Status update: the future of the web is here!

We're all idiots

/rant on

I read a number of posts in the last week that seem unrelated but ended up making me think about this social media circus we are in. Unless you are deaf, blind, and have been sitting on a deserted island the past weeks you must have noticed the hype the media are now creating around Twitter. Respectable media like the NY Times are running Twitter stories almost on a daily basis. We now know how it was thought out, that investors think loads of money will be made on search, that they turned down an offer by Facebook, and especially that it is now going mainstream. We’ve had a few terrible accidents and disasters and Twitter users were able to beat “old-media” bringing the news. As a result every respectable reporter now turns to Twitter not only hoping to pick up some early scoops as well, but more importantly look really cool at the same time too. And don’t forget about real-time search on Twitter, the next Google killer (yeah right).

Personally, I think it is a load of crap. Twitter is currently flooded by people and organizations “playing the system”. Twitter has embraced the hailed network effect of web 2.0, and that is also it’s biggest tragedy. Twitter has become an eyeballs game, just like any other service that shows unhealthy growth. Twitter isn’t growing with twitter users, it is flooded with bots and spam playing with the weakness in the system and its management. Sorry , if management wanted, they could get rid of the spam and bot excesses easily. But since they are addicted to web 2.0 growth steroids there is no compelling reason to help users not get harassed by spam and bots. Why? Because removing it would also ensure that Twitter shows less growth than expected. Making the “mainstream” bubble pop. So instead of doing what is right for its users, Twitter not only lets bots and spam free but even plays its own game with handpicked suggested users for you to follow.

Then there was this post by the BBC in which they interview smart people from the industry that claim that social networks are the “new e-mail”.  Yes, they did call it e-mail 2.0, because that makes it sound even cooler. Digging into the article we find little treasures like one from the founder of Yammer:

Mr Sacks said: “What people want to do on social network these days is post status updates. We think it’s all people want to do.”

Paul Buchheit is quoted:

“I think it’s a new form of communication; not quite e-mail, more lightweight and more real time, often with little bit of a publishing flavour to it,” said Paul Buchheit, founder of FriendFeed, and the creator and lead developer of GMail, while at Google.

And there is this engineer from Facebook that takes it one step further:

Ari Steinberg, an engineering manager at the firm, told BBC News: “It’s been interesting to see the way people change the way they communicate. “You used to e-mail content to people and you had to choose who you wanted to e-mail it to and you didn’t know if your friends even wanted to see it. “Now you can passively put something out there and let people engage with it.”

Notice how each of them highlights their own service strength in these pearls of wisdom that provide insight into our future. Our online future seems to be driven by status updates and passively watching others interact with that. The growth of Facebook, is unprecedented, but as Ari tells us, it’s mostly about status updates. Research from the  Facebook data team suggests that we may have loads of friends on Facebook, we interact with only a few of them. The rest are passive relationships.

I’ve always wondered if my personal experience with Facebook is very different from others. There is the first excitement of joining, getting new (and old) friends. But after a while the excitement wears down and I’m left with a service I can’t get any value from, no matter how hard I try. I can’t explain it any better than this hilarious and ironic article written by Matt Labash in the weekly standard:

One by one, my non-joiner friends have succumbed. As one reluctantly joined the world of “poking” and getting “poked” by people he already talked to, people he had no interest in talking to, or people he didn’t know at all–all conducted under the suspect rubric of “friendship” so that they can look at each other’s photos and write dreary “status updates” on their “walls” (brief squibs about what you are doing at that exact moment, usually with emoticons and inappropriate quotation marks: “Matt Labash is wondering how long to marinate human flesh to get out that ‘gamey taste’ “)–he was almost apologetic about it. Within two days of his birth on Facebook, he said, “I have 198 friends. I have never heard of most of them. This is so dorky, I hate myself for doing it.”

Being a true friend, I didn’t allay his guilt. I told him he was a very sad man, that collecting Facebook friends is the equivalent of being a catlady, collecting numerous Himalayans, which you have neither the time nor the inclination to feed. “You have obviously never been on Facebook,” he said. “It’s so much worse than collecting cats.” By this week, however, he’d lost all ironic distance. When I told him that he now took it all way too seriously, that I liked the old, conflicted him better, and that he should take a hard look at himself, he sloughed me off. He was now just another friend-whore: “I don’t need to look at myself. I have 614 Facebook friends to do the looking for me.”

We're a bunch of Chimpanzees

A new generation is learning that the best the web has brought us is the status update. That friends are measured in terms of quantity, and that interaction can be done passively. We need pokens to connect (my brain just melted by this infantile invention). If that is the future of the web, then you can count me out. I spend the last week without any social media tools and concentrated on real-life relations in both my private and working life. There is no online experience that can remotely match those interactions. We are all sitting behind our screens like a bunch of dressed up monkeys, confusing status updates with real interactions, and failing to see the wonders of life as it passes by. It’s pathetic.

What is the root cause of this idiocy? I firmly believe it has to do with the way business models evolved on the web. When eyeballs, page views, CPM, unique visitors, traffic, and network became more important than individual users we took a wrong turn. We let the web evolve into into a big market place where “Advanced Ads Targeting Features” have become more important than individual value. The web has become a marketing play, instead of a place where we get real value when connecting online.

I’m with 37Signals here who openly wonder why the web lost faith into charging for stuff? Our online future is reduced to a status message and a million marketeers are making plans to exploit that nonsense. I can understand that. Marketeers can’t help it, they are just idiots. But to hear the Web finest entrepreneurs 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.

It is time to end this madness and start charging people for the value that they get. Sure, you will lose eyeballs, traffic, status and all those other destructive measures the web currently brings us. But you will gain something too. You will get happy customers and you will deliver user value instead of network value. You will have fans instead of statistics. There are plenty of reasons to start today with a user centric, or user-driven business model. The question is, are you brave enough to deal with that possibility?

/rant off

Are you enslaved by your mobile device? Take this test!

We are all becoming slaves of our communication habits. With our mobile devices as the new high priests, we hail the prayer of information and we are bonded by blackberry and iPhone. You do not recognize yourself in this description?

Take this small test to see if you have become a slave to your mobile device:

• Do you never leave home without your mobile device? Get uncomfortable when you do?
• Are you holding your mobile device as soon as you have to wait longer than 30 seconds?
• Do you look at your mobile device, even use it, while someone else is standing next to you and talking with you?
• Do you check e-mail or messages every few minutes, even when there weren’t any the past few minutes?
• Are you using it while you are watching TV, or worse, while talking with your husband/wife/partner/friend?
• Are you using it while sitting on the toilet? Ever dropped it there?
• Do you turn it off, after the plane has taken off? Or even not turn it off at all?
• Do you turn the device back on before you have even left the plane? Or landed?
• Do you use it while talking with customers, business partners, family, friends?
• Does your child have to wait to say something to you until you are done checking your e-mail?
• Is your battery always empty, or are you always complaining about it?
• Is your mobile phone lying next to you when you are in bed?

