Why Google will win: entrapment in the iPhone is a failing long-term strategy

The iPhone is a pretty walled garden

Entrapment can be an effective strategy when you are building up a business. Marketers tend to call that customer lock-in. From the perspective of the business this sounds like a great thing to do. Hook the customer to your business and dont let go. From the perspective of the customer it sounds exactly what it is, an entrapment.

There are many examples where entrapment has proven itself as a successful strategy. Think AOL, Facebook, any advertisement driven business, newspapers, banks, cable, insurance or telephone companies. Entrapment works because joining is easy and leaving is nearly impossible. But in most cases these companies haven’t read their history books. Entrapment is a short term winning strategy, but it’s bound to fail in the long term.

It’s human nature they are up against. Sure, we are all lazy, naive, and let things happen for a while. But in the end we don’t like to be trapped. We don’t like it when our freedom (choice!) is limited by the thing that entraps us. And this desire to be free is what drives competition in. Someone creates a monopoly? It’s bound to attract newcomers that blow up that business by doing things differently (remember the innovator’s dilemma?).

The most recent success story wrt entrapment is the iPhone. It revolutionized the mobile space. It showed that a market that was dominated by hardware manufacturers and operators couldn’t really innovate anymore. Apple proved that there were HUGE improvements possible in the user experience of a mobile device. And it has become a huge success.

With the iPhone came entrapment, a strategy Apple has mastered like no one else. Apple dictates every aspect of the iPhone. It has the sole power to decide what app makes it to its store and becomes successful. There are countless stories (here’s one) available by now of developers getting stuck in the horror and randomness of the Apple approval process for their app store.

It doesn’t end there. From the initial launch Apple has even dictates what carrier the end user has to call with. I’ve been using the same mobile operator for years and I am very satisfied with it. And Apple has the audacity to decide that I must change to another operator in order to be able to use their product? For me that was a bridge too far. I do not want to be restricted or entrapped. I want choice.

I’m writing this because I feel it is time to remind Apple of history. Entrapment may be a short term winning tactic, but it’s a long term failing strategy. You can already see the moles digging through this carefully constructed walled garden. Palm has changed it’s app store policy entirely, giving freedom to developers to publish apps. And now there is Android. Where Apple has focussed on building the perfect mobile device, luring people into their trap like sirens, Google has worked with the industry on a new open standard. Where the tech industry initially laughed at their first attempt, I think everyone will now fall silent with the ecology that Google and partners are now creating.

TechCrunch counts an avalanche of 24(!) new android phones in the market. The tech purist will now argue that none of these phone can match the awesomeness of the iPhone. I say BS. The awesomeness of the iPhone will be copied, changed, improved, matched/not matched. It doesn’t matter. Let me repeat that. It doesn’t matter!

The one thing that Apple can’t do and Google just did is offer choice. The empire Apple just started to build up using their dictatorial and proprietary strategy just got blown to pieces by choice. Who do you think will win this battle? Android will flood the mobile market with hundreds of new phones, thousands of apps to go along with it, and presence with every hardware manufacturer and mobile carrier.

Entrapment is great at start. It probably give a lot of adrenaline to dictate what the world looks like. But what Apple and so many others fail to realize is that it’s all short term tactics. In the long term the only winning strategy is a customer that wants to be with you, not one that is trapped into your service. And for that reason the iPhone will be marginalized by its competitors. History already taught us that.

The magic is gone

people

I’ve been on a 2 week summer vacation and hardly spend any time on “Social Media” services. On return I found myself not getting back into old habits as easily. I haven’t spend a lot of time on Twitter or Friendfeed. I hardly ever use Facebook, I can’t even recall when I went there last.

Instead I found myself spending much more time communicating with people I actually know in real life. Not just family and friends, but also people I know professionally. I use my Family Social Network, e-mail (yeah!), physical meetings and my mobile. I am reading a lot more than before. Getting into people’s blogs (I still love Google Reader), reading longer posts and books.

I’ve always considered myself a pretty average user when it comes to social media. I follow about 900 people on Twitter, and am followed by slightly more. I’ve always made sure I tweeted more than the nr of followers I have (so far about 2500 tweets) . I don’t know how many people I follow on Friendfeed or the amount that follow me. I have hundreds of Facebook friend requests, even a lot from “old” friends, but I don’t touch the service. I am on Flickr, but stopped using it. BrightKite, Google Lattitude, great services, but no big deal to me. Instead of looking for alerts daily I’ve noticed that I forget to start or look at services I used to watch daily.

I’ve asked myself what causes this change in behavior. It’s actually quite simple. Public interaction isn’t providing me as much value (joy) as when I started. It’s something I knew would happen. Everything becomes social, but as we now have the ability to interact anywhere with anyone, I find myself scaling down the conversation to a core set of family members, friends, and professionals I interact with. Enough is enough already. The magic is gone.

I don’t see myself as a front runner and I do think that I’m that much different from others. I believe that public social interaction is great, but nevertheless not sustainable. WTF? The whole world is participating, and I’m questioning it’s sustainability? I’m not talking about services here, nor am I talking about professional usage. I’m talking about the individuals using these services. It’s very seductive to dive into and join this global conversation. It’s exciting, it’s thrilling, there are new things and new people to be discovered every day. But let’s face it. How many ‘friends’ do you really, really (I mean really!) interact with? Invest time and energy in?

We might follow or be followed by ten thousands of people, but our human nature tries to scale down this herd (community) into workable proportions. We may do this by following celebrities or in our case tech pop stars. We may use sophisticated services or preferences to tailor the experience to our needs. Or simply ignore most of the stuff passing by and only get into conversations with the same 10, 20 or 100 people. Why do you think the web latest and biggest invention is the status update? The status update addresses our human inability to process a lot of complex real-time data. Instead we flatten it out into 140 characters that we can barely process. I’m suspecting that there are billions of status updates by now, and most of them are ignored. It’s a self-perpetuity engine of waste. If I were an environmentalist, I would attempt to stop part of this ridiculous pumping around of useless information, and save the planet Of course all of this is nothing new. We already shared important stuff with people. The only thing that has changed is the technology and the scale. Visits, letters, phone calls, they have been replaced by E-mail, Social Networks, SMS and now status updates.

While technology has provided us scale, our human nature tries to scale back down using every opportunity and technology we have. We can’t cope with that much interaction, nor does it provide us enough value. I’ll still be on the networks that I like and care about. I’ll interact with the people that interact with me. But don’t expect me to be Social Media-izing 24×7. It’s not because of you or the great things that you have to offer. It’s my human limitations, and the fact that public interaction is less important. I’ll do what I always liked best. I’ll dive into the river every one in a while, have a great time, only to get out again and do something more useful.

