The real value of Twitter’s ‘Suggested users feature

Jason Calacanis has a long post up about the value of a Twitter suggested user. He explains that being a suggested user on Twitter is more valuable than buying a superbowl ad:

Everyone loves a timely or fascinating question and, in my estimation,
I would get a one percent clickthrough rate on each question. If I was
able to reach three million followers, and kept half of them (1.5m),
that means every tweet would get 15,000 visits. Five a day means
75,000 daily visits, and over two million visits a month–or close to
50m visits of two or three years. Some percentage of those two million
would participate in Mahalo by asking or answering questions, and if
that number is also .5 to 1%, that means I would get about 250,000 new
members for my service.

He goes on and explains why Twitter is so disruptive:

What is so disruptive about Twitter
————————–
From my perspective, the most disruptive thing about Twitter is its
presence. It’s everywhere at all times in a way that only an AT&T “You
Will”-style commercial could have predicted in 1995 (or could explain
in 2009–funny how that goes huh?). People get and give Tweets from
the time they wake up until they fall asleep.

Twitter is a giant, open email box that we all hang out in every day.

I don’t really get it. I may be ignorant, but what Jason is actually doing is pretty much old-school web 1.0 thinking. He is thinking eyeballs, traffic, and getting some users from that traffic and monetizing it. He knows Twitter is growing fast, and he has seen that being on the suggested friends list of Twitter gets you ten thousands of followers every day.

What he fails to mention is that the quality of the followers is below zero. You don’t get a targeted group of people you can communicate with. You get everything, including thousands of spammers and bots invading the Twitter network. You get engaged people, listeners, people that signed up and have no activity, people with 20K followers and 2 tweets, etc.etc.

It makes the reach you have on Twitter as good as any spammer that hijacked millions of e-mail addresses. There is always a sucker that falls for it. The real-time effect is pretty much worthless when put into comparison to the nr of followers and the spam being produced. To me the only benefit, if you can call it a benefit, would be that the audience that follows you remains persistent. How many people have you seen closing their Twitter account actively? Before Jason knows it he is addressing 2M Twitter accounts of which maybe 1% may provide some real value. The rest is like with display ads. Not targeted and a waist of money, space and effort.

If anything, social media evolution should have taught us by now that it isn’t a numbers game. It isn’t about quantity, but about quality. And frankly, quality is hard to be found these days on Twitter with their suggestion list, spammers and bots. It seems to me that 9-10 new followers fall in that category at the moment. Could be that I attract the wrong crowd, but I doubt that it is different for others. Jason is betting on quantity, and that might just cost a lot of money with mediocre results.

Don’t just take my word for it. Check out this perfect example of a discussion that Robert Scoble started on Friendfeed, a service that is supposedly the best around when it comes to engagement. Forget it. It performs as bad or good as any other service out there. Most people aren’t engaged (are they even people?). Most are publishers, some are listeners. A few engage, and those are the types that would engage everywhere. The rest are just people that signed up to promote. They don’t care much about engagement.

We may be getting to a real-time web and a more social media place. But I doubt human nature is changing with the same speed. It’s all over hyped and we need to relax a bit about it. To reduce the web’s future to status updates and refer to this as email 2.0 is more than idiocy. It’s mediocre. And it is scary to think that all our creativity, technological progress, and plain smartness has lead to this ultimate achievement of mankind. Is the real value of Twitter’s ‘Suggested user’ feature really $500K as Jason says? I’d say that there are far easier ways to burn money than that.

The network effect in web 2.0 is also its biggest tragedy

Side effects of using steroids

Robert Scoble, nicely served by his friend Loic Le Meur, started a discussion on Friendfeed in which he states that Twitter is broken and that unfollowing everyone might be the only solution. You can find it right here. The story got picked up immediately. Loic triggered this because he unfollowed everyone in Twitter and then build up a much smaller list of friends.  Loic has a good post up about his reasons for unfollowing everyone and starting with a clean slate.  Valid arguments and Loic states to have improved his Twitter experience tremendously.

I’m going to ignore thoughts about Robert and Loic following thousands of people themselves and using the strength of Twitter for their own needs as well. Following people by default leads to exposure to spam. I won’t discuss the topic of everything getting posted on 20 different places thus leading to a whole lot of duplication and pretty much useless aggregation. It is sufficient to say that this duplication increases the perceived growth of a service and it fuels our attention on size and growth.

Diving a bit deeper into what is going on leads to another discussion on Frienfeed, where we can read that Twitter itself is playing a questionable role in the way they have implemented a friend recommendation scheme. From that it seems that Twitter hasn’t put a lot of effort in getting rid of the bots populating the service right now. The underlying reason seems simple enough. Spam is profitable and the metrics we use to measure web service successes are flaky.

What are the most important external measures to determine the growth and success of web services? Things like traffic, page views, unique visitors, registered users. As a result, the more spam bots Twitter has in its network, the higher each of these measured variables. Getting rid of spam bots equals value destruction for them. Can you imagine a headline at the major tech blogs  stating Twitter traffic drops dramatically, only to find out this has happened because Twitter did its community a service by removing spammers. It’s not going to happen. And that is where Twitter and the rest of this web ecology are taking a wrong turn.

We're a bunch of Chimpanzees

The constant pressure to perform towards the outside world, the Tech blogging community, investors, traditional media, is caused by this stupid growth rat race. Fueled by the initial successes of companies harnessing the network effect, we are now all drilled as a bunch of chimpanzees to measure the success of a web service by its millions of page views, visitors, registrations. Every month the major tech blogs give us the ‘Compete’ or ‘Comscore’ benchmark. Are you in or out? Who has the biggest …(you can fill that in yourself). You do not have millions of visits daily? Fail! Web 2.0 on steroids.