If you can answer 3 or more of these questions with “yes”  then I suspect you are enslaved by your mobile device. You will probably experience cold turkey shivers when you are separated from your device. You are also alienating yourself from those that stand with you trying to interact.

The problem with these devices is that they suck up all your attention. When you are looking at the screen, it takes away your ability to focus on anything else. Especially while using a touch screen. It is impossible to multitask. It makes you look arrogant and uninterested if you give your mobile device more attention than another human being standing next to you. We are addicted to real-time information. We take our high priest of information with us to dinner, parties, at a bar, work, home, on the street, while we are waiting, and even to our beds when we go to sleep. It is enslaving us each time we receive new information. We become information addicts, and feel we gain status when we handle the information beast in public.

It’s time to face this and start taking control of our lives again. Focus again on those things that really matter. Instead of messaging someone electronically, why not pay genuine attention to the person standing next to you? We might find that all this access to real-time information gives us a false sense of control. It doesn’t really make your life better, it just makes you more distant.

Me? I score 7 out of 12. I think I can still be saved, but it won’t be easy.  I’ve decided I’m going to get rid of my ridiculous behavior. How about you?

The unlimited power of social media is bound by my human limitations

Social media allow us to interact over content, anywhere, anytime. And we love it. Interaction is what makes web 2.0 valuable. While mainstream users are discovering and engaging in this interaction on services like Facebook and MySpace, the early adopter is way ahead using services like Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed, Dopplr, Seesmic, Yelp, del.icio.us, Digg, Google Reader, StumbleUpon, Disqus etc. (I could go on for a while). A typical early adapter hero is using at least 5-25 of those services and actively shares his own content, events and stuff found on the web with his friends. Content gets aggregated,  shared, re-aggregated and re-shared.

While I do consider myself part of the early adapter scene I have always been reluctant to spent too much time on so many different services. I read about them, I try out a few, but I never spent hours a day on any of these services. For example, I love Twitter, but unlike most Twitterazi I probably average no more than 4-5 tweets a day.I don’t follow thousands of people, but balance the number of followers and follows.

I have several reasons for this. first of all,  I’m not really fascinated by technology itself. I use it, I work with it, I try it, but the final verdict for any service is never based upon the technology. I always look at it from a user (in this case mine) perspective. Does it help me/solve a problem/or provide me value in any way. For precisely that reason I (unlike most) do not like the iPhone I have all that much. If you get past the cool demo effect, an start using it in daily life you’ll find limitations that no mobile handset manufacturer has solved yet, not even Saint Jobs.

The same thing goes for Friendeed. While many of the tech elite’s find Friendfeed the one aggregation service that will replace them all I find it just another tool. Friendfeed lets you share content via RSS feeds with people that subscribe to you. I don’t care all that much about content aggregation (will get to that). But the real power of Friendfeed is that it lets users comment on the content that is being shared. It makes it really easy to start and participate in conversations with other users. By following people you find interesting Friendfeed highlights the content the person you follow for you. Friendfeed attempts to (re-)organize content using the idea that if you follow interesting people, you will see the content that they are interested in.

The users of Friendfeed are wildly enthusiastic about it. There is more engagement, more content, much better discussions. All of this is true. But I also find that there are many people participating in a discussion, surrounding a blog post for example, without having read the post itself. As a result discussions tend to get long lists of everyone ventilating his opinion. Personally I am more fond of interaction that leads to exploration of the subject at hand.

There are services where you share locations, traveling plans, shopping behavior, blog posts, music, video’s. There are so many fascinating ways to meet new people, interact, share content, thoughts, emotions. It’s very addictive once you get into it. But I have found that social media are quickly bound by my human limitations. There is only so much attention I am willing to spend on such services. And I’m not alone in this. If you search for “noise” or “echo” on Friendfeed you’ll find many discussions and strategies to deal with the immense flow of content you are confronted with. Most problems are related to following too many people and getting too much content aggregated. How can you find the interesting people or content if you are flooded with it? The most obvious solutions are to either follow less people, use less services, or spend less time on them. Some are even building their own experiments and take radical different approaches to their social media consumption (see here and here for example).

As a sidestep, this overwhelming content flow makes it really hard for content to stand out. In the blogosphere this leads to sensational blog titles with often virtually no (or copied) content inside. There isn’t any time for lengthy posts anymore (such as this one). The major blogs write short, snappy posts in the hope people are willing to take a few secs and pay attention to it.

This is where Social Media is quickly hitting our human limitations. There is only so much content we can swallow, so much interaction we can handle. We can’t all be Louis Gray or Robert Scoble. A tech guy talks about the signal to noise ratio, in normal language there is just too much to see and participate in. One of the main weaknesses of most aggregators in my opinion is that there is too much unintentional sharing. We don’t just share things we find really important, we share anything. And worse, we don’t share by sending each other something specific (intentionally), but we share RSS feeds making the act of sharing unintentional (or maybe unconscious). As a result the stuff I might be really interested in gets buried under a whole lot of unintentional, unfocused and mostly uninteresting content.

We have been here before.You can see the exact same pattern developing as it did with e-mail. When starting, you get a few intentional mails directed right at you. Later on you get copied in almost every e-mail conversations, both futile things and in cc:, making e-mail much less efficient and forcing us to deploy inbox rules. And on top of that you get a whole lot of messages that aren’t directed specifically at you, but they are in your mailbox and stand in the way of the content that is important to you. You know what that is? SPAM. Social Media aggregation is quickly becoming the next source of gigantic numbers of unintersting pieces of content (AKA SPAM).

And we are so predictable in the way we want to handle this. We need trust filters, noise detectors, blockers, friend feeds and rankings, all kinds of technical solutions to stop all that useless content obscuring the good stuff from us. But we are ignoring the fact that the underlying principle of sharing is the cause of all this. By using RSS which as a technology is truly great as a sharing mechanism, we also accept that we get endless streams of unintentionally shared content. Most of which is useless to the receiver.

