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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update

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

Microsoft and Facebook will never succeed in locking down part of the web

I don’t usually respond so quickly to news. If you are familiar with my blog, it’s not a breaking news kind of blog. But the rumors that Microsoft might be buying Facebook are now quickly taking over TechMeme. Robert Scoble just wrote a response to these rumors. He is turning it into the battle of the century where giants Google and Microsoft are fighting each other over total control of the web. He says:

This has created HUGE value for Microsoft and has handed Steve Ballmer an Internet strategy which brings Microsoft from last place to first in less than a week.

Boom!

Now Microsoft/Yahoo search will have access to HUGE SWATHS of Internet info that Google will NOT have access to.

Data portability is dead on arrival.

Microsoft just bought itself a search strategy that sure looks like a winner to me.

If all this is true there is no way in hell that Facebook will open up now.

It’s Facebook and Microsoft vs. the open public Web.

I don’t know if Robert is right about this. But I’m sure that both Microsoft and Facebook are capable of trying this. If they do, and really try to close of part of the Internet, then it will be a very expensive experiment that will be dead on arrival. There is no way that Facebook will be able to close off the Internet that way. Sure they can do it technically. I’m not even thinking about what about web developers will do. Already they are finding ways to punch holes in the Facebook walls. Google’s web crawlers might not get in there, but there will be other ways. But that isn’t what I’m betting on. I’m betting on something much more powerful. I’m betting on human nature.

In the end we don’t like to be held captive. We don’t like walled gardens. At first nothing might change. Some of the users that aren’t aware of the walls that are drawn up around them will figure it out. And they won’t like it a bit. And if they start a protest on Facebook itself, what can Facebook do? It is their strength (the community) that will defeat them at the end. You can only confign users within a walled garden service if the walls cannot (physically) be broken down. The mobile operators run one of the largest and most succesfull walled garden, it is called the mobile network. That can’t be easily broken down. But on the web I can’t think of a single walled garden that can’t be avoided or broken down.

So I’m not so worried about it. If Microsoft and Facebook want to close off part of the web, just let them. They can have it. But they will have to realise soemthing about that strategy. They don’t OWN the customer. They can try to lock them in, but in the end all they will be left with is one big walled garden with old data. The users will have moved on to something better.

I would rather hope that Microsoft would embrace the User Centric Web. Instead of locking users in, they should consider to set them free. The best business model any company can ever execute is the one that leverages user value. A business model based that locks users in is bound to fail.

PS. Robert loves Friendfeed and claims that will be the alternative to the Microsoft – Facebook content. That’ll be the day

Facebook popularity will decline because of a wrong business model

In Dutch culture people rarely stand out of a crowd. There are a lot of sayings that (badly translated) essentially say something like: “just act normal, that’s crazy enough”, or “don’t stick your head out”. We all try to fit in, be the same and feel uncomfortable when people stick out of the crowd. If someone performs better than others, he or she almost apologizes for it (I was just lucky). In Holland it is not abut winning, it’s about playing the game. That’s probably why we will never win the world cup in soccer, in general perform good but not great on important tournaments like the Olympics or world cups.

Interesting enough a very similar tendency can be seen when people discuss the success of web companies. There are a few untouchables, companies we never speak badly off. Google is great, and there isn’t much it can do wrong.

In other cases however we tend to be more harsh. Think about the monopoly Microsoft had the past years and the way people started reacting to that. In some cases this leads to annoying customers or press, but sometimes it also leads to innovation and competition. If Microsoft hadn’t tried to monopolize their Internet Explorer there wouldn’t have been a Mozilla organization that is now celebrating it’s incredible 500Mlnth download of their popular Firefox web-browser.

It seems that when a new web initiative is showing incredible growth figures we tend to wait for it to start making mistakes or showing decline again. After the initial “wow” people start thinking about how this unnatural growth can’t go on forever and when that day comes, we all knew it would happen, right? This is exactly what seems to be happening with Facebook right now. They have been able to create unprecedented growth in the past 2 years and are now one of the largest Social Networks worldwide. But now bloggers are declaring Facebook to be dead after they had a first dip in their growth figures. In January 2008 the number of Facebook users declined from 8.9Mln in December 2007 to 8.5 Mln in the UK. This was the first decline after a 712% growth overall in 2007.