It is sick. I can’t think of a better way of expressing this. This whole rat race towards world domination is one of the worst aspects of the network effect. We like to think of the network effect in a positive way. A service gets better as more people use it. There is a major downside to it that we seem to ignore. The network effect causes the network to be more important than the users in it. It is more important to acquire and lock in new users than it is to keep existing users happy and satisfied. Users have become statistics in Google Analytics. Our performance dashboards for the valuation of companies do not include anything other than growth figures. Installations, registrations, page views, visitors, bounce rates, uninstalls etc.  And that sucks, big time.

I do not want to be reduced to a number, a statistical value. I want service providers to care about me. I want them to spend more time on keeping me satisfied in their service than spending time on getting more users in the network. I want large companies to act small and personal. I want the growth of a service to be truly organic, instead of getting ‘orchestrated’. I want investors and entrepreneurs to stop feeding web companies steroids to grow big. I want them to start holding companies accountable for generating revenues. I want people to stop caring too much about what TechhCrunch, Compete, Comscore or anyone else has to say about the growth of web services because it only keeps this rat race going. I want CEO’s and journalists/bloggers to start talking about customers instead of taking about the growth of their network (check a few interviews and you’ll see what I mean). I want the web to be the place where user value is more important  than network value.

I realize I am an idealist in many ways. I’m fine with that. But I have enough experience to know that focus on user value delivers the best type of business and revenues. All it takes is a bit of courage and to stop ‘competing’ on growth and world domination. Focus on users and give them the best experience you can deliver. If Twitter would be doing that these spam bots would be gone in days. But Twitter is trapped in this steroid growth race. So they won’t be doing that. See how this leads to wrong decisions? Value destruction instead of creation.

If you deliver user value, you can scale using the opportunites the web brings you. If your strategy is ‘growth first’, then user value can never be added later. And don’t think focus on user value can’t be combined with growth! There are enough good examples of that. Amazon can do it. And so can you.

The praised network effect is also web 2.o’s  biggest tragedy.

Privacy is not dead, it is distributed unevenly

A famous oneliner from the CEO of Sun, Scott McNealy, in 2001 was “Privacy is dead, get over it”. It sounds true. This generation is growing up with Google, social networking, and having all relevant data on the web. We exchange private details of our live in order to receive service and value. We willingly share personal information in order to connect and interact with friends on the web. We are used to services exploiting our user data and don’t mind getting advertisement served in return.

The early adopter crowd jumps on every new social service inviting the rest to join in as well. In a Friendfeed discussion recently, Robert Scoble called privacy dead too. I responded by saying that that’s a stupid thing to say. Robert then explained what he meant. He exchanges privacy for service and gets value. I think that is a perfectly legitimate way of controlling privacy on the web.

Unfortunately, most do not understand the dangers of publishing or sharing personal information on the web. Nor do they know how to control this trade off Robert talks about. Privacy is currently diminished to privacy settings of Facebook. Not only are users not even aware of the availability of these settings, but they fail to realize that these settings do not protect them from Facebook. People don’t realize when they enter a zip code to find a restaurant, or look at the weather, they are giving away crucial information that can be used to determine an identity. Zip code, gender and birth date are often enough to figure out someones identity.
Most people are not aware that their Internet Service Provider has access to everything you do on the web. They know exactly which sites you visit and when. Your e-mail is available to your e-mail provider, unless you use encryption. Even openly deployed schemes, such as having to hand over private and personal information about yourself when signing up for a service like Facebook doesn’t make users worried.

Let’s look at 5 reasons why the sound byte “Privacy is dead, get over it” shouldn’t be taken for granted:

1. Financial theft
The most obvious problem related to a lack of privacy is theft. Credit card theft is big business. Spyware, malware, unprotected transactions on the web, phishing sites where you think you are signing up for a trusted serves that asks for a credit card nr, the possibilities are endless. It is relatively easy to get access to long lists of stolen credit card details. And once your credit card details are known it opens the door for fraudulent financial transactions. It sometimes takes months to figure this out yourself. I bet that everyone that reads my post knows a person that has been a victim of credit card fraud. It is a widespread thread.

2. Identity theft
Identity theft has become relatively simple on the web. We leave many traces of ourselves and our personal information behind on the web. Each piece of information in itself might not be harmful, but we tend to forget how easy it is to collect a much larger collection of personal information using Google, or for example a more personalized people search engine. For identity theft we really only need a few pieces of information. Birth date, gender, zip code. With any luck you can find out where a person lives, which college he went to, who he is married to etc.etc. The possibilities are endless. Chances are a person has published his mail somewhere on the web. Combining relevant personal information from that person his e-mail account can be hacked. And that same e-mail account is likely to be used for bank services. From identity theft we get back to financial theft and more.

3. Reputation
Our reputation in the old days was contained within the social relationships we were involved with. These relationships were naturally confined to locations, time and people we knew. On the web this has changed dramatically. Now everybody has access to personal information of anyone online. You do not have to meet someone to find out about him. Use Google or any other search engine to find out information about a person. You may argue that since you have nothing to hide there can be no harm done. But what if an insurance company sees that you love to skydive, or a photo of you smoking at a party? What if a company that you contacted for a job sees your old college photos where you and your friends were just having a good time? Or they see you having an online quibble with a friend and wonder about your ability to handle conflicts? Or notices that a blog post you wrote gets negative comments from (anonymous) readers? What if a bank investigates you on the web when you apply for a loan, only to find out that you haven’t been working at a job for more than 6 months in a row? Each of the pieces of information are totally harmless when places in one context, but are quite damaging to your reputation in another. Your reputation is now publicly searchable and without the context of a social environment you are acting in, this can lead to harmful situations.

