Calling BS on the Real-Time Web

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Our need for interaction locks us up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Commenting is easy, try blogging for a change!

Fred Wilson started a discussion this weekend suggesting that comments on blogs are often more insightful  than the blog post being commented on. He suggests that comments should be more prominent available in aggregating sites like TechMeme and Friendfeed. And people that don’t blog but do comment often should have a blog site with all of their comments aggregated.

Steven Hodson joins in the discussion and notes that the landscape of blogging is about to change.

The trick for many of us – especially the independent bloggers and smaller networks – is to be willing to take advantage of anyway that comes our way to communicate with our readers. We can’t be afraid of changes as they happen but instead embrace them and use them to our benefit.

I see the same phenomenon taking place, even on a small time blog I have over here. Some people are willing to spent a good deal of time to comment on something I have written. In general the comments are insightful and well worth the read. To me, not only the fact that the commenter is willing to take the time to read and grasp what I was trying to say and then provide his own thoughts, is important. It is the interaction that comes out of it that makes it worthwhile. In that sense I agree with Fred that comments should be getting a more prominent space in the blogosphere.

But at the same time I also feel that commenting is easy. Easy, not because the stuff that is written down is obvious in any way. But easy because the original blog writer triggered a commenter to think and react. And that is what Blogging is all about. Some are in it for the money, some are in it for the fun. But a great blog post, no matter what it is about, makes the reader think. And that is what is so hard  about blogging. I always try to write posts in such a way that my thoughts trigger other people to think and respond. I don’t have to be right. But I love it if it starts a conversation with people. Because out if this conversation there is always something to learn.

And there lies the value of a great commenter. If done right, a commenter helps explore the issue at hand. Offering solutions, perspective. But also asking question, wondering. If the blog poster is the one that starts the chain of reactions, the commenter is the one that helps lead it to a result. There is value in both, but to trigger the chain reaction in my opinion is often much harder than to participate in it. A great commenter can’t live without a blogger willing to write down his thoughts and expose them to the greater conversation taking place. But there is an incredible value in them. I’m not sure if they should be centralised somewhere, because you will lose the conversation that they were in (unless that is captured entirely). It isn’t the comment itself, but the exploration that is most important to me.

I may be wrong on this, what do you think ?

The real value of Social media = Interaction

Fred Wilson writes about his vision of social media. He has a very simple definition for it:

every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.

I like it’s simplicity. Fred says he doesn’t have a “grand vision” or a well thought of strategy to invest in social media. I don’t really agree with that. It’s very hard to write a vision down in just one sentence, and Fred did a good job on it. It set me to think what my idea’s are when it comes to social media. For those of you reading this weblog frequently you already know that I spend a lot of time writing about social media. It’s even part of the title of my blog.

Even though I think Fred did a great job, I don’t think I can fully agree with him. In my opinion, for what it is worth, Fred is describing some of the effects that social media will have on people. Already millions of people are posting their thoughts and experiences on the web, and I agree with Fred that most people that join the Internet will likely engage in these activities as well. But the question it doesn’t answer yet is why? Why do we post our thoughts and experiences to a larger audience? Why is it so attractive to express yourself to people you have never seen or heard about? Are we all such creative, well expressing, extrovert people and web technology just helps us doing just that? I don’t think so. But the phenomenon is out there, it seems everyone is affected by it and joining in.

I believe there is another simple answer to this. I can think of only one reason that might fit every person joining the social media era. I believe that underlying this urge for self expression there is a more basic drive. It is interaction! If anything, web technology has brought us the ability to interact at zero cost. Just think about it for a second. Let’s take Fred’s vision to the extreme. Let’s assume the entire world is expressing his thoughts and experiences on the web. Let’s also assume that that is all that happens, we express ourselves but no one is listening. I bet that the phenomenon would die out very quickly. It isn’t the expressing your thoughts what makes social media tick. That is only half of the equation. It is the “social” aspect of it that matters most. The ability to react, to agree or disagree, to build further (as I do now what Fred’s post), the sharing of experiences in order to learn from each other, to have fun, to argue or fight, in other words, it is interaction that matters.

I started writing this weblog a while back with the idea that I learned so much from reading other people’s weblog that I felt I should attempt to return the favor. I thought I might be able to add to the conversation and hopefully get people to think about the things I would write. But the first start wasn’t easy. Just because I express myself in a weblog doesn’t mean people will find me or take the time to read the things I write. It takes time, effort, and most important you need to be passionate about the stuff you write. And as time went on I went from a few readers to more readers, from no comments to a comment on every post. And that is when the fun of writing on a weblog kicks in. It isn’t the writing (although I can get excited if a piece works out well), it’s the interaction!

I’m guessing it’s like that for anyone that is actively involved in social media. The media provide us ways to express ourselves. But the social aspect of it allows us to interact. And that is where the real value of social media lies. Social media = Interaction!

I’ll tell you another thought I have on that. If it is true that social media is about interaction. And it is also true that every individual on the Internet will join this conversation. Then we should also accept the possibility that in a next evolution on the web public interaction will be less important. It is a simple thought really. If you can talk to the whole world it sort of makes you anonymous again (because you can’t grasp the notion of 6 BLN people talking to you). Public interaction will remain a constant factor, but I’m betting that the trend will be to size down and have this conversation in smaller networks. It is one of the reasons why large social networks have such problems opening up. It’s because their business model isn’t made for smaller networks. Their business model is for conquering the world. But that business model will be less important when we evolve the web and open it up. We will need business models that support the User Centric Web. It’s inevitable, so you might as well join in. Not everyone agrees on this thought, but I did get a real good conversation started on it, and that in itself has helped us to think about new possibilities. It also lead to a followup post

I’ll end this with a quote from Factoryjoe. Chris Messina is one hell of a technical dude. But he keeps surprising me with a human behavioral view above all that technology. A must read imo. If you want to understand why Chris compares Facebook to Russian Railroads, then go no further and read his post here, it’s worth it!

That Facebook is attempting to open source it platform, to me, sounds like offering the world a different rail gauge specification for building train tracks. It may be better, it may be slicker, but the flip side is that the Russians used the same tactic to try to keep people from having any kind of competitive advantage over their people or influence over how they did business. You can do the math, but look where it got’em.

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

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

The vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s about interaction stupid!

