notes that Skype implemented text chat later, which became more important to the user than the ability to call for free. He provides another interesting example that supports his conclusion:

I mentioned in a presentation that the current mobile experience “was crap”, and someone challenged me, asking if I thought the iPhone was crap. They asserted it was not crap, because it had displaced 15 to 20 minutes of browsing in the morning they would have normally needed to boot their computer for.

He concludes, also based upon this iPhone example that voice is not the killer app. The pattern he sees emerging is that:

depending on the needs of the situation, each application has a collection of “best” tools

Which is a simple and therefore beautiful way of looking at it. Rolf is right and wrong at the same time. I believe he is perfectly right with the pattern he formulates. There is always a best set of tools, and these tools even define the application in my opinion. But he is wrong about voice not being the killer application. The mistake he makes actually links directly to his pattern. He implicitly assumes that just because we can use voice on a computer we will. And that assumption is wrong. Skype initially got a lot of traction because of their unique business model, free calling. The early adopters jumped on it and gave the service a  boost.

But Skype is victim of the pattern Rolf has formulated. Skype isn’t the best tool to use for a voice call. It’s free but there are two major obstacles to it. The obvious one is the sound quality which is below average at best. But the most important problem is that most people (I mean regular folks here, not us tech heroes ) don’t want to talk to computers. In other words, the computer isn’t the best tool for voice. You need a headset, a microphone, there is a screen in your face, these are all tools that don’t fit the simple process of making a voice call.

I can already hear you say, but what about the iPhone then. Well, the iPhone, in my opinion, isn’t a phone. It’s a handheld computer that allows you not only to browse the Internet in an intuitive way, but as an extra feature, it also let’s you make phone calls. In other words. the iPhone isn’t the right tool for voice either.

I have been using my iPhone for quite a while now and to be honest, I am less enthusiastic about it than I thought I would be. Why? Because my mobile device for me is an interaction device. It is my remote control to life. I use it to call, SMS, take pictures and go on-line. The on-line part is the best you can get right now. The iPhone has defined a whole new standard for browsing the web with a handheld. Apple has brought us the touch screen, tactile movement control and an intuitive and simple Apple-like UI. But it is crap for calling or SMS. Not only do I need to provide more input to do that (compare it for example to ANY Nokia phone), but the touchscreen and interface get in the way of my input. I can SMS at a great speed on my Nokia, but I make tons of mistakes on the iPhone. The touch screen keyboard just doesn’t work. According to Scott O’Raw I need to use cocktail sticks taped to the end of my fingers to make it work

To rephrase Rolf Skyberg’s pattern a bit I would say that the core functionality defines the best tools. If your core functionality is voice then stay away from the iPhone and get yourself a “regular” mobile phone. If you want a web experienceon a handheld, there isn’t a better option than the iPhone.

We can use this pattern and see what we can learn from some of the posts that made it inot the top of TechMeme this weekend. Robert Scoble scores three hits this weekend with his posts on noise in web 2.0 and 2 separate posts on Friendfeed (here and here). As a side track, I have noticed and failed to understand that writing about either of these two topics leads to massive amounts of traffic, even for a small time blogger like me. For some reason the tech elite just can’t get enough of producing more noise about the noise they produce

Robert declares himself to be a noise junkie. He finds that the best way to be on top of a story, to be the fist to notice something, is to subscribe to all the noise out there and try to detect patterns. As you can see, noise is a relative notion. So for Robert Friendfeed is one of the best tools out there, because it let’s him subscribe to any amount of noise he can possibly handle. There are many conversations about noise out there already. Some love it and some hate it. The ones that hate it leave the services that provide them the noise (in this case Friendfeed) for what it is. The ones that love it try to explain the tons of features to reduce noise. Even the founders of Friendfeed have made noise reduction their top priority.

But looking at the pattern we formulated earlier this won’t work. Why? Because the core function of Friendfeed is the aggregation of information in a simple way. And if we look one layer below that we can already see the business model of Friendfeed. They are going to try and provide the next generation search functionality. Instead of indexing the entire web, something only Google can attempt, they have decided to index that what is shared on Friendfeed. The idea behind it is that if the information is already filtered by the user, then the importance and relevance of it will increase. The assumption may be right, but the way Friendfeed works right now doesn’t help it a bit. Friendfeed has made it simple to share stuff automatically. And because it is dead simple, anything gets shared, including noise. Friendfeed can implement all the noise filters they want, but most users won’t be able to find or use them properly. Right now Friendfeed is the best tool for content aggregation, but it isn’t a tool for noise reduction. Could it be? Maybe, technically these guys can build anything they want. But from a user perspective, I bet it would lead to more complexity in the UI making the effort to reduce noise more difficult than to simply let it flow by.

