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!

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 real value of Twitter’s ‘Suggested users feature

Jason Calacanis has a long post up about the value of a Twitter suggested user. He explains that being a suggested user on Twitter is more valuable than buying a superbowl ad:

Everyone loves a timely or fascinating question and, in my estimation,
I would get a one percent clickthrough rate on each question. If I was
able to reach three million followers, and kept half of them (1.5m),
that means every tweet would get 15,000 visits. Five a day means
75,000 daily visits, and over two million visits a month–or close to
50m visits of two or three years. Some percentage of those two million
would participate in Mahalo by asking or answering questions, and if
that number is also .5 to 1%, that means I would get about 250,000 new
members for my service.

He goes on and explains why Twitter is so disruptive:

What is so disruptive about Twitter
————————–
From my perspective, the most disruptive thing about Twitter is its
presence. It’s everywhere at all times in a way that only an AT&T “You
Will”-style commercial could have predicted in 1995 (or could explain
in 2009–funny how that goes huh?). People get and give Tweets from
the time they wake up until they fall asleep.

Twitter is a giant, open email box that we all hang out in every day.

I don’t really get it. I may be ignorant, but what Jason is actually doing is pretty much old-school web 1.0 thinking. He is thinking eyeballs, traffic, and getting some users from that traffic and monetizing it. He knows Twitter is growing fast, and he has seen that being on the suggested friends list of Twitter gets you ten thousands of followers every day.

What he fails to mention is that the quality of the followers is below zero. You don’t get a targeted group of people you can communicate with. You get everything, including thousands of spammers and bots invading the Twitter network. You get engaged people, listeners, people that signed up and have no activity, people with 20K followers and 2 tweets, etc.etc.

It makes the reach you have on Twitter as good as any spammer that hijacked millions of e-mail addresses. There is always a sucker that falls for it. The real-time effect is pretty much worthless when put into comparison to the nr of followers and the spam being produced. To me the only benefit, if you can call it a benefit, would be that the audience that follows you remains persistent. How many people have you seen closing their Twitter account actively? Before Jason knows it he is addressing 2M Twitter accounts of which maybe 1% may provide some real value. The rest is like with display ads. Not targeted and a waist of money, space and effort.

If anything, social media evolution should have taught us by now that it isn’t a numbers game. It isn’t about quantity, but about quality. And frankly, quality is hard to be found these days on Twitter with their suggestion list, spammers and bots. It seems to me that 9-10 new followers fall in that category at the moment. Could be that I attract the wrong crowd, but I doubt that it is different for others. Jason is betting on quantity, and that might just cost a lot of money with mediocre results.

Don’t just take my word for it. Check out this perfect example of a discussion that Robert Scoble started on Friendfeed, a service that is supposedly the best around when it comes to engagement. Forget it. It performs as bad or good as any other service out there. Most people aren’t engaged (are they even people?). Most are publishers, some are listeners. A few engage, and those are the types that would engage everywhere. The rest are just people that signed up to promote. They don’t care much about engagement.

We may be getting to a real-time web and a more social media place. But I doubt human nature is changing with the same speed. It’s all over hyped and we need to relax a bit about it. To 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. Is the real value of Twitter’s ‘Suggested user’ feature really $500K as Jason says? I’d say that there are far easier ways to burn money than that.

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

Why the real-time web isn’t important

I have been thinking a bit about this notion of a real-time web. Having access to real-time information, as soon as it is published, seems to be a possible Achilles heel for Google according to some (here and here). People who say that do not understand the real strength of Google or it’s possible innovator’s dilemma. But the question that interests me is the user value question. Does it provide us value to have access to information, the moment it gets published? The answer is that it isn’t nearly as important as something else (will get to that).

I guess there are cases where this can have value. An area that comes to mind is big events. The Obama inauguration, a plane crash, earth quakes, the super bowl final.

I’ve tried to use Twitter search and Friendfeed’s real-time options, and honestly, I find the experience mediocre. A bit of nuance might be in place here as we are only discovering the first potential of such services. However, I am trying to grasp what the specific real-time component adds to the experience. And I can’t put my finger on it. I can think of a few reasons why:

1. Life doesn’t jump from one big event into the next one. When watching the Obama inauguration, seeing the Twitter community discussing and commenting it gave a sense of added value. The information added value to the experience at that moment. If I look for Obama on Twitter now I get an incredible amount of useless information. The context defines value. Currently is no context in which real-time search results on Obama now provide me much value. There are times when there is such a context, but most of the time life goes on.
2. Immediate knowledge doesn’t always add value. If there is an earthquake in San Francisco (or anywhere else for that matter) we now see Tweets reporting in within seconds. But that information is only relevant if you are in it (you didn’t need a Tweet to tell you about it), you have people you know live in that area, or you need to know it for professional reasons (e.g a reporter). The randomness of the waterfall of information getting through makes it hard to understand what is really happening out there. A recent plane crash in Amsterdam appeared within a few minutes on Twitter. It gives people a reason to discuss it (terrible tragedy) at the coffee corner, but did it really provide value? Not unless you had a relative in that plane crash.
3. Real-time information is hard to verify and trust. People are saying a lot of things on services like Twitter. Without context or understanding more about the people tweeting, it can be really difficult to understand the trustworthiness and accuracy of the information. You can already see the algorithms being drawn up that take reputation, reliability and trust into account, but this problem can’t be solved easily. Reputation, reliability and trust aren’t real -time characteristics. They take years to build. The only way these characteristics can be determined on information is for that information to be published, read, and responded to by large amounts of people. A blog post can build up trust, reputation and reliability if it has been exposed to readers, critics etc. But a tweet that appears in seconds doesn’t follow that process, no matter what the reputation of the person is that sends it out.

Does all of this means that the real-time web and search has no value. Off course not. Getting the news out fast is important, and it has caused many of he traditional media to get online to join this rat race. But in my opinion speed really isn’t the most important factor.

