Facebook announces user names. It generates a lot of buzz on Techmeme. TechCrunch reports the obvious (vanity), but Chris Messina is the only one that is actually analyzing what Facebook is doing and what impact it can have on our online lives. In a post he entitles “Facebook usernames and the digital battle over your identity” he goes into the underlying strategy of this move and the effect it has on your online identity.
Arguing that Facebook shouldn’t get into the vanity URL business, I still think that they had it right the first time around. Digital identity should change the adapt to humans; not force humans to refer to each other in more computer-friendly ways. But the allure is simply too great. I also can’t say that I blame them, even though I think it’s a distraction along the way towards more widespread real identity (and thereby reputability) online.
Chris goes on and hits the one thing that s relevant about this move by Facebook. the online battle to own your identity, profile and interactions:
So, this is happening, and companies are racing to achieve namespace dominance over your online profile. This is what Tim O’Reilly warned about in his definition of Web 2.0. He said that one of the new kinds of lock-in in the era of [cloud computing] will be owning a namespace. There you have it — who are you going to trust to own yours?
I suggest you read the article in full, it’s an excellent read.
Chris hits on a nerve I’ve always felt was important. While web 2.0 has brought us a lot of great things it also provides service providers more opportunities for user lock-in. User lock-in is a term invented by marketeers (they are all idiots you know). Customer lock-in is in essence a protective measure, hence the “lock-in” part. Marketeers will obviously never say that. They brainwash themselves and their company by arguing that achieving customer lock-in is done by excellent service, providing the user with value and more of that. They are wrong of course. Customer lock-in is achieved by simpler things. The inability for a user to leave a service, to hide customer help behind layers of customer service, 23 pages of legal gibberish called terms of service, the impossibility to switch to other providers, downgrade services etc.
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.
The problem I have with this definition, even though it adequately describes what we refer to as web 2.0, is that it doesn’t address the user and the value he should receive. What we often fail to realize is that the network effect Tim talks about is not only the best thing that web 2.0 has brought us, it is also its biggest tragedy. The network effect forces service providers to concentrate on the size of the network, instead of a primary focus on user value. The Internet is not seen as a platform at all. The service provider sees his own platform as the Internet! And to make matters worse, web 2.0 is governed by old-fashioned web 1.0 business models that leverage that network value, instead of user value.
The network effect and the failure of online business models to evolve with the technological evolution leads to unwanted effects such as customer lock-in, the network value being more important than individual user value, Twitter spam, walled gardens, the total lack of data portability, lack of privacy control, the battle over your online identity, profile and interactions. And now the battle over name space. In effect, it cages us, instead of setting us free. It takes away our ability to be in control of our own profile, our data and our interactions.
And there is nothing we can do about it as individual users are either unaware or unable to generate enough counter force to balance the power on the web. This fight to control you on the web can only be halted if we evolve online business models to a point where revenue and competition are based upon user value instead of network value. If service providers generate revenue buy providing user value they will achieve the exact same effect as they try to reach ow. Users will be committed to user their service. Not because they can’t leave, but because they choose so. All it requires for service providers is to let go, to turn the relationship with the user inside out. Now that would be a revolution.
I’m with Chris here. He sums it all up in one little hidden line in his post:
It’s remarkable how cheap we’ll sell out our identity these days.
The question is, are we seriously going to put up with this? Will we allow Facebook, or any other service provider dictate that their platform is our Internet? That is the ultimate user lock-in. A shiny, gold-plated bird cage.
That is not a future I would feel comfortable with. It’s time we redefine online business models. It may be our only way out of this lock-in to a web that is user-centric instead of network centric.
image taken from: http://ascannerdorky.wordpress.com/2007/07/18/10/
The definition of Social Media according to Wikipedia is:
Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogues (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).
It sounds perfectly reasonable. Social Media gives us all the power to become publishers. To distribute our content and interact over them. To a certain extend this is true. But if you think that the world is waiting for you and your content think again. It isn’t that easy. There are certain rules you need to understand and follow.
While distribution scales endlessly, your ability to interact will not
Wikipedia is right about the scalable publishing technologies. Anyone can now create, publish and distribute content across the web. The technologies involved allow you to reach out to audiences far beyond your social network. There is a problem with this scalability. While your content can be distributed endlessly, your ability to interact over that content cannot. In a sense many of the current successful web 2.0 companies try to scale down this endless stream of content and conversations. Our human limitations do not allow us to follow 10.000 people, process millions of pieces of content and interact over all of them.
Technology tries to help us bring order into this chaos by allowing us to broadcast without the need of interaction (Twitter), limit content and discussions to people we trust (Friendfeed), build up a network of friends we want interaction with (Facebook) or attempt to capture the conversation in one place (Disqus). While technology has found us easy to use and scalable distribution, we do not have proper solutions yet for scaling down our interactions. Search for signal to noise and you will find many different startups and services trying to solve our human limitations wrt scale. This is not a new problem. Google has been working on this for years. They build their search engine and PageRank to try and provide a better signal to noise ratio. It is impossible for us to see all content on the web, so we use search engines to find us the right content.
Social Media adds another dimension to this scalability. It gives us not only more content but also more interaction over that content. Needless to say that this leads to an unprecedented nr of startups trying to provide us new methods and technology to deal with this endless stream of content we now call Social Media.
Social Media isn’t always democratic, it is a game that has winners, losers and cheaters
Anyone can become a celebrity. The past few years of YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, blogging and Idols have proven that anyone can become a hero, right? Hardly. Of course there are excellent examples of people coming from nowhere into stardom, but for every 1 success there are a million failures. When it comes to online distribution and scale, you need to understand that while the technology itself is perfectly scalable, the actual game is a game with winners, losers an cheaters. There are those that have worked extremely hard, for many years, to become a celebrity (In the Tech world people like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray would fit into this category). These people have been providing constant value and interaction to a community and have earned respect and a voice from that.
Then there are those that understand the dynamics behind the game and seek an audience by taking a few shortcuts here and there. Instead of slowly building up an audience by providing constant quality, they actively seek high visibility through different channels and circling around other celebrities. Getting noticed by a person or channel representing a large community will help build your own community of people you can interact with. Needless to say you do need to provide valuable content in order to get noticed. Bottom line is that it takes a lot of work and a thorough understanding of the dynamics of Social Media to become a well known community member. Just because publishing has become easy doesn’t mean that you will be heard.
And there are those that become instant celebrities because they cheat. If you are thinking about becoming a web rock star yourself. Be prepared to either invest all of your time for the next few years in publishing relevant an valuable content and slowly building up a community of followers. Or cheat, buy yourself into high volume traffic without actually having to do anything relevant to earn such a position (I suggest becoming a recommended Twitter user for example).