Why does Facebook stir up such emotions? Why are people waiting for them to fall? Is it because they grew too fast? Because they are constantly measured against the success of Google? Is it because Mark Zuckerberg seems to be having a difficult relation with the press and the blogging world? Or is it because people just love to see something so successful break down again?

I’m not sure. But I do know that screaming out loud Facebook is dead because of a small dip in the number of users in just one country is plain stupid. There are web services out there that wouldn’t mind having such a dip if they also had the number of users and traffic Facebook still has.

Personally I think Facebook will face some really difficult times and I have doubts if they will remain as popular as they are today. But I’m not basing this on a small dip in the number of users. I’m basing my opinion, for what it is worth, on their chosen business model. Facebook has fallen into the $16 bln advertisement trap and they can’t and won’t get out of it. I started a countdown on the downfall of Facebook a while back already. The business model, based upon providing a free service and compensating that with ad harassment, has an incredible upside. It allows services to attract users really quickly and show remarkable growth figures. But with the almost unnatural growth comes the pain. Facebook has faced platform issues. They face the backlash of unsatisfied users that organise themselves in protest groups within Facebook. They face the press and blogging fury that arose when they tried to monetize the build network using SocialAds and Beacon. They have to deal with friend spamming, which is caused by 3rd party application builders that want to lift off of the success of Facebook to create their own glory and fortune. And now they face the press that can smell blood. And all of this isn’t because of Mark Zuckerberg, the incredibly childish or lobotomy like applications Facebook has to offer its users. It’s the business model.

If your business model is based upon monetizing of the Social Graph or network that has been build then you are bound to make the network more valuable than its users. It means that spamming friends is ok, because in some cases these friends might just sign up for yet another zombie-like application. It means that showing ads to relevant profiles is more important than trying to get a meaningful interaction between a user and a brand. It means that customer lock in is much more important than customer or data portability. It leads to the false illusion that sheer numbers of traffic and number users are more important than the quality of the service you provide. And most important of all, it distracts you from the one thing that makes you different from all your competitors. The fact that you are there to provide the user value. Once you lose that notion, your business is likely to decline. And that is what will happen to Facebook and the like in the end. As long as they aren’t monetizing user value, they will be fighting a cause that will be lost in the end.

That is why we like Google so much. Google monetizes user value. They use advertisement, just like Facebook. But they have managed to make the advertisement in itself valuable within the context the user gets to see it.

That is also why Firefox will win in the end over Internet Explorer. Not because of their 500Mln downloads or their technically superior product. No, it will  be because they have chosen to open up the browser. to develop and innovate it with and by its users. To be open about the mistakes they have made and the bugs it still contains. And the assurance they will resolve those to make it a better product.

Facebook isn’t going down because we are all jealously waiting for them to fall down. Facebook is in trouble because they are forgetting the one thing that is really important in business. Provide the customer with value!

I will end this by quoting Rolf Skyberg who has said it better than I could have:

This “luxury lens” also puts close scrutiny on some topics like “social networking”. Is the value you get out of social networking in any way a luxury?

If you had unlimited resources (money), could you deliver a better and more profoundly useful experience than we’re seeing with FaceBook and MySpace?

If the answer is yes, then you should get on building it, because obviously somebody is not delivering on an opportunity.

Solving the mobile equation (yet again)

The past few days I have watched a lot of people writing about Mobile Internet.  Not surprising as one of the most important mobile conferences is taking place in Barcelona right now and a lot of companies are using that conference to launch their mobile initiatives. I am a bit disappointed to hear what seems to be happening there right now. What strikes me most is that mobile operators simply do not have a clue how to position themselves in the mobile Internet arena. They have taken a great beating from non-mobile companies like Yahoo and Google and still really don’t know what hit them exactly. According to a post in Ars Technica even the top executive Mr Sarin of the largest mobile operator worldwide, Vodafone, doesn’t know what to do.

Mobile carriers need to step up their game and make mobile services easier to use, says Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, lest they willingly hand over business to media giants like Google. Sarin made the comments when speaking to the press during this week’s Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, admitting that his industry has not traditionally done a good job in making new mobile services appealing to users. Not doing anything to fix that, will be the industry’s biggest mistake, he said.

