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

Shifting the balance of power inside out solves many web 2.0 issues

Image taken from: http://www.pinkfloyd.co.uk/insideOut/

What are the most important aspects for a User-Centric web to me? In a User-Centric web:

• I get to own my data and my interactions
• I control my privacy
• Services travel along with me, instead of me traveling to those services
• I do not perceive walled gardens, I can take my data with me and (re-)use it wherever I want
• Services connect to me in a standard manner, allowing me to (re-) use my data (think friend list, unified messaging, interaction, privacy control etc here)
• Services read my privacy policy and terms of use, and agree to my terms when connecting

It basically changes the balance of power inside out. Instead of putting control at the web service, control should be with the individual user. If we switch to this perspective you will find that a lot of the issues we currently see on the web would be solved quite naturally. We would not need destination-based business models (with complementary user-lock-in and walled gardens). It would solve the biggest web 2.0 tragedy as service providers would have to compete on user value, instead on network value. And privacy, or the lack of control, of it, would be solved automatically, as the user decides what to do himself. that doesn’t imply that everything will be locked down. It just implies the user explicitly can decide what to do, including the option to share everything.

The problem with this concept is that it takes plumbers to realize it. You need development effort to focus on the core aspects of the way the web works. It isn’t about creating a new Facebook or Twitter. There is no glorious, unique business model available to make this happen. It really isn’t even about technology. we already have the technological capability to make it happen. The real issue is revenue. Unless we figure out a way to generate revenue  in this User-Centric web, we won’t see it happen easily. There are movements working on this.  OpenID is a great example. But we will need commercial companies to embrace this concept and bring it to life. Unless there is a revenue generating perspective they simply will not do this.

The exception is obviously Google. Google is not only the largest revenue generating machine on the web, they are by far the biggest plumber too. Their recently announced Google Wave is a typical example of this. They have just provided us the mean to re-invent the way online communication works. This is going to have a huge impact on existing communication and social networking services if adopted. Google wave to me is one of the first initiatives that will allow us to develop User-Centric services.

Maybe we should simply revert to a very old business model, even older than the current web 1.0 models we upgraded to web 2.0. Maybe we should ask users to pay for the value they receive?

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!

On Google’s Innovator’s Dilemma

Every once in a while a new product or service appears that is immediately labeled as the new ‘Google’ killer. Usually by the major tech blogs who need to say something smart to get the traffic going to their site. Sometimes by the product company itself who might think that that any publicity is good publicity. I rarely read those posts. The idea itself makes me smile a bit as I personally believe that anyone boasting about such a possibility  rarely really understands the nature of the power that Google has build up in the past years.

The nature of the strength of Google can be derived from their mission  “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

The first thing that comes to mind when reading that is their audacity to think beyond reasonable boundaries. Google doesn’t want to organise a specific set of information, they want to organise all information. I do not know a single company that publicly dares to think this big. The consequence of dreaming this big is that you have to act upon in. And that brings us to another strength of Google. If you wan tot organise the world’s information you need unprecedented data storage and manipulation capabilities.

Many people will recall the search engine when thinking about Google. Others might think about Google maps, GMail, Google Earth,  Adwords, or other remarkable services Google provides. I tend to think about the infrastructure that is needed to accomplish the daunting task of organizing all of our worlds information. The infrastructure of Google i s as immense as their mission. They own huge server parks, run some of the largest infrastructures in the world and own probably the largest and most important glass fiber backbone infrastructures in the world. It is nearly impossible for a piece of data traveling the world not to pass Google infrastructure. And they are extending their reach into all networks, including the mobile network.

Imagine the sheer computational capabilities, the ability to store endless amounts of data, the ability to transport unlimited amounts of data, and you are slowly getting the picture that competing with Google isn’t about a product or a service. You are competing with bricks and mortar, with iron, and motherboards, with glass fiber and server parks. The investments needed to overcome that are beyond any ones reach at this moment.