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

Questions

Networks and destinations

1. If everything becomes open and connected, what will happen to the big destinations?

2. Why is the web rapidly evolving into uncountable databases with connections, instead of one database where everything connects?

3. If all services and destinations become open, then what is the point in being a destination site in the first place?

4. Why are we creating webs within webs, instead of one network that connects it all?

Personality and identity

5. Why am I forced to be fragmented across the web, instead of having one presence that can connect anywhere?

6. Why do I need to get my friends to use the social services I’m on, instead of having my friends with me no matter what service I use?

7. What is or defines my online identity? Am I my profile, my interactions, my data?

8. What defines my presence on the web? Is it the fact that I can be found, or that I can interact anywhere?

Data

9. Why is ‘having data about me’ more important than ‘serving me the right data’?

10. Why is real-time data more important than serving the right data at the right time?

11. Can data lead to demand, or does it only take care of supply?

12. Why does a company have control over all data, instead of letting the user be in control of his own data?

Privacy

13. Why does every service need a TOS and a Privacy Policy, but at the same time the users that are exploited don’t have a TOS or personal Privacy Policy?

14. Why does every service have to implement privacy controls for the user, while we could implement 1 set of privacy controls that the user can control across all services?

Business models

15. Why is the economic model on the web broken for most companies?

16. Why do most companies work with advertisement models while clearly few manage to be  sustainably profitable?

17. When does the network effect diminish in web business models and thinking?

Behavior

18. Why can we now publicly rant about anything or anyone, without really being held accountable for our actions?

19. Why do we expect everything to be free, and then have high demands and complain about service?

20. Why would we want to have thousands of friends and interact everywhere?

21. Will we continue to increase interaction or are we reaching saturation?

22. Why do we spend more and more time online while real life passes by so quickly?

Just a few questions that I have. How about you? Do you have any?

Anyone have some answers?

Are you enslaved by your mobile device? Take this test!

We are all becoming slaves of our communication habits. With our mobile devices as the new high priests, we hail the prayer of information and we are bonded by blackberry and iPhone. You do not recognize yourself in this description?

Take this small test to see if you have become a slave to your mobile device:

• Do you never leave home without your mobile device? Get uncomfortable when you do?
• Are you holding your mobile device as soon as you have to wait longer than 30 seconds?
• Do you look at your mobile device, even use it, while someone else is standing next to you and talking with you?
• Do you check e-mail or messages every few minutes, even when there weren’t any the past few minutes?
• Are you using it while you are watching TV, or worse, while talking with your husband/wife/partner/friend?
• Are you using it while sitting on the toilet? Ever dropped it there?
• Do you turn it off, after the plane has taken off? Or even not turn it off at all?
• Do you turn the device back on before you have even left the plane? Or landed?
• Do you use it while talking with customers, business partners, family, friends?
• Does your child have to wait to say something to you until you are done checking your e-mail?
• Is your battery always empty, or are you always complaining about it?
• Is your mobile phone lying next to you when you are in bed?

If you can answer 3 or more of these questions with “yes”  then I suspect you are enslaved by your mobile device. You will probably experience cold turkey shivers when you are separated from your device. You are also alienating yourself from those that stand with you trying to interact.

The problem with these devices is that they suck up all your attention. When you are looking at the screen, it takes away your ability to focus on anything else. Especially while using a touch screen. It is impossible to multitask. It makes you look arrogant and uninterested if you give your mobile device more attention than another human being standing next to you. We are addicted to real-time information. We take our high priest of information with us to dinner, parties, at a bar, work, home, on the street, while we are waiting, and even to our beds when we go to sleep. It is enslaving us each time we receive new information. We become information addicts, and feel we gain status when we handle the information beast in public.

It’s time to face this and start taking control of our lives again. Focus again on those things that really matter. Instead of messaging someone electronically, why not pay genuine attention to the person standing next to you? We might find that all this access to real-time information gives us a false sense of control. It doesn’t really make your life better, it just makes you more distant.

Me? I score 7 out of 12. I think I can still be saved, but it won’t be easy.  I’ve decided I’m going to get rid of my ridiculous behavior. How about you?

It is naive to think our online lives are not connected to real-life

There seems to be a strange disconnect between our online and offline lives. Different rules, norms and values seem to apply. It is as if our online personality is not connected to our real life. We act differently and feel a sense of freedom online that seems to compensate for the restrains we might feel in real life. We are all actors in this massive online play and it allows us to do things we wouldn’t consider doing in real life.

Examples?

We wouldn’t allow anyone, not even the landlord you rent a house from, to put web cams in our houses and record every conversation inside the house “to make our experience better”. Yet we throw our privacy principles over board when we get online and join sites like Facebook or MySpace.

We wouldn’t show a stranger arriving at our doorstep our family photo album. Yet we publish and annotate these same photos online so that the whole world can view them.

We protect our children against danger in the real world. We supervise their first steps into the world.  We don’t let them talk or walk with strangers. We don’t let them bully others. Yet we let them get online unsupervised and unprotected, explore the web and social networking.

We do not divulge private matters concerning illness, lost jobs, winning the lottery, fights, love, etc. to strangers we bump into on the street, yet we disclose all of this online in social networks where half of the time we don’t even know who is listening in.

We wouldn’t tell complete strangers where exactly we live, when we are going on holiday or business trips (what if they rob us), yet you can find all of that information, and more, online.

In real life we have opinions, but we do not disclose these opinions everywhere. We might even be inhibited to do so as it might turn on you at some point in time.  Online we join every conversation and start opinionating immediately. And we forget it gets recorded and will never disappear again.

The people we call friends in the real world is limited. A friend is something different from an aqcuaintance. Online we have thousands of friends. You may argue these are not your real friends, but why then do we disclose so much about ourselves to these ‘friends’? Why do we spend so much time engaging with people we really don’t know?

We do not tell anyone about our bank accounts, our passport numbers, social security numbers or birth dates unless there is a real need to do so. Yet online we sign up for any service that pops up and disclose happily our e-mail addresses, passwords, birth dates etc. In most cases these turn out to be the exact same pieces of information we use for online banking and financial transactions. Every once in a while we get scared of phishing, but soon enough we forget about it again.

We don’t trust new insurance, banking, or telephone companies that tell us we can use a service for free if we allow them access to our private information, and listen in on our conversations.  Yet online we let social networks have access not only to our own profiles, our annotated baby pictures, our families and friends, but also to our interactions with all of them.  We allow all of that private data to be exploited commercially.

We protect our privacy and family in real life, yet we let social networks protect our privacy online? Who protects us then from them?

I could probably extend this list further and think of more disconnects between real life and online behavior. But the real question is, do we care enough about it to actually deal with it? The ability to connect and interact with anyone online has brought us a lot of freedom. It has many positive aspects to it. It has freed us from many real-life constraints. If you can afford to be part of this online experience you will find that it tends to level things. Everyone can be a pop star.