4. Gossip
This is probably an unexpected danger when we build up an online profile. We are much more vulnerable to rumors and gossip. Where this used to remain within the social borders you moved in, they can now reach the entire online world. Anyone that wants to do you harm has a platform to (anonymously) start gossip and rumors about you. As your online reputation gets harmed you will find that it is extremely difficult to protect yourself from this.

5. Databases never forget
When we go online we leave traces everywhere. The site we visit, the things we search, the people we interact with, the transactions we perform. Everything is stored in databases. Often the information stored contains errors. There is no way for us to control what is being stored about us. But once stored, that information doesn’t disappear. And in most cases it doesn’t harm us. A friend of mine once was denied a loan because investigation showed that he was a bad debtor. It took him weeks to figure out that he once forgot too pay a bill of $10 for goods he bought online. He corrected his mistake, but nevertheless, the store had reported his behavior and it was stored away in a database that gets accessed when you apply for a loan. An example of how a small mistake can lead to considerable damage.

There are many more examples thinkable in which the public accessibility of personal information can lead to harm. We are so used to publicizing and sharing personal information that we simply can’t imagine the potential harm it can do us. Just because everyone shares personal information as if it has no value doesn’t mean we should accept that. Just because we all use Google and social networks doesn’t mean we should also accept that privacy is dead. Just because social networks let you sign up for free and encourage you to connect to as many people as possible doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of the possible consequences.

I feel that one of he most dangerous aspects of the “Privacy is dead, get over it” sound byte is the unequal relationship between those that have power over those that do not. A government, take the United States as an example, demands full transparency and doesn’t accept privacy as a constitutional right. But these same rules do not apply to the government itself. It doesn’t provide us transparency. We do not know what the government is doing with our personal information. There is no way for us to gain insight.

The same thing holds for services on the web. In order to join a service we have to disclose personal details. Yet we are not allowed to see or know what that web service is actually doing with our personal data. We disclose personal information to receive value. But we do not have a clue what we are giving away and how it will be used at some point.

This is the fundamental flaw in privacy on the web. It isn’t dead, it is unevenly distributed. The powerful enforce full disclosure without disclosing anything themselves. And as long as this inequality exists we shouldn’t accept the mantra that “privacy is dead” but instead actively work on solutions to help users control their own privacy.

On diminishing network effects in web 2.0, social media and human limitations

This post is a followup of a series I did last year on ‘The Human factor in social media’. Technology allows us to be “always on”. To be part of a never ending conversation. Simply plug in, anywhere, and you can join in. Friends are spread out across every timezone, so there always are people available to interact with. Technology becomes smaller so we can take our connection device with us, wherever we go. Connection technology provide us a network that spans the entire globe. Wifi, UMTS, HSDPA, WiMax, no matter where you are there is always a way to get on-line.

Everyone talks about the network effect in web 2.0 ((over-)simply stated: a service gets better as more people join). The network effect explains why the quality improves, it doesn’t explain why we all want to be a part of it. I feel there is an underlying need for interaction that drives current web development. Any respectable  web 2.0 service is based upon the premise that we all want to share anything with the rest of the world. We have life streams (what am I doing), news feeds (what am I reading), traveling plans (where am I going), shopping behavior (what am I buying), localization (where am I now), fan sites (who am I following). Even when you are not on-line, people that follow you are likely to know exactly what you are doing. Sharing alone isn’t good enough anymore. Now we need to discuss it as well. Everything is becoming social. You can share the things you discuss or discuss the things you share. Web companies have a field day catering our need to share and discuss what we are doing.

This ‘Social Media trend’, if you will, partially explains the phenomenal growth of social networks like MySpace, Facebook and even Twitter. The question is, where will this take us. I can’t predict the future, but I find it useful to think in extremes and see if it can help me get a better understanding of the present. I try to imagine what would happen if every Internet user (there are more than a Bln already) would be part of this process. What if everyone shared everything? What if we would all engage in a never ending conversation?

I imagine that a few things would happen:

1. Our world would become smaller instead of larger. As more people get online, and the data and conversations being shared becomes overwhelming, we will feel the urge to be part of less instead of more. Quality over quantity so to say. It is a natural phenomenon that can be observed right now. Just look at 2 examples of the way we now try to cope with the endless stream of information or conversation. a) Instead of searching ourselves we let others deal with that. In the tech world that would be the Robert Scoble or Louis Gray “like” filter. We ‘trust’ such people to find the pearls of wisdom for us, which takes some pressure off of ourselves. But if you think about it, this behavior is pretty ridiculous. b) We follow or get followed by countless numbers of people that we have never met, only to find out that the information or conversation that gets shared that way is often not as interesting as we thought. We end up listening and engaging with a much smaller fraction of the group of followers.
2. We end up spending our online time more consciously. Right now we spent hours at a time engaging in short bursts of interaction/discussion. It gives us pleasure, fun, a good time. But when does it really matter? When does it truly have an impact on your life? Change the way you think, feel or act? We may find inspiration, fun and profession on the web. But it simply can’t compete with real-life experiences (falling in love, getting married, birth, death, getting fired, getting hired, a fight, making up again, a beautiful sunset). The online engagements, as much fun as they are, are much more volatile than real life. It is the relationships you build up in the physical world that matter in the end. Family, friends, neighbours, co-workers.

It might be a bold statement but I believe that there is a limit to the quality effects of the network. While this effect can be used to explain why Google search improves as more people join I would be willing to challenge its value in interaction. The network effect improves data, the most important currency in web 2.0 if you listen carefully to the experts.

I would argue that the network effect diminishes in value when it comes to interaction. We simply can’t interact with the whole world. Our interactions would become meaningless, lose impact, and our impact would become infinitely small in a global conversation. Our human limitations force us to focus on value, on those things that really matter. In the end there is no need to interact with 6Bln people. The real impact lies in those few people we engage with that make a difference in our lives. The rest is just play.