Don’t get fooled by the ease to publish. Social Media isn’t easy. It takes a lot of hard work to interact
I see the following type of conversation pop up all the time on Friendfeed. A user observes that while he is active on the community, the content he publishes doesn’t draw a lot of attention (=discussion). This is the perfect way to start interaction on Friendfeed btw . It takes only a few seconds before the community starts to give helpful hints. Bottom line in most cases seem to be ‘give and you shall receive’. In other words. If you want people to interact with you, start by interacting with them. In order to become a respectable member of any community, you not only need to produce relevant and valuable content for that community. You also need to add value via interaction. Give, without expecting something in return. While this makes perfect sense, it doesn’t make things easier. Not everyone is as outspoken. There is always a small subset of the community that is responsible for a large part of the interactions. It’s hard to make your voice count. And while the technology does level the playing field (anyone can be or interact with a celebrity), it doesn’t automatically mean that you are heard. It takes time, effort, and a lot of positive energy to build your own voice within a community.
Some random thoughts
Social Media provides us endless possibilities to create, mash up, publish and interact over content. The one thing that holds this endless scalability back is the human factor. We simply can’t deal with a universe where there are no boundaries. As soon as we enter this world we set a playing field by following a specific set of people, signing up for certain services, interact in specific places, search, filter and share specific content. It help us to create order in a chaotic world. The biggest effect Social Media might have is that we will use it to make our world smaller instead of bigger. Quality over quantity. We might see a trend where networks will become smaller instead of bigger. Where content and interactions will become highly focused instead of widespread. Where geoposition and localization will be more important than globalization. Where interaction with people you have actually met will become more important than people you have stumbled across online.
I do not often agree with Facebook, but I do agree with their decision to make privacy settings of their users more important than opening up the vast amount of data they track to 3rd party developers. Marshall Kirkpatrick writes about that decision and points out that Facebook isn’t opening up everything:
Facebook holds a mind-blowing amount of conversational data. The company is analyzing it extensively and it has an omniscient view of conversations across all the networks of friends and privacy restrictions. It uses that aggregate data analysis to make business decisions and to sell advertisements. The rest of us are only allowed to give Facebook more data and to get back a sliver per user that will facilitate more user-level participation in amassing more data at Facebook.
He continues and decides that the value of the data is too big to be held by one company alone:
The data that Facebook controls, conversations and social connections, could be used for analysis of real-time social patterns which could lead to world-shaking new insights. Do we get access to that data? No.
Why not? We don’t get that access because Facebook was built on a fundamental promise of privacy and a complex system of privacy controls. Privacy is good, it’s very good. But, the census gathers and exposes personal data without violating privacy. Lots of systems do.
[stuff deleted...]
The data the network controls is just too valuable to keep locked up for only the company’s own analysis.
Marshall asks an interesting question and provides a provocative answer for it. Is the ability to innovate with user data fundamentally more important than the right of a user to keep his data (interactions) private?
It is tempting to answer this question with a ‘yes’. Many web advocates will explain that by giving up privacy they get value. That the free flow of data has lead to new interaction possibilities that were impossible before (web 2.0). We’ve made our progress because everything is set free. Data that is free can be mashed up and provide new value, unprecedented.
While we all benefit from these effects, we should not lightly dismiss this as a simple case of ‘collateral damage’. Marshall touches a fundamental dilemma. What is more important, the rights of the mass, or the rights of the individual. In the western world we tend to assume an inverse relationship between individual rights and social control. More social control leads to less individual rights and vice versa. Marshall suggests that individual rights may be less important than the ‘greater cause’ of being able to provide more value to users if data is freely accessible. The obvious question to ask when resented with this view is “where do you set the boundary?” In other words, what violation of individual rights is still acceptable for the greater cause of innovation?
But to me, there is a more fundamental flaw underneath. Individuals do not really have the means to protect their rights in the first place. Even with every privacy setting Facebook offers a user, there isn’t a single setting that protects the user’s rights from Facebook itself! There is only one way a user can be in control of his own rights. The user can decide not to participate. The web gave us value, and in return it forced us to give up our most important right. The right of the individual. Everything is free and accessible for all. But in return we have to accept that there is no way for us to control what these companies know or do with the data they collect. No matter how honorable Facebook is, they have a disproportional power that allows them to crush individual user rights. Currently, 3rd party developers complain they can’t store Facebook data because of privacy settings, but Facebook itself doesn’t have that limitation. Teh user doens’t own his data, Facebook does.
I realise that these views aren’t popular. That many already (un-)consciously made the decision to participate. We are accepting a world in which the balance is in favor of the companies that develop services. That it is ok that I have to accept a Privacy Policy and Terms of Use of a company, but that that same company doesn’t commit itself to my individual rights. I do not mind data being set free, but I do mind that I do not really have the means to decide for myself what the tradeoff is. It’s all or nothing. Join the party or stay home. And while we might see the benefit of more value now, this is a decision that can’t be undone easily.
Don’t get me wrong. I totally agree with Marshall that the innovation over user data can lead to incredible value. I’m fine with sharing my data in order to have access to that value. What bugs me is that I do not have control over that decision or that balance. We are scared to give that fundamental right back to the individual. It might break all web business models. But I am an optimist. I think we would be surprised to see how many people would be quite willing to share data in return for value. The difference is that in this new situation they would be able to make a conscious decision. The user would be in control. He would join a service like Facebook and consciously deciding the best trade off between sharing information and obtaining value from the service. And that conscious act would provide us all more value than the current situation in which we are hijacked.
The only way this can be solved is by putting the user in control. Turn the entire model inside out Privacy/accessibility settings should not be set per service, but set by the user. The user shouldn’t have a fragmented profile across every service, but instead have one profile that can connect to any service. He should not have to find friends across many services, but have his friends within his profile, accessible to him across any service he wishes to use. The user can be in control of what his profile would look like per service, who his friends are, what data he is willing to share. The user should own his data. If that would be the case then we would have balance between user and service provider. If the user has control over the decision to share, then there can be a much more effective exchange of data for value. A service provider wanting access to some of that data will have to agree to the individual’s privacy policy and terms of use. We would not need a new developer’s APIs for every service, but we would need one standard API that allows users to connect to services. In many ways, putting the user in control would simplify technology and our ability to mash up data in order to create new value. It enforces a more natural cooperation between service provider and user.
The real innovation of the web would be to restore balance and put the individual user in control again.
1. If everything becomes open and connected, what will happen to the big destinations?
2. Why is the web rapidly evolving into uncountable databases with connections, instead of one database where everything connects?
3. If all services and destinations become open, then what is the point in being a destination site in the first place?
4. Why are we creating webs within webs, instead of one network that connects it all?
Personality and identity
5. Why am I forced to be fragmented across the web, instead of having one presence that can connect anywhere?
6. Why do I need to get my friends to use the social services I’m on, instead of having my friends with me no matter what service I use?