And another quote from that article:

Mobile carriers have the experience and opportunity to keep these customers from slipping away. But in order to do so, they have to offer something up besides a means for other companies to transport data. “Customers want social networking, email, SMS, instant messaging, voice—you name it,” Sarin said. “Communication is our core business. We have to be in all of these spaces.”

Oh boy is he in trouble. Let’s see where he is coming from. Traditionally, Mobile operators have one advantage that other companies don’t have. They offer access to the mobile network. Mobile operators have the monopoly on that. They own the network and monetize users accessing it. There was never a need for the operators to even think about user experience or user services. No need to compete over services, just deliver access and use clever marketing techniques to make your mobile brand more interesting than the other mobile brands. And that is fine in a world where access and the ability to communicate anywhere is the most important user value.

The same thing happened when the Internet grew big in the 90’s. People all went to Internet access providers because they needed access. That was fine for a while, but then other companies realised that once people were on-line there was a much bigger revenue stream available to those that provided the user value in services. There isn’t a single Internet access company that has successfully made the switch from access to user value services.You still get charged for access, but you probably don’t use their e-mail service or spam filters or whatever service any more. E-mail is free and with more storage you can imagine. Other companies filled the gap with anti-virus, spam, and content services. And the Internet access companies are stuck to do what they do best, provide access. They have all tried to create their own content services and failed. They have tried to build advertisement platforms but others moved much faster. It is the penalty for a company that provides nothing more than a pretty expensive plumbing system underlying our on-line experiences.

So Mr Sarin and all other mobile operator executives can try to become user value service providers but they will fail at it. Google, Yahoo, and many other companies have already taken up that part of the revenue stream. They couldn’t be bothered by mobile networks, access technology and the like. They concentrate on what matters in the end. The user experience. Marginalising the role of the Mobile operator to what it does best, providing access.

And then I read this article which talks about a panel discussion between user experience and technology experts during the Mobile World congress. A quote from the article:

The panel, whose title was It’s the User Experience, Stupid agreed that iPhone represents a model for mobile operators to follow, but they reached little agreement on how to follow.

One direction, advocated by Lucia Predolin, international marketing and communications director for Buongirono S.p.A. of Milan, Italy, is to manipulate users by identifying their “need states” — including such compulsions as “killing time,” and “making the most of it” — and fulfilling them subliminally.

Adobe’s Murarka proposed a more technological approach to improving the user experience, satisfying the mobile phone subscriber through better interface design. Sarah Lipman, co-founder and R&D director for Power2B, suggested an almost mystical solution, somehow tapping into users’ “neural networks” to navigate a mobile phone interface “using touch and pre-touch input.”

Never, never trust an International Marketing and Communications director that wants to “manipulate” users. Or someone that wants to “tap into users neural networks”. These people do not have a clue. If this is the innovating power from the mobile industry we will remain in a mobile stone age for a bit longer.

Apple understood that usability, status, and the ability to show of yet another cool device where the first step into improving the mobile experience with their launch of the iPhone. Before the iPhone usability sucks on almost any mobile device. And I’m not the only one that feels that way. It turns out that Apple iPhone users perform 50 times more search requests than other mobile phone users. What is interesting to me, which isn’t mentioned in the source, is whether the searches are performed using the mobile network or a WiFi network. Big difference in my opinion, as the first one costs the uer money, while the second option simply turns the iPhone into a small handheld computer.

In another article it is even suggested that within a few years the number of mobile search requests will overtake fixed Internet searches. Which is true, but sort of obvious. Already here are more mobile devices on the planet than there are fixed Internet computers. If we marginally decrease the complexity to be able to access the web mobile, then people are bound to start using search engines. Good news for Google? They think so.

I do not necessarily agree with that. While more search suggest more advertisement revenues I can’t help but think that we don’t need more search. We need an entire different information access paradigm that is build upon the foundation of a small mobile device. Instead of the current “let’s copy our laptop web experience and cram it on a device with a screen no larger than a few inches and pretty unusable input interfaces”. We definitely need to improve the usability of mobile devices, but before that we need a revolution in mobile UI thinking.