The idiocy of Social Media conversations

I read a post by Robert Scoble just now that made me laugh out loud. He observes that the discussions over at Friendfeed regarding the financial crisis lack depth and knowledge.

In the past 18 hours I’ve read literally thousands of posts and have done almost nothing but hang out on FriendFeed. I’ve seen a LOT of idiocy. And these are supposedly from the smarter, more educated people around. People who I’ve had a beer or two with and who I count as friends and fellow Americans.

[stuff deleted]

The downside of this new media world is that you’ll hear a lot of opinions. Which one is right? I’m not always right. In fact, I’m often wrong. But I’ve counted on YOU, the audience, to help me correct that when I’m off in the deep end. Now, though, I’ve seen so much idiocy that I’m not even sure of my audience anymore. That’s how deep our loss of confidence in each other has come.

It made me laugh a bit for 2 reasons. First, Robert is a passionate Friendfeed user and goes through major ups and downs regarding the value of the service.

Secondly he complains about the idiocy within the discussions on Friendfeed and the loss of confidence in his audience there. For some reason Robert assumes there are experts hanging out on Friendfeed that are engaging in thorough, deep discussions.

This assumption is wrong of course. Friendfeed is a cool hangout place for smart people that much is true. It is a specific type of person that hangs around on Friendfeed. Mostly early adopters of web technology. Regardless of the ’smartness’ of the people that hang out there Friendfeed lacks any support for in-depth discussions.

At best Friendfeed is a bar where we can hang out and ventilate our opinions. Which is fine of course, but hardly in-depth. Besides that, a discussion that possibly involves hundreds of people rarely leads to insight. There is no time to explore, people have to make bold statements in order to hijack the discussion.

Friendfeed provides us the stage for our one minute of glory. Engaging with other cool friendfeed users. It’s a bit like an idols competition. If you engage everywhere and say bold things you might get noted by the crowd and earn the Friendfeed coolness factor.

Does that make Friendfeed useless? Off course not. It can eb a lot of fun. You can meet great people and hang out. But that is exactly what it is. A hang out place for the tech elite. No more and no less. Steven Hodson calls it a silly little corner of the Internet:

Even the idea that a Nobel Laureate of Economics or a discoverer of the Human Genome are going to be found sitting around there computers chumming it up on FriendFeed ot Twitter is ridiculous. Like really, give your head a shake if you believe that. Supposing though that for some incredible reason you did find someone like Stephen Hawking on your friends list do you even thing you would be able to comprehend what the hell they were talking about. Not likely.

So Robert, here’s a suggestion for you. Forget even thinking that places like FriendFeed or Twitter are anything more than really cool places to get together with friends and chew the fat. You know .. just like the old newsgroups or web forums. You want the experts – you’re going to have to go find them where they live because they’re too damn busy to find any value in our silly little corner of the Internet.

You want to have a fun but overall useless conversation hang out on Friendfeed. Nothing wrong with that btw, I love doing that every once in a while. You want in-depth expertise call Steven Hawkins.

The unexpected dangers of Social Media

Yesterday I was going through some of my feeds when I saw something that made me stop and think for a while. It was an automatic update of Robert Scoble to Friendfeed. Robert turns out to be a Dopplr user and has set up his profile to feed automatically into Friendfeed. On Friendfeed we could read that Robert was returning to Half Moon Bay today.

Dopplr is a social networking service that lets you enter in your traveling schedule and share it privately with friends and colleagues. It then comes with all kinds of social functionalities that allow you, for example, to see if any of the people you know happens to be somewhere at the same time you are.

I’ve looked at Dopplr at an earlier stage but decided it wasn’t for me. But the way Robert used that service made me go back to his personal profile to see what Dopplr does. And it turns out there are (obviously) a lot of details available about his personal traveling schedule.

I feel that this is an example of social media use where having the ability to share anything with anyone reaches a privacy boundary we might not want to cross. There is nothing wrong with the Dopplr service itself (or with Robert for that matter). But when a service that advocates private sharing of personal information provides the user with the ability to share publicly things might get a little tricky. Especially if you are a naive user (Robert isn’t).

The power of social media lies in the ability for users to interact everywhere, any time and over any content thinkable. The tech  community has embraced this ability and shares anything with anyone. Life streaming is the new magic word. Personally I find this concept highly overrated. Let’s face it, a lot of our daily activities aren’t interesting enough to share with the whole world. Our lives or the things we do aren’t the same as lives of famous pop stars. It’s weird to see pop stars wishing that they’d be left alone for a while when they get harassed by press and fans. At the same time the infamous (that would be us) try to get the rest of the world to observe them as if they were pop stars by providing a life stream of things that happen. Sorry guys, we aren’t that interesting and I doubt people will lose a night of sleep over my published life stream (yawn). The real underlying problem with life streams is that the things that get shared are useless as there isn’t intent in sharing. The technology allows us to share anything we want, so we do exactly that. Burying the possibly interesting stuff under a thick blanket of total waist. But I digress.

Having a life stream, connecting your daily steps to the outside world has many advantages. But there are also disadvantages that most are not aware of. I feel that the early adopter community isn’t discussing or exploring the privacy aspects enough. We tend to look at the technical side of things (wow, cool technology), or the functional side (hey, I can now share my traveling plans). But we don’t discuss privacy. Privacy is obviously a painful and difficult subject in relationship to social media. It’s something we leave to the service owner to protect. That is not only naive but completely useless. You can have the best privacy controls implemented in a service like Facebook, but who is protecting me from Facebook? Privacy must be the responsibility of the user. But the sad thing about it is that privacy is held in a death grip by social media, and it’s slowly choking and turning blue.