Justin Smith has an article up this morning (well for me anyways ) in which he suggests that Facebook isn’t trying to be the biggest content or entertainment platform, but instead tries to dominate as a communications platform. In his words, Facebook wants to “own”communication with your friends”.

Justin is, in my opinion, only half-right about Facebook’s intentions (more on that in a second). Communication is important, more important than anything else.  Last year Tim O’Reilly mentioned a comscore report that showed that people on Facebook spent most of their time browsing heir own or other people’s profiles, followed by interaction with Facebook applications. Shelly Farnham just published research results in which she looked at the success of Facebook applications. Why do some work and others not?

Her research shows that people interact mostly with applications for communication needs. Or as she says it:

In reviewing the dominant types of applications, it is clear that most of the applications are helping users achieve social goals such as improved communication, learning about the self relative to others, finding similar others, improving self-presentation, engaging in social play, and engaging in social exchanges via gifts and media. Despite its shifting demographics, Facebook is still very much a social arena in the private, personal domain, not the professional domain.

I believe in interaction. Communication is just one aspect of interaction. But interaction is what’s most important. It’s what makes us tick so to say. Now back to the article written by Justin. He feels that Facebook wants to own your communication with your friends. While I think he is right about that, I doubt that Facebook is setting that as an end-goal for themselves. Facebook isn’t a communication platform first.

Facebook is a social graph data hogger. Their sole purpose and existence on this web is to own the biggest social graph in the world. If communication gets them that graph, then they will use that. but only as a means to an end. Owning the biggest social graph helps them to maintain their business model. Justin touches the subject a little when he says:

While I hope Facebook can co-exist with and reward developers of communication-oriented Platform applications, I think Facebook is smart to want to own the most important channels used to communicate with your friends. While it may take a while to figure out how to monetize these new communication channels most effectively, people will always stay most engaged with services that provide the most value, and core communication tools are some of the services that can be most enhanced by ownership of the social graph.

Facebook wants to hold the largest walled garden social graph they can get their hands on. It is the main fuel for their business model, serving ads. But I don’t believe in that business model within the context of social networks. And the main reason I don’t believe in it is precisely because of the way people use social networks. They use it for interaction. And advertisers have no purpose or any value in interactions between friends. They aren’t part of the conversation, they are merely trespassing.

The irony in this off course is that Facebook doesn’t really “own” the social graph. The social graph only exists because of the users within that. If it is “owned” by anyone, then it should be owned by the users that create it.

Facebook only gets to see a small part of that graph anyways. I have many friends I communicate with (both on-line and off-line), none of which are on Facebook. While Facebook does have a mind blowing amount of users worldwide, the amount of communication that actually passes through their platform is infinitely small.

Let’s see. According to this site there are currently 1.3 Bln Internet users worldwide. Facebook has some 33Mln users according to Mashable. So some 2,5% of the Internet population is on Facebook, a pretty impressive number I’d say. But there are a few interesting things to note. First of all, I suspect that much of our communication is spread over a lot of different communication channels. We have physical communication, mobile phones with SMS and voice calls, e-mail (probably more than one address), IM, and at least 5-10 different social networks where in 2,5% of the cases Facebook is one of them. So an average person probably has at least 20 different means to communicate.  We probably interact anywhere between 100-1000 times a day over those means (unless you are cut off and isolated from the world around you). Just think of all the e-mails, SMS, IM’s, voice calls, physical conversations you have on a day to day basis. I would argue that less that 5% of our communication goes through social networks. It means that 95% of all communication of those 1.3Bln Internet users worldwide isn’t passing through social networks. Even e-mail, already dead and buried by most web 2.0 evangelists sees way more interaction than all social networks together. So let’s burst this “Facebook want’s to own your communication with your friends” bubble right here and right now. They can’t and will never be able to own that.

Another interesting thing to note is that the Internet growth is dominated by Asia, Africa and Latin America. These are all regions where Facebook is not dominating social networks. I seriously doubt that Facebook will “own” the biggest social graph in the world. Google’s Orkut, for example, is much more popular in these regions.

The thing with any walled garden service is that user’s find ways around that. Where Facebook and other social networks try to lock-in their users, the users simply use other services to get around that wall. It’;s human nature. We like freedom and will always find ways around any old-fashioned web 2.0 walled garden business model.

Facebook won’t “own” my communication with my friends. If they try to do that they will fail.  My interactions with my friends belong to us. Anyone that doesn’t understand that and tries to interfere with that will not provide users with value. And a business model without user value is sure to fail.

If you want to enter this communication arena then you first need to get rid of the destination based business model. If I have to go to Facebook to communicate then Facebook has already lost the fight before it started.  The web entrepreneur that puts me in the center of my communication needs allowing me to communicate any where, any way, any time using the means that fits best will provide me the best value. Owning a social graph or a walled garden isn’t really what matters. Allowing the user to interact any way he wants is what matters. Fred Wilson understands this. Read his post called everything, everywhere. That is where the real value lies. I guess I will say it just one more time. It’s about interaction stupid!

Gaming will become the social network of the future

The other day I noticed that my kids and a few friends were all staring at a screen while 2 of them were handling XBOX consoles while playing a game. What caught my attention was that I realised that it was a very familiar scene. Kids always play games together, even though only one might actually be holding the controls.

We recently got our youngest (6) the Ninendo DS Monsterjam game (he loves Monsterjam).

We had to order it out of the US as I couldn’t find it here. the other kids knew about the present and were talking about it every day until it arrived. The Nintendo DS isn’t exactly a console for you and your friends, but what happened is that the youngest would sit on the couch and my other 3 kids would sit right beside him telling him what to do, taking over the console if it became too difficult for him, cheering when they unlocked yet another great Monsterjam truck. They are playing interactively all together, even though the Nintendo DS was meant to be a single user console.

Same thing happens on our computers. My older kids play all kinds of interactive games on-line. Not just because they like the games, but more importantly, because it allows them to interact with other kids. Kids from the neighbourhood, from school, or from another part of the world. I have a 10 yr old son that doesn’t speak one word of English yet, but he is in constant negotiation with other kids on this on-line game called runescape.com using the English language.

The success of the gaming industry is enormous. According to this article here, the gaming industry as outpaced movies and music in 2007. Almost $19 Bln in sales, incredible figures really. What is also interesting about it is that people are willing to spend enormous amounts of money on game consoles too (more than $9 Bln). That is interesting too me because it shows that people are willing to spend money on machinery before they even get to play the game itself. People pay for value they get or want.