Is Yahoo’s announcement of their new mobile service OneConnect the answer to this? Not sure about that. I saw a demo video of the new service that is to launch in the third quarter of this year and although it combines all kinds of social networks into a single portal, it seems rather complex and technical to me.  Sure, it’s cool they can connect all major social networks and track people on them, but in itself that is a technical solution to a problem I haven’t experienced yet.  What underlying user value has lead to this service other than “lets make sure we can connect to all these cool services so that we can get lots of users and a big market share. Can you imagine trying to set up that service on your mobile phone and actually make it work with a single button press? Now that would be a cool trick. Honestly, I did ask for such a service last year already, I still wonder if Yahoo has been reading up on my blog. They got me one thing I asked for, but forgot the other great ideas I mentioned in that post

Mobile is considered the most important growth market. Forget the Internet, mobile is where the action will be the coming years. Maybe that’s why Microsoft has replaced its entire management team on Mobile. With massive markets waiting to be unlocked in India, China, Africa, there is more money to be made on the mobile web than the fixed web. But if we have to wait for these 10 most important trends from the Mobile World congress I would say dream on. There are lots of little, currently unknown companies out there that understand human behaviour, mobile technology and user needs on the move. These companies will come with services not thought of before. And some of them will become as big as Google and Yahoo now are on the Web.

Big brother is watching me

A lot of different, seemingly unrelated, things are happening right now in the tech world. Looking through different feeds most of the discussions are about:

The mash-up of content seems to be important right now. I see it everywhere. People love the idea of taking different, seemingly unrelated, bits of data to mash it up into something new and unexpected.  The latest example being the Google – Twitter super Tuesday election mashup. My tech friends all talk excitingly about the possibilities of mash ups. I seldom get enthusiastic about these development. Just because it is technically possible to combine data doesn’t mean I have to like it. It takes more than technical miracles to make me start using this stuff, daily, and integrate it into my life.

Thinking about that I realised that in one area I do like mash-ups. I often write blog posts that way. I read a lot of stuff, have all kinds of experiences with family, friends, at work, and after a while a story seems to develop itself until it draws enough attention to be written down. Often triggered by observations from the people I follow on blogs, an observation or analysis can kick start a series of thoughts that lead to a new post. And I’m not talking about the stories on TechMeme, TechCrunch or any of the other major “breaking news” blogs. No, these things happen most of the time on blogs where people actually analyse behavior, and have something to say about that.

Why am I writing all of this down? Well, because a series of unrelated events and stories I have been reading the past days have led me to write down the title of this post “Big brother is watching me”. It started with a post from one of my favorite pattern hounds, Rolf Skyberg (I’m not anywhere near his capabilities to analyse and detect patterns), who talked about an identity theft that happened to him. In a post called “W3Top.org is stealing Twitter updates” Rolf wrote:

Apparently, W3Top.org thinks it’s perfectly appropriate to take my Twitter updates, post them as part of their “100% Free online dating and matchmaking service for singles”, and create a bogus account for me with bogus friends and an even more bogus location.

He goes on and asks himself the following question:

So this leaves us with the question, who really owns my Twitters? I wrote them, posted them to Twitter, and merrily went long my way.

Twitter is quite clear about copyright of twitters in their Terms of Service:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.

According to the Berne copyright convention, anything privately created is held in copyright by the creator. Brad Templeton explains this here on his page of 10 copyright myths:

For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not.

So we have a copyright violation (I never granted permission for Xasa/Bitacle to republish my works), but we also have something bordering on identity theft.

By republishing my content along with my known username and avatar image, they are implying that I support and endorse their service. This is, by the way exactly what they want people to think.

Because who wants to use a dating service that nobody else actually uses?

I went on and was overwhelmed by the number of “breaking news” posts about the Microsoft bid on Yahoo, the consequences and possible counter-strikes of Google. Ways for Yahoo to get out of a possible deal with Microsoft, US elections with Google and Twitter doing all kinds of data mash ups. Both Google and Yahoo going after Microsoft Outlook with their own upgrades of e-mail packages. Google entering the mobile market in China, and so on and so on.

So the major companies are fighting it out in the open again. A lot of suggestions have been made about the  strategy behind it all. I even made some observations about that myself suggesting that Microsoft and Yahoo could easily build the largest social network ever via integration and innovation of their e-mail services and that even Google might get a bit nervous about that. Robert Scoble seems to think different. He suggests that Google is stirring up the fire to draw attention away from their attempts to jump into the lucrative mobile market.