There are limits to what I can and am willing to process on a day. I have found that a few choices help me deal with this:

1. I see everything as a river of content. It passes by all day long, and whenever i feel like it I dive in. I’m not concerned what I miss when I get out again. the river doesn’t dry up, there is always something else to be found
2. Despite of what you might think I prefer to follow as many as possible. I’m not hunting for follows, but if someone follows me I usually follow back. I’m more concerned to be trapped in a small community with lots of similar people than with possible noise. As long as I accept choice 1. this is fine.
3. I actually read long blog posts and try to provide my thoughts if I feel I can contribute. I haven’t visited sites like TechCrunch in ages. I’m not interested in any post that has a title of “breaking news”. It’s not the launch of something new I’m interested in, but the impact it has on me and others. So not the breaking news, but the analysis is what I find interesting. That’s why I follow people like Rolf Skyberg, Steven Hodson, Chris Anderson, Kevin Kelley, Chris Messina, Zephoria, Jonathan Harris and many more like those (sorry guys, can’t fit you all in here).
4. I don’t comment or like endless streams of content (sorry guys). It’s not that I don’t like many things, but I do feel that I need to be reluctant to join in every discussion. I have an opinion about many things, but I’m by no means an expert on them. Instead of adding more noise to the river, I try to interact in those places where I feel I can contribute.
5. I write long blog posts myself. Maybe it ads noise too, but my intention is to contribute where I feel I can. I read great stuff from others, so I feel I need to pay back by presenting my thoughts.
6. I try not to share too much, only the things I myself really find valuable (this is always hard to do)
7. I spent limited time in this social media river. I have a life with a family, friends. I have an incredibly  exciting job (will get to that later) preparing a commercial launch of a service that will conquer the world starting in September  (don’t they all ). I read books, newspapers, and most of all, I interact with real people. There is a life outside social media you know

This is how I deal with my human limitations in social media. How do you deal with it?

Do we really need privacy controls in Social Media?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the old-fashioned TV is the best social media channel known to mankind

Yesterday I spent the evening watching the Dutch soccer team play against Italy in the European Cup 2008 tournament. It was a great game for us. Holland beat Italy with 3-0 and that is a great score against the current world champion. I thought about it this morning and I realized that a sport event of this magnitude can have such impact on social behavior. I haven’t seen the official figures yet but I’m betting that more than 75% of the entire population in Holland watched that game (including baby’s and very old people). In Italy the same thing most likely. They watched it at home, with friends, at work with colleagues or at a local pub on a big screen. You don’t want to watch a soccer match on your own, there is no fun in it. You need to watch it with as many as possible.

What is even more interesting is that the clear winner of this media battle is a very old-fashioned, traditional channel. It’s TV of course. TV is by far the most social media channel known to man. Some of you social media junkies reading this might think “Is this guy an idiot?”. Well, maybe, but just think about it for a second. TV is an incredibly powerful social media channel. Not because it is interactive (it isn’t). Not because you can discuss the thing you are watching with a gazillion others in real-time (you can’t). Not because every user has a unique profile you can look up and engage with (not possible). Not because it is a 2-way medium (no way). TV is old-fashioned broadcasting. You don’t get to choose, it just serves you the images some TV director decides to show. But you can’t say it isn’t a social medium. Not after millions of people watched that game. It’s just that the social behavior isn’t taking place on the media channel, it takes place because of the media channel. The soccer match brought us all a reason to get together. It isn’t the match or the outcome, it’s that the match gave us a reason to get together and socialize.

I can’t think of a more powerful social media channel than the TV broadcasting a major event. TSure, there are millions of people on MySpace, Facebook. Even more that watch video’s on YouTube or comment on weblogs. But a major TV event can bring hundreds of millions of people to a screen the size of some 30 inches or so. In most cases it’s the major sports events, the Olympic games, some major athletic event, soccer, American football, whatever. And these people engage with the screen. They scream, cheer, curse, cry, hug, and probably show every emotion possible during a match.

It is something the web just isn’t capable of capturing. No matter what social network or service is launched. You just can’t get hundred of millions of people showing that much interaction or emotions together. You just can’t socialise like that in virtual space. Why? I don’t think it is the content or the services on the web.

I think that the real reason for it is that the technology we use to access the web, our social networks, our interaction services are A-social. That is, they do not allow us to use it in a social way. It is impossible to surf the web with two people at the same time sitting behind a computer. You can’t interact on a mobile with more than one person holding it. You can’t socialise on a social network while five of your friends are trying to join in while in the same room. The technology is aimed at a single person using it. That same technology doesn’t allow us to user more than 1 or two senses at the same time. It sucks you in, and shuts off your ability to interact with the environment you are in. Just try it out. Get a room full of people, sit behind you laptop, try to engage in some interaction on the web, and at the same time have a meaningful conversation with your friends. It just doesn’t work. Web technology may have brought us the ability to interact using any social media. But it also makes us all lone rangers, sitting behind our computer screens, desperately trying to interact digitally while the rest of the world has meaningful interactions in the physical world. The keyboard or mobile phone as input device. It just doens’t make us social. It makes us very isolated.

Social interaction on the web is a very poor surrogate for the real thing. That isn’t a bad thing necessarily. Social Interaction on the web brings us fun and pleasure too. But engaging in social interaction in the physical world, enjoying the conversations, being surrounded by real people, being able to feel and display the emotions sort of makes the a bit stale doesn’t it?

That is what social media should be about. It isn’t about the technical capabilities, about the 20 ways we can interact digitally with content or people. It is about stimulating social interaction in the both the digital AND physical world. Get your users to interact with their physical world through the content or service you provide digitally. Forget the traffic, the page views, the downloads. Get people to interact with each other over the stuff you provide them. That is what gets people excited. That is what makes hundred of millions of users sit in front of a screen and share their emotions. Maybe the good old TV isn’t that bad after all.

Why noise will be tackled by scaling down the social media conversation

If anything web 2.0 technology has provided us the capabilities to have a continuous 24×7 public conversation on the web. There are blogs, communication services like Twitter, content services like YouTube, search services to help us find the things we need, profile services like Facebook or any other social network, and now aggregation and “noise” filtering services like Friendfeed and The Filter. Social media, or the ability to interact over any kind of media, provides the participants a never ending conversation space. It’s addictive, there is so much being produced, being shared, being launched, talked about that it forces our Internet backbone down on it’s knees and slowly into cardiac arrest. And we haven’t seen the end of it yet. There is an incredible sized population in Africa and Asia that isn’t on the web yet, but they will at some point.

I was thinking about this last night after I had written a post in which I argued that social media is timely. There isn’t a need to be participating 24×7 because there will always be something that’s important when you join in. I see this enormous conversation as a river of information passing by and me taking a plunge whenever I feel like it.