But I would like to urge you to think about this for a minute. As real-life and online behavior become more and more connected, entangled, you will find that it is less easy to separate them. Online and offline become the same life. While we see our online behavior as play now I doubt it will still be play in a few years. And yet we act as if these worlds are not connected. We disclose almost anything about ourselves online and do not think or understand the possible consequences in real-life. With viruses spreading across the world and a network of computers that spans the entire planet harm can be done in a split second. Where wars are still fought on the ground, they will also move into cyberspace. Where commercial exploitation of your private data now leads to display ads you can safely ignore, it might lead to less harmless forms of commercial activity in the future. Where your next job interview might now depend on your previously achieved results. In the near future it will depend on what a Google search result will reveal about you.

Am I being too negative about this? Maybe, considering current behavior in social media my views aren’t exactly popular. But I also firmly believe that we are formed and shaped by our own actions. My advice would be that you start acting online like you would do in real-life. Thinking these worlds are disconnected is naive.

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

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

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

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

I imagine that a few things would happen:

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

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

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

Our Social Media behavior smothers discussion

I was wondering about an amazing (well to me it is) “discussion” I saw on a blog post over at Mashable. Mark Rizzn Hopkins wrote a post about Early adopters and it didn’t take long before many people jumped on that to provide their opinion.

In the post, entitled “4 questions for every early adopter” Mark tries to describe a stereotype of an early adopter. I kinda liked his stance, I have written about this exact topic before. If you look at it from a wider perspective I feel that the whole Silicon Valley circus with blogs, pr machines, and early adopters running around jumping every cool service they get their hands on is quickly losing it’s sparkle. I wrote a post on that over at Steven Hodson’s blog, if you are interested. But that isn’t what I was looking at.

What I found amazing was the comments that were left behind on Mashable after Mark had published his post. I went through them, one by one, and found that the tone of voice was pretty aggressive in many of the comments. Mark was able to quickly get a pro and a con crowd together in one place. It’s seems that talking about early adopters isn’t without danger.

I found several food fights going on in public where people weren’t really discussing or debating anything. Instead people were passionately writing what they felt was the truth. And that got me to think a little. This social media thing and the value of it. The real power of social media lies in the ability to interact. But to be honest, I wonder if people are really interacting sometimes.

I believe that the weakness in this assumption is very subtle. Social media allows interaction but at the same time, this interaction is bound by a very different set of rules than real-life interactions.

In real-life we have gesture, senses, feelings, etiquette, social control and pressure, and they surround us all. It makes us act in a certain way. It ensures that, in general, we try to be civilised when together. Of course people fight, scream and call names, but it comes at a cost. If you get yourself into such a situation your blood pressure rises, you get agitated, frustrated, feel bad or whatever.

And that is where Social Media interaction becomes different. I feel that once we are on-line, our behavior changes considerably. While we may be shy in real life, it is a lot easier to become outspoken on-line. That isn’t just because you might have a different identity on-line, maybe even one that doesn’t trace back to you in real life. The same thing holds for people, including myself, that simply extend their real life identity on to the web.

It’s the way we get together on-line. Using a keyboard and a computer screen somehow doesn’t make the experience “real” and personal. You may have a public online profile, but it is detached from real life.  Social media can let us interact anywhere we want, but on-line interaction very different from real-life interactions.

It is for that reason people that may be shy in real-life can become outspoken on the web. It also makes us all experts on any matter, even if we don’t know a thing about it. That is why a “discussion” over at that Mashable article isn’t really a “discussion”. People find it easy to be an expert, be offensive or rude. It’s this attitude that makes it hard to have a great discussion, or to explore something with a crowd. Instead of asking questions, we are all eager to provide answers.

I realized (again) that this happens all the time. You can read blogs, comments, discussions on Friendfeed, or any other platform only to find that in many cases the opinions ventilated make the air so thick that it is impossible to learn anything from it. We claim the truth, act like subject experts on any matter, and sometimes even call each other names. Once we get online we feel less vulnerable and start acting like fools.

The one case where this doesn’t happen very often? It’s when you are online getting together with real friends. Then similar stimuli take control of the situation and you start acting like your usual self again. It’s a trap we all fall into one time or another.

All of this above applies to me too of course. I write about Social media technology and their effect on human behavior. I do this because I’m passionate about it. Can I really consider myself an expert on these matters? I don’t know really. So it is best to take everything you read here with a grain of salt.

Remember, just because it is written down doesn’t make it true!

How is the semantic web going to deal with human behavior?

Obiwan and his light sabre

I have read numerous posts  on the semantic web this past year or so. The latest one by Marshall KirkPatrick at ReadWriteWeb in which he writes about an academic that warns us to pay attention to the  question if the semantic web should have a gender.

The semantic web is greatly inspired and advocated by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who suggests it will be the next step in  web evolution. Already in 2001 Sir Tim Berners-Lee wrote an article in Scientific American describing this semantic web.

Most of the Web’s content today is designed for humans to read, not for computer programs to manipulate meaningfully. Computers can adeptly parse Web pages for layout and routine processing here a header, there a link to another page but in general, computers have no reliable way to process the semantic

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The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users. Such an agent coming to the clinic’s Web page will know not just that the page has keywords such as “treatment, medicine, physical, therapy” (as might be encoded today) but also that Dr. Hartman works at this clinic on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and that the script takes a date range in yyyy-mm-dd format and returns appointment times. And it will “know” all this without needing artificial intelligence on the scale of 2001’s Hal or Star Wars’s C-3PO. Instead these semantics were encoded into the Web page when the clinic’s office manager (who never took Comp Sci 101) massaged it into shape using off-the-shelf software for writing Semantic Web pages along with resources listed on the Physical Therapy Association’s site.

The semantic web describes a structure that allows machines to not only process data but also extract meaning (semantics) from it. The idea of course being that if software has access to this knowledge and meaning it could serve its user better.

Personally I would love to have a C-3PO friend walking alongside with me (but then I want the jedi sword as well). But honestly, right now it is hard for me to come up with viable scenario’s in which this would really help me as a user. In the past I have worked in the field of Artificial Intelligence and have seen many promising technologies that would ultimately change the world we live in. Neural Networks, Artificial Intelligent Agents, natural language processing, speech recognition technology. Each of these technologies helped us dream of a world in which machines could understand humans, thus serving them better. If anything I have learned that this isn’t a simple problem to crack. Not just because the technology may provide less capabilities then expected, but even more so because humans are unpredictable in their behavior and usage of the technology.