So unlike the Internet where free but an ad based service is still the major business model. The main reason for choosing this business model is scale. If something is free people are more likely to use it. With scale come ad revenues (although you really need a lot of scale to become rich and famous, ever done the math on that?). Why talk about that in a post on gaming? Well, it allows me to jump to another place where interaction takes place, the social networks. In another survey done by comscore we see that the most popular widget in November 2007 was the MySpace widget. Other widgets like Slide, RockYou, Photobucket, Superpoke, all score high in this ranking. All of which are used in social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

I have written a lot about social networks and argued that current social networks aren’t really there to provide value to its users. Instead they are there to monetise the network. Now look at what people do on those networks. They use it mostly to interact! That is where the value is, it’s about interaction. According to comscore people in the age of 18-24 are far more likely to interact with Facebook applications than people of 25 and older. It is a different generation. Each new generation will grow up in a world where interaction, playing and gaming together is normal social behavior.

I always thought girls were interacting more through MSN, while boys tend to use on-line MMorg games as their interaction platforms. But there are a lot of social games aimed at girls too. My daughter is now playing horsetycoon on-line with her friends. They talk about it when they go to school, they interact with their friends, even while they aren’t on-line, and they agree to meet each other again, right after school is out.

Because of this trend we can see in human behavior, I believe that the future of social interaction will lie in gaming. The children of today are basing their entire on-line interaction on SMS, MSN and on-line gaming. It is the combination of play and social interaction what makes it such a powerful and addictive interaction environment. If I were a marketeer with a brain I would definitely start thinking about the interaction possibilities through gaming. There lies a world of opportunities waiting to be developed. I have said it before, a new social networking generation is rizing. Forget about social networks like MySpace and Facebook, gaming will become the social network of the future.

Freedom to the people (part 2)

In a previous post I talked about some major changes I would like to see happening to the current web. The most important aspect of that is to provide the user freedom again. I said:

More than 2006, when Time Magazine unfortunately called YOU the most important person of the year, I think and hope 2008 will be the year where the user gets his long-wanted freedom back. 2008 will be a year in which we will see the first brand/portal/network/social graph/device- agnostic services pop up. What does all of that mean? It means that the portal or network concept we are so used to is slowly replaced by initiatives where the user isn’t locked in, but viewed as a traveler reaching a place where service is required.

To reach freedom for the users we need new business models. No one will freely remove the existing “customer or advertiser lock-in”, walled gardens, locked user data unless there is a new economic engine that can really set the user free. At the same time we might question the user’s comprehension of what it means to be locked in or set free. Millions of people are already locked into walled gardens and exploited for advertisement reasons without really knowing it or even caring about it. The same thing holds for advertisers. They are locked into a promise that a new era in media has arrived and that it will bring endless new possibilities to reach a targeted audience using tools like Beacon and SocialAds on Facebook.

At best an advertiser reaches a semi-targeted and somewhat ignorant audience. But most likely these new ways of reaching targeted sets of people will lead to indifference by the user. A new business model or economic engine isn’t enough, we also need to show the user that being free has advantages over being locked in. We need to show the advertiser that advertisement only makes sense if the advertisement itself provides the targeted user value. And we need to convince service creators to work on user value monetization instead of network value monetization.

What would such an economic ecosystem have to look like? What benefits should it address? Difficult questions with difficult answers. Chris Messina points this out very well when he says:

We need instead to frame the discussion in terms of real-world benefits for regular people over the situation that we have today and in terms of economics that people in companies who might invest in these technologies can understand, and can translate into benefits for both their customers and for their bottom lines.

The discussion is continued with Anne Zelenka at GigaOM.

Real-world benefits for the user

What could be real-world benefits for the user to be free? Although some obvious advantages like data freedom and privacy control come to mind immediately, we might need to look beyond that. Let’s face it. There are currently hundred of millions of people locked into social networks like Facebook and MySpace and they do not seem to care that their profile data, friends data, relationships and interactions aren’t their own. It is impossible to export any of that into another service thus providing the user choice. But he doesn’t seem to mind much. His privacy isn’t guaranteed and his data is being used to target advertisers onto his profile. Users are often described (and often behave) like ignorant, lazy, “entertain me” like people. Some even predict it is human laziness that will burst the web 2.0 bubble.

I am a more positive thinker about human nature. People need to interact, and they want to do this as conveniently as possible (we are a bit lazy right). Freedom is about having a choice. Being able to say I can choose it the way I want. I believe that if a user is offered choice between spending time within walled gardens or traveling around as a free man, the choice will be on freedom. Freedom would provide the user the possibility to integrate real-life experiences with “cyber” experiences. In a way that is convenient to him.

I wrote about the web being a surrogate of real-life interactions. But if you can integrate real-life interaction with the ability to share and interact with people who are not physically present it would add value.You should be able to decide how, where, when and with whom you would have that interaction. Regardless of device, technology or platform. That is what freedom is about.

You can use Facebook and the friends you have there, but if you want to do something else, then it should be possible as well. Without you losing the ability to interact because some platform locked your friends away behind some wall. And freedom is a blade cutting 2 ways. If you have the choice to interact in the way you want, a service provider that wants to service you needs to provide value. For it is only that user value that makes you want to use that service provider. So freedom for the user leads to user value innovations, everybody wins.

And with this freedom comes the ability to be able to identify yourself anywhere with one means, and the ability to perform transactions anywhere using a simple mechanism.

Benefits for the advertiser

If a user is free he will choose to interact with a brand or an advertiser. It will be a positive choice, one of free will. It provides the advertiser with a meaningful interaction with the user, providing him valuable opportunities to build a brand, advertise or sell stuff that matter. The advertiser can learn more about the user in a way more targeted than a Facebook profile or Beacon message.

It means letting go, stop waisting enormous amounts of advertisement spendings on large groups of users. Instead the advertiser will have to learn to interact on an almost individual basis with users. Microbranding. Scary, but also potentially very powerful. It also means that advertisers will have to deal with the user being on the move (for he is a traveler). It will focus the attention of the advertiser to add value to the experience of the traveler. Not just broadcasting a message to him, but understanding what the travelers needs are when using a service, and adding value to that user experience by providing brand or advertisement that actually matters.

