Calling BS on the Real-Time Web

The tech world is full of the real-time web. Google seems to have missed it, Twitter is on top of it but sucks at indexing it, Friendfeed is the aggregation king, and Facebook might get there by copying Twitter and Friendfeed all along.

Personally I think it is not worth the hassle. Real-time web is a publisher’s thing, not a consumer thing. There are few situations, usually disasters,  where I might be in need of a real-time web. The geek will tell you that it is great to be able track what people are saying when a plane crashes, Obama is inaugurated, or a famous pop star dies. The problem I have with those examples is that life isn’t like that every day. Most of the times we get along quite well without the ability to track these rare situations, and when they do emerge we’ll find out about it quickly enough.

Another argument is real-time search. That’s a lot of BS too. there is so much twittering around that it is impossible to get valuable real-time results in search. Google Pagerank uses an algorithm to decide what could be relevant. You may not like the algorithm, but it does attempt to ensure that there is a reasonable objective approach in getting you valuable results. Chit chat isn’t the way to do that. There currently is no algorithm when real-time search is running. There is only people, and the things they publish right now. It leads to a lot of clutter and near-zero value in search.

The Friendfeed crowd will argue that it isn’t about real-time search, but about real-time conversations. I don’t buy that for a minute. Have you ever seen a discussion on Friendfeed? the service gets praised for their ability to let people interact over content. It’s the best service out there. Personally I find many of the “discussions” hardly interesting or useful. There is too much content, too many people, too many comments, no structure in discussions, too many geeks. But most important hardly anyone  is actually listening (the basis for ANY good conversation is the ability to listen). A Friendfeed discussion isn’t an interaction, it’s a mob screaming out loud. A voice lost in 2000 other voices. I get much more value out of the posts that are aggregated in Friendfeed than the discussions that take place below them.

The real-time web currently is a geek’s wet dream.  I’m sure it will eventually get to a point where people will find aspects of a real-time web useful enough to incorporate it in their lives. But for now I don’t think it is worth all the hassle. I don’t have a “need” for the real-time web. There are more important things in life then having access to a fire hose of unfiltered nonsense. How about getting me the right information at the exact right time!

Why the iPhone will never be the biggest money generating platform

The iPhone will not generate significant mobile revenues

Tomi Ahonen has written a very long post about the history of mobile phone development  in Europe and the United States. Tomi is a well known authority in the Mobile space and is the author of the well known Communities dominate brand book.

His post contains a number of provocative and thoughtful observations. The post itself is as long as an e-book, but I urge you to read it all the way. It’s excellent.

In his post Tomi argues that even though the iPhone has brought a revolution in smart phones it will not dominate mobile revenues with its current offering. the bulk of mobile revenues are not in App stores or the real Internet. Apple’s iPhone represents less than 1% of the mobile market, and it’s revenue generation is infinitely small compared to current real mobile Internet revenues. A quote from Tomi’s post:

So we come down to the applications. Tomi, its a smartphone. By definition, a phone that can accept applications? Why aren’t you talking about the Apple iPhone Apps Store. Yeah, sure, its important for us nerds and geeks, the early adopters of new technology, who have been envisioning a pocketable PC that could be perfect for the gadget freak. Yes, the Apps store is wonderful. A billion downloads, yeah. Except that the mass market consumer, your mother, your father, your sister and your brother, are not like you and me at this blog. They will not madly download tons of apps to any smartphone. The theory of “Crossing the Chasm” has been explained by Geoffrey Moore a decade ago and is not disputed. Techie-geeky appeal of ultra high tech does not translate to the mass markets, in fact in most cases what geeks want and mass markets want are diametrically opposed.

No matter what stats you see for Apple iPhone Apps Store success, whatever the stats, the total market share of Apple is 1% of the phone market. It is exactly at the pointed end of that Crossing the Chasm theory that Moore talked about. This is NOT a mass market, and CANNOT BECOME one if the same model is repeated. Understand what I say. Even if you are able to make a success out of your app in the Apps Store today, it CANNOT translate to a mass market success, using that same model. its not my theory, Moore’s theory holds near unanimous agreement by all technology marketing gurus. Do not kid yourself.

The problem with the iPhone is that it has been developed with a pc in mind. It is a pc device that can also call. This is exactly why I wrote a post about a year ago explaining why the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used. It comes with downloadable applications that let the user customize his device. But that is exactly why it will not be adopted by the mass market.

Yes there is a big opportunity for apps to be sold to smartphones. Yes, it is a very significant market, when viewed from the angle of the software applications industry. But it will always be – always be – only a niche. Do not allow yourself to be delusional about this. We do not buy – and the mass market will not ever buy – smartphones so that they could install some apps to it. The vast majority of users will be contented with the apps that come pre-loaded, and then they go to web based services to get their additional benefits.

The real value (in terms of revenues) lies in the mobile web. This is not the real web displayed on a high end handheld like the iPhone. Instead it is the ‘walled-garden’ Internet that is build and maintained by the mobile carriers. Sounds totally unbelievable right? The facts and figures however are indisputable. Again, a quote from Tomi:

That is where the big opportunity is. Not apps that we install onto a smartphone, but the services that we deliver via the network. Mobile premium services, what could be called “mobile internet” and by this I mean a superior, better, money-making internet than the old legacy dumb internet we have on the PCs. So I explicitly do not mean “the real internet” onto the phones. That is as dumb as putting a real horse to power your car! We have a BETTER engine in the car. And now, yes, please understand, the “mobile internet” is the far better internet than that horrid old creaky stupid cheap “advertising-led” “get-me-more-eyeballs” internet which we all use today. The internet is for good reason called the 6th mass media channel and obviously mobile is the newer, 7th mass medium.

No, while that will be there, and yes, there will be millions and millions of users on “the real internet” on our smartphones, that is peanuts. PEANUTS. The far bigger opportunity in mobile is in the 7th mass media type of mobile internet, the better, smarter and richer money-making and magical mobile internet. That is where the opportunity is. To see how vibrant and lucrative it can be, one need not look further than this decade and Japan and South Korea, where the mobile internet really thrives already. Application developers have a hard time making money selling 1 dollar apps on the Apple iPhone Apps Store. You have to be very lucky to make the top 100 apps listing to have any chance of recovering your development costs. A very risky development path.

But in Japan, they offer the service on the mobile internet, take a subscription of one dollar per month (100 yen) and pay 10% to the carriers/operators and the service provider gets to keep 90%. Rather than one dollar from one customer once, the customer is charged 12 months, 12 times per year. 12 dollars, and the content owner gets to keep 10 dollars and 80 cents of it. Which is better? A dollar or ten? I rest my case, milad.

Worldwide the mobile data market is a much bigger opportunity than pc based Internet. There are more users, more devices, payment is integrated on every device (no need for credit cards). In another great and long post Tomi estimates these markets:

The total mobile premium content industry is worth 71 billion dollars and the mobile messaging industry adds another 130 billion, giving the total moblie phone based data services industry a size of 200 billion dollars for 2008. Now, consider the internet. Even as we add not only all content revenues, and all advertising revenues on the internet, but also the access revenues for broadband and dial-up narrowband internet access, the overall size of the internet business is about.. 200 billion dollars. In half the time, mobile has grown to same size.

Mobile is the bigger internet. Mobile is the stronger internet. Mobile is the money internet. Mobile is the faster-growing internet.

It sounds counter intuitive to us geeks, but the smart phone market is a niche market. No matter how sexy and cool we think it is. The SMS market alone is bigger than the current pc based Internet content market. Premium mobile data services add extra growth that can’t be matched by the web. On the web we are stuck with inefficient, crappy old-fashioned web 1.0 based business models. In the mobile data market every bit transferred represents real revenue. Twitter could have done it, but they didn’t pursue the biggest revenue generator.

Facebook missed that one too.In 2007 I wrote a post entitled “Mark Zuckerberg, when in doubt, follow the money”. I said then:

But there are 2 aspects to a mobile phone that are of huge importance when thinking about next generation web services:

1. The mobile phone platform has billing capabilities
2. The mobile phone user pays to interact with others

Think of the US on-line advertisement spent 2006 ($16 Bln) as a small hill,

think of the worldwide spent on SMS as the Mount Everest (btoh images taken from Wikipedia). It is estimated that the SMS market alone will be $ 67Bln in 2012 (or 3.7 trillion messages a year!) .That is excluding Mobile Internet services. In Japan alone more than $ 1 Bln revenues are generated from mobile data services. So stop thinking ads and start thinking payed services.

The mobile business model is the most User-Centric I can think of. It provides user value and the user pays directly for that value. There is nothing more powerful than that.

Everybody loses in the battle over our online identity

A beautiful bird cage

Facebook announces user names. It generates a lot of buzz on Techmeme. TechCrunch reports the obvious (vanity), but Chris Messina is the only one that is actually analyzing what Facebook is doing and what impact it can have on our online lives. In a post he entitles “Facebook usernames and the digital battle over your identity” he goes into the underlying strategy of this move and the effect it has on your online identity.

Arguing that Facebook shouldn’t get into the vanity URL business, I still think that they had it right the first time around. Digital identity should change the adapt to humans; not force humans to refer to each other in more computer-friendly ways. But the allure is simply too great. I also can’t say that I blame them, even though I think it’s a distraction along the way towards more widespread real identity (and thereby reputability) online.