I do think that it becomes increasingly difficult to find information with enough relevance. There is just too much out there. Google can’t index the entire web fast enough, nor is it able to display the most relevant links in any particular situation. Aggregators, no matter what kind, tend to do a pretty poor job of aggregating relevant information timely for us (yes that includes Friendfeed, Digg, Reddit, and most of the major tech blogs). If you want to know more about that, then read this excellent post by Paul Graham who talks about his experiences with setting up and running the Hackernews community. Excellent read.

It seems we do a much better job at storing and retrieval of information that doesn’t lose value as time passes by. Encyclopedia’s, history, arts, dictionaries, etc. There are however some experiments that try to approach the problem of information organisation very differently. I’ve always been very font of the work that Jonathan Harris is doing this area. Check out his universe demo, and his “We feel fine” project. Seriously, give it a spin and then come back. I’ll hold.

Jonathan’s work proves to me that we haven’t reached the depth of possibilities to handle information. I’ve said this before, but if I were Google or anyone else interested in organising the world’s information, I would definitely get someone like Jonathan on board. His work actually makes me crave for more information. I can get lost in the universes he has created and I return frequently to dive in for some more.

The real-time web sounds cool, but right now it isn’t much more than another technical capability. I don’t really get passionate  about that. Instead I’d like to see what happens if we let non-tech people like Jonathan redefine the way we would be able to access information. I’d say we would find some more ground-breaking and relevant ways of information organisation and retrieval than the “real-time” web. I’d take this one step further and say that it isn’t relevant if published information gets indexed  and found in real-time. The only relevance we should be focusing on is getting the user the right information at the exact right time!

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.

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

The idiocy of Social Media conversations

I read a post by Robert Scoble just now that made me laugh out loud. He observes that the discussions over at Friendfeed regarding the financial crisis lack depth and knowledge.

In the past 18 hours I’ve read literally thousands of posts and have done almost nothing but hang out on FriendFeed. I’ve seen a LOT of idiocy. And these are supposedly from the smarter, more educated people around. People who I’ve had a beer or two with and who I count as friends and fellow Americans.

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The downside of this new media world is that you’ll hear a lot of opinions. Which one is right? I’m not always right. In fact, I’m often wrong. But I’ve counted on YOU, the audience, to help me correct that when I’m off in the deep end. Now, though, I’ve seen so much idiocy that I’m not even sure of my audience anymore. That’s how deep our loss of confidence in each other has come.

It made me laugh a bit for 2 reasons. First, Robert is a passionate Friendfeed user and goes through major ups and downs regarding the value of the service.

Secondly he complains about the idiocy within the discussions on Friendfeed and the loss of confidence in his audience there. For some reason Robert assumes there are experts hanging out on Friendfeed that are engaging in thorough, deep discussions.

This assumption is wrong of course. Friendfeed is a cool hangout place for smart people that much is true. It is a specific type of person that hangs around on Friendfeed. Mostly early adopters of web technology. Regardless of the ’smartness’ of the people that hang out there Friendfeed lacks any support for in-depth discussions.

At best Friendfeed is a bar where we can hang out and ventilate our opinions. Which is fine of course, but hardly in-depth. Besides that, a discussion that possibly involves hundreds of people rarely leads to insight. There is no time to explore, people have to make bold statements in order to hijack the discussion.

Friendfeed provides us the stage for our one minute of glory. Engaging with other cool friendfeed users. It’s a bit like an idols competition. If you engage everywhere and say bold things you might get noted by the crowd and earn the Friendfeed coolness factor.

Does that make Friendfeed useless? Off course not. It can eb a lot of fun. You can meet great people and hang out. But that is exactly what it is. A hang out place for the tech elite. No more and no less. Steven Hodson calls it a silly little corner of the Internet:

Even the idea that a Nobel Laureate of Economics or a discoverer of the Human Genome are going to be found sitting around there computers chumming it up on FriendFeed ot Twitter is ridiculous. Like really, give your head a shake if you believe that. Supposing though that for some incredible reason you did find someone like Stephen Hawking on your friends list do you even thing you would be able to comprehend what the hell they were talking about. Not likely.

So Robert, here’s a suggestion for you. Forget even thinking that places like FriendFeed or Twitter are anything more than really cool places to get together with friends and chew the fat. You know .. just like the old newsgroups or web forums. You want the experts – you’re going to have to go find them where they live because they’re too damn busy to find any value in our silly little corner of the Internet.

You want to have a fun but overall useless conversation hang out on Friendfeed. Nothing wrong with that btw, I love doing that every once in a while. You want in-depth expertise call Steven Hawkins.

Can we have more comment fragmentation please!

Comment fragmentation is a hot topic in the blogosphere right now. There are tons of discussions on it. If you search on the topic you can see that every blogger has an opinion on it. There are tons of blog posts written on it. Today even Seesmic is being accused of hijacking threads of comments. I myself have commented a bit fragmented, here and there ,  so I thought it would be a good time now to provide you with my 2cts on the topic.

Many people seem to have a problem with comment fragmentation. I am going to try and avoid SEO debates on this. Not my thing really although I can understand and appreciate that being important to some bloggers. If we forget any SEO implications most bloggers seem to want to be able to track an entire conversation, preferably in one place. Most would like it on their blog, but if that doesn’t work then there are all kinds of tools around that will help you (or the toolmaker) to centralise it at another place. Friendfeed, Disqus, IntenseDebate, they are all at it.

While the idea of being able to track and follow a conversation that you might have started sounds good, I personally believe that centralising discussion is not a good thing. Conversations are by definition not bounded by time or space. They happen here and there, now and then. It is an illusion to think we can centralize discussions. One of my Friendfeed comments in one of such discussions was:

I just left a comment somewhere, can’t remember. And I saw a guy in an elevator and talked to him about it, my wife is in, and I think I might have dropped the subject somewhere at this party I was at last night, although I can’t remember if I was actually there or not. O yeah, and I just placed this comment here too. What is this fracturing all about, not a big deal obviously

While I ended it with a I did mean everything I said. At the very same time I’m writing this blog post I know there are people out there thinking the same or opposing thing. Writing it down or keeping it to themselves. Talking about it with others or installing software in order to try and get a grip on it.