A Dopplr feed being publicly shared is a good example of this. The advantage of Robert publishing his traveling schedule is that he might be able to hook up with friends during his traveling. But it makes him vulnerable in a perhaps unexpected way. I told him on Friendfeed that if I were a thief, his traveling schedule would provide me with excellent information on his whereabouts. I’d know when he would be home and when not. And I sure would know his house is filled with all kinds of expensive technology (his life stream tells me that). It reminded me of a story on the news a few weeks ago. It turns out that car thieves in the Netherlands had found a very lucrative thieving method. They would go to the long parking area of our national airport and steal expensive cars with integrated car navigation systems. Then they would choose the “home” address on the navigation system and drive to the house of the unaware owners that were obviously on vacation. As a result, not only their expensive car was stolen, but their house was conveniently emptied too.

The information about being home or not is obviously just one example that can have a very unexpected result. We share much more then that. We talk openly about the things we like or not. We talk about people we do or do not like. We are often unaware how much information about ourselves and our thoughts we are sharing publicly. Thirty years ago we would probably need a private detective to find out stuff about other people. Now all we need is to be able to operate Google.

I don’t think sharing information is a bad thing. I do think that current web practices makes people very vulnerable, especially if they do not understand the consequences of their actions, or worse, leave their privacy to be protected by Facebook and the likes. It’s why privacy needs to be controlled by the user himself. This is impossible with current services and that is a dangerous trend. Social media can be more dangerous than you expect.

Who am I to say Robert Scoble and Mark Cuban are wrong?

Just read two excellent posts on the advantage of long term video. I first read Robert Scoble’s analysis who then pointed me to another good article by Mark Cuban.

Robert says that long video will win over short video big time. The reason for this is engagement. If someone is willing to sit out a long video, he must be engaged with the topic:

But why is YouTube going longform, which is what Silicon Alley Insider just reported?

Easy: it’s much tougher to monetize short videos of, say, kids doing skateboard tricks, than it is to put some ads into a long video like the ones I do at FastCompany.tv.

Advertisers also will pay a lot higher rates for those long-form ads.

Why?

Because someone who’ll watch a 30-minute video is HIGHLY ENGAGED. They are far more likely to become a customer than someone who just watches a two-minute entertaining video.

Robert is making a valid point here. Watching a video on the web for 30 minutes needs engagement. So assuming that the people that watch them have a genuine interest in the topic at hand is probably a good guess.

Mark Cuban approaches it from a bit of a different angle. He notes that Hulu is kicking YouTube’s ass in two ways. First, Hulu uses YouTube as a free distribution platform for short teaser video’s which are pre- and postrolled with Hulu bannering. This free service of YouTube drives traffic to Hulu. But more importantly, Hulu can actually generate revenues on each video on the Hulu Platform:

Which leads us to the one area, OK lets say two areas that Hulu is just stomping all over Youtube;
1. Revenue Per Video
2. Revenue Per User

Hulu has one HUGE advantage over Youtube, it has the right to sell advertising in and around every single video on its site. It can package and sell any way that might make its customers happy. Youtube on the other hand, has that right for only the small percentage of the videos on its site that it has a licensing deal with. For probably 99pct or more of the videos on the site, Youtube isn’t supposed to know what they even are.

Mark is probably right about that too. It sounds like the best business model a video service can have.

The thing that nags a little here for me though is that both Robert and Mark are talking from the service provider’s point of view. Robert produces video’s for Fastcompany and notes that they can monetize advertisement much better on those video’s because of this engagement of the user. Mark syas basically the same thing. But what about the user?

Just because he is engaged and is eager to watch a video for 30 minutes or more, that doesn’t mean he is also interested in watching advertisement. From the perspective of the investor, the entrepreneur and the advertiser it seems obvious that the engaged watcher is the to go for with profiled and contextual advertisement. But for the user point of view, it might just be someone interested in the video, not in possible ad harassment to go along with it. We have seen this business model a long time ago BTW. It’s called tv, and most of us use a TiVo-like service or the remote control to get around those advertisements.

It is such a difficult balancing act. Advertisement and customer engagement. I am convinced that on-line advertisement ONLY makes sense if the advertisement itself provides the watcher with value. Robert provides the perfect example of this.

Oh, and don’t even start thinking about the buying process. If you do, you’ll see why Gary Vaynerchuk is the most brilliant marketer out there right now for starting Wine Library TV. I’m going to do a whole post soon just on what Gary is getting that even Google and Facebook aren’t getting.

Watching someone talk passionately about wine (or food in general ) makes anyone remotely interested in the subject hunger for it. So providing wine advertisement there makes perfectly sense. It monetizes the direct need of the user to get his hands on a great bottle of something.

But that example doesn’t hold for a lot of the more tech oriented video content Robert produces. People might enjoy watching them, they are produced with fun, passion and craftsmanship. But I doubt it makes the user crave for something immediately. Technology makes us gadget lovers tick, but it hits the fourth step in the Maslow pyramid. Wine or food addresses our basic need for survival. No competition there.

In the case of Hulu it’s worse. There are engaged watchers there, but these are not targeted the way Gary Vaynerchuk’s audience is targeted. These are TV lovers, they merely switched their behavior to an on-line environment. And when they get advertisement that in itself doesn’t provide the watcher with any value? They will either use the remote control or get a TiVo like service to get rid of the advertisement.

So, from the perspective of the advertiser and the service provider I get the business model. But from the user’s perspective? Who am I to say Robert Scoble and Mark Cuban are wrong?

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

What do Skype, eBay, the iPhone, Robert Scoble, Friendfeed and noise have in common?

Rolf Skyberg of eBay has an interesting post up called “Skype: proof that Voice is not the killer app”. Rolf is an excellent pattern hound and he has come with another interesting pattern after he looked at Skype. Skype was bought by eBay because eBay thought Voice would be the killer app. Read his post for all the details.

As we trudge on into the future, we need to question whether the old way of doing things is necessarily the best. Will your future mobile phone, even support voice calling?