Chris goes on and hits the one thing that s relevant about this move by Facebook. the online battle to own your identity, profile and interactions:

So, this is happening, and companies are racing to achieve namespace dominance over your online profile. This is what Tim O’Reilly warned about in his definition of Web 2.0. He said that one of the new kinds of lock-in in the era of [cloud computing] will be owning a namespace. There you have it — who are you going to trust to own yours?

I suggest you read the article in full, it’s an excellent read.

Chris hits on a nerve I’ve always felt was important. While web 2.0 has brought us a lot of great things it also provides service providers more opportunities for user lock-in. User lock-in is a term invented by marketeers (they are all idiots you know). Customer lock-in is in essence a protective measure, hence the “lock-in” part. Marketeers will obviously never say that. They brainwash themselves and their company by arguing that achieving customer lock-in is done by excellent service, providing the user with value and more of that. They are wrong of course. Customer lock-in is achieved by simpler things. The inability for a user to leave a service, to hide customer help behind layers of customer service, 23 pages of legal gibberish called terms of service, the impossibility to switch to other providers, downgrade services etc.

In the online world customer lock-in is even worse. Here is where Tim O’Reily’s definition of Web 2.0 lacks a user dimension. Tim says:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

The problem I have with this definition, even though it adequately describes what we refer to as web 2.0, is that it doesn’t address the user and the value he should receive. What we often fail to realize is that the network effect Tim talks about is not only the best thing that web 2.0 has brought us, it is also its biggest tragedy. The network effect forces service providers to concentrate on the size of the network, instead of a primary focus on user value. The Internet is not seen as a platform at all. The service provider sees his own platform as the Internet! And to make matters worse, web 2.0 is governed by old-fashioned web 1.0 business models that leverage that network value, instead of user value.

The network effect and the failure of online business models to evolve with the technological evolution leads to unwanted effects such as customer lock-in, the network value being more important than individual user value, Twitter spam, walled gardens, the total lack of data portability, lack of privacy control,  the battle over your online identity, profile and interactions. And now the battle over name space. In effect, it cages us, instead of setting us free. It takes away our ability to be in control of our own profile, our data and our interactions.

And there is nothing we can do about it as individual users are either unaware or unable to generate enough counter force to balance the power on the web. This fight to control you on the web can only be halted if we evolve online business models to a point where revenue and competition are based upon user value instead of network value. If service providers generate revenue buy providing user value they will achieve the exact same effect as they try to reach ow. Users will be committed to user their service. Not because they can’t leave, but because they choose so. All it requires for service providers is to let go, to turn the relationship with the user inside out. Now that would be a revolution.

I’m with Chris here. He sums it all up in one little hidden line in his post:

It’s remarkable how cheap we’ll sell out our identity these days.

The question is, are we seriously going to put up with this? Will we allow Facebook, or any other service provider dictate that their platform is our Internet? That is the ultimate user lock-in.  A shiny, gold-plated bird cage.

That is not a future I would feel comfortable with. It’s time we redefine online business models. It may be our only way out of this lock-in to a web that is user-centric instead of network centric.

Social Media is bound by our human limitations

image taken from: http://ascannerdorky.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/10/

The definition of Social Media according to Wikipedia is:

Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

It sounds perfectly reasonable. Social Media gives us all the power to become publishers. To distribute our content and interact over them. To a certain extend this is true. But if you think that the world is waiting for you and your content think again. It isn’t that easy. There are certain rules you need to understand and follow.

While distribution scales endlessly, your ability to interact will not

Wikipedia is right about the scalable publishing technologies. Anyone can now create, publish and distribute content across the web. The technologies involved allow you to reach out to audiences far beyond your social network. There is a problem with this scalability. While your content can be distributed endlessly, your ability to interact over that content cannot. In a sense many of the current successful web 2.0 companies try to scale down this endless stream of content and conversations. Our human limitations do not allow us to follow 10.000 people, process millions of pieces of content and interact over all of them.

Technology tries to help us bring order into this chaos by allowing us to broadcast without the need of interaction (Twitter), limit content and discussions to people we trust (Friendfeed), build up a network of friends we want interaction with (Facebook) or attempt to capture the conversation in one place (Disqus). While technology has found us easy to use and scalable distribution, we do not have proper solutions yet for scaling down our interactions. Search for signal to noise and you will find many different startups and services trying to solve our human limitations wrt scale. This is not a new problem. Google has been working on this for years. They build their search engine and PageRank to try and provide a better signal to noise ratio. It is impossible for us to see all content on the web, so we use search engines to find us the right content.

Social Media adds another dimension to this scalability. It gives us not only more content but also more interaction over that content. Needless to say that this leads to an unprecedented nr of startups trying to provide us new methods and technology to deal with this endless stream of content we now call Social Media.

Social Media isn’t always democratic, it is a game that has winners,  losers and cheaters

Anyone can become a celebrity. The past few years of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, blogging and Idols have proven that anyone can become a hero, right? Hardly. Of course there are excellent examples of people coming from nowhere into stardom, but for every 1 success there are a million failures. When it comes to online distribution and scale, you need to understand that while the technology itself is perfectly scalable, the actual game is a game with winners, losers an cheaters. There are those that have worked extremely hard, for many years, to become a celebrity (In the Tech world people like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray would fit into this category). These people have been providing constant value and interaction to a community and have earned respect and a voice from that.

Then there are those that understand the dynamics behind the game and seek an audience by taking a few shortcuts here and there. Instead of slowly building up an audience by providing constant quality, they actively seek high visibility through different channels and circling around other celebrities. Getting noticed by a person or channel representing a large community will help build your own community of people you can interact with. Needless to say you do need to provide valuable content in order to get noticed. Bottom line is that it takes a lot of work and a thorough understanding of the dynamics of Social Media to become a well known community member. Just because publishing has become easy doesn’t mean that you will be heard.

And there are those that become instant celebrities because they cheat. If you are thinking about becoming a web rock star yourself. Be prepared to either invest all of your time for the next few years in publishing relevant an valuable content and slowly building up a community of followers. Or cheat, buy yourself into high volume traffic without actually having to do anything relevant to earn such a position (I suggest becoming a recommended Twitter user for example).

Don’t get fooled by the ease to publish. Social Media isn’t easy. It takes a lot of hard work to interact

I see the following type of conversation pop up all the time on Friendfeed. A user observes that while he is active on the community, the content he publishes doesn’t draw a lot of attention (=discussion). This is the perfect way to start interaction on Friendfeed btw . It takes only a few seconds before the community starts to give helpful hints. Bottom line in most cases seem to be ‘give and you shall receive’. In other words. If you want people to interact with you, start by interacting with them. In order to become a respectable member of any community, you not only need to produce relevant and valuable content for that community. You also need to add value via interaction. Give, without expecting something in return. While this makes perfect sense, it doesn’t make things easier. Not everyone is as outspoken. There is always a small subset of the community that is responsible for a large part of the interactions. It’s hard to make your voice count. And while the technology does level the playing field (anyone can be or interact with a celebrity), it doesn’t automatically mean that you are heard. It takes time, effort, and a lot of positive energy to build your own voice within a community.

Some random thoughts

Social Media provides us endless possibilities to create, mash up, publish and interact over content. The one thing that holds this endless scalability back is the human factor. We simply can’t deal with a universe where there are no boundaries. As soon as we enter this world we set a playing field by following a specific set of people, signing up for certain services, interact in specific places, search, filter and share specific content. It help us to create order in a chaotic world. The biggest effect Social Media might have is that we will use it to make our world smaller instead of bigger. Quality over quantity. We might see a trend where networks will become smaller instead of bigger. Where content and interactions will become highly focused instead of widespread. Where geoposition and localization will be more important than globalization. Where interaction with people you have actually met will become more important than people you have stumbled across online.

Just like in the physical world

The fundamental problem of ‘owning’ user data

Who is on control now?

I do not often agree with Facebook, but I do agree with their decision to make privacy settings of their users more important than opening up the vast amount of data they track to 3rd party developers. Marshall Kirkpatrick writes about that decision and points out that Facebook isn’t opening up everything:

Facebook holds a mind-blowing amount of conversational data. The company is analyzing it extensively and it has an omniscient view of conversations across all the networks of friends and privacy restrictions. It uses that aggregate data analysis to make business decisions and to sell advertisements. The rest of us are only allowed to give Facebook more data and to get back a sliver per user that will facilitate more user-level participation in amassing more data at Facebook.

He continues and decides that the value of the data is too big to be held by one company alone:

The data that Facebook controls, conversations and social connections, could be used for analysis of real-time social patterns which could lead to world-shaking new insights. Do we get access to that data? No.

Why not? We don’t get that access because Facebook was built on a fundamental promise of privacy and a complex system of privacy controls. Privacy is good, it’s very good. But, the census gathers and exposes personal data without violating privacy. Lots of systems do.

[stuff deleted...]

The data the network controls is just too valuable to keep locked up for only the company’s own analysis.

Marshall asks an interesting question and provides a provocative answer for it. Is the ability to innovate with user data fundamentally more important than the right of a user to keep his data (interactions)  private?