Designing a great service is the most difficult thing to do. But it might help to think about your core functionality. If you know what that is, then you can start building the best tools for it. Don’t fall into the additional feature trap, and especially don’t build everything the early adopters are screaming for. Stay at the core and if something else is needed, build another tool. The question was, what do Skype, eBay, the iPhone, Robert Scoble, Friendfeed and noise have in common? Well nothing more than this post I guess

I’m a big fan of the concept of a user centric web. That is, a web where things evolve around the user. In a user centric web there aren’t walled gardens. In a user centric web, the user is in charge. He controls his data, his interactions, his transactions. He owns his own set of contacts or friends and has them with him wherever he goes. In a user centric web service providers become just that, service providers. Not data hoggers, traffic drivers, walled gardens. They provide service to me when I desire such a service. The analogy I tend to use is that of a traveler reaching a gas station. I have a need for food, I want to fill the car up again and then move on to another place on my journey.

Google, Facebook and MySpace are fighting it out right now to “own” our data. Google just launched FriendConnect, Facebook delivers Facebook Connect, and MySpace calls it Data Availability. Michael Arrington wrote about this on TechCrunch earlier. He said:

Like Data Availability and Facebook Connect, Google’s Friend Connect will be a way to securely send personal profile data, including friend lists, presence/status information, etc., to third party applications, say our sources. The primary benefit of these services is to allow users to maintain a single friends list and to coordinate social activities across different sites that perform different services. See my post on the Centralized Me for more of my thoughts on this.

The reason these companies are rushing to get products out the door is because whoever is a player in this space is likely to control user data over the long run. If users don’t have to put profile and friend information into multiple sites, they will gravitate towards one site that they identify with, and then allow other sites to access that data. The desire to own user identities over the long run is also causing the big Internet companies, in my opinion, to rush to become OpenID issuers (but not relying parties).

Michael is probably right about the motives of these three. It’s the web 2.0 trap we are all in. Who owns the data? Everyone wants to get a piece of it and they are all using the FREE business model to reach that point. but Free comes with a few problems I noted earlier. It leads to walled gardens, more focus on the network (or social graph) than on the user, forced advertisement and worst of all it leads to customer lock-in, instead of customer freedom.

I like Doc Searls take on this. He calls the developments to open up social networks using FriendConnect and the likes not really open. Instead a federation is created. A federation that lets the user travel around a bit, but he still doesn’t own anything. He isn’t in control of his own data. In other words, a federation isn’t a User Centric Web. Doc Searl points me to this excellent post by Joe Andrieu. Read his post, its really good. A quote that says it all from Joe is:

When we put the user at the center, and make them the point of integration, the entire system becomes simpler, more robust, more scalable, and more useful.

I believe this is what FactoryJoe is also working on. He wrote an excellent post on Data portabilty. He can get a bit technical for those that don’t like the inner workings of technology too much, but I have found it worthwile my time to dig into his writings. He takes the time to explain what data portability is and should be.

So if you ask me what is “data portability”, I’ll concede that it’s a symbol for starting a conversation about what’s wrong with the state of social networks. Beyond that, I think there’s a great danger that, as a result of framing the current opportunity around “data portability”, the story that will get picked up and retold will be the about copying data between social networks, rather than the more compelling, more future-facing, and frankly more likely situation of data streaming from trusted brokered sources to downstream authorized consumers. But, I guess “copying” and “moving” data is easier to grasp conceptually, and so that’s what I think a lot of people will think when they hear the phrase. In any case, it gets the conversation started, and from there, where it goes, is anyone’s guess.

He ends his post with the following remark:

I think the next evolution of the social web is going to be one where we take certain things, like identity, like portable contact lists, like better and more consistent permissioning systems as givens, and as a result, will lead to much more interesting, more compelling, and, perhaps even more lucrative, uses of the open social web.

I hope with Doc Searl and Factoryjoe that the next generation of the web (call it web 3.0 if you want) will be a User Centric Web. It will be both a business and a technical challenge to create it. We first need to get out of the web 2.0 FREE trap. If investors, entrepreneurs and developers are willing to think beyond the current web 2.0 boundaries then great things can happen. And if they do then services like Facebook and MySpace might just get into trouble in the end. I don’t want them to control my data. In a User Centric Web I get to control my data.