You may provide an argument following this line “I wrote a post on a subject and I’m interested to follow and interact in the discussion that it started”. I get the part of wanting to be able to know and participate. It is fun, provides insight and helps our self esteem move up a notch or two.

“Did I just start that amazing conversation? Oh wait, is Robert Scoble paying attention to it, wow.  )”

Be honest, we all love that.

It’s even better if all of this conversation would take place on the original site, the place where the author published his blog post.

But social media technology and services have ensured that the conversation can take place anywhere. That’s the power of social media. It isn’t about media, content or distribution. It is about being able to interact anywhere we want. Web 1.0 and even 2.0 are about building destination sites. Concentrating traffic and users in one place, preferably with walled gardens. Social media is our great escape. It helps us to move away from destinations. It helps the user and the conversation to be set free. It enables what I call the user centric web. The web where the user, and not the destination is important.

Would I love to be able to track conversations I might have started? Sure. Would I love it when people would comment more on my blog than at other places. You bet. But some things should not be forced into central destinations. And conversation or comments are on that list. They need to be set free. They need to scatter around this wonderful universe. One giant conversation. Who cares if we can’t follow it from beginning to end. The great thing about it is, we can always start a new one!

Can we please have more fragmentation!

Friendfeed may be the early adopter RSS king, but Twitter is king of 140 characters

Already in 2006 Time Magazine voted the most important person on the planet to be YOU. They were dead wrong of course. In that year it wasn’t YOU that was important, it was THEM. Them meaning all of your friends you brought along to the different social networks that rose like volcano’s in a flat landscape. 2006 might have been the break through of many social networks and their FREE business models. These business models didn’t make YOU important, it made the network important (or social graph, only they didn’t use that terminology then).

Advertising networks gained momentum too. Everyone trying to get a piece of the Social Networking Walhalla harassing the user (that’s you) with advertisement. $ BLN dollar valuations of companies who’s main objective is to get those advertisement dollars rolling. The user gets his service for free, but as a result he has to put up with advertisement. That has got to be by far the worst nightmare of any Marketeer right? You have a potential customer, according to all of the semantic and contextual data the Social Networking site has collected for you. You show this potential customer an advertisement, making sure it fits the profile. Only to discover that this potential customer does the same thing he did in more traditional media, he ignores it. It is the catch 22 of web 2.0. Everyone trapped in the FREE business model where advertisement money is pumped around but the only one paying the bill is the advertiser who doesn’t get much value for his dear advertisement budgets. The social networking site is the laughing third party who collects the dollars. It’s a business model that can’t hold up much longer. At some point the advertiser should be doing his math and discover that he is paying an awful lot of money for social experiments that aren’t very effective. The nature of the business model is what is wrong with it. It is a business model based upon lock-in, upon force instead of freedom. You get a free service so you MUST put up with advertisement.

There is no end to the optimism of both web entrepreneurs and advertisers when it comes to the promises of web 2.0. Advertising, uhm I mean engaging with you customers, being able to use contextual and semantic information to serve him even better. The Über social graph is already being build by Facebook and the likes. And once the user is being tracked and traced across every destination he goes, the exploitation of that data surely will lead to the promised land.

The data collection going on on the web is immense. It is nearly impossible to visualise the amounts of data being collected by Google and everyone else. I’m betting the actual web and it’s data is probably an infinite small fraction of what is being stored on data hogging servers around the world. I can understand why it is being done (given what I just said above). But I can’t help but feel that it’s a rush to fool’s gold. I haven’t seen a computer algorithm yet that has mastered free choice. I don’t know any data profiling scheme that can make people behave like their profiles suggest.  Human nature isn’t that simple. That doesn’t mean no one is going to make a lot of money on this. I’m just saying that I doubt that all of this profiling will provide the advertisement world much benefits. You can’t make me like your message, just because the data says so.

We see this behavior now already. Even though this data analysis is in it’s infancy and much better algorithms will be thought of. Ever clicked on a Facebook ad served to you? Well, not many have. Ever bought some product because when it got in the way of you interacting with a friend, you thought, “hey, that’s convenient, gotta get me one of those”. It just doesn’t work that way.

I tried out the Friendfeed recommendation that has just launched and the Friendfeed community is wild about. It will serve you the “best” of Friendfeed of the last day, week or month. Using it brought me 2 important lessons:

1. I gotta get me some friends that aren’t Friendfeed fanatics. Almost every recommendation was a piece of content or discussion concerning this tool. Man these early adapters aren’t doing Friendfeed any favor with it. Hailing their trumpets, predicting the conquering of the entire world with a tool. Idiots in my opinion. Friendfeed is just a tool, and a nice one. But they are on to the same data collection I talked about earlier. Instead of just computer alogrithms, they try to use friends recommendations and discussions to filter out the important stuff. Too bad 90% of the discussion on Frienfeed is about Friendfeed itself. That data collection isn’t going anywhere for a while (Crossing the chasm is pretty difficult isn’t it). Or maybe it’s just me and my Friendfeed friends, I don’t know.
2. I gotta get me some friends that aren’t discussing the “downfall” of Twitter. Yep, that is where the other pieces of content were talking about. Same early adopters. Same boring stuff. Morons of course. The early adopters might have jumped the Friendfeed wagon,  Twitter is king of 140 characters. They don’t have to come up with noise filters, ranking algorithms, friends recommendations, semantic data collectors, or anything of the sort. They aren’t in the business of data collection and serving advertisement on that data. They are in the field of interaction. And interaction is the only thing that matters in web 2.0. Social Media consumption, creation, participation, it is all interaction. Sure they have stability issues and an angry early adapters mob against them. But they rule the 140 character world, and given the $ 1Bln spent in mobile SMS in 2007 I say Twitter has a better chance of becoming a successful social utility than Friendfeed.