A simple example in the field of speech recognition. The company I worked for build a speech recognition tool that allowed users to call a phone number and ask for information about departure times of trains. The main driver behind this was cost reduction. Having an operator answer such questions is expensive. If the operator can be replaced by a machine, this would reduce costs. While this sounds perfectly obvious there were always 2 problems that needed to be tackled. One was obviously to train the speech recognition software to recognize speech. That was a daunting task and it brings many difficulties. Just think about users talking in noisy surroundings. There were many other technological difficulties. But the hardest problem to resolve was the user who did unexpected things.

“Where are you traveling too?” ->  I want to go to my uncle in San Fransisco

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand, where are you traveling too?” -> To my uncle

“I’m sorry, I do not understand, where are you traveling too?” -> Are you deaf, I said my uncle, three times already

See the problem in this conversation? The computer/speech recognition software has very limited knowledge and is unable to process the answer of the user. It really wanted to know a destination (in this case a train station or city). The computer is off course asking the wrong question here as it leaves the user with too many choices to answer. But once the answer isn’t recognized, it becomes increasingly difficult to get the user to answer correctly. The example is a bit exaggerated to show you what I mean, but believe me, it is nearly impossible to formulate a question in such a way that users will answer it the way you expect or want them to answer it.

Back to the semantic web. It sounds like a lot of power is unleashed if it becomes possible for machines to “understand” what data means. And I’m sure that there will be cases and situations where this might come in handy for me as a user. But for now I remain skeptic about the power of the semantic web. There is so much more involved in understanding data. There are complex factors that can’t easily be modeled or handled by machines or algorithms. Just think about something as simple as mood. Marshall Kirkpatrick (who is much more of an expert on this than I am BTW), gives an example of how knowledge can be added to data:

The semantic web today is based largely on what are called “triples” – sets of subject, predicate and object. For example Marshall Kirkpatrick [subject], loves [predicate] Punkin’ the Tabby Kitten [object]. (Hypothetical, I don’t have any kittens and please don’t send me any.)

Using these triples we can enrich data and add semantics to it. Now bring in the very human factor of mood. I love ice cream. Does that mean I love it all the time? No it doesn’t. Actually, I rarely eat ice cream, but I do when I feel like it. How can this be modeled into data? Depending on whether or not I had a great cup of coffee in the morning I might feel differently about ice cream in the afternoon etc. etc.

What makes the semantic web such a difficult thing to implement in a useful way is, again, a combination of the limitations in the technology, but most of all the human factor. It just isn’t possible to model human behavior. There is mood, taste, circumstances, irrational behavior and all other types of complexities that we humans can deal with (barely) but machines can’t. Machines might infer semantics from data in the semantic web, but I feel that (unless the task or circumstance is extremely basic) it will add to the confusion the user already has when he interacts with people or machines on the web.

I welcome the research and development being done in the field of the semantic web. But until it provides practical solutions that actually help the user, I remain with many questions about its value. I sure hope that in the mean time people will start developing solutions to current problems in the web. Why not focus on a User-Centric Web first. Easier to do and it provides the user with great value

The human factor in Social Media trends (part 2)

Monday I started something that might take a few days to finish. I called it the human factor in social media trends. For those of you that missed it, you can find the post here, and besides the comments on there was also another great discussion going on about it here.

The object of this thought experiment is to spot a Social Media trend, drive it to the extreme and see what would happen to human behavior. Yesterday I discussed 2 trends, today I’ll try 2 more:

Trend no. 3: Information will be available anytime, anywhere, anyhow -> But the real value lies in people

Google has provided us with an effective means to find information. They are running the largest data and communication infrastructure in the world and have become the largest source of information. Social media take this information delivery process one step further and allow us to interact with information on almost any social object. Everything is RSS-ified providing an automatic delivery of information to a specific place or person. We now have aggregation sites that aggregate the information sites that aggregate information. There is so much information at hand and so many ways it can be delivered to us that many are debating heavily on the noise effect it creates. While this is mainly a Tech Elite’s problem, it is true that it has never been easier for anyone to get access to information.

We query Google for information millions of times a day. And with each query, and each indexing action of a new site, the information stored at Google servers increases. Up to a point where for example automatic translations of text from one language to another becomes possible, without having any knowledge of either language. Where linguists spent years of research building translation algorithms, Google simply uses brute force. It has so much data available that it can simply map one language to another. It’s incredible when you stop and think about that for a while. Chris Anderson of Wired proposed that having access to such enormous amounts of information might change the way science now operates. While he takes this line of reasoning way too far in my opinion, the translation example does show there lies great power in handling huge amounts of data.

To me it seems that having instant access to information makes the information itself less important. We don’t need to remember things, we can simply query it. The information itself becomes less valuable because the transaction costs to obtain it have dropped to zero.

Instead, having instant access to information will drive a need for knowledge. A deeper understanding of the inner workings. And where is this knowledge to be found? It won’t be found at Google, or any of the aggregation sites known today. I doubt knowledge can be indexed or queried automatically. Microsoft disagrees, and they just bought Powerset to move into that direction. It can only be found in people. I suspect that having a unique expertise, experience, or a deep knowledge, will become a very valuable asset in this future of instant access. We can see the importance of knowledge already. Just look at the incredible numbers of new “web 2.0″ startups that start every day. Most of them based upon an idea, a piece of information or technology, convinced that this will lead to a successful business. But few actually make it and become successful. Not because they didn’t have access to the necessary information. But mostly because they lack the knowledge and experience needed to become a successful business. That is why you should start a new venture with people first. It’s the people that make a business successful.

Why is this observation relevant? It is relevant because we haven’t found an effective way to access people with knowledge or expertise yet. Sure there is stuff like LinkedIn, or aggregation sites like Friendfeed. But these services can’t really answer the question “who is an expert in the field of…”. And that might just become one of the most important questions in the near future.

Trend no 4: Public interaction using social media is exciting now -> But higly localised immersed interaction will be more important

The most important value of Social Media isn’t the media itself. It isn’t the content, the channel, the technology. What makes social media valuable is that it allows us to interact. Interaction is by far the most valuable driver for any online service. Friendfeed isn’t an interesting service because it aggregates content from specific people to one place. Friendfeed is interesting because it allows its users to interact over that content.

This value of interaction drives all major social networks such as Facebook and Myspace to lower their walls and allow interaction across their networks. That’s why Google comes with OpenSocial. Every object on the web is to be “socialised”, allowing anyone to interact with or over it. The trend isn’t that we are getting more social networks. The trend is that everything becomes social, making the web one big social object. A place where interaction can take place whenever we feel like it. And it is a public interaction. The bigger the better.

