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

A small discussion yesterday on Friendfeed after I posted a video that puts up a big warning about the way Facebook deals with your privacy. I do not know if any of the claims in that video are correct. Jason Kaneshiro pointed me to an article posted earlier that mentions some of the same assumptions here.

Privacy and Social media. An interesting contradiction. Social Media allows us to interact over any content on the web. It’s pubic by nature, people are stimulated to join an open conversation, become public figures. Social media does sometimes provide us “private” back channels (the direct message in Twitter). It is an unstoppable process. Any website, channel or technology is making the move towards the usage of social media. We love to be part of any conversation and by doing that we increase the value of any service for the service provider and ourselves.

And it feels good too. I don’t care a bit about the aggregation capabilities of Friendfeed for example. But I like the ability to join in a conversation about that content that gets aggregated. Same thing goes for Twitter. Tweets essentially broadcast something to anyone that wants to listen, and every once in a while, it leads to responses that make you smile, laugh out loud, sad, surprised. All emotions are addressed in a way.

I think it is a great that social media allow all of these interactions to take place. It makes the online world a more fun and interesting place to hang out. But it gets messy when the objective of the one providing the social media capabilities isn’t to let us interact. It gets messy when the objective is to store and analyze our interactions and relations on the web in order to make money. It gets messy when a privacy policy of the service provider is 10 pages lawyer talk that no one bothers to read. It gets messy when users are naive enough to think that this isn’t happening at the service they use. That is the point where privacy all of a sudden becomes important in social media.

The sad thing about this is that Social Media and privacy are holding each other in a death grip. But privacy is slowly choking and turning blue. Social Media can’t really exist unless it facilitates public interaction. But underneath lies the trouble. I can’t think of a single web company that isn’t using the free ad based business model to exploit social media. And it is this business model that really fights the battle with privacy. And unfortunately it is winning, big time.

The generation that grew up without social media still has a grasp of what privacy means on the web. The generation that lives with social media now is already losing sight on the concept. And that i a real threat in my opinion. Privacy control is as important as controlling your own finances. It is not something to think lightly about. That doesn’t mean that there should not be any public interaction through social media! But it’s crucial that the participants can decide for themselves which aspects of their online lives an interactions are accessible and reusable by others, and which aren’t.

The only way Social Media and privacy could co-exist, because that’s what is needed, is to make the user himself responsible for his privacy control. These controls can’t be implemented within the social media. They need to be implemented within the on-line presence of the user!

To explain this consider the following (its’s from that Friendfeed discussion I mentioned earlier). Facebook allows you to set all kinds of privacy controls. Within Facebook you can decide what your friends can and can;t see, and up to a certain level you get to control 3rd party access to your profile. But there is one control missing. It is the ” Facebook, stay away from my profile”  control. Facebook helps you to protect yoursef from anyone except Facebook.

Privacy is something the user needs to be in charge of. Who are you to think that you can do this for me? To implement this one could think of a highly localized version. Every user has his own privacy controls on his computer. But a much better solution would be to use the banking model. Create large privacy faults on the web where users can store their interactions and controls. Interacting using social media then simply passes by the controls we have within those vaults. Some will provide full access, some will put constraints on them. And the banker that provides this privacy service only has one business model, that is to protect the user’s privacy. And just like with banking, we want to have choice, privacy banks that compete to provide us the best, simple, easy to use, cheap, customer-centric service possible. A service that can connect with all social media and allows instant, fin-grain controls accessible to the user.

A simple idea, but almost impossible to implement due to the mainstream free ad based business model. Do we really need privacy controls in Social Media? You bet. We haven’t seen the last of this. As more Beacon-like services appear, feeding upon our personal data I think that privacy will wrestle back. Privacy will become a powerful counter force to the public addiction of this free ad based business model and get balance back into this death grip.

An interesting panel discussion with Google and Facebook opposing each other about data portabilty. Facebook refuses for now to implement Google’s FriendConnect. The reason Facebook won’t, according to spokesmen, lawyers and other executives is that Google violates their terms of use. FriendConnect could violate the user privacy, something very dear to Facebook.

A quote from the article written by Dan Farber:

Facebook’s Dave Morin defined openness as giving people control over the information they share and providing developers with the capability to build on top of the Facebook platform. Social data breaks down into three categories, Morin said: identity data, social graph data, and feeds and social actions. With 80 million users, Facebook has a responsibility to make sure that users understand what and how they are sharing information, he added.

David Recordon has a very nice way of saying that the Facebook approach is bullshit:

“What Facebook is doing (with dynamic privacy) is very laudable–if you choose to share something in one place, it should appear in another. It’s just not clear on how this dynamic privacy will work. If Facebook tries to do it by themselves and not with other people, it will be hard to make it really scale,” said David Recordon of Six Apart, who has been involved in data portability efforts.