Then I came across a really good post by Zephoria. In her post called “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should” she talks about the ease at which techies are creating mash-ups without thinking about the possible consequences for the user. She says:

I am worried about the tech industry rhetoric around exposing user data and connections. This is another case of a decision dilemma concerning capability and responsibility. I said this ages ago wrt Facebook’s News Feed, but it is once again relevant with Google’s Social Graph API announcement. In both cases, the sentiment is that this is already public data and the service is only making access easier and more efficient for the end user. I totally get where Mark and Brad are coming at with this. I deeply respect both of them, but I also think that they live in a land of privilege where the consequences that they face when being exposed are relatively minor. In other words, they can eat meals of only chocolate because they aren’t diabetic.

Read her article, it’s well worth your time. The clashes between the big companies is a fight over two things. Data and control. Who has most data and who can control it best. It is what makes Google a fortune, it is what Yahoo wanted to make a fortune out, and it is what Microsoft wants to get his hands on. And if you thought things were all quite with Facebook, it turns out they have added a few new “features” below the radar. One of them is a feature that can suggest friends to you. Facebook can do this because they “own” everything we naive users put into our Facebook accounts. I think it is a pretty meaningless feature. If I needed advice on who should be my friend, I might as well join a dating service.

But it also helps me remind myself that free always comes at a cost. Behind every free service there are hurdles of eager beaver marketeers paying huge amounts of money to collect and mash up your personal data. This giving them the false illusion that if they have access to my personal data in the social networks I participate in, their message will reach me more effectively. Marketeers are idiots of course. They shouldn’t be thinking about that. they should be thinking about providing me value, but that’s another story.

If this era on the web is to be characterised then I would say it is the era where everyone is fighting over data and data control. Big brother is watching me, with the difference that there isn’t one big brother. There are uncountable big brothers, with a few major ones that have their claws into probably 80% of our web experiences. I agree with Zephoria that this is all happening too fast without enough thinking about the consequences for the user. She ends her article with:

Just because people can profile, stereotype, and label people doesn’t mean that they should. Just because people can surveil those around them doesn’t mean that they should. Just because parents can stalk their children doesn’t mean that they should. So why on earth do we believe that just because technology can expose people means that it should?

I don’t think the collecting and mashing up of personal data can be stopped anymore. We have all been drawn into an addiction of “free”services and we are unable to get out of that advertisement trap. Web entrepreneurs can’t think up any new buisness models to compete with the free model. But it might come at great cost. I want the right to own my own data, and I understand that it comes with my own responsibility to control and use that data. I doubt any of the data hoggers is really there to protect my privacy. That is fine really. As long as we all understand the consequences of this, and we all make sure to expose only those parts of ourselves that we feel comfortable with. Remember, big brother is not only watching me, but he is also on to you!

Will Microsoft and Yahoo create the biggest social network ever?

There is a lot of talk about the Microsoft takeover attempt of Yahoo this weekend. TechMeme is flooded with blog posts about the subject. I’m not so interested in the “breaking news” factor, but I am more interested in the effects this might have on the web and its users. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have great assets, which combined might even make Google become a bit nervous.

I doubt it will be in advertisement. Google is the absolute number one in that game and it will be nearly impossible to beat them at their own game. Microsoft has large aspirations in the advertisement world, and Yahoo has performed rather poorly there given all the traffic they receive.

If Microsoft wants to create more value by acquiring Yahoo I would suggest that they start combining and innovating over one of the biggest assets they jointly would have, e-mail.  There are more e-mail users worldwide than any other web service. E-mail is, although outdated, still the most frequently used communication tool. It is more popular and has more users than all social networks like MySPace and Facebook together. Consider the possibilities if e-mail was to be updated and improved to become the ultimate social network. No need to acquire new users, simply offer the hundreds of million users worldwide the possibility to interact in a network.

I said this before in a post entitled: “Dear Yahoo, Microsoft, Google e-mail: Forget Facebook, start innovating!”. E-mail could very well be the heart of a new type of social network. Tim O’Reilly makes a similar observation in his excellent post here. It would need a major redesign though to make it fit for what users really want. In my earlier post I mentioned 9 possible improvements to make e-mail the ultimate social networking environment. If Microsoft/Yahoo would join efforts in making e-mail a social networking tool then Google would have something to worry about. And that isn’t bad at all.