Benefits for the service creator

If the service creator would be able to let go of the concept of “customer lock-in” and think about his business in terms of serving a free traveling customer he would be forced to think in terms of user value. There is no need to put up walls and lock customer or advertiser within those walls, as the user is free to go wherever he wants to. Instead he needs to work on his main competitive advantage, providing the user more value than a competitor could do.

Service creators need to let go of their proprietary platforms, the lock in of users and their data, the free but ad-based business model. They need to participate in a user-centric web, become a gas station next to a freeway servicing the traveler passing by.

There are clear benefits for the service creator. Most importantly, instead of providing services for free and creating revenues through ads, the user will pay for the value he obtains. This leaves the service creator to concentrate on user value and monetizing that. It implies that the service creator should not focus on page rank, page views and user clicks but instead focus on meaningful interactions of the user via his service. Interactions to buy or sell things, to find help or provide help, interactions with friends or strangers, search information. Each of these interactions can be monetized if they provide the user value. We are happy to pay for sending an SMS because it allows us to interact with our friends. We pay for a professional Flickr account because it provides us more freedom and value than a free account. We should be paying Twitter when sending an SMS for it adds value to my interactions with others.

This is not an easy step to be taken by the service creator. Right now he is in control, he owns the platform, the data, the social graph, the connections to the advertiser, and yes, even parts of the user in some way. They have to believe that freedom in the end benefits us all. A user that willingly chooses to go to a service creator will be more valuable than a user that is (unwillingly) locked into the service by the service creator. As Milton Friedman, Economics Nobel prize winner, has said rightly:

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of believe in freedom itself”

I have only provided an outline or framework in which an economic engine might be redefined allowing the user to become free (and taken too many words for it already). More and detailed work needs to be done to define the benefits for all. Then again, courage and the willingness to start is all it takes to set the user free and and the same time making huge amounts of money on the monetization of user value. Any takers out there?

The web is just a poor surrogate of real-life interactions

This Saturday my wife and I celebrated our 12,5 years of marriage together with our family and many friends and neighbours. We had a great time living towards the party while remembering lots of things from the the past years. The party itself was incredible. It is so good to be able to have everyone you care about around and have a great time together. We hired a great band and heard music from the 80s all evening. Brought back many memories from our youth! I even played a few songs with my own band, and ended up playing one song solo for my wife at the end of the evening. Why am I writing about it on this blog? Well, because I was thinking about it this Sunday and while I was remembering it and reliving the emotions, I realised there isn’t an on-line experience that even closely matches what we experienced the past days.

It made me wonder why it isn’t possible (yet?) to relive such moments on-line.

Certain parts of the experience can be supported on-line. For example, we looked at pictures and watched our wedding video. This could be done on sites such as Flickr or YouTube. But the experience wouldn’t be quite the same. Why? because the Internet is mostly an individual thing. I sit behind my computer as I type this, and no one is around looking at me. We could look at wedding pictures on Flickr, but the effect would not be the same unless we could do that together with the whole family (and no, I haven’t connected my 42 inch flat screen in the living room to the Internet, call me outdated if you want).

To support the emotions coming from the interaction with family and friends during a party is just impossible! It made me realise (again) that the Internet and the interactions we have through it are a very weak and surrogate version of the real world. Through real-life interactions we create, share, live, and remember emotions and friendships that are much more powerful than any profile, picture, or on-line interaction could ever provide us. A good example of a tech blogger that doesn’t get this is Duncan Riley who tries to pull a humorless joke on nobel prize winning Doris Lessing. In my humble opinion Doris Lessing understands very well what the Internet has and hasn’t brought us.

Is that a bad thing? Of course not. Actually here lies the chance to make things better (Stole that quote from Factoryjoe ). Interaction and emotions are powerful drivers for us. It is what makes us tick so to say. I have written many times about this already and I am a firm believer that it is the interaction that creates the greatest user value. So if we want to create user value, and at the same time make the user pay for it (getting rid of the often mis-used free but ad based web 2.0 business model), we should be focusing on emotions and interactions.

How about making web browsing a social thing? Surfing and interacting together. How about if I not only upload the pictures of my party to Flickr, but can also agree to look at them on-line, together with a few friends while we talk about it again (haven’t figured out how we can also have a beer together on-line to go with it). I certainly need to talk to my band members about a few misses we made during the second song (well, it was pretty difficult playing Coldplay’s In My Place, what a great song!).

What if I don’t use my Facebook profile to show people what I did this weekend, but instead I invite all my friends and family to this one place within Facebook where we could actually interact to relive these precious moments again. Where everyone could not just observe but add to that experience.

What if we could simultaneously look at the recording of the band playing, and pinpoint exactly where we messed up or played a particularly difficult part well! What if we could hear back the songs the band I hired played for us, legally, and without ads!, making the record industry distribution emotions instead of music. Or download them all together as a package.

What if we could look at all the presents we received, hearing all the stories of those that gave them to us back again, understanding why someone had picked ut that particular present for us?

What if we could tweet about it together, even if not all people that were there had a Twitter account? We would want to Twitter about it! Not because we needed to update the number of tweets, but because we all have one thing in common. We were all at the same party having a great time and want to share that. No need for a Twitter account to do that, just a place where we can relive that moment. this can only become possible if Twitter would become the plumbing of the web, if service owners would service travelers instead of locking in customer (profiles).

What if we could make our digital experience look a bit more like our real-life experience? Wouldn’t you want that? Wouldn’t you even be willing to pay for that? I know I would! But until then, we are stuck with the crippled tools we have available right now.

So the best thing for me to do is to plan my next big party. We’re definitely throwing one when we are married 25 years, in the mean time I’ll think of a few excuses to organise a few more

Advice to the record industry: go from distribution of music to distribution of emotions

Michael Arrington of TechCrunchs wrote an article just now on in which he talks about the CEO of Warner music admitting “we were wrong”:

We used to fool ourselves…We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.

Michael finds the admittance of the industry that they went to war with the consumer limiting his options is the most interesting.Obviously a war that cannot be won. Mathew Ingram his response to this is that Warner is getting religious 5 years too late.

What misses in all this retrospective analysis is the way to go forward. How should the music industry, and especially the major music distributors, change their business in order to survive and start creating value again. They are already past the Innovators dilemma. They have been going about their business not realising that resistance to change is futile.

But I don’t hear any answers from Warner Music to this dilemma. Ian Rogers from Yahoo Music wrote an emotional and so very true post on the previous 8 waisted years in the music industry. He will only invest in 2 things, consumer convenience, and reasons to experience the music. I think Ian does a brilliant analysis.