Does that mean that Google can’t be beaten? I doubt it. History learns that all empires that rise up at some point will come down again. But what is Google’s Innovator’s dilemma? Where will a disruption come from that can overthrow what Google brings on the table right now? I honestly don’t know. But with their ability to diversify, their incredible computational power and infrastructure, their current money generating platforms it has to be something that hurts them in their core. Forget about individual services, walled gardens, huge traffic drivers like Facebook or MySpace. Google’s walled garden is the entire planet. Who has the audacity to think big enough and overthrow that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our need for real-time information consumption is pointless

What if we have instant access to all the data in the world? I’m flying about 38.000 feet above ground and I’m thinking about this question. It’s part of the mission of Google, everyone should have access to all information. It’s also fashionable in Silicon Valley. It seems there are a gazillion startups that aggregate data for us. We seem to have a never ending hunger for data and information. Where we once depended on storytellers, bards, poets, painters, writers, journalists, we now want to know everything written by anyone. Official information providers long thought they could keep a monopoly on ‘quality’ information, but it is now obvious that they have lost that battle. The consumer isn’t interested in “quality”. He wants to know it all.

We write blogs, create news, produce content, act as journalists, and there are plenty of platforms that allow us to spread our message. It doesn’t stop at news. We are eager to share personal information, wishes, needs, thoughts, ideas, emotions, friends, locations. To find information we use Google, news sites, rss feeds, aggregators, aggregators that aggregate aggregators, news feeds, tweets, social networks. Where news could take years to surface a few hundred years ago we now have almost instant and real-time access to information. Almost. The next evolution can be predicted, we will see the rise of real-time information systems.

If anyone can have access to any information at any time, what is then the value of that information? As transaction costs to produce, distribute and consume information drop to zero the question arises if the information value itself drops to zero too? My guess is that in many cases the data itself will have less value. That same data all platforms are now fighting a war over, the data that makes web 2.0 more important than the destinations of web 1.0.

Ironically there are at least two types of “data” thinkable that can never fit this real-time model and at the same time have tremendously more value than data that does fit that equation. Googling Stephen Hawkins may tell you everything there is to know about black holes, but it doesn’t give you any knowledge about them. Knowledge Stephen Hawkings clearly has. A deep understanding and experience that makes knowledge truly valuable. And all the processing power, disk drives and search engines of Google and the rest of the world can’t capture that. There are no short cuts to knowledge, no matter how much processing power and storage capacity we throw at it.

The other type is the storytelling that has been part of human culture as long as we have existed. And I am not just referring to the storytelling that allowed us for centuries to pass information on to new generations. I’m talking about our daily interactions. If I ask you to remember the last conversation you had that made you laugh or cry, chances are pretty high that this conversation was a real-life one, not an online one. It could be a conversation with a loved one, a family member, a good friend, even a colleague. When we interact with each other, we create. We tell each other stories, we share experiences, we define history together. It could be the most difficult conversation you have ever had, but it can just as well be as simple as having a good laugh with a friend, or watching a sunset together. The information that we exchange is meaningless. Unless you were there, because then the information is priceless.

It is for that reason I tend to be rather skeptical of our current online efforts to get information to us via search, sites, aggregators, rss, social networks, soon all in in real-time. Sure it has value, but that value diminishes quickly when the transaction costs drop to zero. These developments are technological in nature. We solve this problem because we can. And when we have solved it, we will find that all the information in the world doesn’t give us a lot of real value. It just gives us convenience.

Google proves that everyone else executes online advertisement strategies poorly

A few posts drew my attention this morning. First, Nick Carr points out that Google is changing the way the web appears, depending on whether or not you are using the Google search engine:

First Click Free allows publishers that restrict access to their sites (to paying or registered customers) to give privileged access to visitors who arrive via a Google search. In essence, if you click on a Google search result you’ll see the entire page of content (your first click is free) and you will only come up against the pay wall or registration screen if you try to look at a second page on the site.