I don’t like the sitting back and let the feeds come to you mechanism anyway. RSS has brought us really great ways to distribute content. But it has also killed the adventuring sprrit of the web user. Instead of wandering around this marvelous world of content and people waiting to interact, we sit back and let the feeds bring it to us. Such a waist of creative processes, of discovery. And such an incredible noise generator. We are screaming for noise filters, ranking algorithms, trust filters (who the hell thinks up this stuff), all to get a grip on the never stopping river of information flowing to us via RSS feeds.

Honestly, I don’t need filters to trust people, to know who ranks high or low, to know who is producing great content or noise. And I have serious doubts that ANY consumer outside the top web elite is dealing with that problem either. RSS is convenient but lazy. It brings you everything you always wanted, and a whole lot of noise with it. It needs noise filters, raking algorithms and all that other stuff. Computer algorithms telling me what to like or not. RSS is unintentional, it is sharing because we can. If there is no intent in sharing it pretty quickly becomes less valuable. That is why we all still love it to get an old fashioned letter or postcard in the mail. It is intentional and therefore so much more valuable. Try subscribing to less RSS feeds if you keep complaining about noise. It will solve your problem instantly.

I always have felt the Internet should evolve around you. Making you and the things you want to do most important. Not the data hogging, or the social graph. But that doesn’t mean that you can sit back and enjoy the ride. It also implies that you have a responsibility in this. You have to be willing to look around, to discover, to make choices. Not just let that RSS juice flow to you. I’m convinced it will work out in the end.

The way RSS is used now is a bit like us reading great books on well known museums. It’s fine.  But actually discovering a new museum, going there, seeing the things that are there, engaging, talking about it, that is where the value really is. And that is more valuable than any RSS feed I could possibly imagine. Friendfeed may be the early adopter king of RSS feeds for now. They are there to collect data, to see if a new kind of “Google” can arise out of social media. And I suspect they will be digging in the same hole where all social networks are digging into. But it’s content right now is a museum we have all seen already. And the discussions of the early adopters are running around in circles right now.

But Twitter is the king of 140 characters. They don’t need all that. They support a basic human need. They need more stability and a well executed business plan. But these 140 characters will be infinitely more valuable to us than any RSS feed with comments and likes will ever be.

How User Interfaces can make or break a new service

Small Update: Just saw that Joshua Porter wrote a nice post in which he states that design (not just UI) is becoming increasingly important. Ties in nicely with this post

One of the most difficult things to get right as a designer is the User Interface of a product or service. Getting the UI right is a key success factor in any development. To me the UI isn’t just the look, feel or the interaction. To me the UI defines the identity of the product or service. It is the only thing a user ever sees (unless he peeks under the hood, but then it’s not your average user anymore, it’s a geek ).  When confronted with a UI I find myself (un-)consciously making all kinds of assumptions about the product, it’s capabilities, it’s difficulty or ease, but most of all it’s identity. The UI defines the product or service so to say. I’ll show you a few examples later on.

There are many factors that make the development of a great UI incredibly difficult. You have to think about the function of the product (what is it for), how it is used, where it is used, physical dimensions, material, color, all possible human senses, the form factor, consistency, complexity, in and outputs. This list goes on and on.

When I was working on my PhD in the field of Industrial Design, I met quite a few designers, both professional and those that were educated to become a designer. It seemed to me that the best UI designers had the ability to consequently apply certain design rules they formulated for themselves before they started a design. These design rules were typically inspired by that long list of requirements I mentioned above. They would spent a lot of time formulating such requirements, because they knew that it would help them design more effectively once these requirements and design rules were formulated.

One of the most difficult aspects of UI design is that the designer needs to play hardball with the other developers once development started. Not only does everyone have his own expert opinion on what a UI should look and feel like. it also turns out that in the process of creation there is less time and less budget available to do things right. As a result, shortcuts are taken and the overall design suffers. This is also the phase where the feature war takes place. I have yet to see a project that implements just the features that were specified initially. More often, developers start freewheeling using their own or alpha user’s feedback and add features to the original design.

Why am I discussing all of this on a weblog about media and technology? Because, in my opinion, a UI can make or break any new product or service. Web 2.0 has brought us the (re-)invention of the Beta release. Every startup that creates a new service starts with a Beta release (sometimes Alpha). This has several advantages of which time to market is most important. Instead of having a development cycle of years, the pressure in the market we now call web 2.0 has reduced that cycle to months, sometimes weeks. It’s more important to be out there, testing the functionality with Beta users, than to spend a lot of time on specification, design and implementation only to find out you are either too late, or you created a great product no one was really waiting for. There is a huge trade off here. Developing with your potential user group shortens the development cycle, but at the cost of stability and usability. But that isn’t the only thing. The Beta period is often also used to test the initial value proposition of the new service. Features are added during the test period and the final release v1 often provides a different service than the Beta release did.

In my opinion the usability and User Interface are often not well thought through. And that is too bad, because it inhibits the user to understand and use the essence of the product or service. This factor can literally break a service from becoming mainstream (along with many other things). UI design is very personal, it’s hard to say in general a design is good or bad.

Let me provide you with a few UI designs I like/dislike. That doesn’t imply that they are good/bad, it’s just my personal opinion. There isn’t any ranking involved, I just selected a few examples, I could have chosen any other really.

The iPhone

An interesting example. The iPhone UI is definitely revolutionary. It is one of the best UI’s I have seen in any handheld computer. The touch screen and the simplicity and consistency of the design are incredible. But to give you an idea how incredibly complex UI design really is, I believe the UI of the iPhone also makes it one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used. Actually, I should have probably said MOBILE device. Steven Hodson asked if I had a kevlar vest when I posted that, and many of the readers disagreed with me. But hte people that disagree are likely looking at it from a handheld device, not from the concept of a mobile phone. The reason for my bold statement is that that very same interface everyone loves doesn’t function well when you are mobile!

