The Open, Social web needs plumbers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is willing to take care of the plumbing?

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

The question is more important than the answer

Yesterday I wrote about the trend that every bit of content that is produced on the Internet seems to get aggregated, producing yet another view of what is already out there. Instead of delivering us inspiration, aggregation brings us more of the same. Aggregation doesn’t inspire us to think, it lets us sit back and consume. I said:

And when people get lost, they will simply return to their human nature. They will look out for the oldest, wisest, or craziest people out there. I don’t think the world needs more information. We don’t need any more or better content aggregation, search algorithms or noise filters. We need more inspiration. We need storytellers (and that will be the topic of another post).

I figured it would be good to spent another post on this topic and introduce you to a few storytellers I deeply admire. These are people that aren’t looking at their rating on any blogging leaderboard. They don’t publish for the sake of it. They don’t bring you the breaking news everyone else already does. They are, in my opinion, people that like to take the time to tell us a story. Something that is nearly always fascinating to read, and often leaves the reader with more questions than answers. They make you think, and that is the sole purpose of their act.

Jonathan Harris

If you are a regular reader of this weblog, then you already know that I am a big fan of Jonathan Harris. He is one of the best storytellers I know. You can find most of his work right here. One of the projects he did that really amazed me is called Universe.

Jonathan writes:

Each night, the great stories of ancient Greek mythology are played out in the sky — Perseus rescues Andromeda from the sea monster; Orion faces the roaring bull; Zeus battles Cronos for control of Mount Olympus. Most of us know the sky holds these great myths, immortalized as constellations. Slightly less well known are the newer constellations, largely added in the 18th and 19th centuries. These more modern constellations reflect a different sort of mythology — a commemoration of art and science, expressed through star groups representing technical inventions like the microscope, the triangle, the compass, the level, and the easel.

As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.

….

Universe is a system that supports the exploration of personal mythology, allowing each of us to find our own constellations, based on our own interests and curiosities. Everyone’s path through Universe is different, just as everyone’s path through life is different. Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from Daylife.

Universe is a concept in which Jonathan brings back our fascination of content exploration. In the earliest times humans would look at the sky and explore the universe. With universe he has created a concept and interface that allows us to explore the world once again. Instead of sitting back and getting stuff aggregated to your screen or profile, Universe demands you to explore, to discover, to be fascinated. Each trip is different.

There is a whole lot more to discover on his site. I love his work on human emotions (check out “We feel fine”). I have seen him present his work once and ever since I have been following him. For all you Twitter fans out there. Jonathan inspired a Twitter tool that is way cooler and more fascinating than any of the tools I’m aware of. check out twistori to find out what Twitter users are experiencing right now!

Rolf Skyberg

Anyone that has the audacity to write 477 slide long presentations and can keep the audience fascinated throughout each slide is a great storyteller. I discovered Rolf when he delivered a presentation in the Netherlands entitled “Web 2.0 why we got here and what’s next”. I went back to slideshare and looked at each of his slides. Rolf wasn’t presenting us anything. He was telling us a story. He calls himself a pattern hound, and he has become one of my favorite blog writers. He doesn’t write posts every day, but when he writes something it immediately sets you to think. Just take a look at a few titles of teh posts he has written. Makes you wanna read them right away don’t they?

• the Facebook stalker and other urban myths
• why you’ll pay to network
• 98% or even 100%-open: not enough in social networks
• delivering a useful luxury

Dig into his archives and start following him. There is a lot more to be discovered there

Michael Wesch

Michael is an assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He and his students have created several video’s that spread out like a firestorm over the Internet. He is a master in storytelling. What can I say, just watch his video’s if you haven’t already.

Conclusion

Storytellers are essential throughout times. Even in this digital age where every bit of information is available in digital form. Where all content is aggregated for you, ready to be consumed. But information isn’t really what inspires us.

It’s a bit like Neo in the Matrix, its the question that drives us, that inspires us. I just showed you three people that inspire me. People that make me think and ask questions. People that don’t necessarily provide us with answers.

There are so many more of them out there. I am really curious to hear who is inspiring you. What are your favorite storytellers? Let me know.

Web 2.0 has brought democracy, but it comes at a cost

I read a few different posts this morning and they inspired me for this one. First there was a post by Betsy Schiffman writing about the Web 2.0 Expo. She writes:

Now that the first burst of enthusiasm for social networking has died, people are realizing that web 2.0 is actually a huge time sink.

Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Plaxo may have helped foster community and communication, but they’ve also added immensely to the flow of often-interruptive messages that their users receive, leading to information overload and possibly a nasty internet addiction.

To underline this argument she uses a picture that I have used myself a few times already, but in a different context.

This is a set of logos of web 2.0 services, you can find many more of them here.

Another post that drew my attention was one by my favorite Pattern Houd, Rolf Skyberg. He writes about the principles of design and challenges us to rethink the way user interfaces are designed:

Is the ease with which we copy-paste both elements and information, forgetting the necessary influences of natural growth, decay, and selection?

If we forced ourselves to design only with pen and paper, would it necessarily create a more understandable interface? Pushing complexity away from the user, exactly where it should be?

Try this experiment for yourself, either in your next design, or your next powerpoint.

If you aren’t willing to take the time to draw each one of those fields and links, I can guarantee that your users don’t want to fill them in.

And he tops it off with a link to a cartoon that says it all.

What do these two posts have in common? To me they address a similar theme, using different approaches. Web 2.0 has brought democracy to web development. Underlying the web 2.0 developments lies a technology wave that has brought us near-zero service development cost. Anyone with an idea (it doesn’t have to be good) can become a web entrepreneur and build that idea into a tool. Anyone can launch that tool without distribution costs and use blogging platforms and social networks to make potential users notice the newly developed service. Anyone can affort to launch a Beta or concept service that isn’t finished because it can then be further developed with the user community. Anyone can build a service and forget about scalability, because it can always be done afterwards. Anyone can follow the ‘American’ dream and hopefully become successful and rich.

There is a clear upside to this democracy process. The speed of development and innovation is higher than ever. New ideas are born every day, but now new ideas can be materialized in the same tempo as they are conceived. There is also a downside to this. Lowering the thresholds to create new services doesn’t make the process of creating a great service ANY easier. If anything, the image above shows that clearly. There are literally thousands of “web 2.0″ services and brands out there. The web 2.0 wave is fragmented into uncountable small, niche, often cloned services. While Betsy talks about the information overload pressure on the user, I would say that the pressure is mostly on the web entrepreneur trying to get his niche ahead of the rest of the pack.

What strikes me most about it is that we tend to forget that building a great service, a great brand, the best usability, is actually all about craftsmanship. It isn’t a craft we all possess just because the technology has lowered the thresholds. Just because I can on-line create and edit images for free and with a few clicks it doesn’t make me a good designer. I can use Ruby on rails and have a web application up and running within the hour. But that doesn’t make me a great programmer or architect. I can easily come up with a web 2.0 brand name, just look at the web 2.0 directory. But that doesn’t make me a brand expert or a brand marketeer. And with the customer running around, constantly trying things out (hey it’s all free right), getting confused or bored easily, making something useful, actually creating user value is incredibly difficult.

Web 2.0 has brought us entrepreneurship and web development for all. But it doesn’t bring us craftsmanship. You either have it, or you don’t. But I know one thing. If you are thinking about becoming the next Facebook, Google, MySpace or whatever, begin your quest with finding talented people. It always starts there. Don’t be fooled by the ease of web development and distribution. Find talented people and create something that is designed, developed, implemented, branded and distributed with user value in mind. That will be the sured way to success.

Facebook popularity will decline because of a wrong business model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Marketeers are idiots

There seems to be some discussion on TechMeme about a research report just released by Burst Media. The report describes the behavior of consumers watching on-line video and their perception to advertisement placements within it. Research results, can we call it results since Burst media isn’t exactly an independent research firm, show that a) people love on-line video, especially for entertainment and b) they hate advertisement and in half of the cases abandon watching the video all together.

Astonishing conclusions. We watch video’s to be entertained, wow, didn’t know that. Everyone citing the research says that it finally shows consumers aren’t interested in advertisement placements in on-line video. Yet another unexpected result. We have seen this all before folks. And people have taken adequate measures against it. It’s called the remote control, and dvd recorder. The setting? Old fashioned regular TV broadcasts which are interrupted by fairly useless ads all the time. But as they provide the TV watcher no value whatsoever, he zaps away to another channel. This is exactly what happens on-line too. The situation or human behavior isn’t any different really. Advertisement within on-line video’s do not provide the user any value, so he zaps away from them. It is sort off pathetic really. The user walks away from advertisement on TV, let’s harass him some more on-line.