[stuf deleted..]

At the very least, First Click Free provides another boost to the web’s centripetal force, as Google further strengthens the advantage that its dominance of search provides. Google doesn’t like to think of itself as locking in users to its search engine, but if you get a privileged view of the web when you go through Google, isn’t that, as Lenssen suggests, a subtle form of lock-in? Isn’t Google’s web just a little bit better than the traditional unmediated web?

Mathew Ingram disagrees with Nick and takes quite a different stance:

As Matt Cutts notes in his comment, there’s nothing preventing publishers and websites from providing exactly the same service to anyone who comes in via search, whether it’s through Google or not. There’s nothing proprietary about it, nothing restrictive or exclusive. In fact, publishers would be dumb not to extend the same policy to anyone who arrives from a search engine. It’s an easy way to give someone a sample of what you’re offering to entice them to pay. I think Nick was just looking for a nice, fat stick to beat Google with, and First Click Free seemed to fit the bill.

I agree with Mathew on this one. Google has already changed the way we use the web. We browse less and search more. The web has already been Googlified as it is the most dominant search engine. We look at what Google presents us. What First Click Free does is provide publishers a nice way of providing potential customers a first glance at what is available in a paid environment.

It’s a smart business model, and resembles Freemium. Google is executing the advertisement model really well. They will, unlike other web services that try to leverage advertisement in their on business model not be hit as hard by the financial crisis. Henry Blodget has a good article on that. He writes about the current financial crisis and concludes that online advertisement will take a hit.

It’s time we woke up and faced reality. Online display-ad spending will fall in 2009, probably sharply. It will probably fall again in 2010. Hundreds of startups counting on advertising as a business model will be flattened. Yahoo, CNET, AOL, and other big display-ad properties will  get hammered. Legions of me-too video sites will croak.  Ad networks, the “hey, let’s just start an Internet company!” flavor of this second dotcom boom, will get decimated.

The reason for this is not just the current financial crisis. Henry shows that the slowdown has already started before the crisis. The underlying reason is that the advertisement business model is severely flawed. In most cases it adds no value to the user experience. I already mentioned this in many different posts, the latest one entitled “How 475Bln customer views can lead to ZERO value”, and another one called “A shakeout of unhealthy advertisement sponsored web 2.0 businesses”.

I do not object to advertisement or a business model based upon advertisement revenues. But this model is misused in a way that doesn’t add value to the end user. And I only believe in business models that provide the end user value. The FREE ads based business model has become a “standard” in web 2.0 thinking, but it hardly ever pays off, not for the startup or the user.

Google continuously proves to be an exception, but they have taken care of the most important aspect to make advertisement work. They have provided a context in which the advertisement itself contains value to the user. The context being search of course. But advertisement as a means to sponsor free services hardly ever provide the user value. They have to put up with the advertisement in order to get a free service. Hardly a sustainable or value adding model. It’s a lose-lose scenario at best.

This business model only has one purpose and that is to attract old school media companies to invest in it as they don’t have a clue of on-line value either. If anything the current financial crisis will force advertisers and media companies to rethink their strategy and simply look at the value that is being generated with online advertisement. And while the transaction and distribution costs are near-zero they will have to conclude that their value and the value for the end-user is also zero. There are better ways to spend your money. And honestly, Google may have startd once without a clue of a business model. But now they are simply so much smarter than anyone in this advertisement business. They keep on innovating the whole model making it better all the time. Working on the context to make sure there is value. Who is going to beat that?

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 linking economy fails because social currency became financial currency

Trust is a difficult subject. How do we trust someone? It’s pretty difficult in real life. We tend to trust people we know well or people that are trusted by people that we know well. We gain trust by interacting with people, by seeing consequent behavior. Reputation is an important factor too. Without realizing we use body language and all kinds of senses to build trust.