This ability to interact anywhere will increase the participation of Internet users for sure. The early adopters are going wild over it, some interacting on a 24×7 basis, but it will attract mainstream users as well. Blogging is just one step into that direction, people will get used to Twitter-like services being added to any service they join. One giant conversation taking place 24×7. You can plunge in whenever you feel like it. But when we have the ability to join in on this public conversation, I believe that the novelty and value of this public conversation will decrease. It won’t disappear, instead it will become one of our possible ways of interacting with other people. Just imagine 100 people joining in a conversation, now 1000 or 1 mln. The scale of that makes the entire experience lose value very quickly.

But with our increased need to get access to knowledge (AKA people) I also believe that the public conversation will be partially replaced by much smaller, highly localised communities of people. In other words, I believe the noise that is created by this huge social media conversation will be resolved by scaling the conversation down.

Communities connected by location, interest, expertise, immersed into the physical world that surrounds them. We will see the same behavior there as we see now in the public, but the real value for the individual user will be obtained from these smaller communities. It will lead to less information and more knowledge. And this trend or effect will be driven by the most personal interaction device we have, the mobile phone.

I’ll stop again as the post is getting long enough already . But I hope you like these little thought experiments. Don’t see them as predictions of the future. I would rather see them as a help to understand the present. And as usual, I’m really interested to hear your opinion on these observations.  Does anything I say here make any sense? Do you recognise any of it in your on-line experiences now?

The human factor in Social Media trends

Sometimes when I am really relaxed (this always seems to happen on a weekend ) I sit back and imagine about possible consequences of things that seem important now. If you follow social media news a bit like I do it seems that there are a few trends becoming increasingly important. But what if we would try to imagine what would happen with human behavior if we drive this trend to the extreme. In other words, let’s forget about technology for a moment, what about the human factor? I like these little thought experiments. It isn’t that they predict any kind of future, it’s more that they help me form an opinion about the present.

So let’s do this exercise on a few things I’ve been thinking about this weekend. As my posts tend to get too long, I will break it up in several. So more to come the next few days

Trend no. 1: Everything will connect with everything, walled gardens will be torn down -> But we will still need a destination

First we had social networks. Large, closed sites where people go to in order to interact with friends. Now social networks are forced to open up. Google’s OpenSocial and Friendconnect, MySpace, Facebook, they are all taking their first steps into data portability. It isn’t because they want to, or because the technology has arrived. It’s because we are now beginning to understand that users don’t like to be contained in parts of the web.

Services pop up everywhere that allow the user to interact with or over any object it seems. Every site or service becomes social. As a result of this, walled gardens will be torn down. I read an article that Doc Searl has written in 2003 (!) already about the web. He and David Weinberger then called it “The world of Ends”. I like that metaphor, but Doc Searl updated it a bit later in 2006. He builds on the concept of a Giant Zero, a 3 Dimensional hollow sphere, first described by Craig Burton (in 1999 wow). An excellent post, worth wile a good read. It describes the web more or less as I imagine it, no walls, open, a utility.

The question that comes to mind is the following. If everything becomes socially connected, if there are no more walled gardens, if we can interact anywhere we want, would there still be a need for a destination? Can we live an on-line life without an anchor point? Surfing the web without some on-line place that we can call home?

I am a fan of the User-Centric web, that is a web that evolves around its users. A web where not the destination or the network is important, but the user. It sounds like a destination-less web. But the more I think about that, the more I believe that even within the User-Centric web, people will still have a need for a central place.

A place where they can start and end their journey. A safe harbor that provides the comfort and shelter of the known. That place will become our most important destination. It will be “home” on the web. Even if we can interact with anyone, anything, anytime, or anywhere we want, we will still feel the urge to return to that place that will be ours. It won’t be a Facebook-like Walled Garden destination. But it will be a Facebook-like place that is owned by the user himself. It would be interesting to try and describe this “home” but that would be the topic of another post and most likely the business model of some new venture

Trend no. 2: “Always on” will have a huge social impact -> But it will lead to a need to disconnect

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

Services are playing with this concept already. Many web 2.0 services are providing us with life streams, traveling plans, shopping behavior, localisation technology, interaction platforms. Even if you are not on-line, at least the people that follow you know exactly what you are doing. This technology feeds an urge for us to share what we are doing, and to follow what others are doing. It is never ending. I find myself sometimes fire up Twitter or Friendfeed or whatever service late in the evening, just out of curiosity. What are people up too right now?

But there is a downside to this as well. The more time we spend on-line, the less time there is for the physical world. This behavior of “always on” will have significant impact on physical relations. We may find inspiration, fun, pleasure, profession on the web, it is the relations in the physical world that matter in the end. Family, friends, co-workers, we will need to find a balance between the “always on” and the off world.

If we take this “always on” to the extreme, then I believe that it will be accompanied by an increasing need to disconnect  or hide. With our desire to be in an constant on-line interaction we will build up a need to disconnect. To get away from that all. To spent time outside the web and not care about what on-line friends are doing. And with this desire to disconnect we might see a hide function appear in life streams. Instead of broadcasting every step we take, we might want to interrupt that flow on purpose.

I believe that when everything becomes a life stream, the impact of that life stream might become less. Life just isn’t all that interesting. There are moments of glory, and there are moments when nothing really happens. And once we see that same pattern appear on-line life streaming won’t be such a big deal anymore. Right now we get all excited being able to connect on-line and discuss everything we want. Once this has become the norm, then its value will decrease, we will not be “always on” for the sake of it. Instead, we will chose our moments more carefully. I described this in a previous post called “Piercing through the myth that always on and instant access are important”. It’s all about finding a balance between the on- and offline world we live in.

I’ll stop now, there are a few more trends that I would like to discuss here. But the post is long enough for now. What do you think? Does anything I say here make any sense. Do you recognise any of it in your on-line experiences now? Does thinking like this help us understand the present better? Let me know your thoughts on this.

Social “search” will not kill web search

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here I am

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

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

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

I wouldn’t just write off Google yet.

Our biggest on-line threat might be the power of scale

In my previous post I spoke about the presentation Charlene Li gave about the future of Social Networks. I ended up analyzing what it would mean for advertisement. But the thought of everything being connected into one big social network, or social graph, remained in the back of my thoughts. I asked myself if this “everything gets connected” thing is something a user wants or something an advertiser needs.  And then this morning I realized what has been bugging me about this. It’s the scale of it.

Imagine the scale of a social network (which may easily be overlaying several different services) that interlinks the entire Internet population. Imagine the scale of the social graph that comes along with it. Try to imagine the enormous amounts of interactions that will take place in such a network. Add the number of user actions to that equation. And then try to think about the data that is being stored and analyzed by those that want to get to us commercially.

The scale of such a network would be almost unthinkably large.  It is like discovering the nearest galaxy with the largest possible telescope, only to realize that there are many new ones behind that.