Let’s take a look at lessons learned from Skype. eBay purchased Skype a few years ago for an admitted outrageous sum of money, betting on the fact that voice is, in fact, the killer app.

He goes on and notes that Skype implemented text chat later, which became more important to the user than the ability to call for free. He provides another interesting example that supports his conclusion:

I mentioned in a presentation that the current mobile experience “was crap”, and someone challenged me, asking if I thought the iPhone was crap. They asserted it was not crap, because it had displaced 15 to 20 minutes of browsing in the morning they would have normally needed to boot their computer for.

He concludes, also based upon this iPhone example that voice is not the killer app. The pattern he sees emerging is that:

depending on the needs of the situation, each application has a collection of “best” tools

Which is a simple and therefore beautiful way of looking at it. Rolf is right and wrong at the same time. I believe he is perfectly right with the pattern he formulates. There is always a best set of tools, and these tools even define the application in my opinion. But he is wrong about voice not being the killer application. The mistake he makes actually links directly to his pattern. He implicitly assumes that just because we can use voice on a computer we will. And that assumption is wrong. Skype initially got a lot of traction because of their unique business model, free calling. The early adopters jumped on it and gave the service a  boost.

But Skype is victim of the pattern Rolf has formulated. Skype isn’t the best tool to use for a voice call. It’s free but there are two major obstacles to it. The obvious one is the sound quality which is below average at best. But the most important problem is that most people (I mean regular folks here, not us tech heroes ) don’t want to talk to computers. In other words, the computer isn’t the best tool for voice. You need a headset, a microphone, there is a screen in your face, these are all tools that don’t fit the simple process of making a voice call.

I can already hear you say, but what about the iPhone then. Well, the iPhone, in my opinion, isn’t a phone. It’s a handheld computer that allows you not only to browse the Internet in an intuitive way, but as an extra feature, it also let’s you make phone calls. In other words. the iPhone isn’t the right tool for voice either.

I have been using my iPhone for quite a while now and to be honest, I am less enthusiastic about it than I thought I would be. Why? Because my mobile device for me is an interaction device. It is my remote control to life. I use it to call, SMS, take pictures and go on-line. The on-line part is the best you can get right now. The iPhone has defined a whole new standard for browsing the web with a handheld. Apple has brought us the touch screen, tactile movement control and an intuitive and simple Apple-like UI. But it is crap for calling or SMS. Not only do I need to provide more input to do that (compare it for example to ANY Nokia phone), but the touchscreen and interface get in the way of my input. I can SMS at a great speed on my Nokia, but I make tons of mistakes on the iPhone. The touch screen keyboard just doesn’t work. According to Scott O’Raw I need to use cocktail sticks taped to the end of my fingers to make it work

To rephrase Rolf Skyberg’s pattern a bit I would say that the core functionality defines the best tools. If your core functionality is voice then stay away from the iPhone and get yourself a “regular” mobile phone. If you want a web experienceon a handheld, there isn’t a better option than the iPhone.

We can use this pattern and see what we can learn from some of the posts that made it inot the top of TechMeme this weekend. Robert Scoble scores three hits this weekend with his posts on noise in web 2.0 and 2 separate posts on Friendfeed (here and here). As a side track, I have noticed and failed to understand that writing about either of these two topics leads to massive amounts of traffic, even for a small time blogger like me. For some reason the tech elite just can’t get enough of producing more noise about the noise they produce

Robert declares himself to be a noise junkie. He finds that the best way to be on top of a story, to be the fist to notice something, is to subscribe to all the noise out there and try to detect patterns. As you can see, noise is a relative notion. So for Robert Friendfeed is one of the best tools out there, because it let’s him subscribe to any amount of noise he can possibly handle. There are many conversations about noise out there already. Some love it and some hate it. The ones that hate it leave the services that provide them the noise (in this case Friendfeed) for what it is. The ones that love it try to explain the tons of features to reduce noise. Even the founders of Friendfeed have made noise reduction their top priority.

But looking at the pattern we formulated earlier this won’t work. Why? Because the core function of Friendfeed is the aggregation of information in a simple way. And if we look one layer below that we can already see the business model of Friendfeed. They are going to try and provide the next generation search functionality. Instead of indexing the entire web, something only Google can attempt, they have decided to index that what is shared on Friendfeed. The idea behind it is that if the information is already filtered by the user, then the importance and relevance of it will increase. The assumption may be right, but the way Friendfeed works right now doesn’t help it a bit. Friendfeed has made it simple to share stuff automatically. And because it is dead simple, anything gets shared, including noise. Friendfeed can implement all the noise filters they want, but most users won’t be able to find or use them properly. Right now Friendfeed is the best tool for content aggregation, but it isn’t a tool for noise reduction. Could it be? Maybe, technically these guys can build anything they want. But from a user perspective, I bet it would lead to more complexity in the UI making the effort to reduce noise more difficult than to simply let it flow by.

Designing a great service is the most difficult thing to do. But it might help to think about your core functionality. If you know what that is, then you can start building the best tools for it. Don’t fall into the additional feature trap, and especially don’t build everything the early adopters are screaming for. Stay at the core and if something else is needed, build another tool. The question was, what do Skype, eBay, the iPhone, Robert Scoble, Friendfeed and noise have in common? Well nothing more than this post I guess

Our fear of not being there when it happens

Several posts drew my attention the past few days. Their scope entilily different, but the underlying social behavior seems to be the same.

First there was Robert Scoble writing about “Not productive enough? Turn off the Internet”. He has been able to process massive amounts of e-mail (over 5000) in a short time because he was disconnected from the Internet. That proved fro him to be an enormous distractor. Not being connected allowed him to be productive (Then again, who says processing 5000 mails is productive ).