Online this is even harder. We miss most senses and can only rely on electronic interactions and referrals. The interesting thing is that unlike in real life trust has been made quantifiable on the web. It’s called Google Juice. With their PageRank algoritm Google has defined a defacto standard for trust. The underlying assumption is that if a lot of people refer (link) to a site it probably contains important stuff and can therefore be trusted.

While PageRank has brought us a lot of great things and helped us to find things we need quickly, it also comes with downsides (as with any algorithm). It can be tricked, optimized, tailored to fit your needs. That is probably why there are so many ranking systems on the web. We have Google, Technorati, TechMeme, all kinds of leaderboards, there is a ranking for anything we can think of. The main motivation for having these ranking systems is measure trust. If you’re high ranked you can be trusted.

Linking has become the main currency on the web. By linking to external sites you provide them with a trust referral. It’s an important process as it immediately affects PageRank. It is also a system that breaks down easily, especially if you in some way or another monetize your site. That is why all of the big blogs seldomly link to external sites. TechChrunch, CNET, they all love to link to themselves. The motive is pure financial, and has nothing to do with content, trust, or any other factor.

I think Mathew Ingram nails it when he says:

When I come across a site — whether it’s Ars Technica, or CNET, or the New York Times — and most of the links are internal, I instinctively don’t trust what I’m reading. Maybe that’s just me, but I think excessive internal linking is almost worse than no links at all. At least having no links at all could be a result of plain old ignorance; linking only to yourself means you know full well that links are valuable, and you know how to do it, but you either can’t be bothered to look for other material or you want the Google juice all for yourself. It’s fundamentally anti-Web. We already have lots of places that don’t link — they’re called the mainstream media.

The big blogs have become exactly that what they loath about traditional media. They may have started as open and trustworthy initiatives, but with the monetization that is taking place now it has become crucial to their survival to act as old fashioned media corporations.

It’s a bit ironic that Mathew, who also happens to be a journalist, needs to point this out to us. Mathew is someone that always links to others, which is why I trust and respect him. Tim O’Reilly started this discussion a while back when he wrote:

When this trend spreads (and I say “when”, not “if”), this will be a tax on the utility of the web that must be counterbalanced by the utility of the intervening pages. If they are really good, with lots of useful, curated data that you wouldn’t easily find elsewhere, this may be an acceptable tax. In fact, they may even be beneficial, and a real way to increase the value of the site to its readers. If they are purely designed to capture additional clicks, they will be a degradation of the web’s fundamental currency, much like the black hat search engine pages that construct link farms out of search engine results.

I have a lot of respect for Tim too, but it’s a bit ironic that the O’Reilly blog tends to link internally too. They use a tagging system below every post that leads to O’Reilly articles only. It’s just a variation of the same theme. It seems that as soon as a blog becomes monetized or written by more than one author linking to the outside world is under pressure.

And with all the aggregators popping up the social media community is searching for trust again. We think of new algorithms (trust filters), people ranking systems, we rank content, people, anything to get a grip on trust.

Personally I think it’s best to use common sense. If you interact or follow people you will soon enough develop a feeling about their skills and value for you. It will help you to build trust. This is important in a world where anyone can act like an expert and publish anything boldy without the restraints traditional media have (they have a news redaction, editors, policies). As I said in a discussion on this very topic at Friendfeed:

On FF or anywhere else on-line it is hard to decide to trust the ‘expertise’ of someone making bold statements. I for one would warn you not to assume everything I write is correct. It is, and remains to be, my personal view of the world

Maybe the linking economy went bust when we started treating it as an economy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A quote from the article written by Dan Farber:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The incredible power of being able to think and act big

Possibly the most important characteristic of web giant Google is their ability to think and act big. Thinking big is really hard to do but has made them the most successful web company in history. Google, the name, refers to the word Googol meaning 10¹⁰⁰ which is a huge number. The name itself suggests that Google has the ambition to index the entire web. It certainly has made them the defacto Internet search standard.