In my opinion the scale of such a network would create a number of problems. Lets get rid of the technical issues first. We aren’t very good at designing and implementing scalable solutions so there are bound to be technical issues with such a large scale solution. I’ll park that one aside, but will get back to it in a short while.

On the service provider side there will be a competition issue. If we are talking global scale here, not just physical, but also in terms of population, then most service providers may just as well stop trying to become the next hit. There is really only one company even remotely capable of running such an incredible infrastructure and that would be Google. Not just because they have incredible expertise on handling large amounts of data. Not just because their whole identity is based on handling the unthinkable amount of data (hence the name Google). Not just because they dare think and act this large which is thoroughly embedded in their identity. Not just because they are already acting in every possible relevant market ranging from search, social network, e-mail, office apps, location, maps, and mobile. Besides all of that, think about the way Google has been thinking about infrastructure. They own data warehouses all around the world, they invest in fiber, they are by far the largest global infrastructure owner worldwide. There probably isn’t much data traveling around that doesn’t pass over the Google infrastructure. I don’t see anyone else thinking about infrastructure on a scale that Google does?

While this has benefited the general Internet population enormously and set free incredible innovations, it will become a hurdle that will provide us with a lot of trouble. Google will own the single biggest walled garden, spanning the entire Internet. And that can’t be good. Even the enormous scale that both MySpace and Facebook are operating upon shrink to tiny size when comparing that to the infrastructure Google holds and will further develop. If one company will own that much infrastructure and data traveling around it, there will be hardly any competition possible.

Who can take on such a giant? Who can compete against the sheer power of owning almost the entire Internet. Who can scale to such a level that they can even remotely compete on numbers? Already Google has taken more than 75% of the search market. Now people dare think they can move up to 90%. If that is the case, then effectively there will be no more competition out there. And that will be the death of innovation.

On the advertisers side, having one large social graph and all the data to analyze this might sound like the Marketeers wet dream. People would be profiled in unprecedented ways. Any cross-section can be made. You could target any thinkable set of characteristics you want. But there is one thing you can’t target. It’s called human behavior. People might show certain patterns on-line, show certain behavior that profiles them in some way. Might have friends that seem similar through some set of characteristics. But human nature isn’t all about patterns. There is always the wild card of the unexpected. Just because you mightbe able to map me in some chart, doesn’t mean your commercial message will hit me between the eyes. You might know a lot about me, but unless you will provide me with value I won’t be listening to you.

What would happen to the user in such a global scale network. With the transaction cost of finding and interacting with people around the world dropping to zero we will probably all have enormous amounts of on-line friends in our social graph. There would not be a single thing unnoticed on-line. Every step we take is being watched by a Big Brother. We can scream out our message to the entire world only to find out that no one is listening anymore. We could have millions of friends, only to realize we really don’t know any of them anymore. By joining the network consisting of the entire population we will have reached something we thought we got rid of, anonymity. There will still be the influential, and no-influential. The haves and have nots.

At the same time we will find that it is almost impossible to have a life without this network. Most of the needs we have will be supported in this on-line network. Most of our identity has moved on-line. We probably can do anything on-line. Besides some basic stuff we really need to do in the physical world (eat, drink), most of our dealings that are needed to make a living, run our finances, obtain services are moving  on-line. Here comes the danger of reliability I talked about earlier. What if we have a universal identity on-line that we use for all our on-line activities. From social interaction to professional services. What if, due to some technical malfunctioning, our on-line profile wouldn’t be available? We wouldn’t be able to participate or interact in this global network. We wouldn’t exist, even if it was for only a short while. A scary thought really.

Is this really what we want when we talk about the need for openness, for data portability, for lowering the walled gardens? The consequence of it might be that one of them takes it all.  I sure do not want one single company to have that much power and control over the biggest influence of the lives of coming generations.

But there is always hope. It’s called human nature.  If we can learn one thing from history it is that when things go up, they will come down again too (simple matter of gravity I suppose). There isn’t a single empire build in history that was strong enough to last for ever. If the trend is that the entire population will be connected in one super social graph, then there are bound to be people that refuse to join such a future. They will find ways to travel around this network without being seen by the owner of that network. They will find ways to communicate and interact without Big Brother watching them. They won’t feel the need to be always connected. They don’t want to be mapped, to be labeled, to follow a specific predicted pattern. They don’t want to be part of something, but instead be a unique individual. And they will be perfectly happy knowing that at one point people will want only one thing, freedom.

What do you think? Will a scenario like the one above be likely to happen? Or am I overestimating the strength Google has (or underestimating the power of possible competitors)? Will Google hit an Innovators dilemma at one point and overtaken by something new? I’m interested to hear what you think of the possible consequences of a global network that connects us all.

Just a few wishes for 2008 (part 2)

In my first post in 2008 I said I would elaborate a bit about things I would like to see happen in 2008. My first wish for 2008 was to bring back freedom and responsibility to the user. The article can be found here but if you want a very short abstract, I said:

My first wish for 2008 is that Service Providers build business models on user value instead of walled garden free but ad-based business models. In doing this they should provide the user with excellent, easy to use, transparent, privacy controls where the default is always set by the standards of the user. This wish would provide us with 3 major changes: The service provider becomes a partner that can be trusted and that provides user value instead of walled gardens, the user gets his freedom, and the user becomes responsible for his own actions and data on the Internet.

I just read an article written by John Battelle that takes a similar angle. He says:

The problem is, no one seems ready to truly set the social graph free. Till now.

With one move, Facebook can change the face (sorry) of this debate by making it falling-down easy to export your social graph. And I predict that it will.

Why? Because I think in the end, Facebook will win based on the services it provides for that data. Set the data free, and it will come back to roost wherever it’s best used. And if Facebook doesn’t win that race, well, it’ll lose over time anyway. Such a move is entirely in line with the company’s nascent philosophy, and would be a massively popular move within the ouroborosphere (my name for all things Techmeme).

Compete on service, Facebook, it’s where the world is headed anyway!

Let’s move on to my next wishes for 2008.

 2. Redesign of the mobile UI and Web to make it really work for its user

I personally feel that accessing the web using my mobile sucks. The experience isn’t even close to the capabilities I have access to on a PC. I have written an article about this called “We need a revolution in mobile UI thinking”. A quote from that:

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

After I wrote that article I was asked what I felt about ovi by Nokia. It is difficult for me to really comment on that until I have actually used it, but a few things come to mind.

The thing I really dislike about it is the pay off they use, “ovi by Nokia, your door to our services”. What do you mean “our services”? My mobile phone is mine, it is my personal space, my remote control of life. I don’t want anyone to tell me what services to use. Ovi might look great, but if it isn’t truly open, forget it. I won’t be using it. I want to decide what services I access via any mobile interface. It needs an API so that anyone can build services on it.  It needs to be freed from any mobile hardware. If a mobile interface is to become successful, it better work on a lot of different handsets. Maybe Android might fill this in, but it remains to be seen. But most of all, we need to get out of the current mobile UI interface, It isn’t fit for our social communications needs.

