A User-Centric Web needs brand agnostic service providers

You are the most important brand

A User-Centric web is by design a brand agnostic web when it comes to identity. There is only one brand, and that is you.

The current web causes different types of problems that can be lead to possibly 2 design flaws. The first one is that it is a document-centric web. Read this excellent post by Chris Messina and Jyri Engström here.  The second one, maybe caused by the first flaw, is that business models evolved and became network-centric. In other words current business models enforce that services focus on scale before user-value. Traffic, usage and numbers are more important than individual user value.

As a result we get customer lock-in (which idiot came up with that term), walled gardens, an unhealthy attention to scale and growth, identity wars (who gets to own you), data lock-in, social graph ownership (Facebook owns your relationships and interactions), etc., etc. It’s a slippery slope we can’t get off easily. There are patches to this mess (e.g. OpenID), but that’s all they are right now. OpenID doesn’t fundamentally change the web, unless it becomes embedded in a User-Centric web.

OpenID provides us convenience. We can now register/login to services using existing accounts we have at Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and so on. OpenID in that sense patches the problem of having multiple identities/profiles across different services. The problem with that patch however is that it still locks me into one of those main services (Gmail, Facebook, Twitter).  There lies a danger with OpenID. Even though it is set up with the right intentions, it might end up keeping the current web alive, instead of helping us move to a User-Centric web. If my identity becomes my Facebook account, I’m not very likely to leave that service. For OpenID to help us move to a User-Centric Web we will need independent identity providers.

If we were to design a User-Centric web, then I would prefer that the “user” part is separated from the “services” part. In other words, my identity, my home base, my relationships, the data that flows through that. It should all be under my own control. To accomplish that we would either set that up ourselves, or for those that don’t know how, create service providers that can take care of that for us. These service or identity providers would have one purpose only, to serve me and my data. Think of it as a bank where I store my online presence safely. They would only have one business model. Provide me service and I would pay for that value. They would only compete with other identity service provides in that user value. We can’t let companies like Facebook or Google take care of our identity, as they are in the business of making money off of my identity and interactions.

Once that is take care of, I can join services, meet friends, interact, do all the things I can do now, but I would be in control of my own online identity. I can decide how much of me a service, or a friend can see. I could lock it down like fort Knox, or open it up like the biggest Social Media fan. There are no portability issues, I can’t get locked into a service anymore. As my online presence is separated from the actual service, I can simply move to another service and have all my friends (data) available there. A service becomes a possible channel through which I can interact. Companies will become true service providers, instead of traps I can fall into. The would compete on user value instead of network value. There is certainly demand for such a setup.

It’s a simple idea, turning things inside out. It isn’t simple to get there though. As long as we keep ourselves trapped in the current web business models we will never reach a tipping point. All we do is dig a hole and lock ourselves in beautiful walled gardens with cute “openX” patches while Facebook, Google and other big companies keep exploiting our online identities and interactions commercially.

The Open, Social web needs plumbers

Chris Messina has a long and good post up about the open Social Web. He hits on a topic I have written about many times as well:

Moreover, by commoditizing certain fundamental features, service providers will move to compete on the level of user experience and service, rather than on lock-in alone. And in the distributed social model of the web, there is nothing more fundamental than establishing a means of expressing durable, cross-site identity.

It is my contention that the individual is the basic atomic unit of society, and without society you can’t get to acting on the “social” layer. And since change only can begin at the scale of the individual, OpenID must occupy a cornerstone of the open, social web.

The commoditizing fundamental features Chris talks about are identity, discovery and access control, contacts and friends, activity streams, messaging, groupings and shared spaces. I read his post and ended up posting a comment on a Friendfeed discussion in which I said:

I guess it all boils down to the point that most initiatives are not willing to work on the plumbing of the web. Everyone wants to build the house and contain people within it. The irony of course is that if you build the plumbing smart you would be part of everything, instead of “owning” a small piece of the web trying to lock users in (And I thought my posts were long )

It reminded me of an old post Rolf Skyberg once wrote about the plumbing on the web. In a post called 98%, or even 100%-open, not enough in social networks he writes:

Unfortunately, this pattern all points into an area where few large companies want to compete: commodity services. To those with dollar signs singing in their sleep, “commodity” is a painful, dirty word where products must compete both on their merits and consumer whimsy. Even if you’re the best, you are forced to walk that careful line between technological prowess and merchantability. It also shines bright lights into the cobwebs of your code; ruthlessly ferreting out weakness.