7. What is or defines my online identity? Am I my profile, my interactions, my data?
8. What defines my presence on the web? Is it the fact that I can be found, or that I can interact anywhere?
Data
9. Why is ‘having data about me’ more important than ‘serving me the right data’?
10. Why is real-time data more important than serving the right data at the right time?
11. Can data lead to demand, or does it only take care of supply?
12. Why does a company have control over all data, instead of letting the user be in control of his own data?
Privacy
13. Why does every service need a TOS and a Privacy Policy, but at the same time the users that are exploited don’t have a TOS or personal Privacy Policy?
14. Why does every service have to implement privacy controls for the user, while we could implement 1 set of privacy controls that the user can control across all services?
Business models
15. Why is the economic model on the web broken for most companies?
16. Why do most companies work with advertisement models while clearly few manage to be sustainably profitable?
17. When does the network effect diminish in web business models and thinking?
Behavior
18. Why can we now publicly rant about anything or anyone, without really being held accountable for our actions?
19. Why do we expect everything to be free, and then have high demands and complain about service?
20. Why would we want to have thousands of friends and interact everywhere?
21. Will we continue to increase interaction or are we reaching saturation?
22. Why do we spend more and more time online while real life passes by so quickly?
Just a few questions that I have. How about you? Do you have any?
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?
There seems to be a strange disconnect between our online and offline lives. Different rules, norms and values seem to apply. It is as if our online personality is not connected to our real life. We act differently and feel a sense of freedom online that seems to compensate for the restrains we might feel in real life. We are all actors in this massive online play and it allows us to do things we wouldn’t consider doing in real life.
Examples?
We wouldn’t allow anyone, not even the landlord you rent a house from, to put web cams in our houses and record every conversation inside the house “to make our experience better”. Yet we throw our privacy principles over board when we get online and join sites like Facebook or MySpace.
We wouldn’t show a stranger arriving at our doorstep our family photo album. Yet we publish and annotate these same photos online so that the whole world can view them.
We protect our children against danger in the real world. We supervise their first steps into the world. We don’t let them talk or walk with strangers. We don’t let them bully others. Yet we let them get online unsupervised and unprotected, explore the web and social networking.
We do not divulge private matters concerning illness, lost jobs, winning the lottery, fights, love, etc. to strangers we bump into on the street, yet we disclose all of this online in social networks where half of the time we don’t even know who is listening in.
We wouldn’t tell complete strangers where exactly we live, when we are going on holiday or business trips (what if they rob us), yet you can find all of that information, and more, online.
In real life we have opinions, but we do not disclose these opinions everywhere. We might even be inhibited to do so as it might turn on you at some point in time. Online we join every conversation and start opinionating immediately. And we forget it gets recorded and will never disappear again.
The people we call friends in the real world is limited. A friend is something different from an aqcuaintance. Online we have thousands of friends. You may argue these are not your real friends, but why then do we disclose so much about ourselves to these ‘friends’? Why do we spend so much time engaging with people we really don’t know?
We do not tell anyone about our bank accounts, our passport numbers, social security numbers or birth dates unless there is a real need to do so. Yet online we sign up for any service that pops up and disclose happily our e-mail addresses, passwords, birth dates etc. In most cases these turn out to be the exact same pieces of information we use for online banking and financial transactions. Every once in a while we get scared of phishing, but soon enough we forget about it again.
We don’t trust new insurance, banking, or telephone companies that tell us we can use a service for free if we allow them access to our private information, and listen in on our conversations. Yet online we let social networks have access not only to our own profiles, our annotated baby pictures, our families and friends, but also to our interactions with all of them. We allow all of that private data to be exploited commercially.
We protect our privacy and family in real life, yet we let social networks protect our privacy online? Who protects us then from them?
I could probably extend this list further and think of more disconnects between real life and online behavior. But the real question is, do we care enough about it to actually deal with it? The ability to connect and interact with anyone online has brought us a lot of freedom. It has many positive aspects to it. It has freed us from many real-life constraints. If you can afford to be part of this online experience you will find that it tends to level things. Everyone can be a pop star.
But I would like to urge you to think about this for a minute. As real-life and online behavior become more and more connected, entangled, you will find that it is less easy to separate them. Online and offline become the same life. While we see our online behavior as play now I doubt it will still be play in a few years. And yet we act as if these worlds are not connected. We disclose almost anything about ourselves online and do not think or understand the possible consequences in real-life. With viruses spreading across the world and a network of computers that spans the entire planet harm can be done in a split second. Where wars are still fought on the ground, they will also move into cyberspace. Where commercial exploitation of your private data now leads to display ads you can safely ignore, it might lead to less harmless forms of commercial activity in the future. Where your next job interview might now depend on your previously achieved results. In the near future it will depend on what a Google search result will reveal about you.
Am I being too negative about this? Maybe, considering current behavior in social media my views aren’t exactly popular. But I also firmly believe that we are formed and shaped by our own actions. My advice would be that you start acting online like you would do in real-life. Thinking these worlds are disconnected is naive.
A few weeks ago my 6 yr old son was sitting next to me while I was watching the news. I was a bit distracted and didn’t realize he was sitting there, but after a while he said something to me that made me turn off the TV. His words were “Daddy, why are there so many dead people on the news?”. He doesn’t watch the news very often, and we tend to not watch it when he is around. But even so, he noticed there is a lot of bad stuff in the news. Six years old, he should not be asking us this.
I was telling Ian Hayward about this (I’m with Ian in San Francisco). He told me that he had not watched the news in over 2 years. The reason for it is that he feels that we are all too influenced by the things reported to us. I thought about that for a while, and I tend to agree with him. We all know the feeling of going on a 2-week holiday and not following the news. It actually helps us feel great during the vacation. Ian has been on a 2 year vacation already.
Other examples. How about the feeling of panic that is fuled by the news around the financial crisis? Don’t get me wrong, there is a crisis. But the economy is influenced strongly by consumer trust. If we don’t trust. we spend less, and we get into a spiral that takes the economy down further.
I sometimes feel the same way about all these social media conversations. They are a lot of fun, but people sometimes take it a bit too seriously. The professional blogosphere is a game. It is a game where (some) people make money. Big sites aren’t there for your entertainment, they are there to make tons of money. Traffic over relevance. Stories promoted into our rss readers. And this is fine btw. As long as we don’t take it all too seriously. There is more to life than spending your time in social media conversations. Its fun, its play, but its imapct isn’t life-changing yet (although it takes away a lot of time ). In the end it is all about what you do in real-life. Don’t let your feelings be manipulated too much by what others think or say out loud. Make up your own mind!