It is tempting to answer this question with a ‘yes’. Many web advocates will explain that by giving up privacy they get value. That the free flow of data has lead to new interaction possibilities that were impossible before (web 2.0). We’ve made our progress because everything is set free. Data that is free can be mashed up and provide new value, unprecedented.

While we all benefit from these effects, we should not lightly dismiss this as a simple case of ‘collateral damage’. Marshall touches a fundamental dilemma. What is more important, the rights of the mass, or the rights of the individual. In the western world we tend to assume an inverse relationship between individual rights and social control. More social control leads to less individual rights and vice versa. Marshall suggests that individual rights may be less important than the ‘greater cause’ of being able to provide more value to users if data is freely accessible. The obvious question to ask when resented with this view is “where do you set the boundary?”  In other words, what violation of individual rights is still acceptable for the greater cause of innovation?

But to me, there is a more fundamental flaw underneath. Individuals do not really have the means to protect their rights in the first place. Even with every privacy setting Facebook offers a user, there isn’t a single setting that protects the user’s rights from Facebook itself! There is only one way a user can be in control of his own rights. The user can decide not to participate. The web gave us value, and in return it forced us to give up our most important right. The right of the individual. Everything is free and accessible for all. But in return we have to accept that there is no way for us to control what these companies know or do with the data they collect. No matter how honorable Facebook is, they have a disproportional power that allows them to crush individual user rights. Currently, 3rd party developers complain they can’t store Facebook data because of privacy settings, but Facebook itself doesn’t have that limitation. Teh user doens’t own his data, Facebook does.

I realise that these views aren’t popular. That many already (un-)consciously made the decision to participate. We are accepting a world in which the balance is in favor of the companies that develop services. That it is ok that I have to accept a Privacy Policy and Terms of Use of a company, but that that same company doesn’t commit itself to my individual rights. I do not mind data being set free, but I do mind that I do not really have the means to decide for myself what the tradeoff is. It’s all or nothing. Join the party or stay home. And while we might see the benefit of more value now, this is a decision that can’t be undone easily.

Don’t get me wrong. I totally agree with Marshall that the innovation over user data can lead to incredible value. I’m fine with sharing my data in order to have access to that value. What bugs me is that I do not have control over that decision or that balance. We are scared to give that fundamental right back to the individual. It might break all web business models. But I am an optimist. I think we would be surprised to see how many people would be quite willing to share data in return for value. The difference is that in this new situation they would be able to make a conscious decision. The user would be in control. He would join a service like Facebook and consciously deciding the best trade off between sharing information and obtaining value from the service. And that conscious act would provide us all more value than the current situation in which we are  hijacked.

The only way this can be solved is by putting the user in control. Turn the entire model inside out Privacy/accessibility settings should not be set per service, but set by the user. The user shouldn’t have a fragmented profile across every service, but instead have one profile that can connect to any service. He should not have to find friends across many services, but have his friends within his profile, accessible to him across any service he wishes to use. The user can be in control of what his profile would look like per service, who his friends are, what data he is willing to share. The user should own his data. If that would be the case then we would have balance between user and service provider. If the user has control over the decision to share, then there can be a much more effective exchange of data for value. A service provider wanting access to some of that data will have to agree to the individual’s privacy policy and terms of use. We would not need a new developer’s APIs for every service, but we would need one standard API that allows users to connect to services.  In many ways, putting the user in control would simplify technology and our ability to mash up data in order to create new value. It enforces a more natural cooperation between service provider and user.

The real innovation of the web would be to restore balance and put the individual user in control again.

Status update: the future of the web is here!

We're all idiots

/rant on

I read a number of posts in the last week that seem unrelated but ended up making me think about this social media circus we are in. Unless you are deaf, blind, and have been sitting on a deserted island the past weeks you must have noticed the hype the media are now creating around Twitter. Respectable media like the NY Times are running Twitter stories almost on a daily basis. We now know how it was thought out, that investors think loads of money will be made on search, that they turned down an offer by Facebook, and especially that it is now going mainstream. We’ve had a few terrible accidents and disasters and Twitter users were able to beat “old-media” bringing the news. As a result every respectable reporter now turns to Twitter not only hoping to pick up some early scoops as well, but more importantly look really cool at the same time too. And don’t forget about real-time search on Twitter, the next Google killer (yeah right).

Personally, I think it is a load of crap. Twitter is currently flooded by people and organizations “playing the system”. Twitter has embraced the hailed network effect of web 2.0, and that is also it’s biggest tragedy. Twitter has become an eyeballs game, just like any other service that shows unhealthy growth. Twitter isn’t growing with twitter users, it is flooded with bots and spam playing with the weakness in the system and its management. Sorry , if management wanted, they could get rid of the spam and bot excesses easily. But since they are addicted to web 2.0 growth steroids there is no compelling reason to help users not get harassed by spam and bots. Why? Because removing it would also ensure that Twitter shows less growth than expected. Making the “mainstream” bubble pop. So instead of doing what is right for its users, Twitter not only lets bots and spam free but even plays its own game with handpicked suggested users for you to follow.

Then there was this post by the BBC in which they interview smart people from the industry that claim that social networks are the “new e-mail”.  Yes, they did call it e-mail 2.0, because that makes it sound even cooler. Digging into the article we find little treasures like one from the founder of Yammer:

Mr Sacks said: “What people want to do on social network these days is post status updates. We think it’s all people want to do.”

Paul Buchheit is quoted:

“I think it’s a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavour to it,” said Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of GMail, while at Google.

And there is this engineer from Facebook that takes it one step further:

Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at the firm, told BBC News: “It’s been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate. “You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn’t know if your friends even wanted to see it. “Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.”

Notice how each of them highlights their own service strength in these pearls of wisdom that provide insight into our future. Our online future seems to be driven by status updates and passively watching others interact with that. The growth of Facebook, is unprecedented, but as Ari tells us, it’s mostly about status updates. Research from the  Facebook data team suggests that we may have loads of friends on Facebook, we interact with only a few of them. The rest are passive relationships.

I’ve always wondered if my personal experience with Facebook is very different from others. There is the first excitement of joining, getting new (and old) friends. But after a while the excitement wears down and I’m left with a service I can’t get any value from, no matter how hard I try. I can’t explain it any better than this hilarious and ironic article written by Matt Labash in the weekly standard:

One by one, my non-joiner friends have succumbed. As one reluctantly joined the world of “poking” and getting “poked” by people he already talked to, people he had no interest in talking to, or people he didn’t know at all–all conducted under the suspect rubric of “friendship” so that they can look at each other’s photos and write dreary “status updates” on their “walls” (brief squibs about what you are doing at that exact moment, usually with emoticons and inappropriate quotation marks: “Matt Labash is wondering how long to marinate human flesh to get out that ‘gamey taste’ “)–he was almost apologetic about it. Within two days of his birth on Facebook, he said, “I have 198 friends. I have never heard of most of them. This is so dorky, I hate myself for doing it.”

Being a true friend, I didn’t allay his guilt. I told him he was a very sad man, that collecting Facebook friends is the equivalent of being a catlady, collecting numerous Himalayans, which you have neither the time nor the inclination to feed. “You have obviously never been on Facebook,” he said. “It’s so much worse than collecting cats.” By this week, however, he’d lost all ironic distance. When I told him that he now took it all way too seriously, that I liked the old, conflicted him better, and that he should take a hard look at himself, he sloughed me off. He was now just another friend-whore: “I don’t need to look at myself. I have 614 Facebook friends to do the looking for me.”

We're a bunch of Chimpanzees

A new generation is learning that the best the web has brought us is the status update. That friends are measured in terms of quantity, and that interaction can be done passively. We need pokens to connect (my brain just melted by this infantile invention). If that is the future of the web, then you can count me out. I spend the last week without any social media tools and concentrated on real-life relations in both my private and working life. There is no online experience that can remotely match those interactions. We are all sitting behind our screens like a bunch of dressed up monkeys, confusing status updates with real interactions, and failing to see the wonders of life as it passes by. It’s pathetic.

What is the root cause of this idiocy? I firmly believe it has to do with the way business models evolved on the web. When eyeballs, page views, CPM, unique visitors, traffic, and network became more important than individual users we took a wrong turn. We let the web evolve into into a big market place where “Advanced Ads Targeting Features” have become more important than individual value. The web has become a marketing play, instead of a place where we get real value when connecting online.

I’m with 37Signals here who openly wonder why the web lost faith into charging for stuff? Our online future is reduced to a status message and a million marketeers are making plans to exploit that nonsense. I can understand that. Marketeers can’t help it, they are just idiots. But to hear the Web finest entrepreneurs reduce the web’s future to status updates and refer to this as email 2.0 is more than idiocy. It’s mediocre. And it is scary to think that all our creativity, technological progress, and plain smartness has lead to this ultimate achievement of mankind.

It is time to end this madness and start charging people for the value that they get. Sure, you will lose eyeballs, traffic, status and all those other destructive measures the web currently brings us. But you will gain something too. You will get happy customers and you will deliver user value instead of network value. You will have fans instead of statistics. There are plenty of reasons to start today with a user centric, or user-driven business model. The question is, are you brave enough to deal with that possibility?