Google really needs competition to keep them sharp. Should they be really worried? Well, yes, a bit. But Google also has assets that could easily be combined into great social networking tools. Let’s not forget they have GMail and chat, Orkut, Google Maps, Android, OpenSocial, RSS and Jaiku. When these assets are combined the right way Google could easily facilitate the ultimate social network, with Gmail at its heart.

It will be interesting to see what will happen the next months. Will Microsoft and Yahoo create the biggest social network ever? Will Google pick up the challenge and roll out their version of a social network? Facebook and Myspace, you better watch out!

Just a few wishes for 2008 (part 2)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          

(images taken from www.s60.com)

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

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

3. Human behavior as the basis for new service development

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

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

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

4. Let content exploration become an interactive adventure again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Ads and Social Networks, an explosive combination?

Just ran into several posts mentioning that Google has stopped an experiment with ads on their social network Orkut. Google claims it was only an experiment and that the ads only appeared in 1% of the pages shown. According to the Wall Street Journal, the experiment was stopped after a protest from a non profit group in Brazil which was offended by the combination of offensive content and ads.

There is some speculation about whether or not ads are lucrative in social network and the fact that Google has stopped the experiment might suggest it is not lucrative business.

I think it is a very risky strategy to use ads in Social Networks. As I have written earlier the user of a social network is spending most of his time either looking at other people’s profiles, or updating his own. These activities, and the perception of the user that his profile is his own personal space do not make a good combination with ads.

I predict that if the ad pressure of social networks such as Facebook will increase that users will slowly turn their backs on the service. That is precisely why Microsoft should not be investing such large amounts of money in Facebook. Instead, it would be better to think of ways to increase the value of the service for the user, in such a way that both the user and the advertiser will meet their goals. Easy to say, very hard to do.

Is Steve Ballmer really smart or really dumb?

A lot of posts appeared this morning on Steve Ballmer who has made some provocative statements about Facebook. They seem to contradict each other. Robert Scoble writes that Steve Ballmer still doesn’t understand Social Networking. Robert makes a couple of valid observations regarding quotes by Steve:

There can’t be any more deep technology in Facebook than what dozens of people could write in a couple of years. That’s for sure,” Ballmer said. Robert replies with a solid argument that it isn’t about technology, it’s about the community. I would add to that that it is also about the brand (Community dominates Brand right ). The Facebook brand is very strong at the moment. Robert also argues that Facebook isn’t just young people and that he is not moving away from Facebook unless his “friends”do so too. Facebook has become a LinkedIn (but better) to Robert. Although I perfectly understand this arguement, I cannot help but noting that Robert is not your average Facebook user. Most Facebook users have a very different motivation of using it (see how most Facebook users are spending their time on-line looking at other users profiles for example). The average Facebook user spends more time investing in updating his personal profile to make it look better than reality, looking at other profiles , and gets much less or no value back from the network. Not like Robert who can leverage the network for tech conversations and personal marketing (nothing wrong with that btw).

Finally this quote by Robert. “It also makes me realize that Ballmer has no clue about the future of advertising. If he did he’d be talking about how Facebook’s ability to concentrate people into buckets in a new way should be copied and studied. That’s where Facebook’s real advertising value is and Microsoft hasn’t demonstrated ANY ability to see that yet. Of course, Facebook itself hasn’t shipped its advertising platform that’ll demonstrate its vision there either, but I hear it’s coming. “ Now here is where it gets interesting to me. I have some serious doubts whether or not Facebook will be able to monetize their incredible amounts of user profiles. As I have argued before, Facebook users will see their profiles as their personal space. They will not like it a bit if they are harassed by advertisement. Looking at how most Facebook users are spending their time on-line looking at other users profiles, I don’t think advertisement will fit in. That is the strength of Google. If I am searching for something advertisement is much more convenient than when I am searching for/or peeking at other humans.

TechCrunch seems to disagree with Scoble on his analysis of Steve Ballmer not getting it. Their most important arguments include the “what if another social network craze pops up”and “the technology can be duplicated”. Sorry, I don’t agree easily with those arguments. Robert is right about the technology. Duplication isn’t a thread at all (more on that in a second). And, there will always be new startups or services becoming more popular than the largest one. that is a fact of life. The question is however if Facebook can withstand those by not becoming too corporate (inflexible) or closed (walled gardens will not do in the end).