I’ve written about my view of a User-Centric web (although I was told I should be calling it the User Driven Web).  It’s what Chris calls the Open Social Web. In this web the user is the most important actor. The problem of getting to this type of a web is that we need these commoditizing features in place first. The question is, what is withholding this plumbing? They are not brilliant new insights (brilliant, but not new ). It isn’t that no one before Chris, Rolf, Doc Searl, myself or others have thought about the need of having this plumbing taken care of. It seems common knowledge, yet it hasn’t been sufficiently addressed or implemented.

I can think of only one reason. There hasn’t been a commercial incentive to make the User-Centric Web happen. There is no money to be made in plumbing, given the current state of web business models. We are still ruled by old-fashioned web 1.0 business models, and they prevent us taking the leap to a fully open, social  web. We need to break free from Tim O’Reilly’s definition of web 2.0 and move beyond that. Until someone figures out how to create revenues by setting up the plumbing , there will be slow progress towards solving it. There are many initiatives, many projects. But turning the web inside out, making the user the center of it, won’t happen until we break through the glass ceiling of current traffic and destination oriented web business models. We need less focus on steroid growth and more on basic infrastructure.

Not only is it more sexy to build a new Facebook, or Twitter, but it is also more lucrative. It’s hard to get investors to line up for basic plumbing. It is hard to convince people that you may earn a decent living by delivering commodity. It is extremely hard to come up with a revenue model for commodity. And until we solve that problem, we won’t easily be able to make the User-Centric web happen.

Who is willing to take care of the plumbing?

Is Yahoo getting back into the game?

I’m wondering if Yahoo is slowly getting back into the game. They have incredible amounts of traffic to their sites but never seem to be able to convert it into great services and loads of revenues, when compared to a company like Google.

I am not wondering about that because Yahoo might be joining OpenID, which is great.

I’m not wondering about that because they are finally starting to innovate around probably one of their biggest assets, email, with Yahoo Life (not a great name, but I understand it is under construction. I think it is a very smart move. I have always questioned why so little innovation takes place in the biggest interaction thing around since last century (yes, I’m referring to e-mail). I wrote a post about that earlier, called “Dear Yahoo, Microsoft, Google e-mail: Forget about Facebook, start innovating”.

I’m not even wondering about that because right now I’m listening to a song by Dizzee Rascals – Sirens, which is not on my computer, but it’s embedded in a new browser based MP3 player Yahoo released just now. It allows you to listen to music on web pages without having to download software, which is kinda cool and useful.

I’m wondering if Yahoo is slowly getting back into the game because it seems they have some great people on board. Remember, great companies start with great people. Jim Collins wrote in his excellent book “Good to Great” that great companies first get great people on board before they figure out where to drive the bus. I wrote a bit about that here. Yahoo’s Ian Rogers falls into that category (picture taken from his blog).

I wrote about a presentation he gave last year in a post called “Advice to the record industry: Go from distribution of music to distribution of emotions”.

I posted 5 advices there,and I think it is pretty cool that at least four of them are now being worked on by Yahoo. I said:

1. 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.
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.
4. How about providing the user easy ways to record and distribute his own music.
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.

With the release of their browser based MP3 player Yahoo is now creating the technology to make distribution easier. They are clearly thinking about user interaction and creation, additional content. In other words, Yahoo is looking at the experience of music, not the distribution of MP3’s. And that is why I am a fan of Ian. He just wrote another excellent post as a followup to last years work.

He is acting on the assumption that the previous walled garden the music industry has been build upon has set back that same industry for over 8 years now. I like Ian’s personal mantra

“I will not invest in futile attempts to create digital scarcity. I will always leverage scale”.

Ian turns out to be a visonair in this industry where he openly discusses previous failures and now promotes an open system in which the focus is to create user value. Not just for record or distribution companies, but for everyone in the ecosystem.

Ian might get some difficult questions regarding revenues, return on investments, etc. but I’m betting that he is going to kick start a change in the music industry, and to go along with that, within Yahoo too. A change where the focus will not be to leverage scarcity, closed or walled gardens. But to leverage user value, with open systems and easy to use tooling. Ian is added to my list of  people I admire and follow for what they are crying out to the world. These people all embody leadership that ultimately will lead to a next revolution in developments and thinking.