/rant off

The Facebook business model is the root cause of a lack of transparency

Mark Zuckerberg just announced that Facebook will revert back to the old terms of service as too many people complained about the new ones. I think it is a honorable that Facebook is retracting a pretty bad plan. It is also good to see that they are now engaging with their community about where to take this. In the post Mark states:

Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.

More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren’t just a document that protect our rights; it’s the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

It’s a difficult thing to get right. Facebook has obligations to shareholders, advertisers, business partners, 3rd party application developers, the employees of the company, and yes, the user too. What makes the task even more daunting is that the Facebook business model (free, advertised based) forces them to leverage the size of the network, instead of monetizing on individual user value. It puts them in a balancing act where the advertisement capabilities need to outweigh the individual user rights in order to keep a decent revenue stream. In other words, the more freedom Faceook has to use the data coming from user profiles and interactions, the more capabilities they have to create revenues.

Why do people sign up for Facebook? I suspect in most cases to have a good time and connect with friends. They do not want or need advertisement. It’s a distraction from the core value they wish to receive from Facebook. At the same time, you can’t provide 175M people a free service without some way of creating revenues (although it remains to be seen if advertisement is going to create enough revenues). The problem is that most people are not aware of this and Facebook is not providing the transparency to make sure people are taking a conscious decision when they sign up for the service.

If anything, it is this lack of transparency that should be solved first. The TOS is only one aspect of that. When you sign up for Facebook it should be clear how the service is making money. It should be clear that when you start adding friends, interact, upload content, etc. that all these actions are monitored and stored. It should be clear that even when you are setting privacy controls to a high level it only affects other users, but that it doesn’t protect you or your interactions from Facebook. It should also be clear what Facebook does with 3rd party developers, advertisers and other companies that use the Facebook ecology to create businesses or revenues themselves. And when all of that is clear, then a user can take a conscious decision whether all of that is ok or not.

That is the dillema Mark faces. How are you going to educate 175M people about your business model and all its effects? A User-Centric or User Driven business model would force you to do the right thing for the user, and as a result of this you create revenues. Facebook is forced to do the right thing for the company in order to protect its revenue streams. And that is a big difference.

Mark Zuckerberg is answering the wrong question, and we fell for it again

There has been quite a bit of uproar about Facebook changing their Terms of Service. Unfortunately, no one is asking the right question, thus letting Mark get away with answering the wrong one. The section that created this uproar reads:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

In other word. Anything you publish on Facebook can be used by Facebook. TechMeme sees a large number of replies to this change and this forces Mark Zuckerberg to write a post explaining Facebook’s motives. He writes:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

[stuff deleted...]

Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.

Mark tries to explain the complexity that arises when users start sharing information. He explains that this TOS change is needed to allow users to have access to shared information , even when the original sender/sharer has deleted his or her account. In other words, if I share a photo with you, and I decide to delete my account, should you then not have access to that photo anymore?

While Mark does a good job explaining this process and it’s complexities I cannot help but feel that the blogging community has let Mark get away with answering the wrong question. He has done a perfect job in avoiding a much more important privacy issue than the issue that arises when two people share information via Facebook.

The questions Mark should have answered are the following:

What exactly does Facebook do with all the user data has been collected on Facebook, and how exactly does it monetize that, even after a user has deleted his or her account?

I could care less about the information I share with others via Facebook. That sharing process is a conscious act. I know that if I share that whatever gets shared is out of my control.  What I do not know is what Facebook does with that information. Why do they tap into all of my interactions and my data? What do they store, and how do they monetize that exactly? If I set my privacy settings as strict as possible do they still see everything? How is that data being used outside of Facebook? Do 3rd parties get access to that information as well, even if I do not want them too?

The problem at hand isn’t users sharing things on Facebook. It isn’t even controlling privacy on Facebook. The problem is that I do not have a clue or option to protect myself from Facebook. Any service that monetizes user data and interactions indirectly using a free but advertisement business model puts the value of the network in front of the value of the individual user. You get a free service, but you do not know exactly what you are giving up for that. And that is what Mark should be explaining. The rest is just a decoy so that the really difficult questions do not need to be answered.

I might not even mind that Facebook monetizes my user data, my friends, and my interactions. But right now, I don’t know how Facebook uses that data.We might think that our online lives are not connected to our real lives. We might even think that privacy is dead. But the problem is not that privacy is dead, but that it is distributed unevenly. In other words, the user is forced into total transparency when signing up for services like Facebook. But the service itself lacks transparency. There is no way we are going to find out what Facebook does with us. And it is this unbalanced relationship that we should be worried about. Mark Zukcerberg does a great job answering the wrong question, and we all fell for it again.

Privacy is not dead, it is distributed unevenly

A famous oneliner from the CEO of Sun, Scott McNealy, in 2001 was “Privacy is dead, get over it”. It sounds true. This generation is growing up with Google, social networking, and having all relevant data on the web. We exchange private details of our live in order to receive service and value. We willingly share personal information in order to connect and interact with friends on the web. We are used to services exploiting our user data and don’t mind getting advertisement served in return.

The early adopter crowd jumps on every new social service inviting the rest to join in as well. In a Friendfeed discussion recently, Robert Scoble called privacy dead too. I responded by saying that that’s a stupid thing to say. Robert then explained what he meant. He exchanges privacy for service and gets value. I think that is a perfectly legitimate way of controlling privacy on the web.

Unfortunately, most do not understand the dangers of publishing or sharing personal information on the web. Nor do they know how to control this trade off Robert talks about. Privacy is currently diminished to privacy settings of Facebook. Not only are users not even aware of the availability of these settings, but they fail to realize that these settings do not protect them from Facebook. People don’t realize when they enter a zip code to find a restaurant, or look at the weather, they are giving away crucial information that can be used to determine an identity. Zip code, gender and birth date are often enough to figure out someones identity.
Most people are not aware that their Internet Service Provider has access to everything you do on the web. They know exactly which sites you visit and when. Your e-mail is available to your e-mail provider, unless you use encryption. Even openly deployed schemes, such as having to hand over private and personal information about yourself when signing up for a service like Facebook doesn’t make users worried.

Let’s look at 5 reasons why the sound byte “Privacy is dead, get over it” shouldn’t be taken for granted:

1. Financial theft
The most obvious problem related to a lack of privacy is theft. Credit card theft is big business. Spyware, malware, unprotected transactions on the web, phishing sites where you think you are signing up for a trusted serves that asks for a credit card nr, the possibilities are endless. It is relatively easy to get access to long lists of stolen credit card details. And once your credit card details are known it opens the door for fraudulent financial transactions. It sometimes takes months to figure this out yourself. I bet that everyone that reads my post knows a person that has been a victim of credit card fraud. It is a widespread thread.

2. Identity theft
Identity theft has become relatively simple on the web. We leave many traces of ourselves and our personal information behind on the web. Each piece of information in itself might not be harmful, but we tend to forget how easy it is to collect a much larger collection of personal information using Google, or for example a more personalized people search engine. For identity theft we really only need a few pieces of information. Birth date, gender, zip code. With any luck you can find out where a person lives, which college he went to, who he is married to etc.etc. The possibilities are endless. Chances are a person has published his mail somewhere on the web. Combining relevant personal information from that person his e-mail account can be hacked. And that same e-mail account is likely to be used for bank services. From identity theft we get back to financial theft and more.

3. Reputation
Our reputation in the old days was contained within the social relationships we were involved with. These relationships were naturally confined to locations, time and people we knew. On the web this has changed dramatically. Now everybody has access to personal information of anyone online. You do not have to meet someone to find out about him. Use Google or any other search engine to find out information about a person. You may argue that since you have nothing to hide there can be no harm done. But what if an insurance company sees that you love to skydive, or a photo of you smoking at a party? What if a company that you contacted for a job sees your old college photos where you and your friends were just having a good time? Or they see you having an online quibble with a friend and wonder about your ability to handle conflicts? Or notices that a blog post you wrote gets negative comments from (anonymous) readers? What if a bank investigates you on the web when you apply for a loan, only to find out that you haven’t been working at a job for more than 6 months in a row? Each of the pieces of information are totally harmless when places in one context, but are quite damaging to your reputation in another. Your reputation is now publicly searchable and without the context of a social environment you are acting in, this can lead to harmful situations.

4. Gossip
This is probably an unexpected danger when we build up an online profile. We are much more vulnerable to rumors and gossip. Where this used to remain within the social borders you moved in, they can now reach the entire online world. Anyone that wants to do you harm has a platform to (anonymously) start gossip and rumors about you. As your online reputation gets harmed you will find that it is extremely difficult to protect yourself from this.

5. Databases never forget
When we go online we leave traces everywhere. The site we visit, the things we search, the people we interact with, the transactions we perform. Everything is stored in databases. Often the information stored contains errors. There is no way for us to control what is being stored about us. But once stored, that information doesn’t disappear. And in most cases it doesn’t harm us. A friend of mine once was denied a loan because investigation showed that he was a bad debtor. It took him weeks to figure out that he once forgot too pay a bill of $10 for goods he bought online. He corrected his mistake, but nevertheless, the store had reported his behavior and it was stored away in a database that gets accessed when you apply for a loan. An example of how a small mistake can lead to considerable damage.