I’ve often said it, and I’ll say it again. The real value of social media lies in the ability for anyone to interact over anything. It is the interaction that creates the value. Smart people like Tim O’Reilly will tell you that web 2.0 is about the web becoming a platform. That data is becoming more important than software. And that network effect determine value.
Clay Shirky is interviewed by the Guardian about his view of the next decade. Not a great in depth interview, but an ok read. In it he predicts newspapers will disappear (wow), and that books will be printed on-demand. I do like his final statement:
What does the next decade hold? Mobile tools will certainly change the landscape, open spectrum will unleash the kind of creativity we’ve seen on the wired internet, and of course there will be many more YouTube/Facebook-class applications. But the underlying change was the basic tools of the internet. The job of the next decade is mostly going to be taking the raw revolutionary capability that’s now apparent and really seeing what we can do with it.
It is hard to imagine anything that would “change everything” as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity. The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even the transforming power of electrification. We’d use artificial intelligence the same way we’ve exploited previous powers—by wasting it on seemingly silly things. Of course we’d plan to apply AI to tough research problems like curing cancer, or solving intractable math problems, but the real disruption will come from inserting wily mindfulness into vending machines, our shoes, books, tax returns, automobiles, email, and pulse meters.
We see evidence for that already. A farmer in America–the hero of the agricultural economy–rides in a portable office on his tractor. It’s air conditioned, has a phone, a satellite-driven GPS location device, and sophisticated sensors near the ground. At home his computer is connected to the never-ending stream of weather data, the worldwide grain markets, his bank, moisture detectors in the soil, digitized maps, and his own spreadsheets of cash flow. Yes, he gets dirt under his fingernails, but his manual labor takes place in the context of a network economy.
I do not pretend to be as smart or experienced as these people. But I think we can safely say that underlying many of these developments there is one major driver. Many of these technological developments have been driven by the human need for interaction. The success of web 2.0 isn’t data. YouTube didn’t become the largest video portal because it stored video’s. It became the largest one because people could share and interact over these videos.
I see that behavior everywhere. Take Friendfeed for example. The most important aspect of Friendfeed isn’t content aggregation imo (that’s actually not important at all as content aggregation lacks intention). It is the ability to interact over the content. I suspect many users engage in conversations on Friendfeed without actually having seen the original piece of content that sparked the conversation.
It isn’t about ‘always on’ either (this used to be the mobile mantra). People do not buy mobile phones with cool technological features so that they can be ‘always on’. The mobile handheld may be a good way to be ‘always on’, but underlying that technical capability I have always felt the underlying need was a fear of not being there when it happens. It allows you to track what is happening and interact any time you feel like it. Interaction is what makes life fun.
I do believe that the nature of the interaction will evolve. Right now it is a very public interaction. Half of the Internet population is on Facebook or MySpace by now. Conversations are taking place everywhere and with anyone. While that will remain, I also think there will be an increased need for more private interactions. Instead of talking with thousands of people all over the world you really do not know, we will see more and more possibilities to allow you to interact with the people you really now and care about.
As a result of this I think we may see a decline in the growth of these huge social networks. If everyone is there, it is simply not as interesting anymore. People will revert to smaller, more private environments in which they can interact whenever they want with their friends, family, colleagues etc.
Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.
This is beginning to sound like a development I have talked about many times, the user-centric web. In a User Centric Web, the user is in control of his data and interactions. Facebook’s attempt sounds like it, but it fails in one major perspective. And Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operation Officer of Facebook, together with Brad’s analysis indirectly explain where it fails.
Sheryl is quoted in the article:
“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.”
Brad writes about the possible intentions of Facebook Connect:
Facebook has detailed information about its users: their real identities, what they like and dislike and whom they associate with. With a member’s permission, it could use that data to help other Web sites deliver more personalized ads. Similarly, those sites could tell Facebook what its users are doing elsewhere, helping to make its own ads more targeted.
In many ways Facebook Connect, and Google’s OpenSocial, attempt to do what the User Centric Web is about. It allows users to take their data with them on the web. It allows them to be in control of their data and their interactions. The problem I have with Facebook Connectand these other initiatives is that to me it seems the wrong intentions are used to build it. Facebook Connect looks like a scheme that will provide Facebook more value. By letting Facebook users leave the Facebook platform they are actually hooked tighter to the platform. And that is good news for the advertisement revene streams of Facebook. User value seems to be reduced to welcome side effect. Facebook Connect lets Facebook extend the reach of its social graph beyond the platform, making the network inevitably more valuable than the user.
In my opinion the underlying business model makes it very difficult to provide the user true control over his data. If your business model is free advertisement based services, then you are forced to make network value more important than individual user value. It make privacy control an “issue” to deal with, instead of a value you can provide your user with. Big difference. I am afraid most social network users don’t care or are ignorant, but the issue of privacy will become more and more important as social media takes control of our lives. Openness and interaction that come along with it are great, but there are also dangers to consider with Social Media.
I’m afraid the NY Times calls it right when they say Facebook aims to extend their reach on the web with Facebook Connect. That sums it all up. Facebook pitches Facebook Connect as a privacy tool. I am left with one question. Who is going to protect me, my data and my online interactions from Facebook?
Few people seem to realize or care about the dangers social media brings to our lives. Our online habits are changing rapidly from a closed, private behavior towards an open and sharing culture. While this brings us lots of good, it seems to me we are still very naive about its possible dangers.
Let me provide you five dangers that arise due to our changed online behavior. These dangers should make us realize that when (not if) we move into an era where data becomes currency, we will need to develop better privacy and security measures to go along with that. There are many more dangers that can be thought of, but I’ve just picked 5.
1. Identity theft
Stealing another person’s identity is easier than you think. We are not aware of the information we share on the web. And we often do not realize that Google never forgets. We can find names, birth dates, family members, school and work history, and much more on anyone. We can find e-mail addresses, credit card information, and from there we can get access to bank accounts and identity information. Honestly, it doesn’t take a genius to steal a person’s identity online. Right now this often has financial repercussions (people buy stuff on your credit card), but the consequences may be more severe. When important aspects of our lives are moved online identity theft can do us more harm. Think about someone committing crimes in your name. And it can be done so easily. All you need to do is sign up for a new cool web 2.0 social networking thingy. This is a harmless example, but you can imagine what can be done.
2. Everything known about you can and will be used against you
Remember that college party where you had a great time and posted a few pictures of you and your friends on the web? Remember that post you wrote where you talked about your political views, your religion, sexual preference, or point of view on various issues? Remember that you friended a person that turns out to be a criminal? Or it happens to be someone that is a bit more explicit, has really different political views than yourself. Often we are not aware what others can find about us. Part of the problem is that we have almost no control over the data that is stored on the web about us. But once it is out there it can and will be used in ways you hadn’t thought about before. How about a status update on Twitter or other social network. “I’m off to the web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco’. Harmless right? Not if you realise how easy it is to figure out the address you live at and then empty your house while you are away in San Francisco.