This ability to think big isn’t that rare. Most web entrepreneurs that start a new venture think that they have fond the single idea to conquer all of the Internet, to become the next Google. Most fail too. It isn’t good enough to think big. You also need to be able to see the bigger picture, to understand it’s complex nature, to see what is needed. It is also important to understand the ecology of such matters, to understand that to have a big impact you need others to do that. And once you understand all of this you then need to execute big. And that is where the power of Google lies. It has become their second nature to think that way. And doing that they can amaze us all.

If you understand this about Google then it isn’t so hard to understand what they are up to now. Google is trying to become the social glue of the entire web. They are the first to acknowledge the power of socializing every application. Most web 2.0 companies have chosen a business model that forces them to become the number 1 destination site in order to be successful. Mark Zuckerberg runs one of the largest walled gardens in the world (if you exclude the mobile operators, they hold even larger walled gardens AND, unlike Facebook, make a whole lot of revenues on them). Almost every web 2.0 business model is based upon traffic and advertisement. That business model trap puts the entrepreneur in the destination mood. He’s got to build a large destination site to become successful.

Google has taken a different approach. Thinking bigger than the rest they leave the fight for social destinations to others (except for the search engine google.com, but they have won that battle long ago) and look at the bigger picture. Instead of having one destination to be a playground, they see the entire web as their playground. And if socialization is the trend, then Google will be the one that connects everything to everyone using their OpenSocial and FriendConnect projects.

And they are extending even beyond the web as we know it. The next addition to this playground will be the mobile device. Again, instead of building one super mobile application, Google simply builds a mobile operating system called Android. They create a whole new ecology, bypassing closed, walled garden. platform developments by the mobile hardware manufacturers. Who cares about Symbian, Windows mobile, or any of the other non-interacting mobile platforms. Google will try to open up these hopelessly closed ecologies and scattered mobile developments by setting a new open standard with Google’s Android. They are in the mobile game now, shaking up the industry as no one has been able to do (with the exception of Apple of course).

Just look at a few of the strengths Google has:

1. They run the largest Internet infrastructure in the world, which includes not only huge data centers but also dark fiber connections. I doubt there are many bits traveling the web that aren’t passing Google infrastructure at some point
2. They are the king of search, both on the web and mobile space. And accompanied by that they are the king of advertisement, taking some 75% of the entire revenue stream worldwide.
3. They have Orkut, Google Earth, Google Maps, Picasa, GMail, GCalendar, Google Docs, Google Gears. And on top of that they have OpenSocial and Friendconnect, API’s to potentially unlock any popular destination site on the web. Resistance is futile, but even the mighty Facebook can’t resist this force much longer. Their feeble attempt to block Google’s FirendConnect will backfire on them.
4. They are the king of RSS, with Google Reader and Feedburner, letting a lot of content flow through their network
5. They have bought one of the best mobile teams in the world. People are always wondering about Google’s move to by Jaiku and then let the service slowly bleed to death. Let’s not forget that the early adopter crowd loved Jaiku at it’s peak, even though Twitter was way more popular. Jaiku simply had better technology and an incredible development team. And these people are now working within Google on who knows what. Best buy they have aver made probably. Who cares about Jaiku, Google has the team!
6. They have created the Android mobile operating system. It isn’t there yet, but it will attempt to dominate mobile development due to its open nature. If all developers jump on Android and the iPhone, the rest of the mobile OS’es will be buried very soon.

Does that mean the competition might as well go home? Does it suggest that Google will take it all. No, of course it doesn’t. I even doubt there was a master strategy that has lead Google to all of this. But one thing is clear to me. All of this is due to their ability to think and act big. And it is really hard to compete with that. Google is getting ready to become the next “Operating system” on the web, including mobile. They have the infrastructure, technology, the capacity, the data, and people to do it. While this is good news for the web user, it is also scary to think that one company can have such a huge impact on our on-line life.