Try making a phone call while you are walking around, literally. The touch screen provides no tactile feedback, the buttons displayed are way too small for selecting contacts, letters or numbers, and the amount of actions needed to select a contact and actually make the call are too much. In my opinion,  the design is optimized for an immobile user (meaning standing still). The touch screen forces the user to use his eyes as the main sense. The UI sucks you and your attention into the device, and shuts off a number of other senses. All that is left is a tunnel vision. Try it, you’ll know what I mean. Walk, start trying to type an SMS, listen to your surrounding, try not to hit anything etc. It’s Impossible. A regular phone allows tactile input and feedback. I can type blind on a GSM that has buttons because I can find the buttons without looking. I can walk and still perform basic tasks. in other words, I can use the mobile phone while i’m mobile. That’s impossible on a touch screen. The same thing goes for messaging (SMS).

Twitter

Twitter is one of the communication services I use on a regular basis. While I have tried several Twitter clients, one flashier then the other, I’m still reasonable fond of the Twitter home page. Why? Because it is deprived of too much functionality. The basic features, Tweeting and looking at tweets are presented in a simple and elegant way. The profile images make sure tweets are personalized because I can recognize images faster than names. The content is presented in a tidy way, and maybe most important of all, Twitter enforces the rule of only 140 characters, a brilliant move to keep things simple and concise. I don’t mind at all that I have to hit the refresh button of the browser (unlike with the different twitter clients). I also don’t mind missing tweets pass by as I forget to refresh. Most Twitter clients decrease in usability really fast because they minimize the space they occupy (Twhirl is a great example of this, it looks cool, but it’s UI  isn’t nearly as good as the default Twitter home page). Instead of making the service convenient when using such small client, it actually gets in the way of usability and readability for me.

Not everything is great about Twitter’s home page. I don’t like the method of adding new people to follow. And I don’t like the fact that pressing options or links make me go somewhere else. I’d rather stay where I am and do the thing I wanted to do there. Going somewhere makes me mentally leave the service, and that’s not right.

Minggl

This service has gotten a lot of great press from A-list bloggers. Minggl integrates a number of social networks into your browser. It sounds like real handy, but I am afraid I don’t like the UI very much. There is a lot of cluttering when all my friends are displayed on the sidebar. There are many buttons in the toolbar that are not clear on sight what they do. There is actually only one button that could have made sense (it is the Minggl button) all the way on the left). But instead of turning the toolbar on and of as I expected, it merely sends me to the home page of Minggl, a place where there is nothing to do for me.

To me the Minggl UI in its current form provides no value, making it a service that sounds next-gen, but will probably not attract me enough to try it out. This is a struggle for any social networking service. Most users have more friends than can be displayed in one overview. As a result a compromise is sought to provide the user with a better view of his friends. But it proves to be very difficult to get that right. In most cases the solution would probably be to buy a flat screen of 2×3 meters, but since not every user has one of those, designers tend to scale down, instead of limit.

Wixi

I have written about this service before. I tried it as a Beta user, only to never return to it. The UI was non-appealing to me. Interestingly enough the home page which I revisited just now seemed to indicate they had improved the UI, but when I logged in, nothing much has changed. It isn’t a difficult interface, but for some reason it is non-inviting for me. I find the folder icons floating around a bit loose from the rest. As if they don’t belong to the service. An example of a new service with a UI that for some reason  gave me no reason to actually try it out. That may not be fair, but it is the truth.

Flock

What can I say. Flock is a web browser that has it all. But not for me. I find the UI incomprehensible. I don’t like it that they have chosen different icons for pretty standard functions, the icons aren’t self explanatory to me, but most of all, it is just too much. Be honest, without reading a manual or hoovering with your mouse over any of the icons shown on the left. How many of them can you assign an action to? There are at least 10-15 icons displayed there that I don”t have a clue what they do.

The main screen isn’t much better. I can’t believe how much information is screaming for my attention on this one screen. My brain melts down if I remotely try to grasp what is displayed there. Flock may be a browser that integrates social networks for me, but it suffers not just from a cluttered UI, but from a cluttered concept.

In my personal opinion Flock is a good example where the UI defines the identity of the service (or the other way around). I have great respect for Chris Messina (I believe he is one of the original designers of Flock). But I find that too much functionality in one concept makes the overall service and its usability far too complex, and therefore hard to use for me.

Friendfeed

I’m pretty impressed with the design of Friendfeed. It’s a pretty complex service with an incredible amount of information (if you start subscribing to a lot of users). They try to keep the screen from getting cluttered by using a simple and elegant design. They try to reduce the amount of information (text), it is pretty obvious where the comments and the likes are. The channels are depicted with icons so that you can guess where the info came from. There are tabs at the top that allow you to see other views. I’m not so fond of the extra options a user has when he looks at an entry. He has the option to like, comment, hide , or more. Especially the hide and more links are a bit confusing to use sometimes. Below the more link are a bit technical terms such as “link to this entry” and “reshare”. Not sure what they do, unless you try it out. Friendfeed will have a lot of UI challenges coming to them. The users are already crying out for filtering or ranking algorithms (hey, they are early adopters right). Extra functionality leads to possible UI difficulties. It will be interesting to see how the team can resolve that.

In conclusion

Getting the UI right for a product or service is a nearly impossible task. There are so many factors to take into account. It is often the place where a service suffers most when implemented. At the same time there are examples where the users in general find a UI well implemented. Most likely because the designer (or team) has not thrown their design rules out of the window when the development takes place. I’m not pretending to be an expert on the matter in any way.

But I’m a user. And these UI’s are designed for me, and all other users. That gives me the right to have an opinion on them. And that is what it is, nothing more, nothing less, it’s my opinion. And while I’m probably not easily satisfied, I have the deepest respect for the UI designers in this world. It is one of the toughest jobs there is. And it takes the best of them for a service to have a chance of being successful.

Never, ever, compromise on UI design. You don’t have to get it right from the start, but you have to have a clear vision where it is supposed to be going to. You have to have a set of design principles that you carve in rock and don’t easily step away from. In my opinion the UI is one of the most important fail factors for any new product or service.

I’m interested in hearing your opinion on this. What UI do you find really great or really awful?