While I do understand the need for privacy and protection for users, I also cannot help but feel that Facebook is playing its final cards in an already lost game of Walled Garden poker. Actually Dave Morin says two different and not so complementary things (I am paraphrasing here).

1. We need to protect user privacy
2. We need your data so that we can let 3trd party developers into our walled garden, thus making a whole lot of revenues

I believe that this whole privacy discussion is bullshit. Am I the only one finding it a bit ironic that I have to leave the safety of MY privacy at Facebook or Google to defend. They aren’t there to protect my privacy. They are there to “harm my privacy as little as possible” in order to make a few bucks. And to be honest, I’m fine with that. I understand that allowing such companies to access and work on the data I provide them I get services in return. But they shouldn’t be having this pathetic discussion over my privacy. They are at it because they have interfering business models. So let’s just quit this “laudable” privacy heroics and just talk about the things that are really what it is about.

There is only one person remotely capable of being responsible for my privacy, and that is me. If you seriously want to help me be in control of my privacy, then stop hiding behind your business models and terms of service. Provide me with easy to use privacy controls that do not need 10 pages of judicial language. Tell me exactly which switches I can set to protect my privacy, ad in return you can decide for yourself how much of the service you provide is free for me. I can understand the need to make revenues.

Stop choosing the path of advertisement harassment and 10 page terms of service while at the same time pretending it is for the “protection of the user”. We don’t need protection from either Google or Facebook. We need these giants to take the side of the user instead of the network.

If Facebook would be truly thinking user-centric, they wouldn’t be talking to Google about my privacy. They would be talking to me. They would provide me easy controls and also be very clear about the consequences of using those controls. If I protect all of my privacy then I shouldn’t expect much in terms of free services (as Facebook does need to make a buck). If I relieve my privacy controls and allow specific access to parts of my personal data, I get the service for free. It is simple, honest, and user centric. In that way I’m in control.

So please, stop doing all these “laudable” things. Hand me the controls over my privacy instead. Choose the side of the user once. It will help us all create a user-centric web. And it will stop us using the dreadful free but ads based business model that locks both the investor and the entrepreneur into walled garden thinking and holds us all in a web 2.0 Death Grip. Right now, a Facebook user is like a beautiful bird. The bird is free to fly anywhere it want, as long as it remains in the golden cage Facebook has provided them.

I’m not sure what to think about the different blog posts covering the interview Mark Zuckerberg has given recently. The tech community seems to be giving Mark a pop star status,leading to witch burning scenario’s, well described by Michael Arrington here. I guess techies are just like other people in need of icons.

Mark and his team do need to get credit for the way they have grown Facebook in a few years. Starting from scratch it is now on of the top communication platforms worldwide. There aren’t many examples of entrepreneurs being so successful in such short time. But now that the time has come to leverage that success, in other words, monetize the platform, I’m not much of a fan of Mark or the Facebook platform.

When it comes to monetising Facebook is constantly trying to balance on a thin line between the interests of the user versus the need for Facebook to generate revenue streams. The most obvious example is the release and backlash of their Beacon project. The main reason for their incredible growth but also this balancing act is that Facebook fell for the $16 Bln advertisement trap, just like many other web 2.0 companies did. In an interview with Marshall Kirkpatrick we can clearly see this balancing act. He says:

Zuckerberg told me today that he believes data portability is an important direction the web is moving in, that fundamental openness between sites is inevitable - but that Facebook is focusing on questions of privacy and user control as its contribution to that movement. That may be a fair, if frustrating, position for Facebook to take. It may also leave them on the sidelines of larger conversations.

Let’s translate this. I hear Mark is saying that data portability is great but that user privacy and the control of it comes first. While I couldn’t agree more, I have serious doubts Mark is there to protect the privacy of his users. Launching SocialAds and Beacon proves that Facebook isn’t there to protect privacy. That doesn’t generate revenues. Facebook’s sole purpose is to monetize the social network with advertisement. Which is fine, but hardly the “user” perspective. Facebook logs everything we do on the platform. We do not have the option to turn this data hogging off. It is the price we pay for getting the service for free. So let’s get one thing out of the way, Facebook isn’t there to protect our privacy. It is there to protect the Facebook network so that it can execute it’s business model without leaking value away outside the network. The biggest problem I have with this is that most Facebook users are completely naive to the working of this business model. They do not have a clue that Facebook collects their data, their interactions for monetizing purposes. It is the “below the radar” data hogging that creates the tension with user controlled privacy. Not the openness of the Facebook platform. Facebook is one big walled garden, and Mark isn’t going to open up that garden for data portability. He needs people to remain within that garden to make money. It is as simple as that.

On data portability he says:

“If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends’ news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive - then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there’s no longer any control over the data for users.