3. Everything is traced to you as a person
If there is one difference between the online and physical world is that data online can be traced to individuals more easily than in the physical world. We are often not aware how much information we give away that can be directly related to us. Social networks have millions of of profiled users in their database. Google has Google accounts. Every time we log into such profiles the data that is collected is directly related to our identity. It isn’t anonymous, it is traceable to ourselves. And that data is used, often for commercial purposes, but sometimes for evil purposes. It may take new laws, new governments, a change in a management team, or a war that can get the wrong people have access to your profile.
4. You have no control over your user data
Web 2.0 services live and thrive by your user data. Facebook exploits your and your friends data and creates revenues from it. Any web 2.0 company that has advertisement as one of its core business model elements will use your data, your interactions, your friends, to create revenues. You get privacy settings that protect you from other users, but who protects you from Facebook itself?
5. Who are you talking to?
Everything becomes social. As a result we can friend thousands of people on the web. In most cases we do not know who that ‘friend’ is. We are not aware that social networking services have a business model in which the network (the no of users connected) is way more important than the individual users. So ‘friending’ is dead simple and encouraged. It seems less important to actually know someone than to ‘friend’ anyone that comes along. Quantity over quality. And while this works out fine in many cases this certainly provides dangers for children, relative less experienced web users, etc. Who are you really talking to?
conclusion
I do not think that sharing, social networking or social media are necessarily bad things. I do mind that current practice ad business models make sharing more important than privacy and security. The current financial flow doesn’t allow us to develop better privacy or security measures as there is no one interested in investing in it. Privacy is losing ground to social media while they should be developed hand in hand. I often hear the argument “I have nothing to hide, so what is the fuzz about”. I find that a naive view on this subject. This shift in behavior caused by social media services with data becoming the most important currency is a development that is unstoppable, and it calls for immediate action.
[Disclaimer: I am responsible for the new Glubble for Families release, so this post is related to my work at Glubble. If you want to follow what is happening over at Glubble I suggest you take a look at our glubble blog here.]
After months of hard work the Glubble team has released the new Glubble for Families. We’re really excited about this. Glubble for Families has gotten a total redesign and comes with a ton of new features. We have worked with our user community to make Glubble an on-line experience for the whole family. The Glubble web site has gotten a total revamp and is looking great too.
If you want to know what Glubble for Families is about, we have created a short video for you that explains it all.
We are getting great feedback from our users already and the press has picked up on it too. There are great posts already over at Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat, CNET, ParentTalkToday.com and more. Very exiting.
The past few months have provided me more challenges, experiences and learnings than ever. Building a service for families and children, making sure they do not have to worry about the (complex) technologies, getting the communication and the usability right, a business model that is truly user-value based.
I think I will be writing some more about those experiences later. For those of you that have followed me on my blog you will find that many of the things I find important in web services have gotten a place in Glubble for Families.
For now I’ll leave you with a special tribute the Glubble team has made for Ian Hayward. Ian has been the driving force behind Glubble and it was him that once started the journey that got us here today. Glubble for Families is now used in 125 countries around the world!
Facebook is bringing us back Beacon again. According to Nick over at All Facebook Beacon had not really disappeared. It was just less intrusively in sight. A little storm appeared on Techmeme over it.. For the very few of you that failed to hear about Beacon before. It’s Facebook;s attempt to monetize the user data and social graph from their 100Mln users. Facebook is, just like almost any other web 2.0 site, unable to create enough advertisement revenues to justify their $15Bln valuation. Beacon is their attempt to create more advertisement revenues.
Personally I believe that the future of on-line advertisement lies outside of social networks. If I’m connecting with friends, whether I know them in real-life or just on-line, there is no room for advertisement. It sits in the way of our interaction, adding zero value to the conversation. I don’t see the difference between on-line or real-life behavior.
Let’s make this Beacon and other social advertisement projects a bit more practical and project it to your normal life. What would you do if you found out that while you were sitting at your rented home taking to a friend, the house owner is recording your conversation, your relationship with this friend, the way you have decorated your home, what movies you like, what political views you have, the coffee brand you are using. What if that house owner takes all this information from you and then uses it to provide you a better advertisement experience? Would you enjoy the commercial message? Think wow, what a cool brand, this is just what I need? Glad that I know this house owner who brings me this cool stuff?
Somehow I doubt that. More likely you would either sue the house owner for breaking in to your privacy. Or, you might find your copy of the rental agreement only to find out that somewhere on page 12, buried deep in incomprehensible juridical language it says that the house owner is allowed to do all this. Would you stay in that house? Or get out of there to find a place that is yours?
People often react a bit uncomfortable when I provide this example. I am always surprised how little people understand about the way they are tracked and traced on-line. I’m also amazed to find that tech savvy people often don’t seem to mind. We seem to have a fait accompli attitude towards free ad based business models. You get stuff for free right, so don’t complain about it. I find that attitude dissatisfying. As if there are no alternatives and we just have to live with it.
So why do we not accept this in real life but are we willing to be tracked and traced on-line? I believe that there are two basic reasons for this behavior.
The first one is naivety. I believe a huge part of the people on the web do not realise nor understand the length at which they are watched. I doubt many have ever tried to read the terms of use or privacy policy of any web service. Too much unreadable text, so why bother. But there seems to be another reason, and it is more subtle. I believe that people aren’t concerned as much with protection of their privacy on the web because their real lives aren’t taking place on the web. It seems a less real place. A place where your digital self can travel around, play, have fun. But that digital self seems to be partially disconnected from real life for most. As a result we tend to use different behavior or values when we go on-line. It isn’t real so it’s not as important. We seem to find it justifiable that anyone on the web can invade our privacy and use our data, our interactions and our profiles for commercial reasons.
Facebook does this particularly well. They provide you privacy controls to set your privacy level. This provides any naive user the comfortable feeling that he and his privacy are safe with Facebook. But what this user doesn’t seem to understand is that Facebook merely provides you privacy controls against third parties. The question no one ever asks or gets answered is, “who is protecting you from Facebook”?
The answer is no one of course. Facebook offers privacy controls for everything but Facebook. Once you sign on your soul is theirs, and they get to commercialize it any way they can. They tell marketeers that a new era has begun in advertisement. Marketeers see advertisement wet dream appearing (what do they know, marketeers are idiots). The user is left in ignorance, providing him a false sense of security as Facebook protects their privacy. And in the end old school advertisers get to pay for this mess as users continue to ignore advertisement that provides them no value. A great business model. Such a waist of energy, of creativity, of user value and of advertisement money spend.