Mozilla enters the mobile arena with Apple and Google but we already know the winner!

I just watched the Mozilla video showing a demo of their first visions on what a mobile Firefox browser should look like. I love it already. Not because of the way it looks or the cool technology underneath. I love it because when listening to the screencast Aza Raskin talks about the user experience all the time.

Mozilla has clearly looked and thought about the current mobile browsing experience. It sucks on anything but the iPhone. Apple has set a totally new standard with their multi touch browsing experience. Mozilla takes that experience and adds two powerful features to it.

1. All input activities are taking into account that the user has relatively big fingers compared to the mobile touch screen. That means Mozilla will be spending an enormous amount of time thinking about the best possible input controls. In the demo we see bigger buttons, and neat tricks to avoid typing in letters if possible. Best of all, Mozilla is showing us that the entire screen can be used for content while there is still an intuitive way of finding the navigation buttons.
2. The browser will be open source developed. This is an incredibly powerful force Mozilla brings along. If anything, the mobile development phase we are entering now will be a fight over usability. Apple has set a new standard and others will add to that. But Mozilla has by far the most open development environment thinkable. It will attract a lot of smart people and experience to the browser development. They will be testing all kinds of usability schemes and doing that in the open will help them find the best possible user experience.

We can see the same thing happening with Google’s Android. Where Mozilla is the king of open source browsing, Google will try and become the king of mobile operating systems with Android. I think this is a very compelling move. Apple has build the “coolest” mobile handheld device so far. There isn’t one that can match that experience. But there are now a few strong competitors entering this domain. And where the Mobile handset manufacturers have mostly lost the capabilities to design a unique user experience, these new initiatives will provide us exactly that.

The interesting thing about this is that we can see a new era of mobile connectedness arise. Most business models in the mobile space currently fail due to huge barriers. Data plans by the operators put incredible strains on the cost factor for the user. But another issue is the overall usability. The mobile handset manufacturers such as Nokia, Samsung and their competitors have spend the last decade building more and more features into their handsets without a fundamental redesign of the user experience. They have chosen to ignore this issue. But the newcomers on the block have a totally different approach. Each of them has thrown the current design principles out of the window and started all over with the user experience in mind. See an earlier post I wrote about that topic called “The mobile web experience needs fundamental rethinking.”

The fight on the mobile platform will be a fight for usability. And already we know the clear winner. It will be the user.

Now all I can hope for is that these developments don’t forget that the mobile phone is primarily an interaction device. Next to this great browsing experience I still want to be able to make phone calls and send people messages. And yes, we do need to enter text there. That issue hasn’t been resolved yet, even though Apple took a good first shot at it. It’s why I wrote that the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I ever used. Not because of it’s browsing capabilities. But because it is really hard to use the thing as a phone when you are physically on the move. Try walking and typing at the same time, you’ll understand what I mean.

Now where can I get me one of those mobile Mozilla browsers

Why the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ll give away one idea for making things better. Why not get rid of the whole inbox-outbox messaging paradigm. It sucks on a mobile phone. Instead convert the entire paradigm into a life stream, similar to the way Twitter and Jaiku work. It fits human behavior much better. We don’t always want to look into or respond to every message we receive. Showing these messages as a constant stream allows me to look at it whenever I want to. It doesn’t call for my attention whenever a message arrives, but I get to decide when I wish to give the message my attention. It allows me to pick up things that are important, and it also provides me easy ways to respond to on ore more people. And it lets me ramble my thoughts to whoever is willing to listen to them.

And we could easily integrate calling behavior in that same life stream too.

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

Is Mobile the next advertisement heaven?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advertisement holds web 2.0 in a death grip

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

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

A quote from Scott’s post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, you don’t have to control my data to provide me value

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update

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

In a User Centric Web I get to control my data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He ends his post with the following remark:

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

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

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

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

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