While this sounds like a real privacy issue which Facebook solves for its users, it really isn’t. Facebook isn’t actually deleting information or protecting the user when he changes settings. Facebook has your data, always, and never deletes it. The real issue is that the data isn’t owned by the user. He doesn’t have any real controls over it. Sure, he can ask Facebook not to display certain aspects of it in a newsfeed, but the data is still there, owned by Facebook. The Facebook user gets a false illusion of privacy and security, but in fact he doesn’t have the control. Always look who is in control, who owns, and you will know who is controlling privacy.

The answer to this privacy issue is really simple. Let the user own and control his data. Only then privacy responsibility is put where it should be, at the user. That doesn’t mean privacy is secure, users make mistakes or do not take their responsibility. It just means that the responsibilities lies there where it really belongs. I’m not sure if the user is ready for it yet, but it is the right thing to do. Check Dick Hardt’s work on identity 2.0 out. He knows what he is talking about and works on ways to solve this issue.

On Beacon Mark says:

On Beacon, Zuckerberg said: “There were sites that people wanted to share from, like Yelp, where you’re already making public comment. For shopping, maybe in a couple of years people will want to share that.” He said that it “was probably a mistake” to roll out Beacon in the context of user commercial activity. He emphasizes that Beacon is a part of the Facebook Platform more than it is an advertising effort.

I think Marshall gets it right when he says:

Zuckerberg’s assertion that people may be more excited about exposing their shopping activities in a few years may be correct, but it might also be the delusion of a man trying to monetize the tricky market of social networking.

I remember the speech Mark Zuckerberg gave when project Beacon was launched. He wasn’t talking to the users. He wasn’t addressing user issues or user value. He was giving his speech to top executives in the advertisement business. He was explaining to them that the world of advertisement was fundamentally changing due to Facbeook and Beacon. So let’s drop the “users want to share” part of this message and recall that the business model of Facebook isn’t about leveraging user value. It is about leveraging network value. Facebook is getting the Turkey ready for serving, the question is, who is the Turkey?

More on data portability:

I asked Zuckerberg if he was taken to the edge of a cliff and had to implement either OpenID, oAuth or APML immediately - which would he chose? He said he enjoyed the question, that OpenID was the one of the three protocols that had been most discussed internally, but that the bulk of actual developer demand seems to him to be focused on the Facebook Platform.

And finally Mark says:

“We are philosophically aligned [with the data portability movement],” Zuckerberg said. “We are pushing in our own way to make the world a more open place. It’s going to be good when it happens.”

I like the “philosophical alignment” part of it. Yeah we are committed to data portability (on a philosophical kind of way), but for now we will focus on the platform itself. Well, he couldn’t have said it any clearer than this. Facebook is holding on tightly to their walled garden. But it is a fight they will not be able to win. Human nature will not let them,. It is in our nature to look for freedom, not to be bound by some network value leveraging business model.

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!

This is a post I actually started writing at the end of 2007. But I had a hard time putting the finger on what it was really about. After today’s announcement of Google and Facebook now joining the dataportability.org work group I decided to look at it again to see if I could get my thoughts about the consequences of freedom on paper.

Looking back at 2007 for me the year has brought us expected but almost endless growth in social networks. The two biggest, MySpace and Facebook have reached both incredible amounts of users and traffic. There is obviously a need for users to participate in such networks. With rapid growth always comes pain. In the case of Facebook clearly the introduction of SocialAds and Beacon have become their major hurdle to be taken this year.

But a more subtle revolt is gaining strength by the minute. It comes from web knights fighting for the cause of freedom. People like Doc Searl, Tim O’Reilly, David Recordon, Rolf Skyberg, and Chris Messina are raising their voices to set the user and his data free. These people have been shouting hard enough to make some the companies with the biggest user data bases, Google and Facebook, to finally join an initiative to work on data portability. Marshall Kirkpatrick from readWriteWeb makes an interesting remark about that:

The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.

Customer lock-in is exactly where the problem lies. We need freedom for users, not lock-in.

There has been a lot of talk about the current openness of social networks. Most services aren’t really open. The user gets inside but isn’t able to get out or publish his data from that network anywhere else. The web 2.0 free but ad based business model enforces these walls and is a major threat to both user and data freedom. The holy grail of behavioral targeted ads is strong amongst social networks owners and advertisers. But the tension between the advertiser wanting to get his message across and the user who’s privacy is not guaranteed will lead to backlashes as Facebook has been dealing with at the end of 2007. This tension is becoming so strong that even the Federal Trading Commission has felt the time has come to publish privacy guidelines.

While I also have argued that it is time to set the user free, I have been thinking a little bit about the possible consequences of that. Freedom always comes at a cost. That is fine, as long as we understand what that cost might be. Let’s first see what kind of freedom we are talking about. In a previous post I used the concept of a traveler and a gas station to describe the type of web we might be moving into. This concept leads to:

A passport that identifies you at all destinations, a traveling bag where you can keep your personal belongings, money, food, drink, a good map for the area you travel to, a language guide, and easy ways for you to: obtain relevant information/keep track of/meet/interact with friends and strangers.