Privacy is the most under discussed, underestimated and undervalued theme of what we now call web 2.0. Even Tim O’Reilly feels that we’re not doing ourselves a favor with these business models. But I would take it one step further. if Tim gets his way data will be the future. But who is going to control that data? If we go on like this it sure isn’t going to be the user. No one is building services that help the user get a grip on his digital tracks. There is no business model for it. We need to open up, give the fellows even more data to ensure that they can all live a prosperous and wealthy live as web service owners.
I’d like people to challenge that line of thinking. We need think more about privacy and start thinking user value. We need developers to build tools that help users control their privacy. And we need entrepreneurs ad investors that build user value based business models. Chris Messina provides a good example of this line of thinking in his Diso project. He is doing the right things there.
I am a bit behind on my reading. While I finished this post I noticed that Skott Karp has a very similar post up now in which he questions why Facebook doesn’t make more advertisement revenues. His conclusion is the same as mine. Advertisement doesn’t provide the user any value in social interaction.
[disclaimer: this post is both personal and work related]
Tim O’Reilly (finally) challenges current web 2.0 practice, providing free ad based services. In a post here he is quoted:
“(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways,” O’Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. “And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”
If you are a regular reader of this blog then you know that this has been my stance from the start. Free is just a cleverly concealed trap. It doesn’t focus on user value. It focuses on having a large user base and ensuring the value is monetized on size. It’s an indirect business model that by default makes it hard for the service provider to provide real user value to the user. It might give a service provider distribution because teh service is free. But the advantage of distribution is diminished by the lack of revenues. There is only one company that has succeeded in the advertisement business model, and that’s Google. They take up over 75% of ALL ad revenues in the on-line market. The rest is taken y the thousands of free ad based initiatives leaving most with bread crumbs.
I prefer a business model where the user gets value, and you monetize on that value. It’s the cleanest and best business model there is. Ask yourself this. Would you prefer a few hundred thousand enthusiastic customers that pay for the value that they receive, or would you prefer millions of users that get a free service, aren’t really getting the value they deserve and end up with advertisement too because you need to make a living?
If you are an investor or fast web 2.0 entrepreneur you will likely choose the second model. It’s makes you feel you can rule the world, beat Google, Facebook and the likes. The model is meant for that. Great distribution (it’s free), and revenues are created by enlarging the user base. A win-win situation right? Well, not for the customer. Because the focus of that model is on growth, not on user value. If you are an entrepreneur that is concerned with his customers, you will never choose that model. It’s that simple.
That doesn’t mean FREE isn’t a great business model. Just don’t mix it up with advertisement, especially if you are in the social media or social networking business.
I’m currently preparing a consumer launch for Glubble. We’re about to release Glubble for Families, a great set of on-line activities that involve the entire family. Glubble provides parents convenient tools to help their children discover the web and social networking without worrying if they are safe. It makes the web change from an individual activity into an experience that connecting the entire family.
This is an example where FREE ads based business models would never work. For this simple reason social networks such as Facebook or MySpace can never target the family market. When you are in that market, you need to be on the side of the parent and the family. You need to provide them value and ensure their experience is both fun and safe, without advertisement.
It’s for this reason we have chosen for a business model in which there will always be a fully functional safe and fun service for free. At the same time we will offer great premium services that will provide families even more value. This model allows us to focus on one thing only, to provide customer value. With Glubble the Family Social Network has arrived.
ps. if you want to join our preview of Glubble for Families, drop me a line and I’ll send you an invite.
The past few weeks I have been in a crazy roller coaster preparing a public launch for a new service. It’s a lot of work, there are so many little and big details to take care of, a team of people working day and night to get things done. It’s a lot of fun too.
Last night, while I was finishing of some work, I looked back a little and found that my on-line behavior of the past weeks has changed a lot. I’ve spent less time on (social media) services that I am subscribed to. I haven’t been in Friendfeed discussions, Twittered less, Google reader is hopelessly out of control, and services like social median, twine, Facebook (I rarely use it, but people do try to friend me all the time) and many more that ping me for my attention haven’t gotten any attention at all.
The funny thing is that I have been interacting more than ever in this period. I have met and talked with many people spread around different time zones. But the way we met was very traditional. I used physical meetings, phone, skype, and (god forbid) old-fashioned e-mail. These weren’t all work related meetings. Actually, I’m thinking half of them had nothing to do with the work we’re facing. But because I’m spending a lot of hours working I find I spent less time on-line talking to “friends” in all kinds of social networks.
It looks like I have reached a social media saturation point. Balancing life and work, pleasure and profession, off-line and on-line, I find that many of the web 2.0 services we early adaptors boast about aren’t all that important. It seems to me that, unless you are making a living in this tech world as a blogger, tech evangelist or whatever, many of these services do not provide enough value to justify using them all the time. There isn’t a need for me to enroll in yet another Twitter variant called Yammer. Even if they did win some prize in some tech meeting. There isn’t really a need for me to check all tech discussions going on over at Friendfeed as these discussions rarely bring something new. There isn’t a need to follow TechMeme and other popular tech aggregation news sites as the news echoes its way into our lives.
That doesn’t mean that web 2.0 services are a waist of time. But at the same time, a lot of those services do not add real value to my personal life. If they did, I’d sure be spending more time on them. It might be great to be able to meet up with thousands of friends over on any social networking site. But I find meeting people I respect, family, friends, and professional colleagues more important. If I have to choose, due to time constraints for example, I notice now that I choose to narrow the circle of people that I interact with. And that is opposite to what social networks want us to do. They want us to widen our circle, as having a large network is more important to the service provider than providing value to the individual user.
It turns out I ended up using services that provide me, the individual user, value. It’s the problem of most social networks. As they all seem to choose the path of free ad-based business models they end up providing me less value and having a focus on enlarging the network. Most web 2.0 services have turned into a playground that way. They are fun to visit, but really not all that important. I love amusement parks, but I don’t need to spend every day or hour there. Maybe that is why “old fashioned” e-mail, or Skype, the place where I store my family photo’s, and my mobile phone are so much more important to me.
It’s because these services were build to provide me value, and monetize that value. Instead of web 2.0 services that offer me everything for free to lower the threshold of joining. Those services monetize the network with ads, not the value they provide me. That’s a bad choice. The threshold to join is low, but the threshold to ignore or leave is even lower. And because of that the service provider needs to focus even more on enlarging the network, making it easy on me to ignore the service. A catch 22 I’d rather not be in if I was a service provider.