Update: Facebook just announced here that they are not going to allow Google’s FriendConnect on Facebook. The reason for this is that FriendConnect, according to Facebook, redistributes user data without the user knowing about it. Robert Scoble responds with Facebook having a point with respect to privacy. Both Robert and Facebook are arguing from the side of the service provider making the decisions though. That is exaclty why the user needs to be in control. The problem wouldn’t exist in the firs place. In a discussion on Friendfeed Robert says:

to me the Facebook privacy issue is giving its users control over where their data gets used. So, if I want to change my email address it changes everywhere on Facebook. If someone takes my email address off of Facebook into another system, like Google’s Friend Connect, unless they also respect those changes then I’ve lost control of my data. That, in Facebook’s view, is bad. - Robert Scoble

Again. If the user is in control of his own data, this is a non-issue. In a User Centric Web updating my own data and notifying my friends that I did could be done without the interference of these big social networks.

Yesterday I wrote about the trend that every bit of content that is produced on the Internet seems to get aggregated, producing yet another view of what is already out there. Instead of delivering us inspiration, aggregation brings us more of the same. Aggregation doesn’t inspire us to think, it lets us sit back and consume. I said:

And when people get lost, they will simply return to their human nature. They will look out for the oldest, wisest, or craziest people out there. I don’t think the world needs more information. We don’t need any more or better content aggregation, search algorithms or noise filters. We need more inspiration. We need storytellers (and that will be the topic of another post).

I figured it would be good to spent another post on this topic and introduce you to a few storytellers I deeply admire. These are people that aren’t looking at their rating on any blogging leaderboard. They don’t publish for the sake of it. They don’t bring you the breaking news everyone else already does. They are, in my opinion, people that like to take the time to tell us a story. Something that is nearly always fascinating to read, and often leaves the reader with more questions than answers. They make you think, and that is the sole purpose of their act.

Jonathan Harris

If you are a regular reader of this weblog, then you already know that I am a big fan of Jonathan Harris. He is one of the best storytellers I know. You can find most of his work right here. One of the projects he did that really amazed me is called Universe.

Jonathan writes:

Each night, the great stories of ancient Greek mythology are played out in the sky — Perseus rescues Andromeda from the sea monster; Orion faces the roaring bull; Zeus battles Cronos for control of Mount Olympus. Most of us know the sky holds these great myths, immortalized as constellations. Slightly less well known are the newer constellations, largely added in the 18th and 19th centuries. These more modern constellations reflect a different sort of mythology — a commemoration of art and science, expressed through star groups representing technical inventions like the microscope, the triangle, the compass, the level, and the easel.

As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.

….

Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone’s path through Universe is different, just as everyone’s path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife.

Universe is a concept in which Jonathan brings back our fascination of content exploration. In the earliest times humans would look at the sky and explore the universe. With universe he has created a concept and interface that allows us to explore the world once again. Instead of sitting back and getting stuff aggregated to your screen or profile, Universe demands you to explore, to discover, to be fascinated. Each trip is different.

There is a whole lot more to discover on his site. I love his work on human emotions (check out “We feel fine”). I have seen him present his work once and ever since I have been following him. For all you Twitter fans out there. Jonathan inspired a Twitter tool that is way cooler and more fascinating than any of the tools I’m aware of. check out twistori to find out what Twitter users are experiencing right now!

Rolf Skyberg

Anyone that has the audacity to write 477 slide long presentations and can keep the audience fascinated throughout each slide is a great storyteller. I discovered Rolf when he delivered a presentation in the Netherlands entitled “Web 2.0 why we got here and what’s next”. I went back to slideshare and looked at each of his slides. Rolf wasn’t presenting us anything. He was telling us a story. He calls himself a pattern hound, and he has become one of my favorite blog writers. He doesn’t write posts every day, but when he writes something it immediately sets you to think. Just take a look at a few titles of teh posts he has written. Makes you wanna read them right away don’t they?

• the Facebook stalker and other urban myths
• why you’ll pay to network
• 98% or even 100%-open: not enough in social networks
• delivering a useful luxury

Dig into his archives and start following him. There is a lot more to be discovered there

Michael Wesch

Michael is an assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He and his students have created several video’s that spread out like a firestorm over the Internet. He is a master in storytelling. What can I say, just watch his video’s if you haven’t already.

Conclusion

Storytellers are essential throughout times. Even in this digital age where every bit of information is available in digital form. Where all content is aggregated for you, ready to be consumed. But information isn’t really what inspires us.

It’s a bit like Neo in the Matrix, its the question that drives us, that inspires us. I just showed you three people that inspire me. People that make me think and ask questions. People that don’t necessarily provide us with answers.

There are so many more of them out there. I am really curious to hear who is inspiring you. What are your favorite storytellers? Let me know.

Being able to pass relevant information from one person to another has always been part of the evolution of mankind. When there was no technology we used storytelling. People would listen to the oldest, wisest, craziest people in their community to hear about the past or the future. Families used storytelling to teach children their heritage. Slowly drawings were added to this information passing, possibly starting with the earlies cave drawings. Where storytelling was used for 1 to 1 or 1 to a few connections, the ability to draw lead to more persistent information passing. From symbols we went to pictures and written language. Storytelling remained as an important way of sharing information but we added letters and manuscripts to it. Manuscripts were copied by writing them down again. Each manuscript was unique in its own.

