Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior

If you are a tech person than it is a bit hard not to notice that Microsoft has just released Microsoft Live Mesh. TechMeme and many tech bloggers are excited about it. There are numerous posts out there that explain what Live Mesh can do technically. I think I like Robert Scoble’s post best, because he automatically tries to find implications and uses of the technology for users.

I believe it is a pretty bold move of Microsoft. Instead of fighting a battle on just the desktop, or the browser, they are now challenging everyone in both the desktop and on line world by providing a platform that syncs a users devices, applications and data in one place. What strikes me most is not the technical solution they have chosen, but the fact that the technology is “open”. By “open”I mean that it isn’t necessarily limited to Windows devices, or even worse, Microsoft products. If this technology will be adopted quickly then Microsoft might just dominate the world once again. This time not by forcing a software system down every computer owners throat. But by providing a valuable platform that can tie all the user’s technology together in one place.

I have a technical background and have worked many times with complex technologies. I have build software in different languages, and worked in teams on complex technological implementations. But I am always amazed at the enthousiasm of tech bloggers when an announchement as this is made. Everyone gets all excited about the technological capabilities, but I haven’t found much on the usage of it. The question to be answered is, how will the user benefit? Let’s face it. Most people don’t know how or could care less about synchronizing folders or data. Having a “newsfeed” is nice, but it seems any service that launches without one is old-school “web 2.0″ (we moved on to 3.x I guess). Running software from any device or any place is a cool tech solution, but there aren’t many non-tech people out there yet that have a need for it.

Does that mean that the launch of Microsoft Live Mesh isn’t a big deal? Sure it is. But I’m not getting excited of the technology announcement. I’m interested in the announcements of companies building great user services over this platform!

I will be thinking a bit about this the coming days. And I sure hope the development community will do that too. Let’s not talk about the technology. Let’s get into the user experience, the services, the drivers that make me want to use it. The first thing that comes to mind is that this technology could be leveraged to create a user centric web, a web in which the Internet, the interactions, the devices evolve around the user, instead of a portal. Being able to get and share the important stuff with friends without having to go somewhere first would be a great improvement over current web 2.0 thinking. But it needs ot be non-technical. And that might just be the biggest challenge of this impressive technology launch.

After I posted some of my observations about flaws in web 2.0, I received a lot of positive and smart reactions. Becoming a bit overconfident I suggested that we might be able to aid future service design by exploring with more people how to move on to the next level of social interaction. I called them Open Social Interaction Networks (for lack of a better name, any takers?) where the value for the user is central in design, not the value of the network which has been the most important monetizing scheme in almost all current social networks such as Facebook or MySpace.

Since I asked for it I might as well start up the discussion by looking at perhaps the most important aspect of such services, the needs of the people using them. Rolf Skyberg wrote a really excellent presentation on this and took Maslov’s Hierarchy of needs as the basis to explain, that the market puts safety, prosperity and socialisation first.

I would like to look at it from another perspective and see what we can distill when we look at the behavior now on the Internet. It occured to me that there are many opposing beliefs. Some feels the social network is defined by the value and size of the network, while others looks more at quality. Some want their interaction to be public and stretched to the limit of what a human could possibly cope with (See Robert Scoble wanting to handle more than 5000 Twitter and 5000 Facebook relations. That is pretty amazing to me), while others will only be interested in a few qualitative friends. Some feel the network is the value, but it lacks ways to leverage it, others think that separating content form people will do the trick. There are people out there creating content like crazy, while others only consume it. Some want to gain celebrity status while others like being anonymous.

Lets see where this gets us. If I would draw two axes with a few of these parameters and look at what seems to be important to the user, I get:

I’m not in any way pretending to be complete, but it does provide some insight in that people will act differently under different circumstances and in different communities. We might aim to support just one type of interaction in a specific community, and design the possible interactions only for that specific community. But, as we are looking at an improvement for web 2.0, we would also need to look at the boundaries and unification of these interactions. It would need open networks and possibilities to use them privately as well as public.