There are many more examples thinkable in which the public accessibility of personal information can lead to harm. We are so used to publicizing and sharing personal information that we simply can’t imagine the potential harm it can do us. Just because everyone shares personal information as if it has no value doesn’t mean we should accept that. Just because we all use Google and social networks doesn’t mean we should also accept that privacy is dead. Just because social networks let you sign up for free and encourage you to connect to as many people as possible doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of the possible consequences.

I feel that one of he most dangerous aspects of the “Privacy is dead, get over it” sound byte is the unequal relationship between those that have power over those that do not. A government, take the United States as an example, demands full transparency and doesn’t accept privacy as a constitutional right. But these same rules do not apply to the government itself. It doesn’t provide us transparency. We do not know what the government is doing with our personal information. There is no way for us to gain insight.

The same thing holds for services on the web. In order to join a service we have to disclose personal details. Yet we are not allowed to see or know what that web service is actually doing with our personal data. We disclose personal information to receive value. But we do not have a clue what we are giving away and how it will be used at some point.

This is the fundamental flaw in privacy on the web. It isn’t dead, it is unevenly distributed. The powerful enforce full disclosure without disclosing anything themselves. And as long as this inequality exists we shouldn’t accept the mantra that “privacy is dead” but instead actively work on solutions to help users control their own privacy.

5 reasons why a User-Centric business model always wins

A few posts drew my attention this weekend. first there was Chris Anderson talking about the economics of giving it away. It seems to me that Chris is changing his tone of voice in FREE. Whereas he often has focused on the zero cost distribution of FREE, he now talks about the revenue side of things. He notes that in a market where both venture capital and advertisement investments dry up startups need to make real money. This quote says it all:

What about those companies trying to build a business on the Web? In the old days (that would be until September of last year) the model was pretty simple. 1. Have a great idea. 2. Raise money to bring it to market, ideally free to reach the largest possible market. 3. If it proves popular, raise more money to scale it up. 4. Repeat until you’re bought by a bigger company.

Now steps 2 through 4 are no longer available. So Web startups are having to do the unthinkable: come up with a business model that brings in real money while they’re still young.

Fred Wilson follows up with a post about the need to not only look at revenues, but also at costs. He writes:

Chris goes on to suggest that Internet entrepreneurs are going to have to get people to step up and pay for something instead of just giving everything away for free because advertising isn’t going to foot the bill for every company. That may well be true and we are certainly thinking that way for most, if not all, of our portfolio companies. But Chris’s examples, particularly Facebook and Digg, are examples of companies that might benefit from looking at the cost side of the profit equation at some point (maybe not yet).

And then there is Facebook, with Mark Zuckerberg who feels he has found the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. In an NY Times article, ironically entitled “Networking site cashes in on friends” we can read about his strategy:

Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.

In an attempt to finally monetise the social networking site, once valued at $15bn (£10.4bn), it will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight.

I feel we may finally have reached a tipping point in thinking. While the FREE advertisement based business model might have given us lots of good things (free services), it comes with many downsides and basically holds web evolution back:

1. It leads to focus on network value instead of user value. In other words, the network and growth are more important than providing individual users value
2. It leads to walled gardens. If you have to make money with advertisement, and your business is not search, then it is imperative that you keep your customers locked in. The phrase locked in says it all. Instead of freedom we contain our users. Get him into the service and then never let him out.
3. It leads to destination sites, instead of user centric services. For advertisement we need traffic and eyeballs. It is therefore important to get your users to gather together in one place.

I feel Facebook still isn’t convinced. They choose yet another indirect business model. Instead of focus on user value, they will now try to exploit user data towards brands. You get a service for free, but in return we sell you, your friends, and your data to other brands. Possibly the largest marketing database in the world. I’m not looking at any moral aspects of such a deal, but think about the inefficiency for a second. There is a clear misalignment between what the Facebook user perceives as value received from Facebook versus the value Facebook executives are trying to exploit. And it is this misalignment that makes it so hard for Facebook to make enough revenues. They have huge operational costs with servers and a large organisation. And they can’t back that with advertisement money. My prediction is that it will be quite hard to monetize the user database the way they are thinking about it now. The reason for this remains simple. A Facebook user is there because of interaction with friends. That’s it. Having a good time online doesn’t match any advertisement or marketing goal. If they want to pull this off, they better start lowering their operational costs big time.

I believe a User Centric business model is more powerful in the end. Focus on user value and monetize that value. It is the simplest and clearest business model there is.  It is a model that comes with several advantages:

1. With one specific variant, Freemium, you can use the best of FREE (near zero cost distribution) while at the same time monetize on user value
2. You will be forced to keep your operational costs to a minimum as you do not want your customers to pay for the overhead you are creating to deliver value
3. If your main focus is user value, you will build user centric services instead of network value services. Everyone will benefit from that. It will lead to open systems, cross platform integration and service oriented business.
4. It forces you to constantly innovate your concept of user value. You want customers to stay with you because of the trust and value you provide, instead of locking them in.  As a result constant user centric innovation will keep competition out and your customer happy
5. It is fun to engage with happy customers. Do not underestimate this aspect. I can still get very excited when I read the “300.000 paying customers of SmugMug”. SmugMug doesn’t really have customers, they have fans!

Let’s hope more services will follow that path. it will do the user and the web a lot of good. A User-Centric web is to prefer over any other type of network.

On Apple, Facebook, Google, Whuffie and why customer lock-in sucks

What is the difference between customer lock-in and customer value It’s huge! Customer lock-in is a marketeers wet dream. It is a bonus received at the end of the year. It is an internally focused measurement. It is EGO. If your CEO, organization, or marketeer is talking about customer lock-in you can be sure of one thing. Making revenues is more important than bringing value to a customer.

Don’t get me wrong, every company has to make revenues. But think about this for a second. Which company would you rather work for, or buy products from? A company that is focused on revenue and sees customers as a byproduct of that revenue? Or a company that is focused on providing user value, and as a result of this earns a good living?

How to you reach a status of customer lock-in? You can’t accomplish that by serving the customer value. Instead you focus on the costs involved to move away from your service. If the cost of leaving the service are high enough, your customer will not attempt to leave. Too much hassle. Examples? We see lots of businesses attempting some form of customer lock-in. Try leaving a mobile operator and taking your mobile phone number with you. Leave an Internet access carrier and then try to keep your data or e-mail address. Try switching banks making sure your monthly payments are still in order. The list is endless.

The online space isn’t any different. Web 1.0 thinking is essentially customer lock-in thinking. Web 1.0 business models force customer lock-in. It is their oxygen. Without customer lock-in, no revenues. It is the reason web 2.0 isn’t really a revolution but simply an evolution. Examples? The most obvious one is Facebook. Once you sign up your soul is sold and leaving again is impossible. Actually, that is not entirely true. If you simply quit, your account will not be deleted. But if you really want to get out, start acting against the terms of service and they will wipe your account faster than the speed of light. Facebook is a black hole that sucks you, your friends, your interactions and data in, but never lets it out again. It is the perfect customer lock-in platform.

Another example? The Apple iPhone. Apple builds great products but dictates everyone how to use it. I have an iPhone but I couldn’t buy it from the mobile operator I have been happy with for years. Instead of offering me choice, Apple has decided to make it exclusively available via a select set of operators. The reason is simple, it isn’t about customer value, but revenues. While the iPhone itself may be a great and user-friendly product, the Apple strategy is a lock-in strategy. Forcing me to buy the phone and jail breaking it. Sorry Apple, I don’t give a toss about your exclusive strategy, I want choice! Google’s g-phone? Exactly the same issue. Not because of the way they will distribute it. But because it needs a Google account to be useful.

Customer lock-in is a lucrative business. Corporations have tons of marketeers employed to build their customer lock-in strategy. The funny thing about it is that if you would get rid of all that overhead (yes, marketeers are idiots), you would not only save a whole lot of money unwisely spend, but you would also have the chance to work on customer value. It would make your customer, your employees much happier. It would generate profit and build you a strong business with loyal customers. You would not need a “Social Media strategy”  to “engage” with your customers. You would not need “loyalty”  programs. Note that these two “social” strategies become customer lock-in tools if applied within a customer lock-in organization. You would not need Tara Hunt to explain to you what the Whuffie factor is, as it would be in your genes. Having said that, you’d be crazy not to hire ten Tara Hunts and turn your company around form customer lock-in to customer value. A company build on customer value would be doing these things naturally, well before any consultant has thought of a new Powerpoint title called “Social media”. It is funny to realize that great developers tend to understand this much better than any marketeer ever can. It’s because a great developer does not take revenues into account. He looks at customers first.

There are many reasons thinkable why customer lock-in is dominant in company strategy, but that is big enough in itself to write another post about. Sufficient to say that if your company is using social media consultants to enter this exciting new web 2.0 world, you are in deep trouble

On diminishing network effects in web 2.0, social media and human limitations

This post is a followup of a series I did last year on ‘The Human factor in social media’. Technology allows us to be “always on”. To be part of a never ending conversation. Simply plug in, anywhere, and you can join in. Friends are spread out across every timezone, so there always are people available to interact with. Technology becomes smaller so we can take our connection device with us, wherever we go. Connection technology provide us a network that spans the entire globe. Wifi, UMTS, HSDPA, WiMax, no matter where you are there is always a way to get on-line.