          

(images taken from www.s60.com)

We are still using SMS, web browsing (screen too small, bandwidth/cost too high), and that darn inbox/outbox paradigm (ever tried to handle 100 or more SMSes, MMSes, e-mails  a day using that mechanism?). Old school thinking.

Microsoft just announced their version 7 of their Mobile platform. It uses a touchscreen,  like the iPhone does, as a main interface element but will also use motion gestures of the user as a UI interface element.It will be interesting to see if this will lead to better UI development, but For now I hear a lot of technological features, not user experiences. And, I still see the inbox/outbox appearing in the screen shots.

3. Human behavior as the basis for new service development

Innovation is so often triggered by technology. That is not a bad thing necessarily. Many great developments start with the application of new technologies. However, where a lot of these innovations fail is their ability to support human behavior. Technology needs to be used and needs to be useful. If it isn’t the case, then the role of human behavior hasn’t been taken in account thoroughly enough. There have been numerous new technological capabilities launched in 2007 with confusing names and propositions. Just look at a snapshot of the web 2.0 directory and tell me, which services do you know and actually use?

So often this is caused by people thinking they know what users want, but fail to simply engage with them to really understand human need. I call that observing social behavior though a fishbowl. It sounds so simple, yet is hard to do. At the same time, the reward for providing user value is very big.

The good thing about this is that it leads you away from a mediocre web business model that is currently being used in web 2.0 developments. Instead of thinking about locking in the customer, you need to think of providing him value (thus setting him free, big difference).

4. Let content exploration become an interactive adventure again

There is an enormous amount of content on the Internet. Way too much to handle. It becomes increasingly difficult to find the right content. To help us there are numerous sites that index and present the available content to us. But that doesn’t help either. If I want to find something which might interest me but I don’t  really know what it is I’m lost. I tried browsing sites like YouTube, but it doesn’t work for me. I could look at the most popular, best watched, highest rated video’s, simply browse on subject or whatever, but at the same time I feel the interface isn’t helping me to find what I want. I’m not the only one with that problem. Looking at the blogosphere there are many examples of a video traveling through many different blogs. Everyone is looking at or recommending the same cleverly launched video’s.

I think the overwhelming availability of content is one part of the problem. The rating mechanism’s every site uses is another (it helps us all look at the same things). But the third aspect of this problem is human laziness. We all want to be entertained, but we don’t really want to put in the effort to find great content. The reason for this is that it is actually quite boring to find content using the current sites and interfaces provided. The search for content needs to become an adventure again. We need to explore new worlds, and get excited by all of our personal findings. To do that, we need new ways of exploration, new interfaces to enter these large worlds.

I hope that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft will be paying a lot of attention into the work of Jonathan Harris. He has shown that the exploration of content can become exiting and adventurous.

Check out his universe demo to see what I mean by that. It is a new paradigm for browsing, and it is a powerful one. While you are at it, also take a look at some of his other projects. He has done some amazing and inspiring stuff.

5.  Let the web continue to be a place for inspiration

I read a lot of blogs, surf to different sites, communicate with family, friends and even total strangers. Why? Well, for one thing, interaction is what life is about. But another way of looking at it is that it helps me to find inspiration. Inspiration in life, work, blogging, anything really. There are so many smart and creative people out there. All you need to do is take the time to look around. I posted a few inspirational sources earlier here, but it is really just a modest list.

Enough for now. What are your wishes for 2008? Let me know? It would be interesting to compile them all together.

Observing social behavior through a fishbowl

Is human behavior changing because of the way the web has allowed us to interact, or  are we still following the same basic social rules as, lets say 10 years ago? My guess is that human behavior is affected around the edges, but no more than that.

The web has certainly lowered the transaction costs, or effort, to interact with others. Going from long traveling journeys to meet, smoking signals, snail mail and postal coaches, the telegraph, Morse code,  radio, fixed telephony, e-mail, mobile telephony, SMS,  the web, and now many different kinds of social networking tools and platforms, transaction costs for the user have dropped to virtually zero allowing us to interact like madmen. Human nature forces us to interact with others as much as we can. And as we are supported by this economic law of zero cost, that is exactly what we do. It is for this very reason punishment often comes in the form of captivity and taking away the ability to communicate.  We do this with children (“Go upstairs to your room!”), but also with criminals when we send them to prison.

The lowering of transaction costs is (partly) responsible for the enormous amounts of e-mail, SMS, IM messages, phone calls, pokes, nudges, friends, social networks people use every day.  But it comes at a cost (free always does). Not only have we increased the number of times we interact with others, the amount of useless communication has increased to a level beyond comprehension. There are predictions that more than 90% of all e-mail traffic is SPAM making e-mail a lame duck in communication. Join any social network and within seconds you have friends you never knew you had (or perhaps ever wanted).

Does all this technology lead to different communication behavior. Sure it does. People contact each other and call each other friend from all over the world without ever meeting physically. They send each other virtual gifts,  even paying for some of them, send each other meaningless messages (to the observer) and communicate just because they can.

Dana Boyd writes some nice observations about this in her article called “valuing inefficiencies and unreliability”. One of her observations is that it has become easy to spam your friends. the example provides is Facebook Causes. I fell for one of those a few weeks ago when I joined the Movon.org protest against Beacon. And now I’m being asked to protest against President Bush, and a few other “important” causes. Another observation form Danah is that people tend to try to find excuses to blame technology when they do not want to communicate with others. “My cell phone was out of reach”, “I never got your e-mail” etc. This has become increasingly difficult as the technology is becoming more reliable.

I have seen some different behavior  with teens. While my parents were socially trained to always answer a phone call and I am used to answer any SMS I receive, teens can easily ignore calls or SMSes they receive. Not only do they not bother to think up excuses for not responding, it is a completely accepted behavior by their friends. The receiver instead of the sender decides what importance the  interrupt get.

But even with the endless possibilities to interact with each other some things in human behavior do not change. We still love story telling, the troubadour or bard of the middle ages has become the blogger everyone loves to read. We value the opinions from a friend more than that of a stranger. We value communication that has taken effort more than that which cost us no energy. Danah provides us with nice examples again. Teens start regarding Facebook applications as spam after a while, even if it comes from a friend, because it takes the sender no effort at all to send it. Comments are valued much higher, as it takes the sender time and effort to write one. It is exactly for this reason I always like it when people take the time to comment on my blog. Not only have they taken the time to read it, but they also have taken the time to respond. Out of this interaction new things arise.