But the early adopters feel there is a real problem with this non-stop social media conversation . It’s the noise problem (Try a search on “noise” here for example). How can we find the things that are really important from that huge pile of information floating around. That is partially why we have aggregation and filtering services. Each of them, using one algorithm or another, tries to compile a tiny subset of the universe and present that to its users. The question that remains is whether or not the right tiny space is presented.

What all these technologies essentially do for us is remove all kinds of physical boundaries like time, distance and space. These constraints prevented us in the physical world to meet 1 Mln people at a time, getting to know people from any place in the world, have anyone that wants to, no matter where or when they are, listen to the things we say. Web technology removed those boundaries, essentially turning this digital world into a giant market square where we can meet.

While I’m writing this, Scott O’Raw just published a post which ties in really good with this one. In his post Scott talks about this very same conversation and worries about people like Robert Scoble trying to become a talkshow host. Robert is very often at the center of conversations (well in the tech world anyway), and that helps him deal with the massive amounts of information. It also makes the brand Scobleizer more sticky. Scott agitates against these shock and awl tactics just for the sake of getting attention. The article is well worth a read, so go over there and give it a shot.

And while all of these conversations seem rather attractive right now I wonder what will happen when not 10 Mln or a100 mln users but 1 Bln users are participating. Or 3 Bln. The entire population in this planet. Everything connected into one uber-social graph. Everyone talking to everyone on the largest virtual market square know to man. The entire digital universe becoming a social media heaven.

I believe we might just get lost in this universe. The conversation simply becomes too large for anyone to even remotely grasp its complexity. Right now we are all creating our own public appearance, getting enough Google or any other kind of juice so that we can actually be found and listened to. Just take a look at a relative small conversation Robert Scoble started just now over on Friendfeed. Imagine not 100-200 people talking and not really listening, but instead 1Mln or 5 Mln doing that. The conversation would lose it’s importance immediately. If the entire planet is out there, connected, wouldn’t that make us all anonymous again? I think so. I believe that once people have had a few experiences with the excitement of being part of this public conversation, they will settle down again. Humans aren’t capable of dealing with such complexity, and computer algorithms, filtering tactics, friend referrals, don’t really reduce the complexity, it just flattens out the conversation until we all hear the same things.

There are two reasons why I suspect that this global social media conversation will be less important in a next evolution of the web. The first reason is that in order to reduce complexity people will eventually fall back on smaller, more personal, more localized communities. The conversations taking place in such communities will be more immersed within the actual physical world the users live in. That doesn’t imply there won’t be a public conversation. I’m suggesting the smaller communities will prove to be much more valuable than large scale ones.

The second reason is that the most important access device that will be used for the web in the coming years is by its nature a very personal device. It’s your mobile phone, quickly turning into a hand held web browser with communication features. One of the characteristics of this device is that it tends to suck you in, leaving you unaware of your surroundings (probably why so many car accidents happen while people are using a mobile phone while driving). It effectively shuts down a few of our senses such as hearing and seeing (except for a tunnel vision). While the monitors on our computers will become larger, TV screen like, the mobile device will remain small and will draw all attention to it’s screen. As a result of this sucking in and the device’s graphical capabilities it is my believe that we simply can’t deal with the complexity of a conversation on a scale of millions. Instead, we will be using that device more effectively with those that we know, friends that we care about and trust. In other words, in much smaller communities. And with that descaling the noise problem will be reduced to a much smaller proportion.

We don’t really need noise filters, the sheer complexity of the social media conversation will resolve itself because we won’t find enough value to continue to participate in such immense structures. We will end up scaling down in smaller but more valuable communities. You can try it out today already. Just stop following people for the sake of it or the numbers. Try to select carefully and notice how the noise level drops to a point where quality and personal interactions take over the enormously crowded marketplace we are all visiting today

On Twitter and the missed opportunity to execute a social utility business model

Bernard Lunn has written a good post on the (lack of) a social media business model. He writes about the difficulties for social networks to monetize using advertisement. Although he builds his storyline a bit different from me, he is saying a lot of things I believe too. A few days ago I wrote about the same subject in a post called “Advertisement holds web 2.0 in a death grip”. A nice quote from Bernard’s post:

If social media is not funded by advertising, it must be funded by subscriptions or transactions. Neither is easy.

Social media is fundamentally different – it is few to few, not one to one like telephone or one to many like traditional media. There is also a fundamental problem for advertisers. We are focused on communicating with each other, not looking at content with some hopefully relatively relevant ads attached. Any advertising in that context is an annoying interruption, unless we learn to tune out the ads so effectively that it becomes useless to advertisers.

Bernard analyzes what three major social networking sites could do. They all have 2 options, remain a walled garden, or open up and become a utility. Both paths, or fork in a road as he calls it, could lead to value creation. But if a social network remains closed it will become a niche. Bernard’s preference (as is mine):

The mass-market utility model will win out in the end for 3 reasons:

1. The social graph is so closely linked to communications, which has always been a utility model.
2. The ownership issues around the social graph are murky. A utility skates past that problem, saying “you own, we manage.” AT&T does not own your Rolodex, or insert ads when you are calling Mom because they own your connection to Mom.
3. The social graph has to be monetized in creative ways and the best way to make that happen is make it available to all the entrepreneurs and established businesses, on clear and simple terms.

I believe that Bernard nails it. Social interaction is something of all times. It is the most vital element of our on-line experience. Content creation and consumption isn’t nearly as interesting if there isn’t interaction. The interaction itself shouldn’t be supported by advertisement. Advertisement trespasses when I’m having interaction with my friends. I once, jokingly, said I started a countdown for the downfall of Facebook.  The reason for this countdown is that they are executing a wrong business model. They aren’t near that downfall yet, but if they choose to remain closed then the slow decline as Bernard also calls it will happen. They just don’t own enough of the Internet to make that work. They have a walled garden of 100M users, Google works on a walled garden of the entire Web population. They are different measures.

We have seen already one example of a very successful social interaction utility. Unfortunately this example is not a great example for a successful utility business model. It’s Twitter of course! Twitter has commoditised the 140 char message more effectively than anyone could ever dream of. It has the capability to become mainstream due to its addictiveness, interactiveness, fun. But it also has serious operational problems (which I don’t want to emphasize, they are really hard working on it and I wish them all the best). But to me Twitter is also the example of a missed opportunity for a social utility business model.

Twitter should have taken its popularity and become a social utility service other social networks could implement. By doing that they would not only have become the standard for short social communication messages in any social network, but they would also be able to execute an Amazon-S3 type of business model. There would also be opportunities to charge users for the utility they use. Maybe not in the web domain (although I could see premium and freemium services appear), but definitely in the mobile domain. That is where the growth of Twitter should lie. That is where the money is! And if they can think of a way to stop cluttering the inbox of a GSM, then they could make the crossover to mobile and become one of the most successful paid mobile services. They have taken the immense popular SMS (100 BLN revenues in 2007), and socialized it using the Twitter service. An incredible opportunity, missed by a long shot.