I wonder what the average marketeer does when he comes home after a long day of work and turns on the TV or watches some on-line video’s. Do you think he is sticking around with all the commercial breaks. No way. But he is getting payed to think that consumers like his commercial interruptions and that they dare not zap away from his sponsored message. Marketeers are idiots, and I don’t mean you of course, but the guy from that other company.

Does that mean there is no room for commercial messages or advertisement on-line? Of course not. But marketeers need to stop thinking that they can run ineffective tricks from old media in the “new” on-line world hoping they will be more successful there. Think again. There is one constant factor in the new world that was already there in the old world. It is the consumer. Human behavior doesn’t change that much simply because it is now on-line. If they didn’t like your message before, they won’t like it now either. The rules haven’t changed, just the equipment and the playing conditions.

Marketeers need to start thinking about new ways to get customers involvement. Instead of broadcasting a message they need to think about customer engagement (I like that term much better than brand engagement), customer experiences, and customer value.  Forget about bannering, cpm, and other fairly irrelevant metrics to measure the success of a campaign. Think about how you can deliver your customer an experience he or she won’t forget. Think about how you can start interacting with your customers in ways you can’t in the physical world. Think about delivering true value to your customer.

These simple, yet really hard to achieve, goals can never be met by bannering or pre-roll video advertisement. You and your advertisement are standing in the way of the desire of the customer to watch that video. Yes, you are getting attention, but it is negative, not positive. But if you understand the things that are important to your customer, then a new world of opportunities opens up. You can deliver him the content he wants, in the detail he needs it. Think vertical instead of horizontal. Think micro instead of macro. Think targeted instead of large. Think social instead of a-social. Think content, not banners. Let your customers interact, they love it. Try to interact with them too, and do this every day, with respect, sincerity, and with no other intention than to help and to provide the customer with value.  Ask yourself a simple question, how do I want to get treated by a company that provides me services? Make sure you do better than that. Read blogs or books from people that have smart things to say about that.

Tara Hunt writes wonderful things about Social Capital, perhaps translated into the respect you need to earn to engage with consumers. Try the link below for a video presentation she did last year in the Netherlands.

Or read this post by Rolf Skyberg from eBay, talking about customer engagement.

There are so many opportunities the on-line world can provide marketeers to get in touch with their customers. But they need to understand human behavior first. Get a grip and quit harassing us with “sponsored” messages that do not provide me any value.

Looking back at 2007 with a few lists of the best of..

It seems everyone is closing off 2007 with all different kinds of lists. I haven’t done that yet, but to make up for it, here are a few of mine:

My own 5 top posts in 2007:

1. De zin en onzin van advertenties in sociale netwerken, an article I wrote (in Dutch) for the largest and most popular Dutch blog Marketingfacts.
2. Counting down the downfall of Facebook as they set to introduce major add play
3. The flaws in web 2.0 and how to correct them
4. 10 ways to improve web 2.0 and move into an era of true interaction
5. Well, this was too close to call, these two posts got an equal number of visits:
   • Dear Yahoo, Microsoft, Google e-mail. Forget about Facebook, start innovating!
   • Following the emotions of millions of people

My top 5 blogs I like best (no particular order):

• Rolf Skyberg
• Doc Searl
• Fred Wilson
• Ze Frank
• Zephoria

These people are smart, understand social networks, business, human behavior, make me laugh, provide me inspiration. If you ask me again tomorrow, I will end up writing a different list

The top 5 video’s from 2007 I like best:

Top 5 presentations of 2007:

What are your top 5 lists for 2007?

Observing social behavior through a fishbowl

Is human behavior changing because of the way the web has allowed us to interact, or  are we still following the same basic social rules as, lets say 10 years ago? My guess is that human behavior is affected around the edges, but no more than that.

The web has certainly lowered the transaction costs, or effort, to interact with others. Going from long traveling journeys to meet, smoking signals, snail mail and postal coaches, the telegraph, Morse code,  radio, fixed telephony, e-mail, mobile telephony, SMS,  the web, and now many different kinds of social networking tools and platforms, transaction costs for the user have dropped to virtually zero allowing us to interact like madmen. Human nature forces us to interact with others as much as we can. And as we are supported by this economic law of zero cost, that is exactly what we do. It is for this very reason punishment often comes in the form of captivity and taking away the ability to communicate.  We do this with children (“Go upstairs to your room!”), but also with criminals when we send them to prison.