Josh Catone wrote an interesting article entitled “Why we need web apps on the desktop”. One of the reasons Josh feels there is a need for web apps to come to the desktop is that the browser is no place for multitasking. He shows an impressive list of applications he is running all at the same time and concludes that his browser (Firefox) would probably not be able to cope with a similar set of web applications. In his words:

There might be a day when the web truly is our operating system, and when browsers really will be designed to run multiple applications. But that day hasn’t arrived, and until it does, bringing web apps to the desktop is another important step in their evolution and the way forward in pushing the idea of hosting data in the cloud out to the mainstream.

Then there is Hugh Mccleod, who announced that he would stop using Twitter and that he has deleted his account. As expected a lot of bloggers reacted in defense of Twitter, with Tony Hung leading the pack, trying to show Hugh what he would be missing now that he has taken such a definite step.

What do all of these things have in common? In my opinion there is an underlying social behavior that we are all part of. You might think it is interaction, that is one of the main themes in my weblog. But I don’t think that explains it all. It is the fear of not being there when it happens.

Just think about that for a minute. Why do we need to be in 10 different places at once. Why does the web have to become a ubiquitous interactive environment that connects us to millions of friends across the globe. Why do we have aggregators that aggregate news and content from other aggregators, who in their turn aggregate etc. etc. Why is it so hard for us to turn of the computer at night and leave that never ending conversation. Which is sort of stupid, as this conversation is never ending. It’ll be there in the morning again.

We have a need to be part of something. We need to be there when it, whatever it is, happens. That is why we multitask. Why we are part of a gazillion social networks. Why we Twitter, Friendfeed, Pownce all day. What if the news breaks and we are not there? What if something hits the fan and we have missed it? It might be explained by the fear of not being there.

Robert Scoble didn’t turn of the distraction. Robert Scoble accepted that by letting go of the conversation, he wasn’t missing out. He was simply dealing with his fear of not being there. It happens to the best of us. Letting go sets us free. The conversation will never stop. So why not take a break from it every once in a while. the world will go on, and you will play an import part of in it.

Friendfeed a destination site, that is soooo web 2.0!

Michael Arrington writes this morning about the fast growing aggregator service called Friendfeed. After launch, just one month ago the ex-Google founders already see a steady climb of users. Most likely because a number of power users like Robert Scoble and Michael himself have joined the service and brought along their network of tech followers.

I joined Friendfeed too a few weeks ago (here) and was surprised to see its simplicity. Friendfeed allows you to import news or messages left behind by your friends. But it aggregates them(using RSS) from all kinds of different sites. Friendfeed currently allows you to import feeds from some 28 sites like Twitter, Jaiku, Digg, Google Reader, Delicious, StumbeUpon, Flickr, Youtube. Friendfeed also allows you to react or comment to things shared on other sites. So if Robert Scoble posts a Twitter and I am subscribed to his Friendfeed, then I can comment his Twitter inside Friendfeed. Unfortunately the comment doesn’t appear on Twitter, only on Friendfeed.

And that is probably precisely why I don’t use Friendfeed as often as I use Twitter for example. While it does a great job aggregating all the feeds for me into one place, it is quickly becoming a destination site. And honestly, that is so web 2.0.

I hate it when I need to go to my Friendfeed site to view all the feeds and comment on them. It sucks that my comments or ratings don’t leave Friendfeed but remain on that portal, only to be seen by those that are currently logged into the same site. And that makes Friendfeed provide us with great aggregating functionality in an old-fashioned web 2.0 destination site.

It makes me feel locked-in, puts up walls around me. Friendfeed is the most hypocritical of them all, literally feeding off the success of other sites (just look at Michael Arrington stabbing at Twitter). But when it gets interesting, when I get my chance to interact with something I discovered on Friendfeed, I don’t get to leave the Friendfeed walled garden.

So excuse me if I’m not nearly as enthusiastic as all the first mover bloggers that have written positive articles on the service. Yes, it’s a great aggregator fo feeds. Yes, it is incredibly easy to use, uncluttered, and fortunately ad free.

But they have missed the opportunity to create something unique, something that goes beyond web 2.0 thinking. They have missed the opportunity to make Friendfeed a service centered around its users, instead of centered around their own portal and database. And with the new search functionality added, they are locking in users even more to the Friendfeed site. And that is too bad.  It could have been a user-centric web 3.x service. Instead they stopped at old fashioned web 2.0.

The crazy thing about that is that if everyone is finally attracted to Friendfeed and locked into their service, there will be nothing left to aggregate from other places. Robert Scoble asks himself how many services we actually need. Well, with Friendfeed we don’t need any other right? Everyone loses, and that is too bad. So follow me on Friendfeed if you like. But for interaction, I’ll will probably also hang around other places, for example at my Twitter account

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!

Just a few minor wishes for 2008

As this is my first post in 2008 I will take the opportunity to wish you all a fantastic 2008. I hope that some of your wishes will come true (or else you wouldn’t have anything to wish for) and that 2008 turns out to be a great year.

The past week I have been disconnected from the Internet. I spend my time with family and friends enjoying Christmas and new year celebrations, the most important things in life. I also started doing some work on our house, we’re about to start to build four new bedrooms to fit our fast growing children in.  It was really relaxing not having to read e-mail, look at newsfeeds, or even Twitter. I found it quite easy to unplug. But I couldn’t help myself thinking about some of the things I have been writing about the past year. So I ended up making a wish list of things I like to see happen on the Internet this year.  I will spend some time at the beginning of this year to write them out. But here is the first one for 2008

1. Bring freedom and responsibility back to the user.
The current Facebook – Scoble data storm is the perfect example of that. Scoble is banned from Facebook for trying to export data of his friends to another application Plaxo. This has lead to a large discussion where people either agree with Scoble or Facebook. And some wonder who really owns the data. Scoble is back on again, Facebook let him back.