I sure hope that the utility model thinking will gain momentum in VC land. I also hope Twitter will make a turnaround in terms of operations and business model. I would hate to lose that service. I want it to become successful as a social utility business model. It will help us create the User Centric Web.

Social “search” will not kill web search

Glenn Derene suggests that Social Networks might replace search giant Google as a place where people will start their search. He bases this on a conversation he has had with a VC. A quote from his post:

So what is my VC friend talking about? The larger the Web grows, the more important search becomes, right? That’s probably so, and as a note of clarification, he changed his statement slightly to say, “Search, as we know it, is dead.” What he means is that, with the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Second Life, LinkedIn and even Google’s own Orkut, the next generation of Web users may find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?

I have written about this idea before too. Google and other search engines index an incredible amount of information, but it it often up to the experience of the search engine user to get a good result. If I ask the right question Google delivers quicker than anything else. If I ask the wrong question I’m forced to scroll though millions of search results to find what I need.

There are different possibilities to tackle that problem. We could replace the Google bot indexing by human indexing, like Mahaloo does. Humans can interpret information better than computers, but the downside is off course that they can process much less information too. We can create large encyclopedias on-line which are updated by anyone (Wikipedia), or by experts in the field (KNOL). We could analyze surfing behavior, social interaction and social graphs of people and use that information to provide the user with more targeted information (which for now is used more often in advertisement). This is where the VC friend is pointing too. If Facebook, or any other social networking site knows more about you, and your friends it might be able to do a better job at search. While I can agree with that up to a certain point (I’ll get to that), the article takes a false turn in my opinion. Glenn provies he following example:

But what may turn out to be the strongest signal of all is the footprint you make with your online identity. Consider how much information you voluntarily provide on your Facebook profile. Now imagine if you could combine that with your Netflix renting and Amazon buying habits. Then throw in the suggestions of your friends and the pages you visit the most often. All those various sources of information about you are currently stored in different locations—on your computer’s browser history, on your Facebook page, on the servers for Netflix and Amazon—but just imagine how accurate a search could be if every time you had a query, the mass of data about you that exists on the Internet could inform the results. (Google and Yahoo already do this to a limited extent by tracking your search history to refine results, and surely startups will try.)

This is the Walhalla of search, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A Social Network owners wet dream. But it’s just too good to be true. I don’t buy it. I’m not saying that knowing things about a person might help a service provider provide more targeted results, but I don’t know of a single example where this has been implemented successfully. Every social network site is hogging data to accomplish just this. Whether it is to target ads or to provide the user with search capabilities. But it is likely to fail at least as often as it will succeed. Google provides me in 80-90% of the time with the answer I’m looking for. If a search engine that knows about my profile fails half of the time, I wouldn’t bother using it.

Why would such an attempt fail half of the times (or something in that order)? Because it doesn’t take human behavior into account. There are at least two barriers that can hardly be overcome by any computer algorithm or data hog system. First of all, on-line I’m not who I really am off-line. On-line people can have multiple identities, lie about themselves, provide us with profiles that look better than real life. I wrote about that earlier in an article called “The Future of advertisement lies outside of Social Networks“. I wrote:

I’m hiding behind thousands of friends, only showing you the public me, a persiflage of real life. You might think that this universal social network will provide you better information than demography does now. Yes, I am 39 years old, married to a lovely wife, I have four kids and I live in the Netherlands. But that really is just a small, public part of me.

Here I am

Secondly, a computer algorithm can hardly interpret my mood of the day. Depending on how I feel, what I have experienced earlier, what I’m about to do in the future, the coffee I had for breakfast, etc, etc, I might be looking for different things when I type “I am looking for a car” in the search bar. Chances are that by taking into account my profile information, social graph, interactions on Facebook or any other social network, the “social search” algorithm will be way off.

Depending on the question you need answered, people will start using different search algorithms. If you want to know the phone number or address of a doctor you rarely visit, you will use Google. If you want to buy a new espresso machine, chances are that you will read all kinds of reviews on the Internet (which always contradict each other and are often biased) but will end up in a store tasting the espresso right there (nothing beats that experience). But if you need answers to complex questions, then the best way to go is to ask your family, friends, colleagues, Twitter followers. You will get the best answers there. Finding information is great, interacting about it is even better. No search engine or social search algorithm can beat that.

Social search algorithms will definitely have their place in search the coming years. But I doubt they’ll perform much better than Google does right now. Adding social information into a search query might work really well, but not always. And when it’s off, it’s likely to be way off.

I wouldn’t just write off Google yet.

Centralization of social interaction is not a good idea

This weekend an interesting discussion arose around the new RSS service Shyftr. Louis Gray started the discussion with a post , Robert Scoble,  Tony Hung, Mark Evans and many others, including myself chipped in our 2 cts. From there on I could the conversation moving around Twitter, Friendfeed and many different blog posts and blog comments. It’s been at the top of TechMeme for quite a while.

In my post I argued that once an idea has been written down in public it’s impossible to control the conversation around it r even know if there is a conversation taking place. One of the unwanted side-effects of these new RSS services is that they essentially live of the traffic that could have gone to the original blog poster. This is especially frustrating if a blogger is trying to make a living out of his passion. I recommend reading a very thoughtful, personal, honest post written by Steven Hodson on that issue.

After reading through all the different inputs in all the different places (and I’m sure I’ve missed a whole bunch of them) I started wondering about the effects of conversations exploding in all directions, places, platforms. A lot of bloggers asked themselves the question if it would be possible to centralize all these comments/blog posts/conversations, so that nothing would be missed (see here for example). While it would certainly be nice for the original blog poster to see what the spin off effects of his blog post were, I am convinced that it would be a bad idea to try and centralize these type of conversations.

One of the most important reasons for me to blog is to be able to inspire people. To write something down I’m passionate about, and then seeing others willing to invest the time to read it, and even react with a comment, blog post or tweet. It is truly great of be aware and part of a conversation that kick started because of something I have written down. Interaction leads to better understanding, opposing/similar views, deepening of the issue, or plain old fun. It therefore sounds like a great idea to centralize these discussions.

Tony Hung replied to my blog post with a great comment (he wasn’t agreeing with me, which is fine!). One of the things he said was:

Not many people will be happy to put in the time if the most humblest of things — the conversation — is happening away from their blog, without them even *knowing* where it might be happening.