Thinking about this and looking back at some initiatives that drew my attention I thought it would be good to go into this a bit deeper. As usual, let’s try this from the consumer’s perspective.

People download music like crazy. Sometimes legal, but mostly using P2P technology (this has become such common practice, I wonder if we should just declare this legal, but this might be a thin line to anarchy) . There is definitely a subset of consumers willing to pay. They got to Amazons, iTunes, or deal directly with their favorite band. But most don’t, and the reason for it is obvious.

The transaction cost for music distribution has dropped to 0 with p2p technology and platforms like Facebook, Virb, MySpace etc . Where the music distributors used to provide value with distribution (thus getting payed for it), there is no value in distribution anymore. It took them 8 years to figure this out, and they haven’t got any answers to that yet.

The same argument holds for the band. Why use a record label if you can record, produce, and distribute your music yourself? Arguably this might be easier for a major band like Radiohead, but small bands do the same. And lets not forget that bands make their money now in the events they play and the merchandise that sells during these events. That is why the Radiohead move is excellent. They put the consumer/fan in the driver seat, making them responsible for paying for the music they download. This strengthens the emotional ties between the fan and the band, which will pay itself back via the concerts and the merchandise.

And it is here that lies the answer for the music industry in my opinion. They should stop thinking in terms of distributing music, and start thinking about distribution of emotions. Instead of alienating the bands and the fans from them, why not embrace them and become the platform of emotion distribution. There is a lot of revenues there.

And they have everything in place already. They have access to the bands, to the fans, to the content, to the merchandise. It’s all there, and all it takes is to let go of the single revenue stream they hold on to so tightly, and create a new emotions based revenue stream. And instead of fighting the fan who seems to be doing all these illegal things, embrace them, study their actions, and support them, thus locking them in again.

Having said all that here my 5 Ct’s on things they could do:

1. Have you looked at the video I linked in this post? I chose this one because it is a mash-up between “official” video material and a user adding his own music to it. People love to do this. Browse YouTube, and you will find millions of examples where people add video to music or add music to video. My first advise: stimulate fan interaction. Provide the fan with a platform in which he can access the music content and mash it up into something new and exciting. provide the fan with the platform that connects him to his favorite band and let him contribute to it. Can you imagine what happens if Warner would set this free for ALL their artists?
2. Focus on additional content. If the music is free, why not give it to the fan for free? But lock him in with additional merchandising stuff, exclusive pictures, video’s, tickets to live concerts, contests, live chats with the band, etc. And while you are at it, combine that with the excellent branding opportunities it provides. And make damn sure it is easy and convenient for the user.
3. Think interaction. People love to interact, and a fan is more than willing to pay for it. That is why they go to concerts and listen/sing along to the music. Add the mobile platform to this. Interact with the fan via SMS, and let him pay for the value it provides. Set up video walls at concerts where fans can be on during the performance with text, video, pictures. Do the same on the Internet. Let the fans meet up and interact.
4. How about providing the user easy ways to record and distribute his own music. We are talking on-line tools for recording and editing music. I am struggling my way through Cubase as an amateur musician, and although it is a powerful tool, it is also pretty complex. There are many user generated music distribution platforms out there, why not embrace them yourself?
5. Provide the music for free and across any platform the fan uses. Think iPod, think mobile phone, think stereo set at home, think computer, think p2p etc. Make distribution even more convenient than it already is, and make a living of the emotions.

The music distribution game is dead. Now that you know it, why not bury the hatch and start thinking consumer value again. You will not last in the distribution of music game. Move into the distribution of emotions. That is always the place where the money is!

The conversation never stops

If I would have to name one thing technology has brought us the past years it would be the ability to interact with each other. There are so many ways we can connect now that we almost need to hire a PA to manage all these connections. People love to interact. Without interaction life would be meaningless (probably why prisoners are sometimes locked into isolation). As interaction provides value, we should be looking at ways to monetize on that interaction (instead of monetizing on ads). The ability to interact is in my opinion the most important value driver for any service.

There are so many examples of interactions creating value. When writing this up I remembered a Harvard Business Review study about eBay. It turns out that people that joined the eBay community buy and sell more stuff on the eBay site, than people that are not part of the eBay community. Approximately 80.000 people were asked to join the eBay community, 3300 became active users, and 11.000 became lurkers. Revenues after one year of following these people increased up to 56% with eBay profiting several million dollars from the increased trading of both active community members and lurkers.

Or what about the study here, that tells us that in 2012 4,81 Bln mobile users will sent approximately 3,7 trillion SMS messages to each other, That is an average of 769 SMS messages per year, or 2,1 SMS messages per user per day, leading to $ 67 Bln SMS revenues. BTW, the largest mobile growth is to be expected in Asia.

Why do people love to watch video’s on YouTube or look at Facebook most of their time. In my opinion it is not the “sit back and watch” or “entertain me” behavior we all display when watching TV. I bet that every time we are at YouTube or Facebook it provides us with thoughts, ideas, memories or experiences that we can communicate about. It is this communication that makes the experience valuable. Sharing this crazy video with a friend and have a laugh about it. Looking at this dorky or very cool person on Facebook and talk about that with friends. We just can’t help ourselves. We need to communicate.

A recent study in Canada shows (again) that people that download music using peer 2 peer technology (in other words download illegally) buy more CD’s than people that don’t download music. Bands are now bypassing the “old”music distribution and distribute music themselves, even leaving the responsibility to pay for it with the user. Why does it work? Because it leads to interaction. Interaction between the band and its fans. Interaction between the fans, and interaction between the fan just downloading the music and his non-fan friend which he now tries to convince how incredibly cool this band is. Focusing on the interaction in music provides an experience that in itself will create value.

Why then, when people display such obvious needs to communicate, do web 2.0 business models not leverage this interaction directly? It is because the web enforces disjoint metrics upon us. Actually Google is probably largely responsible for this. Their PageRank has made us all into traffic slaves. When providing commercial services on-line it is all about having a high PageRank, about users being able to find your service and then view it. In order to be noticed, what better to do than provide cool services for free? But someone always has to pay the bill. And the way to do this, orchestrated by large media companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, is to create advertisement revenues. The metrics are easily manipulated leading to possibilities to fraud the system. Before you know it we are back into the advertisement bombarded TV world again. But advertisement does not increase the value of interaction. It doesn’t provide real value when two people are connecting (”this message was sponsored by..”). And people have found effective ways to get around it, using the remote control zapping away, or using DVD recorders to fast forward advertisement. On the Internet, most users will simply ignore ads, like a blind spot. This leaves only those that create massive amounts of traffic to their sites to actually earn some revenues in advertisement (there is always some fool clicking on an ad). I’m not naive, advertisement will always be there, but I don’t think it should rule our interactions.