For me, the following items might be important to a user (not complete I am sure!):

1. The user would need excellent and easy to use controls to set privacy in a contextual manner. In one occasion he might not want anyone else to know about his interaction with another person, in another he might want to let the whole world know about it. Same thing goes for a user profile. I don’t just mean the Facebook profile we have carefully constructed to be better than reality, but instead a user profile is defined by his interaction with others. Being able to switch between private and public interaction, thus forming both a private and public profile would be a powerful tool.
2. In some occasions the user might find simple interaction forms sufficient enough, while in others he might want to use more complex forms of interaction. Two things seem important here. The user can have access to all forms of communication without a “Geekness”factor. So Mobile Internet as an example will only do, if the user experience and handling are simple and intuitive enough to match some of the on-line interfaces available to me. And second, communication and interaction are basic services for all. So no forced Twitter account on the Twitter network, but a Twitter-like service across any network I chose to use.
3. There would be a need to be able to organise my friends and family, and distant or unknown relations into different categories. Again, simplicity is the key here. Allowing smart categorization of the people in my network will help me focus my energy on the type of interaction I want. I personally would like to get rid of the current practice of “asking permission to be your friend” It is awkward and defaults to limit my possibilities to interact. I’d trade it with better blocking options for abuse.
4. We would also need new ways to connect, explore and find information and people across many different networks. this calls for OpenID being implemented across the networks. While we might use conventional browsing and searching techniques for that, I am personally intrigued by the work of Jonathan Harris, who has done some amazing projects which allow total new ways of organising and exploring people and information on the Internet.
5. We need some sort of decentralization of services and social networks in order to be able to leverage them all as a user. this will also ensure the value is user centric, not network centric. One way of dealing with that might be to integrate services into our web browser. This immediately makes the Internet evolve around me, instead of me having to go to all these different portal destinations. 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 yet as they are essentially destination based making the destination more important than myself.
6. If my profile is created by interaction with others, then using it contextually during my explorations could be a powerful functionality. User controlled of course, but I might be interested in locating people, content or even advertisements while exploring the world based upon my current actions and previous interactions. It seems to me this would be a better matching factor than for example tagging or previous surfing behavior only.

Got to stop here as the story is becoming too long already. Let’s hear what you have to say on this. More to come in the next weeks on supporting such needs with tools and technology, and possible monetizing schemes.

While there is lot’s of enthusiasm and sometimes over hyped investors reactions to what now is commonly known as web 2.0, there is also serious warning that it is flawed. I have written some earlier posts on it (here, here). Rolf Skyberg wrote a very nice article in which he basically states that social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace are really crappy interaction platforms. A quote from Rolf: ““Social networks” are the crappy proto-versions of a coming integrated “online” communication system. The future is not in social networks, but in the type of communication they represent. Social networks are just one form of that communication.”

And this morning I saw an interesting article by Seth Porges, called “Will Human Laziness burst the web 2.0 bubble“. In this article he states that although initially everyone is enthusiastic about setting up profiles in social networking applications, this enthusiasm wears down due to laziness. In the end people will not put the effort into these platforms.

I agree with Seth up to a certain level. People are spending far more time on their profiles, than on what these networks should be about, communication. We all have experienced this laziness once the initial “coolness” factor wears down.

There is also an interesting sidestep to this. I was pointed to Andrew Keen by this article in Emerce (in Dutch). Andrew argues that “the Internet is killing our culture and assaulting our economy”. He basically objects to the enormous amount of anonymous additions to the content of the Internet (Wikipedia as an example). The sources are not verifiable and the crowd that fills Wikipedia, Digg and other sites is essentially very small.

But,I don’t think that is the only reason why web 2.0 is flawed. A much more important reason why most web 2.0 platforms will not be sustainable in the end is that they were essentially not build to provide true value to its users, but instead they were build to create en leverage the value of a large network! The larger the network, the more value it creates to the platform owner in terms of advertisement revenues and of course the possible take over by one of the larger companies which have too much money to spend anyway. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t really help the user. Users are putting much more energy and creativity into the networks than they get out of it. Be honest, have you really gotten as much value from other (often unknown) “friends” on Facebook, Myspace etc than the amount of effort you have put into this?

So, what to do about it? Well, for starters, creating services that are truly centred around the user, instead of the network itself. Easy to say, very difficult to do.  I don’t really believe in the yet another social network start-up in all kinds of niches. The efforts of service creators and the user should be focused on interaction, communication, not on profile building. Your profile is your communication and interaction with others.

I believe that next generation services will provide the user easy ways to do just that. Be in touch with their friends whenever they want, in which way is convenient to them. With open interfaces to all services (check out this article on developments here). No walled gardens on social networks, which basically enforce the seeking value in the network, instead of providing value to its users. Communication with true friends should be private, interaction with larger groups may be public (but only if the user chooses too). Sharing emotions, stories, pictures, real-life events will remain the main driver of such platforms. But not necessarily public, more e-mail like (but better). Social networks are not the main issue, Social interaction should be. It is this social interaction that creates value for the user, and in the end will also create value for the service provider and advertiser!

What do you think, what will next generations services be like? Do you agree that the current services will not survive once the dust clears, or am I missing the point?