Everyone talks about the network effect in web 2.0 ((over-)simply stated: a service gets better as more people join). The network effect explains why the quality improves, it doesn’t explain why we all want to be a part of it. I feel there is an underlying need for interaction that drives current web development. Any respectable  web 2.0 service is based upon the premise that we all want to share anything with the rest of the world. We have life streams (what am I doing), news feeds (what am I reading), traveling plans (where am I going), shopping behavior (what am I buying), localization (where am I now), fan sites (who am I following). Even when you are not on-line, people that follow you are likely to know exactly what you are doing. Sharing alone isn’t good enough anymore. Now we need to discuss it as well. Everything is becoming social. You can share the things you discuss or discuss the things you share. Web companies have a field day catering our need to share and discuss what we are doing.

This ‘Social Media trend’, if you will, partially explains the phenomenal growth of social networks like MySpace, Facebook and even Twitter. The question is, where will this take us. I can’t predict the future, but I find it useful to think in extremes and see if it can help me get a better understanding of the present. I try to imagine what would happen if every Internet user (there are more than a Bln already) would be part of this process. What if everyone shared everything? What if we would all engage in a never ending conversation?

I imagine that a few things would happen:

1. Our world would become smaller instead of larger. As more people get online, and the data and conversations being shared becomes overwhelming, we will feel the urge to be part of less instead of more. Quality over quantity so to say. It is a natural phenomenon that can be observed right now. Just look at 2 examples of the way we now try to cope with the endless stream of information or conversation. a) Instead of searching ourselves we let others deal with that. In the tech world that would be the Robert Scoble or Louis Gray “like” filter. We ‘trust’ such people to find the pearls of wisdom for us, which takes some pressure off of ourselves. But if you think about it, this behavior is pretty ridiculous. b) We follow or get followed by countless numbers of people that we have never met, only to find out that the information or conversation that gets shared that way is often not as interesting as we thought. We end up listening and engaging with a much smaller fraction of the group of followers.
2. We end up spending our online time more consciously. Right now we spent hours at a time engaging in short bursts of interaction/discussion. It gives us pleasure, fun, a good time. But when does it really matter? When does it truly have an impact on your life? Change the way you think, feel or act? We may find inspiration, fun and profession on the web. But it simply can’t compete with real-life experiences (falling in love, getting married, birth, death, getting fired, getting hired, a fight, making up again, a beautiful sunset). The online engagements, as much fun as they are, are much more volatile than real life. It is the relationships you build up in the physical world that matter in the end. Family, friends, neighbours, co-workers.

It might be a bold statement but I believe that there is a limit to the quality effects of the network. While this effect can be used to explain why Google search improves as more people join I would be willing to challenge its value in interaction. The network effect improves data, the most important currency in web 2.0 if you listen carefully to the experts.

I would argue that the network effect diminishes in value when it comes to interaction. We simply can’t interact with the whole world. Our interactions would become meaningless, lose impact, and our impact would become infinitely small in a global conversation. Our human limitations force us to focus on value, on those things that really matter. In the end there is no need to interact with 6Bln people. The real impact lies in those few people we engage with that make a difference in our lives. The rest is just play.

Our need for interaction locks us up

MySpace has over 200 Mln registered users. Facebook follows fast with 140Mln registered users, and they are adding an astonishing 600.ooo new users every day. A rough estimate suggests that more than half a Billion people are registered in social networks worldwide. That is half of the entire Internet population. Clearly there is a need to be participating in social networks. The need is interaction.

While social networks undoubtedly have brought us many great things I find that the current setup is undesirable. Techies might consider Facebook and MySpace web 2.0, but their strategy is very much 1.0. They are silo’s. You are either in, or out. Or as Doc Searl puts it, Facebook is the Borg. Once in, it is hard to get out. You should realise that it isn’t Mark Zuckerberg or a talented developer providing you cool features that keeps you locked inside a social network. It is their choice of business model. MySpace and Facebook have only one mission, and that is to become the single silo everyone uses as their communication platform on the web. It allows them to execute their free, advertisement based business model. In this business model the network is more important than the user. In other words, the business model becomes more effective when the number of users increase. This is not to be mistaken from the network effect Tim O’Reilly often speaks about in referral to web 2.0 services. Web 2.0 services improve as more people join, in other words, the quality of the service improve as more people use it. In the case of the free advertisement based business model the revenue stream increases when more users are joining, but the overall value provided to the individual user is not 1-1 related to the number of users.

For that reason social networks make it super simple for you to add new friends. At the same time it is nearly impossible to leave the network, taking your data with you. And it is a service violation to export your Facebook contacts to another service. Getting in is easy, leaving is out of the question.

In order to keep the silo the most important platform, new services are added all the time. Facebook is not just a social network anymore, it is a platform of services. It provides users so much functionality that there seems to be no reason leaving it once you are in. A whole generation is now growing up thinking that Facebook is the Internet. And while Facebook and other social networks continue to add new services making this sound very reasonable I see a few reasons why this is undesirable:

1. There should not be a single company having so much power over our web experience. Especially if such a company leverages our (private) data in their business model. Diversification is good, building one platform and closing everyone into that platform sounds more like an old fashioned communist-like scheme to me
2. Privacy needs to be controlled by the user, it should never be controlled by the company that exploits all data and interactions of that very user
3. People are largely ignorant about possible dangers of the information they are sharing through social networks
4. The business model involved is mostly destructive as hardly any value is created. Facebook has a gazillion pageviews every day. While we are interacting with our friends, they display advertisement to us, thus trespassing through our relationships. The advertisement is largely ignored by all of us. No value creation there. And the sucker that ends up paying for this “value”? The advertiser, unaware of the bottomless hole he is throwing his money into.

Social networks are there for our desire to interact. But that interaction comes at a cost, we lose our privacy and diversity. While that might not sound like a big deal now I believe that in the end this will not be beneficial and even dangerous for us. The nearly unlimited growth of social networks will stop at some point. As we are all on MySpace or Facebook, it will become less valuable and cool to be part of it. Human nature simply doesn’t like captivity.

Facebook Connect a privacy tool? Yeah Right!

A good article by Brad Stone at the NY Times entitled “Facebook aimes to extend its reach across the web”. Brad talks about Facebook Connect:

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

This is beginning to sound like a development I have talked about many times, the user-centric web. In a User Centric Web, the user is in control of his data and interactions. Facebook’s attempt sounds like it, but it fails in one major perspective. And Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operation Officer of Facebook, together with Brad’s analysis indirectly explain where it fails.

Sheryl is quoted in the article:

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.”

Brad writes about the possible intentions of Facebook Connect:

Facebook has detailed information about its users: their real identities, what they like and dislike and whom they associate with. With a member’s permission, it could use that data to help other Web sites deliver more personalized ads. Similarly, those sites could tell Facebook what its users are doing elsewhere, helping to make its own ads more targeted.

In many ways Facebook Connect, and Google’s OpenSocial, attempt to do what the User Centric Web is about. It allows users to take their data with them on the web. It allows them to be in control of their data and their interactions. The problem I have with Facebook Connect and these other initiatives is that to me it seems the wrong intentions are used to build it. Facebook Connect looks like a scheme that will provide Facebook more value. By letting Facebook users leave the Facebook platform they are actually hooked tighter to the platform. And that is good news for the advertisement revene streams of Facebook. User value seems to be reduced to  welcome side effect. Facebook Connect lets Facebook extend the reach of its social graph beyond the platform, making the network inevitably more valuable than the user.

In my opinion the underlying business model makes it very difficult to provide the user true control over his data. If your business model is free advertisement based services, then you are forced to make network value more important than individual user value. It make privacy control an “issue” to deal with, instead of a value you can provide your user with. Big difference. I am afraid most social network users don’t care or are ignorant, but the issue of privacy will become more and more important as social media takes control of our lives. Openness and interaction that come along with it are great, but there are also dangers to consider with Social Media.

I’m afraid the NY Times calls it right when they say Facebook aims to extend their reach on the web with Facebook Connect. That sums it all up. Facebook pitches Facebook Connect as a privacy tool. I am left with one question. Who is going to protect me, my data and my online interactions from Facebook?

5 dangers of social media

Few people seem to realize or care about the dangers social media brings to our lives. Our online habits are changing rapidly from a closed, private behavior towards an open and sharing culture. While this brings us lots of good, it seems to me we are still very naive about its possible dangers.

Let me provide you five dangers that arise due to our changed online behavior. These dangers should make us realize that when (not if) we move into an era where data becomes currency, we will need to develop better privacy and security measures to go along with that. There are many more dangers that can be thought of, but I’ve just picked 5.

1. Identity theft

Stealing another person’s identity is easier than you think. We are not aware of the information we share on the web. And we often do not realize that Google never forgets. We can find names, birth dates, family members, school and work history, and much more on anyone. We can find e-mail addresses, credit card information, and from there we can get access to bank accounts and identity information. Honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to steal a person’s identity online. Right now this often has financial repercussions (people buy stuff on your credit card), but the consequences may be more severe. When important aspects of our lives are moved online identity theft can do us more harm. Think about someone committing crimes in your name. And it can be done so easily. All you need to do is sign up for a new cool web 2.0 social networking thingy. This is a harmless example, but you can imagine what can be done.