The things is, people will interact, no matter what. Why not focus on increasing the value of the interaction itself. Let people pay for the interaction, instead of trying to monetize something on the side that doesn’t ad value to this interaction. It goes against all rules of web 2.0 business models. It might be a barrier for people to join a service when everything else is free. You are probably scaring of both investors and advertisers with this approach. But, if you provide real value to a user, and you are able to get that message to him, isn’t it worth a try? You know there is one piece of knowledge that supports you taking that disruptive step. The conversation never stops.

Short update:

Just after posting this I saw Tom Foremski posting a message that there is a growing distaste by VC firms of web 2.0 companies.

For example, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Silicon Valley’s leading VC firm, has stopped investing in Web 2.0 startups. “We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies,” says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins. He mentioned this during an after dinner conversation last week. He said he had recently told John Battelle, one of the organizers of the rapidly growing Web 2.0 Summit conference, that the term no longer had the same positive cachet it once had. In the VC community it clearly has a negative one.

Sounds like we are perhaps on a turning point? Maybe this will trigger startups to step out of the usual business model and come up with exciting new services and equally exciting new revenue models.

Google’s assault plans on social networks

TechCrunch just posted an article in which they reveal that Google might be planning a “major assault” on the social networking scene.

I have written on the Google strategy before, and it seems that a lot of the things written down then are now becoming a reality. Google plans to open up all their applications, creating a social layer across all of them. But, in contradiction with Facebook, Google seems to have plans to open up the network two ways, not only allowing a user to us this layer across many different Google applications, but also across different social networks. It’s what many call “the web as a platform”. Scott Karp dismissed that term a while ago, quoting Google’s Jeff Huber:

A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.

This of course being a direct declaration of war on Facebook.

The most important asset according to Scott is data, and Google has plenty of it. Actually, I don’t really agree with Scott on this. Data is static, it is the application or usage of data that is important. It is not just about data, it is about interaction.

Google is definitely in a position to open up the social network space and even fill in some of my wishes to get out of the web 2.0 trap, I am wondering if they are going to make the right choices, especially when it comes to privacy. Google probably already knows everything there is to know about me, but can they handle my privacy as well?

And more importantly. Will they think user centric, or simply connect everything because technically they can create the APIs.

But my main interest will be on their plans of their mobile strategy. Opening up the web is one thing, being able to connect the web to the mobile space is much more interesting. That is where the money is. Through the mobile space we can get out of the web 2.0 advertisement trap and create working business models that are not based upon ad harassment.

Will Google understand this? They will, but as their business model is advertisement, I doubt they will fill it in the right (user centric) way.

Solving the Mobile Internet equation

There is a lot of talk going on about mobile services. Especially Location Based Services (LBS) get a lot of attention. A few posts that drew my attention:

Om Malik wrote a short overview article of the deals that have been made in this business, showing that big investments are being made now.  There is an overview of different Location Based services here.

The NY Times gave a warning in several posts about the privacy concerns in their articles “Google’s Purchase of Jaiku Raises New Privacy Issues”and “Privacy Lost: these phones can find you”.

Steve Ballmer who used the same metaphor I used in earlier articles calls the mobile phone a universal remote control for your life (I like that metaphor, obviously).

Different announcements on new services, for example, Whrrl is Yelp plus Twitter (who comes up with these names?), and BluePulse shows you how to compete with Facebook and MySpace by offering social network capabilities only for mobile.

And finally Walt Mossberg started a lively discussion in  his post “Free my phone” which he makes the following comparison:

That’s why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them.

On a more personal experience, I watched a short live streaming show yesterday when a friend of mine send out a Twitter message in which he invited anyone to look at his live streaming conversation he had at that precise moment in a cafe in Amsterdam.

So what can we make of all this? Well, for starters, bloggers and investors like mobile. At the same time I think it will take some time for the mobile internet to become a hit. There are still many problems to be solved for mass adoption.

Why do you think SMS is THE killer data application for mobile? It is simple to use and supports a need for instant interaction to its users. All reasonable successful mobile services use SMS as their main interaction interface. And this is not just because it is simple. A major barrier for service creators to solve is the habits mobile users have. SMS has become such a major usage driver in mobile that it will be very hard to replace that with, for example, a graphical UI. In order to replace SMS as the main interface from Mobile to Internet (and any cell phone company will want that to increase ARPU=usages=$) you need interfaces that are as easy and quick to use as SMS is currently. Asking the user to change habit is very hard to do.

In that sense I am a bit skeptical about all these social network services that pop up, especially the location based services. I am not claiming they won’t become the next hit, but I do feel there is a lot of opportunism and technological innovation taking place that doesn’t really answer the “what is in it for the user’ question.

Just look at the examples that are provided to show the “convenience”of Location Based Services. The NY Times article quotes a user that when seeing her friends were too far away to make it on time to a meeting, she decided to leave later as to arrive at the same time. And she didn’t have to call her friends to tell them.

Pleazzzzzze, who came up with that being a killer app for LBS? This will never do, it totally bypasses the NEED of people to interact. How often do you find yourself in a conversation with someone on a mobile asking him where is and when he will arrive? It is the most important question being asked by voice and SMS? And now we don’t need that anymore?

Or the “if I walk around in a shopping mall I get harassed by all these great promotions of stores nearby” example. I don’t have a NEED for that. The whole reason I am shopping is that I want to take time to explore and buy things I am looking for. Without everyone screaming at me to come to their store. Imagine people physically standing in front of stores trying to pull you in as soon as you walk by (ever been in Egypt on a market?). It sucks, and I doubt many users would like it.

The problem with most startups that are in the mobile services business is that they tend to take cool technology and build all these services around them without really thinking about human behavior or needs. Forcing their high tech services onto the mass will not lead to the main stream adoption they are all looking for. And the fact that important tech bloggers like to use them is only a very small and perhaps insignificant indicator for success.