What do Skype, eBay, the iPhone, Robert Scoble, Friendfeed and noise have in common?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We don’t need more information or aggregation, we need inspiration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friendfeed stats show its just Twitter with bookmarks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friendfeed competes with TechMeme as a tech news aggregator

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

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

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

My friends aren’t on Friendfeed

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

Friendfeed is an echo chamber of tech stuff we already know

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

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

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

Friendfeed doesn’t allow intentional sharing to just a few

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

Friendfeed is a web 2.0 destination

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

Conclusion

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

5 reasons why Facebook sucks

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

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

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

Facebook is based upon a flawed business model.

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

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

Facebook is spam.

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

Facebook is about data hogging, not about user value

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

Statistics on Friendfeed usage provide interesting insights

A small update: I just saw a post of Justin Smith (Inside Facebook)  interviewing Bret Taylor (co-founder of Friendfeed) about the difference between the Facebook and Friendfeed newsfeed. I don’t usually add links afterwards, but this one fits really well. I guess they hadn’t read this post yet

A few days ago I wrote a post in which I explained that I wasn’t as enthousiastic as most bloggers seem to be about the social network aggregator Friendfeed. My reason for this is simple. If actions of users are shared with others without intent, that is the person performing the action is intentionally sharing, the content that gets shared is usually less valueable.

I have been thinking about that some more the past few days and decided to digg into this a little deeper. I’ll show you some statistics about Friendfeed in a minute, but first some Facebook.

Today I went to my Facebook profile (which I rarely use, but that is the topic of yet another post), and looked at my “newsfeed” there. Here is an example of a typical newsfeed of mine (I erased personal details from friends).

I just found out from a computer, not from my friends, that someone is playing a game, someone added another application, someone changed a profile picture, etc. etc. I also get informed by Facebook about some top networks I should be on. None of these items were intentionally shared by my friends and in my personal opinion none of the items provide me any value. Is this because I have the wrong friends. I doubt it. The problem for me is that the wrong information is shared. Social networks aren’t interesting because I can track down every (mostly dull) action a friend is taking. Social networks are interesting because they should allow people to interact. That is, to intentionally reach out to each other to share stuff, communicate, play, have fun etc. That is what makes it social. What we see here is an Orwellian report about activities that the actor doesn’t even know it is being shared, and to me as a receiver it is of no interest. It’s Big Brother watching you, but it doesn’t provide anyone value. Not even the Big briother (in this case Facebook). They are data hoggers, and collect all these actions to get a grip on user profiles and social graphs. For advertisement purposes. Well, it’s great to know that my friend plays Scrabble. I can see the advertisers getting all excited about that already. I’m not interested to read “Alexander went to Amazon to buy book X”. I’m interested in “He John, I just bought book X. It’s about Y and I am sure you would like it too”. The first one is non-intentional, the second one is a conscious act of sharing which adds way more value.

Back to Friendfeed. I looked at some statistics about Friendfeed usage. What are the top feeds being shared on Friendfeed, according to Friendfeed stat?

• Twitter
• Blogs
• Google Reader
• Tumblr
• YouTube

The actual order can’t be determined right now due to some limitations in the Google App Engine on which Friendfeed stats is build, but Twitter seems to take the lead by more than 50%. Here are a few items that surprisingly aren’t shared very often:

• Friendfeed ?
• Picasa web albums
• Vimeo
• Disqus
• Flickr (it’s in the top ten, but still pretty low in my opinion)

I looked up a few Friendfeed “power users”. Robert Scoble manages to produce 96% input from Twitter and 4% from his blog. Louis Gray produces 71% input from Google reader, 14% Twitter and 7% Flickr. Steve Hodson produces 50% from his blog, 33%(!) from Disqus, and 17% from Twitter.

What can we learn from this by no means statistical sound analysis? Friendfeed is mostly an echo chamber of stuff we already have and know elsewhere. The stuff that gets shared most is Twitter, and right after that the blogs people post and share. I can easily find examples of a blog post being shared by 5-10 different people, thus producing the echo I’m talking about.In my previous post some folks noted that they liked being able to comment stuff on Friendfeed. I couldn’t find statistics on that yet (I hope that will get implemented soon). But the reason why people like that is pretty obvious. Social anything is about interaction. It is what makes us all tick. Not the sharing, but the possibility to communicate.

I said earlier that the stuff we all produce in Friendfeed is less valuable because there is no intent or conscious act when things get shared. Looking at the statistics above I now believe that Friendfeed is nothing more than a techie bloggers echo chamber. It could vastly be improved if either Friendfeed or some API builder would produce a page with statistics about what is being shared most right now. Instead of seaing all the duplicate shares I would like to see that the tech community is sharing a specific post N times. The same thing goes for comments. Which shared items get the most comments. That will show us what people are talking about most. With these additions Friendfeed might replace TechMeme as it not only shows the important blog posts, but also allows us to interact on them. It will certainly become a powerful traffic driver for bloggers. These things don’t make Friendfeed less useful (I will be using it sometimes), it just means that the branding of Friendfeed should be changed.

But at the same time I believe that in its current form Friendfeed will not penetrate the consumer (or non-tech) market successfully. People aren’t really interested in the non-conscious, non-intentional sharing of actions. Who cares? Just look at the stuff Facebook produces in its newsfeed. It might have been be called novel when it first arrived, but it sucks. People want to interact. And Friendfeed in its current form produces way too much non-valuable stuff for consumers to be able to interact. That’s probably why Twitter is so popular, even on Friendfeed

I’m interested in hearing what you think about this. Is Friendfeed just a bloggers wet dream or not? Does it provide you value, even if most of the stuff that gets shared is non-intentional? Let me knwo what you think about all of this.

Why I don’t like Friendfeed as much as I wanted, it lacks intention

Webware writes about Friendfeed this morning. A quote from the article that drew my attention:

The vision

FriendFeed is currently a “social-network aggregator.” It picks up the stuff you do online and tells your friends about it, saving them the hassle of visiting all your online hangouts to see what you are up to. But as many people have noticed, this leads to social overload. It’s too much information to process. Buchheit and Taylor were clear with me that they have more work to do on FriendFeed to make the core aggregation feature more useful. In particular, they want to add intelligence to the service so it highlights what you’re interested in, not every last thing your friends are doing.