2. Everything known about you can and will be used against you

Remember that college party where you had a great time and posted a few pictures of you and your friends on the web? Remember that post you wrote where you talked about your political views, your religion, sexual preference, or point of view on various issues?  Remember that you friended a person that turns out to be a criminal? Or it happens to be someone that is a bit more explicit, has really different political views than yourself. Often we are not aware what others can find about us. Part of the problem is that we have almost no control over the data that is stored on the web about us. But once it is out there it can and will be used in ways you hadn’t thought about before. How about a status update on Twitter or other social network. “I’m off to the web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco’. Harmless right? Not if you realise how easy it is to figure out the address you live at and then empty your house while you are away in San Francisco.

3. Everything is traced to you as a person

If there is one difference between the online and physical world is that data online can be traced to individuals more easily than in the physical world. We are often not aware how much information we give away that can be directly related to us. Social networks have millions of of profiled users in their database. Google has Google accounts. Every time we log into such profiles the data that is collected is directly related to our identity. It isn’t anonymous, it is traceable to ourselves. And that data is used, often for commercial purposes, but sometimes for evil purposes. It may take new laws, new governments, a change in a management team, or a war that can get the wrong people have access to your profile.

4. You have no control over your user data

Web 2.0 services live and thrive by your user data. Facebook exploits your and your friends data and creates revenues from it. Any web 2.0 company that has advertisement as one of its core business model elements will use your data, your interactions, your friends, to create revenues. You get privacy settings that protect you from other users, but who protects you from Facebook itself?

5. Who are you talking to?

Everything becomes social. As a result we can friend thousands of people on the web. In most cases we do not know who that ‘friend’ is. We are not aware that social networking services have a business model in which the network (the no of users connected) is way more important than the individual users. So ‘friending’  is dead simple and encouraged. It seems less important to actually know someone than to ‘friend’ anyone that comes along. Quantity over quality. And while this works out fine in many cases this certainly provides dangers for children, relative less experienced web users, etc. Who are you really talking to?

conclusion

I do not think that sharing, social networking or social media are necessarily bad things. I do mind that current practice ad business models make sharing more important than privacy and security. The current financial flow doesn’t allow us to develop better privacy or security measures as there is no one interested in investing in it. Privacy is losing ground to social media while they should be developed hand in hand. I often hear the argument “I have nothing to hide, so what is the fuzz about”. I find that a naive view on this subject. This shift in behavior caused by social media services with data becoming the most important currency is a development  that is unstoppable, and it calls for immediate action.

On competition, web 2.0 sarcasm and watching television on Friendfeed

A few things that caught my attention this morning. First, an excellent review by Walter Mossberg on the new Google phone called G1. He describes many of its new features, strengths and weaknesses.

My take on it? Competition is a good thing. It will raise the bar yet again and force Apple and others to build better mobile phones and especially better software on mobile phones. One thing that worries me is the lock-in Google has build into this phone. Google is everywhere, but where sites like Facebook are bounded by their own platform (you can stay out of it if you want), Google gets a grip on the entire online world (web and mobile). This would be ok if you weren’t forced to use Google accounts for it. It turns the entire online world into a Google garden. Scary and not the way to go forward. It’s a privacy’s nightmare, just like the stuff Facebook is doing on their platform.

Then a post that made me laugh out loud, a post by Silicon Alley Insider with a presentation from a “venture capitalist” that understands what is going on. It’s meant to be funny, but there is always some truth to be found in such ironic presentations. We all see the crazy web 2.0 fundings, advertisement models, a business plan that doesn;t create value and only aims for a “Google buy me”  scenario. It’s happening out there and if anythign this financial crisis should lead to rationalization and get rid of these destructive business models.

I’m sure the Friendfeed fan club will get all exited about it’s latest feature. Friendfeed  can now show shared items in real-time instead of a user having to hit the refresh button in his browser. Great feature, but as the underlying issue of irrelevant and unintentional content sharing isn’t really solved it will only provide us a real-time update of fairly useless stuff. No sense in trying to do that too often. If anything, the one strength Friendfeed had,  comments on entries, will be lost in this real-time update. Nothing to get exited about for me. It’s like watching tv, you sometimes enjoy staring at things without having to activate your brain. Useless but relaxing nevertheless

Ignorance is bliss, a new privacy nightmare is born

Facebook announces that they have just integrated Microsoft Live Search into Facebook. Undoubtedly to generate some cash revenues next to the advertisement business they are in.

Am I the only one that finds that they get scarier every day. Facebook not only builds walls that ensure it’s nearly impossible to get out of, but now they also track and trace me while I am searching the web? With Google at least the search results are anonymous and adding to some greater good and benefit of the user while leading to revenues for Google. With Facebook I am not anonymous while I’m searching. Facebook gets into my profile, my friends, my interactions and now search. And it is all for the user of course as they note in the announcement:

Along with your search results, you may also begin to see ads for products, services or other things that are relevant to your query.

It obviously won’t take long before Facebook starts messing with your search actions to provide you and your Facebook friends a “better”  experience within Facebook, as Leah Pearlman from Facebook notes when she finishes her exciting announcement:

Leah is searching on Facebook for a good place to eat tonight with her friends.

I’m sorry, but the giving you a better user experience just doesn’t cut it for me. Facebook provides interesting social networking features but their advertisement based business model puts them on the Big Brother side, not on my side as a user. They are digging in way too deep into my social interactions for me to feel safe when I use the service.

What scares me most is that most users either don’t care or don’t understand the possible implications of this. If there was any country or government in the world that would keep track of it’s citizens the way Facebook is doing we would be talking cold war and dictatorship. But on the web it seems to be OK that someone holds private information on more than 100Mln users (that’s a big country), their relationships, their interactions and search.

Ignorance is bliss they say. I say we’re all a bunch of morons that we allow this to happen. By giving companies like Facebook access to such large amounts of private data we are opening the doors for a privacy nightmare. And that door can’t be closed anymore. Facebook doesn’t forget.

Beacon and other forms of advertisement have no place in Social Interaction

Facebook is bringing us back Beacon again. According to Nick over at All Facebook Beacon had not really disappeared. It was just less intrusively in sight. A little storm appeared on Techmeme over it.. For the very few of you that failed to hear about Beacon before. It’s Facebook;s attempt to monetize the user data and social graph from their 100Mln users. Facebook is, just like almost any other web 2.0 site, unable to create enough advertisement revenues to justify their $15Bln valuation. Beacon is their attempt to create more advertisement revenues.

Personally I believe that the future of on-line advertisement lies outside of social networks. If I’m connecting with friends, whether I know them in real-life or just on-line, there is no room for advertisement. It sits in the way of our interaction, adding zero value to the conversation. I don’t see the difference between on-line or real-life behavior.

Let’s make this Beacon and other social advertisement projects a bit more practical and project it to your normal life. What would you do if you found out that while you were sitting at your rented home taking to a friend, the house owner is recording your conversation, your relationship with this friend, the way you have decorated your home, what movies you like, what political views you have, the coffee brand you are using.  What if that house owner takes all this information from you and then uses it to provide you a better advertisement experience?  Would you enjoy the commercial message? Think wow, what a cool brand, this is just what I need? Glad that I know this house owner who brings me this cool stuff?

Somehow I doubt that. More likely you would either sue the house owner for breaking in to your privacy. Or, you might find your copy of the rental agreement only to find out that somewhere on page 12, buried deep in incomprehensible juridical language it says that the house owner is allowed to do all this. Would you stay in that house? Or get out of there to find a place that is yours?

People often react a bit uncomfortable when I provide this example. I am always surprised how little people understand about the way they are tracked and traced on-line. I’m also amazed to find that  tech savvy people often don’t seem to mind. We seem to have a fait accompli attitude towards free ad based business models. You get stuff for free right, so don’t complain about it. I find that attitude dissatisfying. As if there are no alternatives and we just have to live with it.

So why do we not accept this in real life but are we willing to be tracked and traced on-line? I believe that there are two basic reasons for this behavior.

The first one is naivety. I believe a huge part of the people on the web do not realise nor understand the length at which they are watched. I doubt many have ever tried to read the terms of use or privacy policy of any web service. Too much unreadable text, so why bother. But there seems to be another reason, and it is more subtle. I believe that people aren’t concerned as much with protection of their privacy on the web because their real lives aren’t taking place on the web.  It seems a less real place. A place where your digital self can travel around, play, have fun. But that digital self seems to be partially disconnected from real life for most. As a result we tend to use different behavior or values when we go on-line. It isn’t real so it’s not as important. We seem to find it justifiable that anyone on the web can invade our privacy and use our data, our interactions and our profiles for commercial reasons.

Facebook does this particularly well. They provide you privacy controls to set your privacy level. This provides any naive user the comfortable feeling that he and his privacy are safe with Facebook. But what this user doesn’t seem to understand is that Facebook merely provides you privacy controls against third parties. The question no one ever asks or gets answered is, “who is protecting you from Facebook”?

The answer is no one of course. Facebook offers privacy controls for everything but Facebook. Once you sign on your soul is theirs, and they get to commercialize it any way they can. They tell marketeers that a new era has begun in advertisement. Marketeers see advertisement wet dream appearing (what do they know, marketeers are idiots). The user is left in ignorance, providing him a false sense of security as Facebook protects their privacy. And in the end old school advertisers get to pay for this mess as users continue to ignore advertisement that provides them no value. A great business model. Such a waist of energy, of creativity, of user value and of advertisement money spend.