Kara Swisher has published a few excellent article son the possible investment of Microsoft in Facebook, the latest, called “PopQuiz:Skype = Hype, then Facebook=?” I agree that investing $500 million in Facebook would be way over the top. But, as I commented here, it would give Microsoft and Facebook another more subtle issue. The ad pressure on Facebook users would have to increase with such an investment, and they won’t like it a bit.

So, what is the real threat to Facebook? It can be summarized in 2 simple points:

1. Facebook, as most other social networks, remains a closed network
2. Facebook is network value centered not user centric (see point 1). Facebook wants to leverage the value of the network, not necessarily bring value to its users. See my earlier post on that.

So is Steve Ballmer really smart or really dumb? I’d argue for smart. Either he gets social networks in the current state and doesn’t want to invest too much in it (talking down the Facebook hype, AND trying to keep Google away from Facebook), or he doesn’t really get it, but because of that will probably make the right choice by mistake and remain very suspicious of monetizing social networks. And if he does invest 500 Mln in a company that barely makes $ 30Mln a year right now, well……

High Risk investment: Microsoft wants a piece of Facebook

Different sources (for example here, here, here) reported that Microsoft might be putting a large financial injection into Facebook. According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft might invest $300 to $500Mln to obtain a stake of 5% in Facebook. Thus valuing Facebook at approximately $10 billion!  In the lengthy article the Wall Street Journal provides a good analysis of the strategy behind such a deal. Microsoft wants to get big in on-line advertisement, and Facebook might be a platform that will give them a lot of leverage against Google.

I personally think it is a very risky strategy. Not only do I find the 10Bln value over the top, there is a more subtle issue here. Google turned over almost 4Bln $ in on-line advertisement  in the second quarter this year. But they are not concentrating all that ad revenue in one place. Instead they are capable of spreading their ad revenues over numerous platforms and places on the Internet. And people that are already searching, will not object to a few ads, especially if they match the search.

But if Microsoft is going to monetize their Facebook investment, I think that will be a very risky strategy. Now you are entering the profiles of people, their personal space, their on-line identity. They will not like it very much if there is too much advertisement there. When on-line at Facebook, you’re most likely looking at other people, you’re probably not searching for something. So advertisement there might be much more offending to the users. There is a risk involved here for both Facebook and Microsoft. It’s not a good idea to start annoying Facebook users with too much advertisement. I don’t think  I would value that opportunity at $10 billion.

Freedom is worth at least 600Mln Dollar

The European Commission just fined Microsoft for an amount of some 613Mln US dollar (different news items seem to contradict each other on the amount, read about it here for example). That is a whole lot of money. But what interests me is how Microsoft will deal with this. Will they finally start opening up and not try to dominate the software market by forcing users to work with their applications (think Internet Explorer, Media player etc)? Or will they keep playing this game of bundling all kinds of software with their Windows system making it the default choice for many users.

I think if Microsoft would make the right decision and allowing competitors into their territory it will benefit everyone. The user will have more choice, the competitors get a chance to obtain market share, but Microsoft, in the end, will benefit because they will be forced to make better products.

Take a look at the Internet Browser market for example. I’m not trying to start another browser war here, but most people probably don’t even know they have a choice. For them the little blue e on the desktop is the Internet. There are of course different (and probably better) alternatives out there. Firefox for starters, but don’t forget Maxthon either. What most of these competitors share is the ability for the user to customise their browser and experience in any way they like. It allows for a much better internet experience and provides a platform where new innovative services can be build easily. Unfortunately, these competitors don’t do a very good job communicating these advantages yet. I happen to be a Firefox fan, but to be honest, it isn’t all that easy to find the customisations I like. There are too many out there already, and it takes me too much time to find the things I like best. And Mozilla seems to me an organization of incredible technological skills, but they still lack the customer focus needed to make Firefox an even greater success than it already is.

So guys, you just found out the price for freedom. Start communicating en get these IE users that are ignorant of the possibility of choice to try out the alternatives out there. An, while you are at it, let’s develop some customisations that will make all social networker adepts out there really wanna use your products! Haven’t you noticed yet, that the Internet browser is MY portal to the world!