Facebook is now providing scientists valuable information on the way people socially interact. Harvard scientists are now following all students from an entire class  at one college to study how personal taste, habits and values affect social interaction. Facebook provides the academic researchers with an enormous amount of data. Data which wasn’t available at such low transaction costs before.

While this sounds great I cannot help but feel that the researchers are really only observing a very small part of human interaction. People do crazy things on Facebook. Mostly because it is so easy to do crazy things. The costs of interaction are zero with massive amounts of waist as a result. Facebook slamming, profile rating, spam, hatemails, the worst in human behavior arises when people interact on-line. Does that mean that teens are a-social beings? I doubt it. I am sure that teens are slowly getting used to a different meaning of the word friendship in different contexts. But I also think that in the physical world these teens aren’t so different from an older generation when it comes to human interaction. We are still bound by basic social rules in which tell us how to respond to another person. We like to interact, love, care, listen, be heard.

But due to technological possibilities we often tend to forget about human nature. Technology provides us capabilities, and because of that these capabilities will be deployed.  It is easy to forget about human nature, about human needs when we design all these great new services. The sexier the technology, the more easily we forget about the most important actor, namely the user. Rolf Skyberg wrote a nice post about that called “Why innovation”. In this post he describes how meeting real customers changes his perception on his role as disruptive innovator at eBay. Rolf intuitively knows that technology isn’t what eBay’s innovation should be about. It is about doing the right things for the eBay user, allowing technology to make life easier.

The trap almost any marketer falls into is thinking he knows what is best for the customer, without actually ever meeting one. Using massive studies and research reports the marketer of today is armed with so much information about social behavior that he  can easily be fooled into  thinking he knows what is best  for the customer. I am not saying customers know what is best for them. But meeting them and interacting with them provides so much more value than reading a report on their behavior.

(image taken from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benjius/1174865875/)

It is what I call observing social behavior through a fishbowl. You can see the person, even see what he is doing, but you also be sure that what you see is a distorted version of reality. Human nature isn’t all that difficult to understand. It is around us, all we need to do is look for it.

Human nature: Some things will never change

I usually start writing new entries after the weekend, but yesterday just didn’t work out. I was in a car accident with 6 other cars on the freeway. Nobody hurt, but I parked my car in the back of the car in front of me, so I wasn’t going anywhere after that. It took a few hours of getting alternative transportation, and from the picture below you can see the damage to my car.

Anyway, I was planning to write something on human behaviour. It comes from observing my wife making her first moves onto a social network, in this particular case Hyves in the Netherlands. The observations are not statistically founded, but they depict, in my opinion, some basics that have some universal truth in them.

My wife uses Internet and mobile. She is not a tech person, but instead uses these means to an end. She doesn’t care about the technology itself, but if it helps her communication needs then she will try it. She has gotten numerous invites to join Hyves over the past year or so, but wouldn’t join. Main reason? “I can already call, SMS, e-mail, and IM my friends. I don’t need anything else”.

I think I might be responsible for her finally trying it out. I had told her that I joined Facebook and that a friend I went to High school with had found me there. It was curiosity that killed the cat. She went on to create a profile and started adding current friends.

So observing her trying to make it work (I didn’t help her ) I noticed a few things:

• Initially she put a lot of work into the profile creation. Not so much in updating personal information, but more into the visual aspects of it. She added a number of widgets to make it look more personalised. She ended up adding mostly slide shows with pictures. That’s what makes it personal. But, it wears down quickly. Once satisfied with it, she hardly takes the time to update it.
• After adding current friends, she started using the search bar to find people she knew from the past and contacted them
• She doesn’t use it to look at other profiles, unless they are people she actually knows
• She really hates the UI, hates the complexity of adding widgets, customisation (too much one size fits all) and the slowness of the site and the way it loads changes
• She likes the interaction with new and old friends, but doesn’t understand why she always has to go to her hyves profile in order to interact with them (she gets e-mail alerts, but can’t see everything in the e-mail)
• She doesn’t trust the site itself, and she is concerned with privacy. She sets the privacy controls pretty tight, only friends can see it all. She has been contacted by people she doesn’t know. When that happens she blocks them.
• She talks about her hyves experiences with her friends, and they all seem to have the same types of issues with it.

Her behavior is probably quite different from the younger generation that now invades Facebook and MySpace, so there are bound to be differences. But I also think there are similarities that we can learn from:

• Interaction is the most important functionality for any social service. It is not the network, the profile, the widgets, gadgets, promotions or anything else. It is the ability to find friends and have meaningful interaction with them that provides the value. Interestingly enough, current social networks do not really concentrate on interaction but are more concerned with data collection from “social activities”. I have foudn freinds on Facebook, and now I need to answer these Social Graph question (please confirm you knwo each other from highschool). Yuk. On a related subject, Fred Wilson started yet another TechMeme leaderboard discussion noting that individual bloggers are falling of the top 100 TechMeme leaderboard. He has some concerns in finding the pearls in the blogosphere with everyone looking at the same blogs. I am not concerned with “breaking news” posts, I always pick up the analysis afterwards and the discussions in the comments that lead to new ideas, insights, experiences. Interaction is what it is about, not the “scoop”! On my blog I fortunately get more comments than the posts I write, and that is what makes it fun. And I always respond, because in this interaction we create new things.
• UI is key. I’ve said it before, UI is often the element that inhibits mass adoption of web 2.0 services. While the tech savvy people have no problem copying widget code around to create web items is not an intuitive interface at all.
• Interaction needs (fast) response. Not just from friends, but also from the application of the site. Social networking sites are often not designed well for this. Facebook is rumoured to have a 5000 friends limit because the applications start breaking down after you reach the 2.500 number of friends. I am not a frequent Facebook user, but I have seen quite a number of 404 page errors, and faulty applications. I like Twitter, but the way it tends to break down and stop pushing tweets to me on-line or mobile really sucks.There is a lot of talk right now about the capacity of the Internet and whether or not it will break down due to too high user demands. I’m not concerned with bandwidth issues. I’m concerned with interaction barriers. Closed networks, messages that don’t come across, the inability to respond anywhere and any way I like to is what concerns me.
• Privacy remains an important and unsolved issue. The most important issue here comes from the tension between the user who wants to be in control of his own data (but really isn’t) and the service provider who needs control of the data in order to monetise the service. Opening the walled gardens (thus forcing the service provider to think in user centric services and value creation) isn’t good enough. The user needs to be in control of his data. Data must be set free. That is the most important barrier (next to the interaction thing) that needs to be taken.

We need to support conversations, the conversation never stops. It is through interaction that we all create and experience value. Social networks and most web 2.0 applications are only one step into this new world. They have got to let go of the idea that it is the service or the advertisement deal that is important. Make the user and his interactions important, that is where the money is!