In my opinion we can learn a lot from this incident. First of all, applications that build their business models around walled gardens will increasingly have to fight of those that will try to tear down these walls. And they will lose. Human nature will always find a way to deal with walled gardens, just look at the brief history of the Internet (or any history really).  Walled gardens are broken down constantly and re-appear in different form. But the business model that comes along with it is not a good business model and will ultimately fail.

Secondly, the breaking down the walled gardens issue is really a data war as Scott Karp calls it rightly. It is about service providers trying to monetize user data and in order to do that they need that data exclusively.

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 realise 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).

Thirdly, Nicolas Carr gets it (half) right when he says:

Facebook has an obligation to protect the data entrusted to it by its members. At the very least, members should have the right to decide whether or not their personal information can be scraped out of the Facebook database. Scoble did not give them that choice.

Users should be protected against possibly harmful automated data collections. Nicolas points out that Facebook has an obligation to protect its users. True, but only for the right reasons, e.g. the protection of its users. They are crossing a thin line when they are doing it really to enforce walled gardens around the user.But the user has no NEED for walled gardens, all he really NEEDS is freedom.

But with freedom comes responsibility. The user can’t just sit back and blame Facebook or any other service for not protecting him. He needs to actively enforce his own privacy and protection rules to ensure that he is in charge of his information.

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 read Dave Winer’s comments this morning, I really like his analysis. He says:

So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation — or a last gasp of the generation that’s about to run out of gas. It’s their choice. And it’s fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle.

I tend to think that Facebook is part of a generation of service providers that is unable to make the transition. To speak in terms of Jim Collins, they are a good company, but I doubt they are a great company (yet).

The most important things in life

This image is taken from a Calvin and Hobbes comic book I have at home, called Scientific progress goes boink, by Bill Waterson. This has got to be one of the best Christmas poems I have ever seen in a comic book. I love Calvin and Hobbes and often wish I had this incredible imagination of Calvin.

I added a few lines to make the poem a bit more geeky. The coming days I won’t be writing about:

• Tweeterboard: Yet another useless leaderboard tool
• Current web 2.0 thinking is mediocre, lazy and opportunistic
• Observing social behaviour through a fishbowl
• Freedom to the people (part 2)
• We need a revolution in mobile U thinking
• The art of becoming successful
• It’s about interaction stupid!

Or any of the other topics I’ve been writing about the past few months. Instead, I’m going to spend this time with my family and friends, so that we can enjoy our Christmas together and I can get new inspiration for new blog posts.Enjoy, and I wish you, your family and friends all the best for this coming Christmas.  I will return after Christmas to write once again about this crazy and fun world we live in!

The New York Times river flows, but whereto?

Dave Winer is doing some interesting experiments to reshuffle the New York times content into something he calls a river of information. He uses the metadata the NY times provides in its on-line HTML news and using that data he can create mashups based upon , for example, outlines or keywords. Others have experimented with it as well allowing searches such as articles on Bill Gates.

I’m not sure what problem Dave is trying to solve.  I am no expert on search or news, but I wasn’t sure what the value was of the mixup he created for me. It seems to me that Google reader does everything Dave was ging for (search on the NY times rss feed for Bill Gates and I seem to get everything they have written about Bill Gates.

I also tried using it on my mobile (As some of the commenters explained would be good), but that didn’t work out very well. Navigation is poor, but the striping of all the flashy content you don’t need on a mobile did help a bit.

The keyword version was awful to look at, but more important worse to use. I have to roll over to each number to get an outline of what is underneath. A user interface nightmare.

The total overview of what is on the New York times is interesting, but for such a large resource the overview becomes so large I need an overview of the overview.

The question that comes to my mind is what problem Dave actually tries to solve. I can’t find it on his blog post announcement. I do see a lot of comments from people in the field (techies, here, here and here for example) that really like the work and the possibilities of the technology.

Is this a technology push of a problem that doesn’t exist, or am I missing the point? Personally I believe in the river of information analogy that Anna Zelenka posted earlier. She argues that there isn’t an information overload if you are willing to accept there is so much information. Just tap into it when you have a need and don’t try to follow everything (leading to stress and overload). That is what I do with Google reader really. But there are even better ways of finding answers to questions, the best being of course simply by asking them to another human being.

We might do this the “cool” way and twitter about it, getting loads of response from other techie twitters. But, simply asking a friend or someone you know or who you suspect knows the answer works too. As it turns out, people search way better than search engines according to Oliver Parriche of Yahoo. Yahoo Answers there are already 250Mln entries by users.

But if we really want to move forward here, why not embrace the work Jonathan Harris has done with his universe project. It not only has a very intuitive interface, but also links pieces of information in a very surprising way allowing the user to truly explore the universe of information and (Re-)discover great things himself.

What do you think about it? Am I all wrong about it and is Dave onto the next invention after he came with rss? Or is this more of a new tech feature that isn’t going to attract users?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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……

A cold case of SNIF, or Social Network Invitations Fatigue

Just saw Robert Scoble, probably one of the world heaviest social network users (in number of networks and size of his network), exclaiming he isn’t going to try out any more new initiatives unless at least 100 people ask him too do so. Judging the comments he got on that post, he isn’t the only one getting a little fed up (although, he does mention it might just be fatigue related to his newborn). Have you noticed there are more people complaining about it? Are we all falling for SNIF (Social Network Invitations Fatigue)? There are announcements for new initiatives each day. It is impossible to keep up. We now need profile services that can integrate all our profile services that actually integrate all my profiles on the Internet (anyone following this?). Pretty soon I will be hiring people that will integrate all these integration services for me, thus creating my super Internet profile for me! Sort of ties in nicely with my previous observations suggesting the Internet doesn’t evolve around you doesn’t it? Any takes on a better name describing this phenomenon? Anyone got suggestions how to cure SNIF?