Design of an Open Social Interaction Network: Human needs

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.

The flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them part 2

After I wrote my earlier post called “The flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them” I was surprised by the really positive replies and also the quality of the discussion that seems to have been triggered by it. There are some really smart people thinking and writing about the current state of web 2.0. Let me provide a quick summary of the responses and then proceed into deepening this discussion.

Chris Clark told me I was missing the point as he correctly points out that web 2.0 isn’t just about Facebook or MySpace. Web 2.0 has provided companies a way to have meaningful discussions with their customers leveraging technologies such as Wiki’s, Blogs. He also mentioned that user generated content is becoming to rival the quality of in house productions.  Chris, you are right of course. I focused in my post on the user perspective, but if you turn it around and look at a company’s perspective, then things have definitely become better.

Kirill Bolgarov agreed with most of the things I said and states that “those who rule the party of social networking are smart enough to somehow force the evolution of the networks into something more like what you have described..”. Kirill, I believe that these changes will evolve from users turning away from closed networks to more open networks, and by service creators that will ultimately understand what’s really important

Jordan Mitchell states that “my sentiment is that the problem is that social networking really ought to be a feature of the Web rather than a destination”. He also feels that the people web should be a different layer from the content web. Jordan, I like that thought. It enforces openness, instead of walled garden social networks.

Rian agrees with me on my statement that we aren’t getting as much value out of a social network but has a very different approach on why that is the case. He argues that the network is the need, but that current user experiences doesn’t allow them to tap the full potential of their networks. He suggests that in an open social network the trick becomes how to identify the most important actors and tap into the benefits related to them. He writes smart things, check out his earlier posts on the matter. Rian, although I agree with your analysis that it would be beneficial to let users become more aware of relationships in order to tap into the useful resources, I also feel that it still addresses only one aspect of the equation, me finding other interesting people. But true interaction is not just about me finding things, it is also about me giving something valuable to the network. Professionally I might be interested to find many smart people that think about changing web 2.0 into something better, and interact with them (as we do now!).  At home I will be more interested in interaction with my friends and family, a much smaller group of people. No need here to have a large network, just simple and elegant ways to be interacting with them across all the possibilities on the web.

Rolf Skyberg wrote an excellent post in reply to mine called “Trancending my human limitations through the web“. He not only wrote very nice things about my blog (thank you!), but also stresses the point that humans love to interact. Internet supports that with things like relative permanence, instant perception and near-boundless audiences. But social networks suck at it. Why? Rolf states it’s money. If you give a product away for free there is always a monetizing scheme which provides the companies with a strong incentive to build a closed large network. The solution for the user of course lies in a large OPEN network. Rolf, I agree with you on this. It is precisely for this reason I find the possible Microsoft investment in Facebook a very risky strategy. it will increase ad pressure on the user, and they won’t like it a bit.

So how about taking this discussion one step further? Can we use the positive energy and smart thinking around us to draw up a high level design of a new web?  I’d rather not call it web 3.0 (tacky right?).  It would be an interesting experiment to see if we can come up with some great idea’s that might help service creators to develop services that are adding true value to the user. We would need to consider human needs first, then go into the ways of supporting those needs using tools and technologies. But we also should be thinking about  monetizing it in such a way that the user and the service creator and advertiser benefit from it (there is no such thing as a free lunch right?).  If there is enough need for it I would suggest we all start writing some articles about it the coming weeks. Let’s see what happens with it. I will give it a go and try to write a post on it once a week.  Now all we need is a catchy title, something that will inspire us to write. How about “Design of an Open Social Interaction Network”? I’m open to better alternatives, post them in the comments section and we can see if we can improve on this.

Good luck, and let’s surprise each other with some excellent posts on the “Design of an Open Social Interaction Network”. Hope some of you out there like this experiment and join in.

The flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them

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?

Opening up your Social Graph

John Battelle pointed me to an excellent post by David Recordon from SixApart. He talks about the possible privacy and security issues in sharing information on the Internet. He argues rightly that your Social Graph (your list of friends and connections) belongs to you, not to others. Read it and look at the examples he provides. It gives you a nice idea about the possibilities to start getting aback control of your privacy, without losing the opportunites to connect to your friends in social networks. Excellent work. If this really takes of it will have great implications on existing social networks, but even more, on the behavior of the users in those networks.