And he is right. We want to know about the conversation that takes place. If we know about it we can become part of it. So why not centralize it? I’m sure the technical capabilities to do so are there. Someone is bound to think of and build something that tracks down reactions/comments/trackbacks/discussions to blog posts and centralize them in one place. A bit like the Disqus comments centralization, but taking it much further than just comments.

I believe that there are two reasons for not wanting to centralize conversation, control and diversity. While the argument of being able to follow and participate in conversations is valid, I cannot help but feel that there is also an underlying behavior of wanting to be able to control the discussion that follows from a blog post. It provides the blogger with a sense of power or control to have everything centralized. Being able to follow everything being said, being able to react/counteract/take part in the discussion gives us the illusion that we can influence or control its outcome. It also feeds our pride (look what I’ve started), which is a perfectly human reaction. Being able to control, or even have the illusion that a conversation can be controlled, is not a good idea. It means that we are putting boundaries around it, that the outcome is limited to some extend, because we are trying to control or influence it. It’s like a walled garden social network. Once you are trapped inside it’s nearly impossible to get out. If anything it will provide limitations to the social interaction and that is not right.

Having the conversation centralized doesn’t  necessarily make it better either. That is where the diversity comes in. If a blog post, or any content for that matter, ignites interaction in many different places with many different people, then the outcome of this interaction is unpredictable for sure. My goal in blogging is to inspire people to think and form their own opinion about something I am passionate about. The best thing for me as a blogger is to be able to unleash discussion, even to places I don’t know about. Knowing that I might have started thinking, creativity, discussion is what makes it a great experience for me.

I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that I might never know about the effects. The conversation will find its way to people who can form their own opinion about it. It might be a much better opinion, might lead to a blog post that is way smarter than mine. It might lead to new ideas I hadn’t thought about. It might also lead to copy behavior, or even theft. It might lead to new businesses being started, people becoming rich, or it might even lead to nothing at all. But I believe that this chaotic, unpredictable and uncontrollable process in the end always leads to something better.

A good idea doesn’t become better because the people you already know talk about it. It doesn’t necessarily get better when like-minded people respond to it. It gets better through diversity. Diversity in people, in thinking, in opinions. Centralization will most likely lead to like-minded people coming together “controlling” the outcome, mostly unintended. Fragmentation leads to ignition, new ideas, new insights, new people taking it further than you could have imagined. In most cases I’m probably not even aware of that. But in those rare occasions that I am, it gives me a great feeling to be a part of that.

So for once, let’s not try to get a grip on the conversations taking place. Let’s not try to centralize it with a web 2.0 interface, a destination site with a great API, desktop applications or browser plugins. Accept that social interaction takes place everywhere, on-line or off-line, and understand that the uncontrollable manner and the diverse interaction is what makes life so valuable.

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.

Statistics on Friendfeed usage provide interesting insights

A small update: I just saw a post of Justin Smith (Inside Facebook)  interviewing Bret Taylor (co-founder of Friendfeed) about the difference between the Facebook and Friendfeed newsfeed. I don’t usually add links afterwards, but this one fits really well. I guess they hadn’t read this post yet

A few days ago I wrote a post in which I explained that I wasn’t as enthousiastic as most bloggers seem to be about the social network aggregator Friendfeed. My reason for this is simple. If actions of users are shared with others without intent, that is the person performing the action is intentionally sharing, the content that gets shared is usually less valueable.

I have been thinking about that some more the past few days and decided to digg into this a little deeper. I’ll show you some statistics about Friendfeed in a minute, but first some Facebook.

Today I went to my Facebook profile (which I rarely use, but that is the topic of yet another post), and looked at my “newsfeed” there. Here is an example of a typical newsfeed of mine (I erased personal details from friends).

I just found out from a computer, not from my friends, that someone is playing a game, someone added another application, someone changed a profile picture, etc. etc. I also get informed by Facebook about some top networks I should be on. None of these items were intentionally shared by my friends and in my personal opinion none of the items provide me any value. Is this because I have the wrong friends. I doubt it. The problem for me is that the wrong information is shared. Social networks aren’t interesting because I can track down every (mostly dull) action a friend is taking. Social networks are interesting because they should allow people to interact. That is, to intentionally reach out to each other to share stuff, communicate, play, have fun etc. That is what makes it social. What we see here is an Orwellian report about activities that the actor doesn’t even know it is being shared, and to me as a receiver it is of no interest. It’s Big Brother watching you, but it doesn’t provide anyone value. Not even the Big briother (in this case Facebook). They are data hoggers, and collect all these actions to get a grip on user profiles and social graphs. For advertisement purposes. Well, it’s great to know that my friend plays Scrabble. I can see the advertisers getting all excited about that already. I’m not interested to read “Alexander went to Amazon to buy book X”. I’m interested in “He John, I just bought book X. It’s about Y and I am sure you would like it too”. The first one is non-intentional, the second one is a conscious act of sharing which adds way more value.

Back to Friendfeed. I looked at some statistics about Friendfeed usage. What are the top feeds being shared on Friendfeed, according to Friendfeed stat?

• Twitter
• Blogs
• Google Reader
• Tumblr
• YouTube

The actual order can’t be determined right now due to some limitations in the Google App Engine on which Friendfeed stats is build, but Twitter seems to take the lead by more than 50%. Here are a few items that surprisingly aren’t shared very often:

• Friendfeed ?
• Picasa web albums
• Vimeo
• Disqus
• Flickr (it’s in the top ten, but still pretty low in my opinion)

I looked up a few Friendfeed “power users”. Robert Scoble manages to produce 96% input from Twitter and 4% from his blog. Louis Gray produces 71% input from Google reader, 14% Twitter and 7% Flickr. Steve Hodson produces 50% from his blog, 33%(!) from Disqus, and 17% from Twitter.

What can we learn from this by no means statistical sound analysis? Friendfeed is mostly an echo chamber of stuff we already have and know elsewhere. The stuff that gets shared most is Twitter, and right after that the blogs people post and share. I can easily find examples of a blog post being shared by 5-10 different people, thus producing the echo I’m talking about.In my previous post some folks noted that they liked being able to comment stuff on Friendfeed. I couldn’t find statistics on that yet (I hope that will get implemented soon). But the reason why people like that is pretty obvious. Social anything is about interaction. It is what makes us all tick. Not the sharing, but the possibility to communicate.