In my opinion (for what it is worth) the same thing holds for the development of mobile services as for any other. Keep it simple, hide all technological features and focus on human needs.

The need to interact with friends is BY FAR the most important one to focus on. And I don’t mean interaction in social networks perse. A simple example, I am using Twitter now and although it is meant to work as a microblogging tool, it is most fun when it becomes an interaction tool. If there is no interaction, Twitter makes me a groupie instead of a friend, and that just doesn’t work for me.

Start building open and simple to use interaction building blocks before we start focusing on browser-based mobile services. Solve the “getting my message to my friends and back” problem first, allowing not only text but also pictures and perhaps video to be send and received. MMS is not an option for this as it doesn’t work across all phones. If the problem can be solved across main stream cell phones and using open and standardised modules, then mass adoption becomes reachable.

From that, connecting the mobile phone to Internet based services, using these open and standardised modules will be the next important step. Forget about ads, or too much promotions,  as they will not work on mobile phones. Too much of an invasion of my private space as a user. Instead, think about the business models that actually work on mobile phones, that is payed services! Rolf Skyberg predicts that “free services” in the end are doomed to fail and I agree with him, although I am not sure yet how we can migrate successfully from free (ad based) services to payed services.

I do believe that privacy might become an issue with all the new capabilities. Here lies a great response for the user, but also for the service creator to protect the naive user! Revealing locations might sound like a lot of fun, but if it is not controlled by the user in a simple and effective way, the results might be disastrous (without him realising it).

So how about it? What do you think of these developments? What are the needs of mobile users and how can we support those needs in a simple and effective way?

Dear Yahoo, Microsoft, Google e-mail. Forget Facebook, start innovating!

I read an article this morning by the Wall Street Journal on social features in e-mail. In this article they state that e-mail providers are trying to gain back ground from social networking sites like Facebook  by adding social features to their e-mail platform.

I am a big fan of the concept of e-mail being at the heart of social networking. Why? Because e-mail has a lot of features that are important to me. It has a simple address book, easy interaction mechanisms, it is essentially a person’s directed tool (otherwise it is spam), and is used by a whole lot of people. Om Malik started a good discussion on e-mail being the ultimate social networking environment earlier. He states:

Given its critical role in our digital lives, I wonder if email could be the underpinning of a social environment — much less a social network and more a “relationship and interaction manager that aggregates various social web services” — that doesn’t require rewiring our brains and changing our behavior.

I think the concept of e-mail can be improved to become exactly that. It currently has flaws that need correction, spam being the most obvious one. But the WSJ article makes me wonder if the guys at Yahoo, Microsoft and other e-mail providers really understand social networking. Adding stuff to e-mail that existing social networks already have won’t be a competitive advantage (wow I can now create Yet Another Profile Page in my e-mail!!!)!

Why not focus on those things that they can do much better and get some real innovation going:

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

This list could easily be expanded if we were to sit down with a few creative people. So stop walking the paths every social network is walking, and start rebuilding the concept a-synchronous e-mail into something more fluid,  perhaps the ultimate social interaction tool!

Twitter makes me a groupie, I’d rather be a friend

I have recently decided to give Twitter a try. Out of curiosity, as I read a lot about it. The most compelling argument to give it a try was provided by Robert Scoble (couldn’t find the original post, sorry) who said it was the best way to interact directly with his readers. And I like interaction, as you might have gathered from earlier postings.

People either love Twitter, or don’t seem to understand why the people that love it find it meaningful. To be honest, after a month of usage (which might be a bit short for a review), I’m having a love/hate relationship with it. The usage of the service is dead simple, so that is of no concern.

Twitter is a non-stop stream of 140 character messages flowing across the world. You simply tap into this flow by starting to follow people. You need to follow the concept of information handling if you want to deal with the flow of information.

In my mind it was a mobile service first, but letting the flow of messages reach your phone is not advisable. There have been times where I easily got 20-30 SMSes in 5 minutes. Going through them (and deleting them again) is a mobile RSI enforcer.  Sending twitters from my mobile work like a breeze, but there comes another issue. In what language do I twitter? I follow (and am being followed) by Dutch people but also English speaking people. So what to do. Twittering in Dutch seems rude to the foreigners, twittering English seems a bit overkill for the Dutch. Anyone got a solution for that?

I found the best way to leverage the power and fun of Twitter is to use it from the desktop. I use TwitBin, a small Firefox add on that installs a pane on the left of my browser allowing me to follow the flow of information without the hassle of removing messages form my mobile.

So why is Twitter fun? I like it for 2 reasons:

1. Twitter is emotions. Forget the 140 character messages, forget the scoops that arise faster on Twitter than on Techmeme. I don’t care about them. But the emotions and conversations that arise after the scoop are so much fun. As an example, I got the “Jaiku is taken over by Google” scoop from a number of twitter messages. The initial WOW effect wears off very quickly this way. But the comments, analysis, congratulations, jokes, rants that followed that scoop (actually same thing happened on Jaiku). That was fun!
2. Twitter gives me a very nice picture of what people I haven’t actually met are about. It is amazing how much you can read about someone’s character, believes, hobbies, opinions etc. by simply following a flow of small messages.

So why do I have a love/hate relation with it? Well, besides the flooding of my mobile phone part if not used carefully, the one thing I hate about Twitter is the asymmetric following concept.

I can follow other people that don’t (or don’t want to) follow me. As a result of this I am reduced to a Groupie instead of a friend. I can listen to all their messages, but I can’t reply, add to them, or choose not to answer them. I follow a few people I don’t really know, but judging from the messages they twitter, i would like to interact with them on Twitter.

So here is my request to Biz, and the folks I am following on Twitter. Make follow each other the default in Twitter, the user can always block someone later if he becomes annoying. I have written about the “having to ask permission to become a friend” issue in social networks. I hate it. And if someone takes the effort of following you, why not follow him back. Who knows what great things will happen in this interaction!

(Re-) discovering great things on the web

Tim O’Reilly wrote a nice post today on the effects of self fulfilling prophecies on social media. One of the examples he provides (read his article, it’s longer and nicer than my brief summary here) is that if everyone uses the same sources to find or publish information, the system becomes self enforcing where in the end everyone covers the same stories (the Techmeme leaderboard effect). I wrote a similar warning earlier when the Techmeme leaderboard was first announced.