With the introduction of printing technology things changed rapidly. Now books could be copied much quicker and at much lower costs. Again, the storytelling remained, but books and newspapers made the information passing process faster and simpler. The technology developments that lead to the telephone lead to the possibility to share information real-time without the need of being at the same location. Much later, the mobile version was created, allowing communication without a fixed position. These different technologies allowed 1 on 1/few/many information passing.

Computer technology gave us the ability to communicate electronically via chat and e-mail. And with the introduction of Internet technology, the possibility to make information accessible to anyone on the net became a reality. The first version of the Internet was a static library of information. Web pages were added and the most important problem to solve was how to find the right information. Information became clustered in web portals, and finding information using search was invented. The cost of information creation/storage dropped to nearly zero and left us with infinite amounts of information, creating the problem of finding the right information.

Web 2.0 provided us technology to tackle this. Partially by clustering people and information into communities. It also gave us user generated content. Instead of companies or professionals, everyone could now create information, video, audio, pictures, and share it with the whole world. the Internet changed from a static library of information into a dynamic world of opportunities. Everyone can now become a storyteller by simply starting a weblog. The subscription to a magazine or newspaper has now been replaced by RSS subscriptions to weblogs. And to structure this world full of dynamic information we need new ways of finding the relevant stuff.

Search engines work to a certain extend but cannot deal with our urge to have instant access to something created right now. the information flow needs to be real-time. The response of web companies is to provide near real-time tools for information flow. With services like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, we get real-time many to many conversations. And for our convenience of finding the right information we now have content aggregators that find all relevant content for us. Often specialized for a specific content type and using a computer algorithm (e.g. TechMeme provides us with the latest in Tech news using a special algorithm). Facebook providing us near real-time access to what our friends are doing. Or Friendfeed, a content aggregator that lets people do the content aggregation. By subscribing to people we know, find interesting or trust, Friendfeed provides you with the content those people like.

But the problem of finding the right information is of all times. Just look back into history (not just my short, inaccurate, and incomplete summary ) and we can see that finding the right stuff is a problem of all times. We now have nearly unlimited computer power and storage capabilities, but that leads to nearly unlimited (and often unclassified) amounts of information too.

So the question becomes, what is next? I can’t look any better into the future than you can, but I have a tendency to look at the past and try to see if human nature can provide us with clues for the future. I believe that we haven’t seen the end of content aggregation or search engine algorithms yet. Simply because the web business model drives us there.

All that content aggregation really does is reposition, reclassify or reorganize content that is already out there on the web. Whether it is done by a computer algorithm in the case of TechMeme, or done by people, in the case of Friendfeed. But you can easily spot a few problems with aggregation. First of all, if content aggregation tries to be complete, all it does is try an attempt to get all the content out there back into one place. The more content it aggregates the more difficult it becomes to find the interesting stuff from the pile. The signal to noise ratio drops to the level of the entire web. We quickly need search algorithms and noise filters to get to the good stuff.

If content is aggregated using people, then we get a “democratic” version of the web. It filters out the stuff that the community likes best, leaving the more obscure or less liked stuff behind us. But I’m no so sure that the stuff that comes up this way is always the best stuff. If anything, democracy principles to select information, also leads to predictable and similar content. There isn’t room for obscurity or weird stuff. The people that are in such communities will end up selecting only part of what is out there, governed by themselves and the social community they are part of.

Web 2.0 technology and business models are aiming at the masses, large communities with millions of members, enormous content aggregators with uncountable amounts of content. But I believe that a large part of the Internet population will end up getting lost in this new digital universe. It is like the Star Trek computer that Captain Picard can talk to. It has all the information, but what if we simply don’t know the right question to ask?

Content aggregation is the new thing now. But the problem we should be solving isn’t the many to many flow of information. It is the one to a few, or few to a few that needs to be tackled. I doubt I’ll ever need to know about all the content that is out there. It is just a small part of it that I’m interested in. Content aggregation, no matter what form is used only leads to more content leading to noise, filtering and search. Social networks allowing us to connect to the entire world leave us with too many connections and too much information. It leads to more than we can handle. It leads to so much information, tagged and targeted, that the information itself becomes less valuable.

And when people get lost, they will simply return to their human nature. They will look out for the oldest, wisest, or craziest people out there. I don’t think the world needs more information. We don’t need any more or better content aggregation, search algorithms or noise filters. We need more inspiration. We need storytellers (and that will be the topic of another post).

What do you think? Where do you get your inspiration from? Are there any storytellers out there we should know about?

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