I said earlier that the stuff we all produce in Friendfeed is less valuable because there is no intent or conscious act when things get shared. Looking at the statistics above I now believe that Friendfeed is nothing more than a techie bloggers echo chamber. It could vastly be improved if either Friendfeed or some API builder would produce a page with statistics about what is being shared most right now. Instead of seaing all the duplicate shares I would like to see that the tech community is sharing a specific post N times. The same thing goes for comments. Which shared items get the most comments. That will show us what people are talking about most. With these additions Friendfeed might replace TechMeme as it not only shows the important blog posts, but also allows us to interact on them. It will certainly become a powerful traffic driver for bloggers. These things don’t make Friendfeed less useful (I will be using it sometimes), it just means that the branding of Friendfeed should be changed.

But at the same time I believe that in its current form Friendfeed will not penetrate the consumer (or non-tech) market successfully. People aren’t really interested in the non-conscious, non-intentional sharing of actions. Who cares? Just look at the stuff Facebook produces in its newsfeed. It might have been be called novel when it first arrived, but it sucks. People want to interact. And Friendfeed in its current form produces way too much non-valuable stuff for consumers to be able to interact. That’s probably why Twitter is so popular, even on Friendfeed

I’m interested in hearing what you think about this. Is Friendfeed just a bloggers wet dream or not? Does it provide you value, even if most of the stuff that gets shared is non-intentional? Let me knwo what you think about all of this.

Dreaming away about a user centric web

FactoryJoe wrote an interesting post earlier called “Relationships are complicated”. In this post he talks about the (technical) difficulties to support complex (on-line) relationships. He provides (an excellent) example of the way Facebook deals with this complexity, reducing your relationship to a static tic box in which you can set a few options.

(image taken from FactoryJoe blog post)

Even though human relationships are complex to model, FactoryJoe still feels there is a need for something he calls the portable contact list:

Put another way, it’s not good enough to simply dismiss the trend of social networking because our primitive technological expressions don’t reflect the complexity of real human relationships, or because humans are just one of kind of “object” to be “semantified” in TBL’s “Giant Global Graph“… instead, people are connecting today, and they’re wanting to connect to people outside of their chosen “home” network and frankly the experience sucks and it’s confusing.

He defines a few possibilities to support this need:

I can say that, from what I’ve observed so far, these are things that computers can do for us, to make the social computing experience more humane, should we establish simple and straightforward means to express a basic list of contacts between contexts:

• help us find and connect to people that we’ve already indicated that we know
• introduce us to people who we might know, or based on social proximity, should know (with no obligation to make friends, of course!)
• help us from accidently bumping into people we’d rather not interact with (see block-list portability)
• helping us to segment our friendships in ways that make sense to us (rather than the semi-arbitrary ways that social networks define)
• helping us to confidently share things with just the people with whom we intend to share

Read his post for more detail. It’s good reading! After reading this, I thought about this for a while. I agree with FactoryJoe that human relationships are very complex. It would be very difficult to model them correctly, even if you would try to infer information about these relationships from my interactions. The value of a relationship depends on so many complex factors that I doubt this could ever be automated. Just think about it. Factors like how you’ve met, mutual experiences or friends, earlier interactions, mood, physical meetings, character, the list goes on and on.

There is one “program” that can handle that complexity easily and instantly. Why, that is you of course! Humans can deal with the complexity of handling these relationships. I may have thousands of (on-line) contacts, I usually know which are important to me and which aren’t. It is a dynamic process that has different outcomes depending on my mood of that day, the interactions I’m having, the things that interest me most at a particular moment, the amount of coffee I drank etc.

I believe that the concept of a portable contact list is a nice technical solution to the wrong problem (will get to that in a moment). FactoryJoe and all those working on it are using the current web 2.0 models to describe the problem (’have your friends with you”) in the context of current walled garden social networks (aka social graph data hoggers). Each social network has it’s own “contact list” format. They are unwilling to set that free, or have it accessed from outside of the walled garden because their entire business model is is build upon the assumption that if you “own” the social graph you can make an advertisement fortune out of it. This is a pretty dumb business model really. People use social networks for interaction, and there isn’t room for advertisers when I interact with my friends.

Recently Microsoft joined in on this ‘lucrative’ business model. Partnering with some of the largest social networks, Microsoft has defined a new standard for the portability of contacts. Using that standard users can now safely exchange their relationships between Microsoft Messenger, Facebook, Bebo, Tagged, Hi5, and LinkedIn. While this sounds like a great solution for the user, it really isn’t. Just think for one second about this. Why do these social networks all of a sudden allow the user to move his data in and out of the network? They aren’t doing it to provide the user with value, that isn’t their main business model. No, they all simply want a larger piece of the social graph. If they can get their hands on interactions the user has outside of the social network, it makes the social network as a social graph data hogger more important.

The real problem isn’t a portable contact list. The real problem is that none of the services today provide the user with the tools to allow himself to be responsible for his on-line relationships. My interactions with others are mine, they shouldn’t be owned by a social networking service. So instead of thinking about a portable contact list I would like to see a solution worked out in which users own their own on-line relationships, regardless of the service they are using. The data belongs the the user themselves. If we decide to become on-line friends, then there is a mutual exchange of the most relevant information that allows us to interact. If I then choose to go over to Facebook and use it for interaction, I already have my friends with me. I can make intelligent decisions on what information I allow Facebook to see, but essentially Facebook becomes a broker service that allows me to interact with friends, even if neither my friends or myself are on Facebook! Any social network would just be there doing what it should be doing, facilitating interactions. I could Twitter with friends, follow a few using Friendfeed, or whatever, without having the need to import my contacts. They are already with me. They are in my pocket, like a small address book, privately kept away. Secure, perhaps similar to a credit card. I can make transactions on-line (e.g. interact with others), the site that services me would simply be the intermediary that lets me interact with friends. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle piece. if I provide it to a service, connect it so to say, I have my friends to interact with available. But it’s only temporary. As soon as I’m done, I’ll disconnect and taking my friends with me again.

The great thing about this is that it solves a number of (privacy) issues. The users get to own their data, interactions, contacts. But more importantly. It forces the service provider to become just that, a service provider. Not a social graph data hogger, not a destination site, but an organization that services travelers passing by. No need to fight over data, over social graphs. The user has needs, and the service provider that services them best will win. It puts the focus of the service provider on providing value to the customers it serves. It is the analogy of a gas station. A traveler drops by, gets some gas using a universal connection method, pays for the value he gets, and moves on to his next stop on his journey.

And the things FactoryJoe wants to resolve would still be possible. I could allow my friends to catch a glimpse of my interactions with other friends, so that new connections may be born (social proximity). I could find people if they want to be found. I can block interactions with the people I don’t want to interact with. And most important of all. I am responsible for my own address book. I can manage it the way I want, segment it the way I feel like.