His solution to this vacuum we are creating together, is to ensure that you read fresh input, input that leads to diversion. Out of the crossover of information of, for example, art and science, new things will arise. I like that idea very much. It sometimes is hard to look for things that go beyond your own knowlegde or the field you are working in. But, learning niew things only happens when you are not in your comfort zone!

I would add a few more ways of getting fresh input:

1. Get into conversations on blog posts. I’m really not interested in how many people read my posts. But I am interested in those that take the time to digest my writings and are willing to comment or add to it. I always try to respond, and also look up that person if possible. I have found some very nice and smart people I didn’t know about this way. Remember, inspiration comes from interaction.
2. Look past the “scoop” posts (take the umph-tiest scoop post on Google taking over Jaiku’s an example, you know what I mean), and see what happens in the analysis afterwards. Often, when reading through those analysis posts and the comments they get provides me with lots of smart people I want to now more about.
3. Keep track of people writing  blog posts that are numbered (great example here), and people that  scan massive amounts of blog posts to select their favorites for you. I found 2 great posts this way today.
   • Check out Anne Truit Zelenka, who writes some very smart things about the way we (should be) consuming information. Think of looking at a huge river of water flowing, you don’t want to swallow it all, but become aware of the fish below the surface. Ties in nicely with the obervations of Tim O’Reilly. I would like to point both Anne Truis Zelenka and Tim OReilly to the work of Jonathan Harris (yes, I am a fan), who has done some amazing work on structuring emotions of millions of people in a different way.

   And check out these two new video’s done by students from Kansas State University. They are essentially follow-ups on the video “The Machine is us/ing us” I wrote about earlier. Amazing how well they bring their analysis of what is going on with them in web 2.0. I like it already, as they focus on the social aspects of new technologies.
   

4. Don’t forget to meet people in real life! Nothing better than having a conversation with inspiring people, especially if they are not working in your field of expertise!

The world is full of inspiration and fascinating people. All you need to do is look past reputations, leaders, big sites, and easy scoops, and let yourself be surprised by small things, unknown people and information beyond the information bubble we are often  stuck in professionally. Get out of your comfort zone and start interacting!

10 ways to improve web 2.0 and move into an era of true interaction

I have expressed my opinions about the flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them earlier and have gotten some very smart replies to that. I believe that in the end it is all about interaction between people. My interaction is my profile. It says more about me, about the things I find valuable, than anything I write in a profile (we all look better on Facebook than in real life right?). I also believe that current business models force service providers to put value into the network or application they build, instead of focusing on creating true user value.

In order to get out of the trap called web 2.0 we need to correct some flaws or perhaps (re-)invent some of the things to get to the point where interaction becomes the most important thing in any service. Having a need for a name for it I called it an Open Social Interaction Network, but I’m still open for anything better than that (let’s not call it web 3.0 please).

To deepen this discussion let me state my 10 personal wishes that in my opinion help us get out of web 2.0, where value seems to be put mostly into the network, into something that totally evolves around our interaction with others, thus providing value to YOU and ME:

1. I want to be able to export my friends and contact information to any other service I choose. Lets be real. The network does not OWN that data. It is mine. I have either taken the energy to find and add contacts to my friend list, have gotten it from them, or have typed them in myself. I want to be able to use that data anywhere I want. Why can I import all my data into a network, but they don’t provide me with an export function? Try it on Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Jaiku, Orkut. They are all willing to import my Outlook or Gmail contacts, but none provide me easy options to export my contacts from their service to another. Of course I am bound to privacy rules set by myself or my friends (if they don’t want me to export, I won’t)
2. Export my (multimedia) content to any other service I choose. Heck, if I want to burn a CD of all content I got or sent I can’t even do it. Twitter and Jaiki work with feeds, but Facebook doesn’t? Well, they are happy to import feeds, but I can’t export Facebook activity or content out of the network. Same goes for pictures, videos and any other content that I have kept, or that has been sent to me.
3. I have friends and contacts on many different networks. I want a lifestream service that allows me to see all of their activity regardless of the network and vice versa
4. In relation to point 3, I want to be able to message any of my contacts, without having to go to a specific network. In other words, if I know (or even don’t know) that my friend is on Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and a few other networks I want to be able to send 1 message that is delivered smartly to my friend, without me having to think which service to use. Of course, if I want to, I can make that choice in a simple and intuitive way. And equally, my friend Joe can set his preferences the way he wants to receive incoming messages.
5. In relation to point 4. I want to have presence information available over all networks. That will help me interact more efficiently with my friends. So if I know that my friend Joe is on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, Gmail, and I can see where he hangs out at the moment I might make an intelligent decision on how to contact him, or what I am sending over
6. I want to be able to write or publish content to multiple platforms in one action. So, if I write a blog entry on my blog I might also want to publish it on Facebook or MySpace, have a tinyurl published in Twitter and send a few friends an e-mail or SMS about it
7. In relation to point 6. If I get the same entry across multiple networks or platforms that’s hardly efficient. So some intelligence to make sure I get the message on the most convenient way would be nice (how about retracting all forms after I read one? So if I see a picture from a friend on Facebook, then I probably don’t need a twitter tinyurl or Flickr link anymore)
8. I want to be able to follow interesting topics regardless of where the conversation is taking place. I have a tracking facility on Google Reader, Twitter and many other platform. Let’s integrate them so that I can follow ALL conversation on that specific topic (if I really want to)
9. I want to be “on”as soon as I am connecting to the world. What do I mean by that? I want to integrate point 1-8 in my browsing experience. Not just widgets on a desktop, not just a unifying portal that I need to go to. No, when I connect to the world, it should be there with me, available when I call for it. It requires that I will be able to login automatically to any network I am part of. OpenID or anything that looks like it should be available as a standard. And personally, I would like to integrate it all into my browser so that I can explore and interact at the same time (DISCLAIMER HERE: I am involved in a (currently stealth) project that integrates cool interaction services into your web browser (more on that some other time) so I am positively biased to such solutions. Current integration on the web (take NetVibes or Facebook as examples) is not sufficient as they are essentially destination based making the destination more important than myself. And needless to say that if I am on the move I want to be connected using my mobile.
10. I want excellent and easy to use privacy controls to go with points 1-9, allowing me to set both general privacy measures as well as per item or message control.

So how about it? Am I on the right track here or do you feel its all nonsense? Do you have other wishes? Are there services that already do what I want (and I simply have missed it?). I’m interested to hear what it is you want out of next generation services.

Anyone care to implement some of this ?