The lowering of transaction costs is (partly) responsible for the enormous amounts of e-mail, SMS, IM messages, phone calls, pokes, nudges, friends, social networks people use every day.  But it comes at a cost (free always does). Not only have we increased the number of times we interact with others, the amount of useless communication has increased to a level beyond comprehension. There are predictions that more than 90% of all e-mail traffic is SPAM making e-mail a lame duck in communication. Join any social network and within seconds you have friends you never knew you had (or perhaps ever wanted).

Does all this technology lead to different communication behavior. Sure it does. People contact each other and call each other friend from all over the world without ever meeting physically. They send each other virtual gifts,  even paying for some of them, send each other meaningless messages (to the observer) and communicate just because they can.

Dana Boyd writes some nice observations about this in her article called “valuing inefficiencies and unreliability”. One of her observations is that it has become easy to spam your friends. the example provides is Facebook Causes. I fell for one of those a few weeks ago when I joined the Movon.org protest against Beacon. And now I’m being asked to protest against President Bush, and a few other “important” causes. Another observation form Danah is that people tend to try to find excuses to blame technology when they do not want to communicate with others. “My cell phone was out of reach”, “I never got your e-mail” etc. This has become increasingly difficult as the technology is becoming more reliable.

I have seen some different behavior  with teens. While my parents were socially trained to always answer a phone call and I am used to answer any SMS I receive, teens can easily ignore calls or SMSes they receive. Not only do they not bother to think up excuses for not responding, it is a completely accepted behavior by their friends. The receiver instead of the sender decides what importance the  interrupt get.

But even with the endless possibilities to interact with each other some things in human behavior do not change. We still love story telling, the troubadour or bard of the middle ages has become the blogger everyone loves to read. We value the opinions from a friend more than that of a stranger. We value communication that has taken effort more than that which cost us no energy. Danah provides us with nice examples again. Teens start regarding Facebook applications as spam after a while, even if it comes from a friend, because it takes the sender no effort at all to send it. Comments are valued much higher, as it takes the sender time and effort to write one. It is exactly for this reason I always like it when people take the time to comment on my blog. Not only have they taken the time to read it, but they also have taken the time to respond. Out of this interaction new things arise.

Facebook is now providing scientists valuable information on the way people socially interact. Harvard scientists are now following all students from an entire class  at one college to study how personal taste, habits and values affect social interaction. Facebook provides the academic researchers with an enormous amount of data. Data which wasn’t available at such low transaction costs before.

While this sounds great I cannot help but feel that the researchers are really only observing a very small part of human interaction. People do crazy things on Facebook. Mostly because it is so easy to do crazy things. The costs of interaction are zero with massive amounts of waist as a result. Facebook slamming, profile rating, spam, hatemails, the worst in human behavior arises when people interact on-line. Does that mean that teens are a-social beings? I doubt it. I am sure that teens are slowly getting used to a different meaning of the word friendship in different contexts. But I also think that in the physical world these teens aren’t so different from an older generation when it comes to human interaction. We are still bound by basic social rules in which tell us how to respond to another person. We like to interact, love, care, listen, be heard.

But due to technological possibilities we often tend to forget about human nature. Technology provides us capabilities, and because of that these capabilities will be deployed.  It is easy to forget about human nature, about human needs when we design all these great new services. The sexier the technology, the more easily we forget about the most important actor, namely the user. Rolf Skyberg wrote a nice post about that called “Why innovation”. In this post he describes how meeting real customers changes his perception on his role as disruptive innovator at eBay. Rolf intuitively knows that technology isn’t what eBay’s innovation should be about. It is about doing the right things for the eBay user, allowing technology to make life easier.

The trap almost any marketer falls into is thinking he knows what is best for the customer, without actually ever meeting one. Using massive studies and research reports the marketer of today is armed with so much information about social behavior that he  can easily be fooled into  thinking he knows what is best  for the customer. I am not saying customers know what is best for them. But meeting them and interacting with them provides so much more value than reading a report on their behavior.

(image taken from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benjius/1174865875/)

It is what I call observing social behavior through a fishbowl. You can see the person, even see what he is doing, but you also be sure that what you see is a distorted version of reality. Human nature isn’t all that difficult to understand. It is around us, all we need to do is look for it.