It is a very basic and simple list of needs. Translate these needs onto the (mobile) web and we can easily come up with services that address these needs. Entrepreneurs need to think more in terms of running a gas station on a freeway waiting for a car to arrive and servicing the traveler, instead of becoming an amusement park owner, letting children drive a Donald duck car, but only if you visit Disneyland.

Perhaps the most obvious thread to this freedom comes from the user himself. Often depicted as lazy and unwilling to do the work needed to be in control of his own privacy, we tend to think that no one is really waiting to be freed. An argument heard often is “People on Facebook don’t care about the walled garden”.

This is probably true in a lot of cases. But I’m betting that the majority of the people on Facebook or Myspace, or any social network is completely unaware of the underlying business model of the service. They haven’t got the faintest idea that Facebook actually uses their data and interactions to draw advertisers to the platform and the user. Is that a bad thing? No harm done right? True, but it isn’t exactly transparent. And the trouble starts most of the times when the user tries to move his data from one network to another. Not only is this almost impossible to do, it also raises questions who really owns the data.

I believe it is a good thing to open up walled gardens, to set data portability standards and allow the user to move his data around in a way he prefers. I also believe that by doing that, service providers will start moving away from the free but ad based business model and start thinking about user value again. It is a knife cutting both ways. Everybody benefits.

Let’s assume that all of this is happening, that the user gets his freedom again. What does that mean for the user itself? H.L. Mencken once said ‘The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe”. I think that this quote ties in nicely with the earlier observation that Facebook users are mostly ignorant about the Facebook business model. They have a sense of security that their data is safe at Facebook and don’t really think about the consequences of their privacy.

Freedom comes with consequences:

1. You can’t really be free unless others are free as well. If you are able to export your profile, data from one place to another, but your friends can’t or won’t then it won’t do you much good.
2. If you control your data, then you get the responsibility for protecting it to a level that you are comfortable with. No blaming services like Facebook anymore. If things go wrong, then you probably screwed up yourself
3. With this responsibility comes work and effort. As people are inherently lazy and pattern steered beings, changing this pattern will be a major hurdle. If controlling your privacy takes too much effort you won’t do it, with all the consequences being your own responsibility.
4. Just as you have the freedom to chose how to handle your privacy and data, your friends have that right too. It isn’t really up to you to move data you got from a friend to another place. It is your friend who should be deciding about that.

Right now I don’t hear a lot of talk about how these issues are going to be handled when data portability becomes a given. I would have been surprised if it was being discussed as data portability seems to be a tech-created solution to the wrong problem. As I said before:

Unfortunately, we are all fighting the wrong war. It shouldn’t be about who owns the data. Who cares? It should be about providing me the best value. What I simply cannot understand is that service providers don’t realize they can have ALL relevant data directly from me if they provide me value, and if I am willing to trust them. It is all about choosing the wrong business model (data, walled gardens, free but ad-based services) instead of providing the user true value (the best business model you can think of).

Freedom for the user can only be achieved if we implement the right tools for him to protect and benefit from that freedom.  We need:

1. Excellent, easy to understand and use, transparent, privacy and trust controls where the default is always set by the standards of the user. This standard should be implemented across any service the user actually uses. It implies that these measures are user centric, not site-centric!
2. Easy to use exporting and archiving tools. Freedom for me and my data isn’t really true if I can’t move around easily. We need standardization so that exporting social data from one network to another can be done seamless by the user himself. That also includes downloading all my stuff to my own computer, burning them to a CD etc. Ever tried burning your Facebook contact data to a CD?
3. I often see privacy tools implemented in such a way that technically protect my privacy well, but require unwanted amounts of effort to use. I don’t want to be in a continuous dialog with a privacy control system asking me if person x or company y can have a specific piece of information. It will take too much effort of the user and will therefore never work. Instead we need a finite set of default behaviors that are related to the task I’m doing as well as the data that is being used. An obvious example would be that it would be rather odd if Facebook would start asking me about my credit card details when I’m browsing profiles. But when I’m buying a book at Amazon, it is just fine. In the first case I might want to actively make a privacy decision, in the second case probably not.

Data portability is important and it is good to hear that some of the major players are now joining the work group. But I hope they aren’t going to solve a technical problem. What they should be thinking about is how technology can support human needs. If they do that users will be freed, if they don’t then we will be stuck with a technical solution to the wrong problem. To be free, or not to be free, that is the question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discussion is continued with Anne Zelenka at GigaOM.

Real-world benefits for the user

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

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

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

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

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

Benefits for the advertiser

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

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

Benefits for the service creator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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