This sounds like an easy to resolve problem. But of course it isn’t. It requires thinking through what such a personal address book would have to look like. What maintenance services the user needs to keep it updated and managed. Exchange protocols allowing unknown people to become on-line friends.

But the most difficult thing to resolve is the fact that web 2.0 service providers need to rethink their entire existence. Instead of becoming social graph data hoggers they would have to become user value service providers. That step may very well be too big for them to take. Most likely we would need a web 3.x revolution to make that happen. I don’t mean semantic web here, instead I would argue for a user centric web.

In a user centric web the user is in charge. He owns his personal data, his privacy, his own interactions. He can connect to the user centric web anywhere he wants, using his personal, always fitting key. From any of the contact points he chooses, he can start interaction with his friends. The contact point becomes a user centric service point. The user simply pays for the value he gets, instead of getting bombarded with unwanted advertisement. Interaction with friends is the responsibility of the user. Meeting new friends too. He isn’t forced to go to a specific destination (a walled garden approach). He simply starts his interactions from any place he wants. It would force the services to open up, to be available anywhere the user wants. And I don’t mean by providing programmer’s API’s so that programmers can interact with a site (a site is a destination and the API is there too lock users into that site). That is patching up flaws in web 2.0. No, I mean opening up in the sense that I can always access the service, no matter where I am or what I am doing. It’s a bit like having no urls in advertisement really. Instead of focusing on destination (= url) we might focus on finding the service (=search).

What have I been trying to prove with this post? Well, first of all, I can’t draw a good picture no matter how hard I try But I’m a bit of an idealist about the user centric web. It sounds great, but I don’t think it will happen anytime soon. We need to get the power to the people first. And I doubt that Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter, and the web 2.0 likes will be willing to give up control over “their social graph” just like that. But then again, it doesn’t hurt to dream about it every once in a while.

Social networking may be declining, social interaction won’t

I read a Business Week article this morning which suggests that the current MySpace generation is becoming fed up with the ad bombardments on the site. They seem to be spending less time on MySpace because of it. A quote from the article:

The MySpace generation may be getting annoyed with ads and a bit bored with profile pages. The average amount of time each user spends on social networking sites has fallen by 14% over the last four months, according to market researcher ComScore. MySpace, the largest social network, has slipped from a peak of 72 million users in October to 68.9 million in December, ComScore says. The total number of people on such sites is still increasing at an 11.5% rate, but that’s down sharply from past growth rates. “What you have with social networks is the most overhyped scenario in online advertising,” says Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Specific Media, which places ads for customers on a variety of Web sites.

I don’t really know if we are now seeing a decline that marks a steady downfall of the current social networking sites. There seems to be contradicting numbers around. TechCrunch, for example, showed in January that Facebook is still growing in traffic, while MySpace is going down. According to Mashable traffic is increasing and they use a totally different measure, using the traffic measures from one of the largest content delivery networks Akamai. According to Akamai, they have delivered 5 times more data over their network to social networking sites in the last year. this suggests that people are spending more time on social networking sites.

And then there is the information Google provided for last quarters results. It suggests that Google has trouble monetizing ads on MySpace:

CFO George Reyes said social networking advertising is not monetizing as expected. When questioned further Sergey Brin, president of technology, said: “We don’t talk about individual partners or anything like that.” Brin noted some things were tried that didn’t pan out. While Brin won’t talk about partners it’s fairly obvious that MySpace is an issue. Google is obligated to pay at least $900 million in minimum revenue guarantees to MySpace through 2010. Later, the question was revisited again. He noted that Google also has Orkut and other social networking partners. “We have an incredible amount of this inventory,” said Brin. “I don’t think we have the killer best way to monetize social networks yet. We have had a lot of experiments (and some disappointments).”

So what does all of this mean? Well, for starters, monetising social networks through ads is hard. If Google, best in class,  is still struggling with this then you can imagine others will have similar problems. I believe that ads in itself provide little value to the users in social networks, and for that reason it is a faulty business model. Essentially the same thing happens on a web page as on TV. People will ignore ads when the ad itself does not provide the user any value in his actions. Ads work in search because you are looking for something, but do not work when you are interacting with a friend. The ad itself doesn’t provide extra value to the interaction. It is as if you and I are having a drink in a bar together, and the bartender keeps drawing our attention with commercial messages. It’s annoying, and most likely, we will simply go to the next bar to grab a beer without commercial interruptions.

SocialAds launched by Facebook have, and will, experience the same problems. Although the underlying mechanisms might be smarter (Facebook watches you and your friends like a Big Brother and uses your profiles and interactions to match ads) it essentially doesn’t solve the real problem. There is no room for advertisement when people interact. And their first Beacon attempt wasn’t a success either. Facebook got an overwhelming negative response mostly because people didn’t like it that the feature couldn’t be turned off or that it would invade privacy.  In my opinion, the beacon system is build upon a wrong assumption. it assumes that mimicking the “advice from a friend” on-line will help increase sales or better targeted advertisement. As I have said earlier, the interaction you and I might have when I tell you about a new car I bought isn’t the same as the beacon message in my newsfeed that says that “Alexander just bought car X on site Y”. In the first example there is trust, talk, emotions, gestures, the opportunity to agree or disagree with each other, in other words true interaction. In the second case there is a “computer system” that tells my friends I just bought a car. Not the same, and not enough value to help my friends to buy a car too.

I believe for this reason current most popular social networking sites will either evolve into something better, or disappear all together. I don’t know if the figures I started out with are a measure that show this decline in popularity, but I’m betting on something that is a constant factor throughout. Social behavior. People have jumped on the social networking train to be part of its success. But now that the hype is over, the question becomes if these sites provide the user real value.

Building and looking at other people’s profiles is fun at first but becomes tiresome pretty quickly. I see this all around me. People joining a network, spending a lot of time to build a personal profile. But after a while the fun wears off, and less time is spend on that activity. So what do these people use social networks for? Interaction of course. They use the chat functionality to chat with their friends, send them messages etc. the profiling and all the applications that help you beef up your profile aren’t interesting enough. And I’m betting that current social networking sites do not provide the user enough value to keep him on board while the advertisement pressure is increased. Maybe new initatives like Friendfeed will do a better job at it.

What are we left with then? Interaction. It is always about interaction. People love to interact. Social networking sites will have to evolve into social interaction sites where friends can use any tool needed to interact with each other. Through feeds, sms, tweets, IM, e-mail, voice calls, video messages, you name it. The web entrepreneur that can think of a web business model that monetises user interaction will be the winner. Providing value can always be monetised. Social networking may be declining, social interaction won’t!