Every generation needs a new revolution

Facebook and Google are getting a lot of attention these days. Everyone, including myself, seems to have a take on it and the urge to write about it. It is time to step back, observe and try to understand what is causing this.

The CEO’s of rivalling companies are falling over each other, often like little children. Personally I like Steve Ballmer best (seriously), he is such an incredible promoter. Just look at his great response to John Battelle’s question on search here, or his quote on Android being a paper tiger for now. Business week summarises a few here (including one of my comments ). Or how about Mark Zuckerberg, the man that seems to have gained a pop star status with his incredible success in growing Facebook to 50Mln users. On top of his success he seems to have stated that the user really has no choice when it comes to SocialAds.

If the Internet has brought us one thing it is the ability to start a hailstorm as a counter-force  to the scooping blogging community reporting on the successful initiatives or people.  The first hacks on OpenSocial have already been reported, as well as a recipe to block SocialAds. 100 Year old laws have been dusted off to explain that Facebook SocialAds are illegal. And some even started a countdown for the downfall of Facebook .

Web 2.0 brought us an explosion of innovations in social networking services. The biggest contest ever for the attention of the user. Web 2.0 companies create phenomenal free services and show unprecedented user base growth. It is all about eyeballs, who has the most users, the largest network. The waves of success were driven by free services. The question how create revenues being the last to answer. But with the success of all these services, monetization becomes an issue. Pressure is now on all the successful CEO’s, how to make revenues that live up to the incredible valuations being drawn up? The way out is provided by the advertisement business, nearly $ 42 Bln is predicted to be available in 2011 in the US only. It is this pile of money available that provides everyone a way out. It is the golden pot at the end of the rainbow that can be used to pay for the costs of free services and to justify incredible $15 Bln valuations of successful web 2.0 companies.

So why the emotional responses, why the polarising blog posts on these matters? Is it jealousy, because some are more successful than others? Maybe, but I am inclined to think it is something else.

I think it is because we are finally starting to realise that everything comes at a price. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Your “free” Facebook account is payed by SocialAds. Your perceived secure privacy on social networks isn’t as secure as you might have thought. The service you thought was build for your needs is now turning into an ad machine. One that takes your personal information and relationships and uses these to provide you with ads that, luckily won’t feel like ads according to Mark Zuckerberg (phew, a relieve here).

These services need your attention, draw you in because it is free, but won’t let you out once joined.  Try taking your personal belongings, your messages, your friends, your emotions with you from one service to the next. It can’t be done. It is the Catch 22 for web 2.0.

I think it is precisely this trap we have fallen into that is now delivering all these emotional responses on the web. We are finally beginning to realise that web 2.0 didn’t give us freedom at all. It provided a well disguised containment, a trap that lured us in. Beautiful sirens singing to us, backed up by bloggers, newspapers and magazines telling us it is all about you. And now with our  saviour Mark Zuckerberg telling us that there is  no way out. But Mark is getting a bit nervous with rivals like Google who, in perception at least, do offer a way out with OpenSocial and  Android.

It is becoming clear to me now that the current web 2.0 generation needs a revolution. If we want to get out if this trap then there is, as always, only one way to do this. We have got to take control of our lives on-line. Don’t let anyone tell you different. Your data is yours! It isn’t Google’s, Facebook’s, or Microsoft’s. We need to start making so much noise about this that these guys will be forced to open it all up. And you have the power to do so. You can use the strength of the network that you have created yourself to protest and oppose this confinement. I can’t wait for the first protest groups on SocialAds to appear on Facebook. Let’s see how many supporters will join that. And don’t get me wrong. I am not against ads, but I do oppose to the idea that we currently have no freedom because of ads!

And in revolution, there are always new thinkers and leaders that can  show us the way. My vote is with people like Doc Searl, David Recordon, Tim O’Reilly, Dick Hardt, Dave Winer and Rolf Skyberg. People that not just complain about this trap, but thoroughly understand it and provide possibilities to get out of it. There are $16 Bln reasons to get out if this web 2.0 advertisement trap and move into a new era of user centric thinking, of true interaction!

It is like President Jefferson already said so long ago: “Every generation needs a new revolution”.

Free (ad-based) Social Networks versus payed Social Networks

Rolf Skyberg posted his prediction that users will eventually pay to network, as free social networks tend to provide “value”a user is not really looking for.