 I have been using Friendfeed irregularly the past few weeks. I was thinking about this the other day. Why am I less enthusiastic about the service than a lot of bloggers (here and here for example) out there? The service gets full attention of the blogging world and seems to be the new pet for tech geeks (I wonder how many non-techies are on Friendfeed?). I have had a few good times on Friendfeed, but these times were characterized by the interaction that took place over there. People commenting on something and replying to each others comments. Interaction is what I like most in any kind of service. I like Twitter for just that reason. While Twitter was made for people to answer the question “what are you doing?”, I like Twitter much better when an uncontrolled , unexpected, funny and often surprising @conversation starts (that is, people actually addressing each other on Twitter instead of addressing the whole world). It’s interaction and it makes the service work for me.

Based upon my own experiences I’ve come to a pretty harsh, untested, unfounded conclusion about social network aggregators.  They are based upon the wrong assumption. And the founders of Friendfeed seem to understand this pretty well. There is one major flaw in such services, they lack intention.

Let me explain what I mean by that using a quote from that webware article.

“It picks up the stuff you do online and tells your friends about it, saving them the hassle of visiting all your online hangouts to see what you are up to.”

This quote says it all. Friendfeed and the like are build to save us the hassle of finding out what our friends are doing. They assume that it brings us value to sit back in a lazy chair to find out what our friends are doing. But the problem with that assumption is that it doesn’t bring us enough value.

Just think about it for a minute. Off all the things you do in a day, all the people you meet, all the things you read, write, think. How much of that stuff is actually interesting for your “friends” to know about? Would you bother to tell them about it if Friendfeed didn’t exist? I bet that more than 90% of your experiences in a day aren’t really worth mentioning to your friends. But Friendfeed and the likes can’t make that distinction. They publish everything you have imported into Friendfeed, making the rest of the world look at 90% useless information to dig up perhaps less than 10% good stuff. Why? Not because there is too much information. it’s because of a lack of intention.

By now each Friendfeed user probably has imported 10-20 RSS feeds and isn’t even remotely aware of all the stuff he is sharing automatically. Because of this lack of intention most of the shared stuff is worthless. If I see something that I know my friend really likes and then share it intentionally with him, it provides us both with value. But if I spill my guts to the world without thinking about what I’m sharing it makes most of the things I share pretty worthless.

Precisely for this reason I believe that services such as Twitter are far more valuable than Friendfeed. If someone posts a Tweet, he or she is using intention. It is a conscious act to say something out loud. Does that mean all Tweets are valuable. Off course not. But if intention is there, then you will see value far more likely than when something is aggregated automatically.

Friendfeed might look great to us tech geeks and bloggers. Mostly because the service is being used to draw attention to blog posts, tech info, breaking news, etc. It is a way to get attention for something, to draw traffic to your site. Friendfeed is becoming a traffic driver as Fred Wilson points out. Instead of getting RSS readers to you blog, which takes a lot of time and dedication from a blogger, we can now all post our stuff to Friendfeed. And some folks are likely to click on the link out of curiosity.

But I have serious doubts that such a social network aggregator provides non-tech people any value.  What if we could see all “social” activities of our friends without them having the intention of sharing something specific with us? The information value, fun or surprise factor would diminish rather quickly. It is like the Facebook news aggregator. I am not a heavy Facebook user, but I can’t say that I get a lot of value knowing my friends just took a movie quiz, played a game of scrabble, poked or zombied someone. Call me old-fashioned, but it just doesn’t provide me value. But if one of my Facebook fiends intentionally sends me a personal message, it immediately provides me with value.

Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor came from Google, and did a great job technically aggregating everything into Friendfeed. They did an even greater job drawing venture capital and getting the blogosphere to really get hyped over Friendfeed. But honestly, they should really rethink the basic principle of Friendfeed. They should stop  trying to figure out what is valuable to me as a user, as shown in this quote:

 Buchheit and Taylor were clear with me that they have more work to do on FriendFeed to make the core aggregation feature more useful. In particular, they want to add intelligence to the service so it highlights what you’re interested in, not every last thing your friends are doing.

There isn’t an algorithm that will filter out the garbage and show me the valuable stuff. The principle is simple, garbage in means garbage out. And Friendfeed has made it very simple for its users to draw in anything at all. I never INTENDED to have all that stuff shared

I’ll keep reminding myself when new services arrive that interaction is what it is all about. Forget aggregation. Aggregation is for convenience,  for the unintended. Interaction is intentional and therefore always more interesting!

Friendfeed a destination site, that is soooo web 2.0!

Michael Arrington writes this morning about the fast growing aggregator service called Friendfeed. After launch, just one month ago the ex-Google founders already see a steady climb of users. Most likely because a number of power users like Robert Scoble and Michael himself have joined the service and brought along their network of tech followers.

I joined Friendfeed too a few weeks ago (here) and was surprised to see its simplicity. Friendfeed allows you to import news or messages left behind by your friends. But it aggregates them(using RSS) from all kinds of different sites. Friendfeed currently allows you to import feeds from some 28 sites like Twitter, Jaiku, Digg, Google Reader, Delicious, StumbeUpon, Flickr, Youtube. Friendfeed also allows you to react or comment to things shared on other sites. So if Robert Scoble posts a Twitter and I am subscribed to his Friendfeed, then I can comment his Twitter inside Friendfeed. Unfortunately the comment doesn’t appear on Twitter, only on Friendfeed.

And that is probably precisely why I don’t use Friendfeed as often as I use Twitter for example. While it does a great job aggregating all the feeds for me into one place, it is quickly becoming a destination site. And honestly, that is so web 2.0.

I hate it when I need to go to my Friendfeed site to view all the feeds and comment on them. It sucks that my comments or ratings don’t leave Friendfeed but remain on that portal, only to be seen by those that are currently logged into the same site. And that makes Friendfeed provide us with great aggregating functionality in an old-fashioned web 2.0 destination site.