We are rebuilding part of our house. We have a lot of space, but not enough rooms. We hired a local carpenter to help us out and he is doing a great job filling in our wishes. I help out too every once in a while. I do that because I love the feeling of having constructed something and see it work. As we build new rooms we need electricity, heating and computer infrastructure in these places. Yesterday I spent the whole day at home working on both electricity and plumbing. I got the infrastructure rerouted and felt great when I turned on the heating system at night to discover it worked the way I planned it.
Why do I write about this on this weblog? Well, because it got me thinking about the importance of basic infrastructre. You can have a beautiful house, but if the basic electricity and plumbing infrastructure isn’t there then it becomes a very expensive camping facility.
The same thing applies on the web. Imagine a “home” on the web. Where would it be? What would it look like? What basic infrastructure would it need to be called “home”? According to Wikipedia “a home is often a place of refuge and safety, where worldly cares fade and the things and people that one loves becomes the focus”. I think I like the simple stance of an article by the BBC better, home is where the heart is.
I realized after the euphoric feeling of getting the plumbing in my house to work last night, that there isn’t an electronic equivalent of a home for me. There are places I hang out, places I visit, things I like. There are services that make me smile, laugh out loud. There are services I use professionally. There are places I can meet friends, interact with them, have a good time. But there isn’t a single place I can call “home”. There isn’t a place where my heart lies. I’m an on-line refugee.
I think it is important to have a “home” on the web. It needs to be a place that I can call “mine”. It needs to be build in a way that makes me feel comfortable. Or as Alain the Botton says in the BBC article:
To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with the things we believe are most important.
As the French writer Stendhal put it: “What we find beautiful is the promise of happiness.”
It needs to be a place I feel comfortable with. It needs to be a place where I can invite friends to have a good time together with. It needs basic infrastructure to make life comfortable. And it needs to be a place I can either own, or rent. Although current social network sites do have a lot of the basic infrastructure in place they do not qualify as a “home” to me. They have customizable profiles, data storage, friend lists, entertainment etc. But I can’t own or rent my own space there. I get it for free, but as a result of this I have to open my doors to the eager beaver data hogging social network site. I can live there, but the social network gets to own the content and interactions happening in my place. I can decorate the place, but the social network helps me out a bit and plasters advertisement on my walls. I can invite friends over to have a good time but the social network places us and our interactions into their “social graph”, a fancy word for their monetization efforts on behalf of me and my friends. I can’t invite all my friends over to my house, only those that have a place on the same social network. I can pick my own friends, but I am also spammed with new ones because the ultimate goal of the social network is to have everyone related to each other. I can chose my own location, as long as it is within the boundaries or walls of the social network.
I do think that social networks understood this first. They may have started on a different notion, but quickly turned their efforts towards building a place the user would find cool to hang out. But their business model has made it impossible for us to get access to a place we can truly call “home”. There are only three ways thinkable out of this dillema.
We all create our own social network infrastructure and capabilities based upon open standards (OpenSocial?) and socially interact without the interference of social networks trying to monetize on our interactions.
Existing social networks drop their mediocre web 2.0 FREE business model and futile attempts to monetize our social interactions, and instead use a business model that is focused on user value.
Someone picks up this challenge and builds an open social networking infrastructure that provides us the building blocks to create our own “homes”on the web. Building blocks that let us build a “home” we can call our own. A place where we can live without being harassed by the equivalent of webcams following every move we make in a feeble attempt to monetize our lives. A place that is truly ours because we either buy or rent it.
I don’t see option 1 or 2 happening. Once you have gone down the road of FREE but ads based business models it’s impossible to switch. But Option 3 is a legitimate and commercially viable option. One could easily argue that hundreds of millions of users on current social networks prove me wrong. But if you do not aim for world domination I believe you can easily build yourself a viable business case for this. There are enough people willing to pay for a “home” on the web they can call their own. A place that is truly user-centric. I know I would.
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.
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.
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
Yesterday John Furrier and Robert Scoble dominated tech discussions when they wrote about the possibility of Microsoft buying Facebook and then locking Google out of part of the web (the Facebook Walhalla that is). It seems like a possible scenario. Facebook has an incredible amount of users and is one of the largest walled gardens in the world (MySpace would be the other and bigger one). Microsoft can’t beat Google in advertisement or search, but they really want to be a serious competitor. That is why Microsoft wants to buy (part) of Yahoo now. And if they were to buy Facebook they could possibly have access to a holy grail with 100Mln users and their interactions with their friends (e.g the Facebook social graph). They could then build search on that social graph and possibly become the “next-generation” Google. That is a search and advertisement giant on social networks. These take-over rumors have already been denied by Facebook but that really doesn’t matter much. I’m not interested in such a deal, but I am interested in the thought that some might be delusional enough to think they can lock down millions of users and confine them to a small part of the web.
There are some serious flaws in such a scheme. I named the most obvious and important one already yesterday and it’s that human nature doesn’t like to be confined (within a specific area of the web). We don’t like walled gardens and we are bound to find a way out. The argument against this (Facebook is a walled garden and has already 100Mln users) is weak as there currently isn’t a viable alternative. But there will be one once the web is divided into an open and a closed section.
But underlying this customer freedom there is another big issue at hand. The current fight between the big Web companies isn’t really about users or web. You might think its data, but that is only a trigger for something else. The fight is about control. Most web 2.0 company, with the social networks leading the pack, think they can control part of the web (and therefore part of the revenues) if they can control the data that flows through it. That is the main reason for building walled gardens, its about control.
Facebook now controls the data of 100Mln people. With that control they can decide who gets a share in the pie and who doesn’t. Scraping attempt (e.g. data removal from Facebook) gets the penalty of removal. The argument provided is that the user’s privacy is at risk, but that is a ridiculous argument. They might even believe it a bit, but underneath that argument is always the fear of loss of control.
There isn’t a single web 2.0 company that can guard the user’s privacy. It just doesn’t fit the business model they are executing (unless your main product is privacy, but then you don’t need the web 2.0 FREE business model. You can get users to pay for it the old fashioned way). In the end there can be only one responsible for data and privacy, and that is the user.
The ability to control data is highly overrated by social networks. Every network hogs the data of its users as if it were pure gold, but the real value of a social network doesn’t lie in the data. You can’t map me into a profile by hogging my data. On the web you only get to see a fraction of the real me, a public persiflage. I might even have multi facet identities, or a different identities for different things. If you are going to map advertisement to me it won’t take into account my mood of today, the things I experienced yesterday, the things that interest me right now. You could take away my data from me, but how are you going to take away my interactions? Do you think that if I’m banned from your service or a network I can’t interact with my friends any more? There isn’t any control, just an illusion of it.
That is why a User Centric Web will be more valuable. In a User Centric Web the roles are switched. In a User Centric Web the user controls his data and the service provider does what it needs to do, provide service. No battles over data, users, social graphs, networks or walled gardens. Only battle over what matters most, user value. The service provider that provides the best service will win.