Matthijs van den Broek pointed me to a press release by Comscore about the usage of Social networks in Germany and France (German Social Networking Community Reaches 14.8Mln). MySpace seems to be a clear winner here, and Facebook only reaches a 4th place. There is a good post by Nicole Simon which provides doubts about the comscore figures as they do not seem to cross check with local measurement.

One thing that I noted in the comscore analysis was their explanation why MySpace did a good job. It was due to their local presence and ability to present local pages in the local language. It supports the theory that culture and language are strong factors to be dealt with in marketing and advertisement. To me it also supports my personal beliefs that in the end not the number of friends in a social network is important, but the quality of the interactions you get out of it. See my earlier posts on this topic (Internet doesn’t evolve around you). I am convinced that in the end a social network that supports my interactions with my true friends will be more valuable than one in which I get interaction with someone across the globe that I don’t really know. Discovering new people is fun, intensifying the relations with my best friends is even better. If you’re not convinced, look at the video of a Facebook and MySpace user that is getting a little fed up with all the unwanted interactions here! Lots more of them to be found at YouTube. Maybe, this factor will in the end make Social Networks that have a strong local presence more successful. What’s your opinion on this?

I was a little in a hurry in my previous post. In this post I argue that, despite what we are meant to believe, the Internet does not evolve around you. Perhaps services like Facebook, MySpace, but also the latest in social networks pagii give the user the feeling that he or she is the one that it is all about. Each of these services rely on you setting up and sharing a personal profile, the value for the company of course being the network that evolves. But where is the true value for me as a user?

Yes, I have all these cool applications and extensions to set up a great profile. These extensions allow met to do things I can’t do by myself (no publishing talent). So great effort goes in to the design of my profile, and then the setting up and inviting of as many friends as possible. There are many great tools out there to make a great profile (note my earlier post on rock you for example).
Notice that I haven’t mentioned any true value that I have gotten from all these efforts. As it turns out, the value I receive back from these services is relatively low. My friends seem to put more effort in the design of their profiles than in true interaction. Sometimes having interaction with a previously unknown person might provide some satisfaction, but I tend to measure and value these services on the interaction with people I know really well, and we seem to interact much more using 1-1 communications services like physical get togethers, mobile calls , SMS, e-mail, IM, Skype (maybe I have the wrong type of friends?).

Right now, social networks are much more publishing than interaction tools. There is nothing wrong with that, on the contrary. Looking at the growth of the number of users in such applications it really fills in a need for millions of people. But, at the same time, relative few of the publishers out there really create new content. Most use the basics to get started, and then quickly become readers, instead of publishers, turning the Internet into a very large TV space. Wasn’t that a pre-web 2.0 service, broadcast?

I think that when all of the dust of web 2.0 settles we might see some new initiatives rise that will help all those millions of publishers out there to start interacting with all sorts of methods. not justy publishing, but interacting. Sharing their lives, important happenings, emotions, conversations. mabe there are already a few out there, can you point them out?

I saw a nice quote this morning on Rolf Skyberg his site.

“Unfortunately, Facebook has wandered into familiar territory of social networking by imagining (hoping) that the value is in the network, and not what you get out of the network. This is an easy mistake to make, because nobody wants to believe that their tool is only something you use to get something else done.” For the rest of this article by Rolf look at:

http://rolfskyberg.wordpress.com/2007/08/07/it-aint-all-that-facebook-might-have-started-a-firestorm/

The company that understands that best will ensure that what you get out of the network is just as important as what you put into it. Call it web 3.0, I would call it true interaction.

Scott Karp writes about his experiences with the new Yahoo mash service. His article draws up all kinds of questions about social networks and their targeted audiences. The difficulty with all of these networks is that one size doesn’t fit all. There is always a tension between the size of the targeted users (is it a niche or not), and the advertisers you need for your business model to work. It seems that most social network attempts try to become a new myspace or facebook, targetting very large populations. But for precisely that reason it often doesn’t seem to fit very well when joining. But smaller communities struggle with their business models as well. In a Dutch article on fabchannels attempts to add comercial video adds to their service (you can watch music concerts there), a spokesman of fabchannel says “visitors haven’t complained about the video adds yet). Hmm, that doesn’t sound like the user is thrilled to watch these video adds either.

I think the selection of Time magazine, declaring YOU to be the most important person of 2006 is totally wrong. It is still the entrepreneur trying draw your attention to get you to his portal, or the advertiser pushing his message to you. But the internet doesn’t evolve around YOU (yet)! That is only a story they are trying to make us believe. What do you think, are there services out there that are all about you?