It makes me feel locked-in, puts up walls around me. Friendfeed is the most hypocritical of them all, literally feeding off the success of other sites (just look at Michael Arrington stabbing at Twitter). But when it gets interesting, when I get my chance to interact with something I discovered on Friendfeed, I don’t get to leave the Friendfeed walled garden.

So excuse me if I’m not nearly as enthusiastic as all the first mover bloggers that have written positive articles on the service. Yes, it’s a great aggregator fo feeds. Yes, it is incredibly easy to use, uncluttered, and fortunately ad free.

But they have missed the opportunity to create something unique, something that goes beyond web 2.0 thinking. They have missed the opportunity to make Friendfeed a service centered around its users, instead of centered around their own portal and database. And with the new search functionality added, they are locking in users even more to the Friendfeed site. And that is too bad.  It could have been a user-centric web 3.x service. Instead they stopped at old fashioned web 2.0.

The crazy thing about that is that if everyone is finally attracted to Friendfeed and locked into their service, there will be nothing left to aggregate from other places. Robert Scoble asks himself how many services we actually need. Well, with Friendfeed we don’t need any other right? Everyone loses, and that is too bad. So follow me on Friendfeed if you like. But for interaction, I’ll will probably also hang around other places, for example at my Twitter account

Social networking may be declining, social interaction won’t

I read a Business Week article this morning which suggests that the current MySpace generation is becoming fed up with the ad bombardments on the site. They seem to be spending less time on MySpace because of it. A quote from the article:

The MySpace generation may be getting annoyed with ads and a bit bored with profile pages. The average amount of time each user spends on social networking sites has fallen by 14% over the last four months, according to market researcher ComScore. MySpace, the largest social network, has slipped from a peak of 72 million users in October to 68.9 million in December, ComScore says. The total number of people on such sites is still increasing at an 11.5% rate, but that’s down sharply from past growth rates. “What you have with social networks is the most overhyped scenario in online advertising,” says Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Specific Media, which places ads for customers on a variety of Web sites.

I don’t really know if we are now seeing a decline that marks a steady downfall of the current social networking sites. There seems to be contradicting numbers around. TechCrunch, for example, showed in January that Facebook is still growing in traffic, while MySpace is going down. According to Mashable traffic is increasing and they use a totally different measure, using the traffic measures from one of the largest content delivery networks Akamai. According to Akamai, they have delivered 5 times more data over their network to social networking sites in the last year. this suggests that people are spending more time on social networking sites.

And then there is the information Google provided for last quarters results. It suggests that Google has trouble monetizing ads on MySpace:

CFO George Reyes said social networking advertising is not monetizing as expected. When questioned further Sergey Brin, president of technology, said: “We don’t talk about individual partners or anything like that.” Brin noted some things were tried that didn’t pan out. While Brin won’t talk about partners it’s fairly obvious that MySpace is an issue. Google is obligated to pay at least $900 million in minimum revenue guarantees to MySpace through 2010. Later, the question was revisited again. He noted that Google also has Orkut and other social networking partners. “We have an incredible amount of this inventory,” said Brin. “I don’t think we have the killer best way to monetize social networks yet. We have had a lot of experiments (and some disappointments).”

So what does all of this mean? Well, for starters, monetising social networks through ads is hard. If Google, best in class,  is still struggling with this then you can imagine others will have similar problems. I believe that ads in itself provide little value to the users in social networks, and for that reason it is a faulty business model. Essentially the same thing happens on a web page as on TV. People will ignore ads when the ad itself does not provide the user any value in his actions. Ads work in search because you are looking for something, but do not work when you are interacting with a friend. The ad itself doesn’t provide extra value to the interaction. It is as if you and I are having a drink in a bar together, and the bartender keeps drawing our attention with commercial messages. It’s annoying, and most likely, we will simply go to the next bar to grab a beer without commercial interruptions.

SocialAds launched by Facebook have, and will, experience the same problems. Although the underlying mechanisms might be smarter (Facebook watches you and your friends like a Big Brother and uses your profiles and interactions to match ads) it essentially doesn’t solve the real problem. There is no room for advertisement when people interact. And their first Beacon attempt wasn’t a success either. Facebook got an overwhelming negative response mostly because people didn’t like it that the feature couldn’t be turned off or that it would invade privacy.  In my opinion, the beacon system is build upon a wrong assumption. it assumes that mimicking the “advice from a friend” on-line will help increase sales or better targeted advertisement. As I have said earlier, the interaction you and I might have when I tell you about a new car I bought isn’t the same as the beacon message in my newsfeed that says that “Alexander just bought car X on site Y”. In the first example there is trust, talk, emotions, gestures, the opportunity to agree or disagree with each other, in other words true interaction. In the second case there is a “computer system” that tells my friends I just bought a car. Not the same, and not enough value to help my friends to buy a car too.

I believe for this reason current most popular social networking sites will either evolve into something better, or disappear all together. I don’t know if the figures I started out with are a measure that show this decline in popularity, but I’m betting on something that is a constant factor throughout. Social behavior. People have jumped on the social networking train to be part of its success. But now that the hype is over, the question becomes if these sites provide the user real value.

Building and looking at other people’s profiles is fun at first but becomes tiresome pretty quickly. I see this all around me. People joining a network, spending a lot of time to build a personal profile. But after a while the fun wears off, and less time is spend on that activity. So what do these people use social networks for? Interaction of course. They use the chat functionality to chat with their friends, send them messages etc. the profiling and all the applications that help you beef up your profile aren’t interesting enough. And I’m betting that current social networking sites do not provide the user enough value to keep him on board while the advertisement pressure is increased. Maybe new initatives like Friendfeed will do a better job at it.

What are we left with then? Interaction. It is always about interaction. People love to interact. Social networking sites will have to evolve into social interaction sites where friends can use any tool needed to interact with each other. Through feeds, sms, tweets, IM, e-mail, voice calls, video messages, you name it. The web entrepreneur that can think of a web business model that monetises user interaction will be the winner. Providing value can always be monetised. Social networking may be declining, social interaction won’t!