Privacy is the most under discussed, underestimated and undervalued theme of what we now call web 2.0. Even Tim O’Reilly feels that we’re not doing ourselves a favor with these business models. But I would take it one step further. if Tim gets his way data will be the future. But who is going to control that data? If we go on like this it sure isn’t going to be the user. No one is building services that help the user get a grip on his digital tracks. There is no business model for it. We need to open up, give the fellows even more data to ensure that they can all live a prosperous and wealthy live as web service owners.

I’d like people to challenge that line of thinking. We need think more about privacy and start thinking user value. We need developers to build tools that help users control their privacy. And we need entrepreneurs ad investors that build user value based business models. Chris Messina provides a good example of this line of thinking in his Diso project. He is doing the right things there.

I am a bit behind on my reading. While I finished this post I noticed that Skott Karp has a very similar post up now in which he questions why Facebook doesn’t make more advertisement revenues. His conclusion is the same as mine. Advertisement doesn’t provide the user any value in social interaction.

Email isn’t dead yet, but it needs radical innovation

Alex Iskold has a good write up on the competition e-mail is facing from broadcasting tools like blogs and twitter, discussion tools like forums and wiki’s, or business tools like Todo, CRM. He asks himself is E-mail in danger? He ends with the conclusion:

Email has been the blockbuster and the Internet killer app for the past few decades, but it doesn’t have a monopoly. New more contextual ways to communicate are emerging and slicing pieces of the email pie, particularly in the consumer market.

We’re likely to see a consumer shift from email towards more compact forms of communication, but in the enterprise the email hold is strong and unlikely to be replaced any time soon.

I’ve written a few times about the concept of having e-mail become a center for social networking. While this may sound a bit weird (e-mail is old-school), there are arguments in favor of this. If we forget about technology, servers, clients etc, then one of the most important values of e-mail is that it contains our central address book. It is easy in use, and a whole lot of people are using it.

The younger generation is obviously starting to use Facebook and other platforms as messaging platforms (although they still need e-mail to sign up ). But that isn’t just because Facebook provides better messaging capabilities. In my opinion for too long the concept of e-mail hasn’t changed. When e-mail became the most important messaging method it also developed some serious problems that were never fixed. Just think about the client-server model, SPAM, the inability to connect with people you don’t know the e-mail address of, the urgency and pressure to respond to messages etc. etc.

Social networks and other interaction forms gave us a way out. It provided new ways of interaction and didn’t have these issues e-mail couldn’t resolve. We now have profiles, as many friends as we want, broadcasting tools, subscription tools to be automatically updated with news from friends, easy sharing of any type of content (not just text), web based.

Does that mean e-mail is dead? No, I don’t think so. It’s death is being proclaimed every once in a while in the blogosphere but e-mail is still the most widely used messaging system on this planet. Alex Iskold is right though, it faces tough competition from a whole lot of directions. E-mail can still reclaim it’s place as a messaging mechanism within the entire suite of possibilities, but it needs innovation.

Google has recognised this already and has been working on many improvements on Gmail. Even though Gmail seems nearly spam free, it is web based, it supports threaded conversations, it still lacks features that have become “basic” in online interaction. I wrote a post about this almost a year ago called “Dear Yahoo, Microsoft and Google e-mail, forget about Facebook, start innovating!” I proposed 9 improvements (there are many more). Some of them have been taken care of, and some of them haven’t:

1. Focus on interaction, not on user profiles. My profile is my interaction with others. I don’t care about pimped up profiles that do not match reality, I care about interacting with my family, friends, co-workers, interesting people I might not know. It is the interaction that defines me.
2. Create a spam free, streaming, multimedia sharing environment. Stop thinking in terms of me sending a message to you. That concept leads to overfull mail boxes and me feeling the pressure of having to answer them all. Think me sharing the things that are important to me with you. Think of a stream of thoughts, messages, content, emotions I want to share. As a receiver I might look at them, or choose to ignore them for now. Think of sharing on-line, so that my e-mail becomes a streaming messaging service. I don’t have to deal with loads of data in my inbox, the data is on-line available and more important sharable without too many storing and bandwidth constraints.
3. Think of ways that I can share the things I have just found somewhere. Control Copy, Control Paste a link or content into an e-mail message sucks from a user perspective. So how can we improve on that?
4. Think about the e-mail address book. It doesn’t handle multiple identities, e-mail addresses etc. It doesn’t have any presence capabilities. What if I want something to reach my friend who is not behind a terminal, but is available on his mobile?
5. Think about urgency. Everyone sends me e-mails using the red !, so that won’t do anymore as an urgent message concept. Urgency depends on the sender, the receiver, content, place, time, terminal etc. Broaden this concept and make it work for us.
6. Think about incorporating social search for subjects, messages, people, anything I need really. Think multimedia, think conversations, etc. Current search capabilities limit me to keywords. But how about interaction during my search.
7. Think about decentralization. Make the service USER centric, not PLATFORM centric. Integrate it in all the devices and tools I might want to use. Make it work for me, instead of me working to get it working.
8. Think OPEN, let me access the service anywhere, let me import and export anything I want to and from the service, let me have streams available on any platform, or incorporate any other service stream into this service.
9. Think about seamless integration of family, friends, contacts across existing platforms. It is such a pain for me to figure out how to add my friend on MySpace, G-mail,  MSN, Hotmail, Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook to my address book. And while doing that, think of ways I can easily decide where to land my message to a friend, or perhaps let my friend decide where he wants to receive it.

Arguably these points could fit a number of services, but e-mail still has the position to make it an important social networking hub. It is such a shame if that position is lost because of a lack of innovation. Gmail is just one step into that direction, we need a more radical approach to make e-mail fit for our online social interactions.

Who are you to think you are responsible for my privacy?

An interesting panel discussion with Google and Facebook opposing each other about data portabilty. Facebook refuses for now to implement Google’s FriendConnect. The reason Facebook won’t, according to spokesmen, lawyers and other executives is that Google violates their terms of use. FriendConnect could violate the user privacy, something very dear to Facebook.

A quote from the article written by Dan Farber:

Facebook’s Dave Morin defined openness as giving people control over the information they share and providing developers with the capability to build on top of the Facebook platform. Social data breaks down into three categories, Morin said: identity data, social graph data, and feeds and social actions. With 80 million users, Facebook has a responsibility to make sure that users understand what and how they are sharing information, he added.

David Recordon has a very nice way of saying that the Facebook approach is bullshit:

“What Facebook is doing (with dynamic privacy) is very laudable–if you choose to share something in one place, it should appear in another. It’s just not clear on how this dynamic privacy will work. If Facebook tries to do it by themselves and not with other people, it will be hard to make it really scale,” said David Recordon of Six Apart, who has been involved in data portability efforts.

While I do understand the need for privacy and protection for users, I also cannot help but feel that Facebook is playing its final cards in an already lost game of Walled Garden poker. Actually Dave Morin says two different and not so complementary things (I am paraphrasing here).

1. We need to protect user privacy
2. We need your data so that we can let 3trd party developers into our walled garden, thus making a whole lot of revenues

I believe that this whole privacy discussion is bullshit. Am I the only one finding it a bit ironic that I have to leave the safety of MY privacy at Facebook or Google to defend. They aren’t there to protect my privacy. They are there to “harm my privacy as little as possible” in order to make a few bucks. And to be honest, I’m fine with that. I understand that allowing such companies to access and work on the data I provide them I get services in return. But they shouldn’t be having this pathetic discussion over my privacy. They are at it because they have interfering business models. So let’s just quit this “laudable” privacy heroics and just talk about the things that are really what it is about.

There is only one person remotely capable of being responsible for my privacy, and that is me. If you seriously want to help me be in control of my privacy, then stop hiding behind your business models and terms of service. Provide me with easy to use privacy controls that do not need 10 pages of judicial language. Tell me exactly which switches I can set to protect my privacy, ad in return you can decide for yourself how much of the service you provide is free for me. I can understand the need to make revenues.

Stop choosing the path of advertisement harassment and 10 page terms of service while at the same time pretending it is for the “protection of the user”. We don’t need protection from either Google or Facebook. We need these giants to take the side of the user instead of the network.

If Facebook would be truly thinking user-centric, they wouldn’t be talking to Google about my privacy. They would be talking to me. They would provide me easy controls and also be very clear about the consequences of using those controls. If I protect all of my privacy then I shouldn’t expect much in terms of free services (as Facebook does need to make a buck). If I relieve my privacy controls and allow specific access to parts of my personal data, I get the service for free. It is simple, honest, and user centric. In that way I’m in control.

So please, stop doing all these “laudable” things. Hand me the controls over my privacy instead. Choose the side of the user once. It will help us all create a user-centric web. And it will stop us using the dreadful free but ads based business model that locks both the investor and the entrepreneur into walled garden thinking and holds us all in a web 2.0 Death Grip. Right now, a Facebook user is like a beautiful bird. The bird is free to fly anywhere it want, as long as it remains in the golden cage Facebook has provided them.