Can you feel the power of such a paradigm switch? Put the user in control means letting go of the false illusion that you as a service provider had control in the first place. It forces any service provider to think about user value, about how to be more attractive to the user than any competitor ever could be. The paradigm switch would immediately break down walled gardens and create an open space where the user can travel anywhere he wants to and take his friends and data with him.
And the great thing about it is that you really don’t need all that data to service me in the best possible way. You can provide me value without controlling my data. If you provide me value I will even hand you the data that is needed for you to provide me value. You don’t have to guess what I’m about, I’ll tell you if it helps you to help me. Does that mean that having data has no value. Of course not. But hogging data from users and trying to control the user through that data doesn’t make sense. Context, interactions, actions, needs, emotions, experience. They are all much more important than data. I like what Fred Wilson says about this.
Social web services need not fear data portability. They need to fear others providing a better experience. Because when others do that, the flow of data moves and they aren’t in the middle anymore. They might still have your data but they won’t have you. And that’s where the value is.
And remember, just when you think you have control, a new generation of users arise and they’ll want revolution. Dear Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook. You don’t have to control my data to provide me value.
Update
Bruce Schneier just wrote a really good essay on the issue of data and privacy. Ties in nicely with this post.
Being able to pass relevant information from one person to another has always been part of the evolution of mankind. When there was no technology we used storytelling. People would listen to the oldest, wisest, craziest people in their community to hear about the past or the future. Families used storytelling to teach children their heritage. Slowly drawings were added to this information passing, possibly starting with the earlies cave drawings. Where storytelling was used for 1 to 1 or 1 to a few connections, the ability to draw lead to more persistent information passing. From symbols we went to pictures and written language. Storytelling remained as an important way of sharing information but we added letters and manuscripts to it. Manuscripts were copied by writing them down again. Each manuscript was unique in its own.
With the introduction of printing technology things changed rapidly. Now books could be copied much quicker and at much lower costs. Again, the storytelling remained, but books and newspapers made the information passing process faster and simpler. The technology developments that lead to the telephone lead to the possibility to share information real-time without the need of being at the same location. Much later, the mobile version was created, allowing communication without a fixed position. These different technologies allowed 1 on 1/few/many information passing.
Computer technology gave us the ability to communicate electronically via chat and e-mail. And with the introduction of Internet technology, the possibility to make information accessible to anyone on the net became a reality. The first version of the Internet was a static library of information. Web pages were added and the most important problem to solve was how to find the right information. Information became clustered in web portals, and finding information using search was invented. The cost of information creation/storage dropped to nearly zero and left us with infinite amounts of information, creating the problem of finding the right information.
Web 2.0 provided us technology to tackle this. Partially by clustering people and information into communities. It also gave us user generated content. Instead of companies or professionals, everyone could now create information, video, audio, pictures, and share it with the whole world. the Internet changed from a static library of information into a dynamic world of opportunities. Everyone can now become a storyteller by simply starting a weblog. The subscription to a magazine or newspaper has now been replaced by RSS subscriptions to weblogs. And to structure this world full of dynamic information we need new ways of finding the relevant stuff.
Search engines work to a certain extend but cannot deal with our urge to have instant access to something created right now. the information flow needs to be real-time. The response of web companies is to provide near real-time tools for information flow. With services like Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, we get real-time many to many conversations. And for our convenience of finding the right information we now have content aggregators that find all relevant content for us. Often specialized for a specific content type and using a computer algorithm (e.g. TechMeme provides us with the latest in Tech news using a special algorithm). Facebook providing us near real-time access to what our friends are doing. Or Friendfeed, a content aggregator that lets people do the content aggregation. By subscribing to people we know, find interesting or trust, Friendfeed provides you with the content those people like.
But the problem of finding the right information is of all times. Just look back into history (not just my short, inaccurate, and incomplete summary ) and we can see that finding the right stuff is a problem of all times. We now have nearly unlimited computer power and storage capabilities, but that leads to nearly unlimited (and often unclassified) amounts of information too.
So the question becomes, what is next? I can’t look any better into the future than you can, but I have a tendency to look at the past and try to see if human nature can provide us with clues for the future. I believe that we haven’t seen the end of content aggregation or search engine algorithms yet. Simply because the web business model drives us there.
All that content aggregation really does is reposition, reclassify or reorganize content that is already out there on the web. Whether it is done by a computer algorithm in the case of TechMeme, or done by people, in the case of Friendfeed. But you can easily spot a few problems with aggregation. First of all, if content aggregation tries to be complete, all it does is try an attempt to get all the content out there back into one place. The more content it aggregates the more difficult it becomes to find the interesting stuff from the pile. The signal to noise ratio drops to the level of the entire web. We quickly need search algorithms and noise filters to get to the good stuff.
If content is aggregated using people, then we get a “democratic” version of the web. It filters out the stuff that the community likes best, leaving the more obscure or less liked stuff behind us. But I’m no so sure that the stuff that comes up this way is always the best stuff. If anything, democracy principles to select information, also leads to predictable and similar content. There isn’t room for obscurity or weird stuff. The people that are in such communities will end up selecting only part of what is out there, governed by themselves and the social community they are part of.
Web 2.0 technology and business models are aiming at the masses, large communities with millions of members, enormous content aggregators with uncountable amounts of content. But I believe that a large part of the Internet population will end up getting lost in this new digital universe. It is like the Star Trek computer that Captain Picard can talk to. It has all the information, but what if we simply don’t know the right question to ask?
Content aggregation is the new thing now. But the problem we should be solving isn’t the many to many flow of information. It is the one to a few, or few to a few that needs to be tackled. I doubt I’ll ever need to know about all the content that is out there. It is just a small part of it that I’m interested in. Content aggregation, no matter what form is used only leads to more content leading to noise, filtering and search. Social networks allowing us to connect to the entire world leave us with too many connections and too much information. It leads to more than we can handle. It leads to so much information, tagged and targeted, that the information itself becomes less valuable.
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).
What do you think? Where do you get your inspiration from? Are there any storytellers out there we should know about?
. It takes only a few seconds before the community starts to give helpful hints. Bottom line in most cases seem to be ‘give and you shall receive’. In other words. If you want people to interact with you, start by interacting with them. In order to become a respectable member of any community, you not only need to produce relevant and valuable content for that community. You also need to add value via interaction. Give, without expecting something in return. While this makes perfect sense, it doesn’t make things easier. Not everyone is as outspoken. There is always a small subset of the community that is responsible for a large part of the interactions. It’s hard to make your voice count. And while the technology does level the playing field (anyone can be or interact with a celebrity), it doesn’t automatically mean that you are heard. It takes
“)–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.”