I have been thinking a lot about that since I started writing on my blog. I agree with Rolf, simply because I feel that “free”never comes for free. There is always a catch. In this case, the service provider who has to monetize the network the users build up (that’s really weird isn’t it?). And this catch has way too many unwanted effects for me that need fixing. For example, I can’t even export my friends and re-use them in other networks. Or, have you ever tried burning a CD with the best content you have ever received in your network of choice?

But the problem always lies in the transition of going from “free”services to payed services. How do we do that. What transition will work? That is the real question. Because of the fact that a user cannot export his self build Facebook network of friends, he will be reluctant to start using a (probably much better) payed service. He would have to rebuild the network, and how would he be sure that his friends would join him on this payed service?

I currently see 3 ways of creating this transition:

1. The transition starts from mobile. Why? because there, we are already used to paying for services. Ad supported mobile phones will never work, but I think that social networks that originate from the mobile, instead of the web will emerge
2. The transition starts from e-mail (Rolf also suggests we might bundle a payed networking service with e-mail). I like it. Why, well for starters E-mail isn’t free! You pay for it, as soon as you subscribe to an Internet access service. But more important, e-mail does provide the import and export of contacts and provides support for the basic need of interaction. All we need now is to upgrade the concept of e-mail to a sharing/interacting/social networking tool instead of a spamming or “I still have 1000 unread messages left” tool.
3. No transition, but user controlled ads. Well, this is a weird suggestion, but what if we could have free services, no walled gardens, ads to monetize it (well, someone has to pay for the services and bandwidth right), BUT the user decides what ads show, when  and how (heck, there are probably users enough that would be willing to create ads for the advertiser if you ask them nicely). Most people think were too lazy to do this, but if I could have very simple ways of tuning ads to my preferences at any point (turn them off for a while  would also be an option) I might just do that. Saves me a lot of time looking for stuff when I really need it.

Interesting discussion. I’m going to put my money on 1 and 2 for now, but who knows where this will go. I am curious if there are already payed services that are successful? Anyone have an idea how to make the transition without asking the user to put too much effort into converting his friends into a payed service?

Social Networks from the service creators point of view

There was a panel discussion organised at Picnic 2007. With Jyri Enstrom of Jaiku, Matt Biddulph of Dopplr, Felix Petersen of Plazes, Biz Stone of Twitter, and Raymond Spanjar of Hyves as panel members I was waiting for an interesting discussion on social networks.  I’m sorry to say I found it quite disappointing. For more info see the Picnic blog here. No real insights into the success of social networking or ways in which they will eventually evolve into. The most valuable thing noted by most of the panel members was that the social network helps you find things when you need them, the information coming from “friends” in the network.  Everyone seems to think mobile social networks will be the next thing. Personally I feel there is still a long way to go and many hurdles to be taken. No real discussion on business models either, although Biz Stone from Twitter made a good point in saying that he wants the Twitter API be the interface through which applications and services will integrate SMS and the Internet (base upon the fact that Twitter does 20x more traffic through their API than through their home page). Ties in nicely with some of the clever things Rolf Skyberg said on his post on the social client. Someone has to do the plumbing, right? Well, Twitter is working on part of that.

Tara Hunt video presentation on Social Capital at Eday

Just saw a very nice and complete overview of all the different presentations at Eday in the Netherlands. Thanks to Frank Janssen of FrankWatching for this. One that stands out for me is the presentation by Tara Hunt, called “how to make a gabillion dollars on community marketing”. Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, are the founders of Citizen Agency. Her message ‘People don’t buy brands, they buy hope, stories, memories, necessities is well known. The video can be watched here, skip past the first minute or so if you don’t speak Dutch. The presentation can be found here, although it isn’t any good without Tara presenting it. I reported on the Rolf Skyberg presentation on “web 2.0: how did we get here and what’s next” and on earlier, but there is lots more to look at in the overview. Enjoy.

Web 2.0 according to Rolf Skyberg of eBay

Marketingfacts pointed me to a nice presentation of Rolf Skyberg, disruptive innovator at eBay. Rolf discusses the evolution of the Internet and puts it into a historical context. When reading it this way, he shows us that the evolution to web 1.0 and 2.0 isn’t as unpredicted as we thought. When going forward he points out some very basic lessons of the past that still apply to the future. Read the presentation yourself. He does a much better job than I explaining this. Thanks for the inspiration Rolf. I liked it!