The tech world is full of the real-time web. Google seems to have missed it, Twitter is on top of it but sucks at indexing it, Friendfeed is the aggregation king, and Facebook might get there by copying Twitter and Friendfeed all along.

Personally I think it is not worth the hassle. Real-time web is a publisher’s thing, not a consumer thing. There are few situations, usually disasters,  where I might be in need of a real-time web. The geek will tell you that it is great to be able track what people are saying when a plane crashes, Obama is inaugurated, or a famous pop star dies. The problem I have with those examples is that life isn’t like that every day. Most of the times we get along quite well without the ability to track these rare situations, and when they do emerge we’ll find out about it quickly enough.

Another argument is real-time search. That’s a lot of BS too. there is so much twittering around that it is impossible to get valuable real-time results in search. Google Pagerank uses an algorithm to decide what could be relevant. You may not like the algorithm, but it does attempt to ensure that there is a reasonable objective approach in getting you valuable results. Chit chat isn’t the way to do that. There currently is no algorithm when real-time search is running. There is only people, and the things they publish right now. It leads to a lot of clutter and near-zero value in search.

The Friendfeed crowd will argue that it isn’t about real-time search, but about real-time conversations. I don’t buy that for a minute. Have you ever seen a discussion on Friendfeed? the service gets praised for their ability to let people interact over content. It’s the best service out there. Personally I find many of the “discussions” hardly interesting or useful. There is too much content, too many people, too many comments, no structure in discussions, too many geeks. But most important hardly anyone  is actually listening (the basis for ANY good conversation is the ability to listen). A Friendfeed discussion isn’t an interaction, it’s a mob screaming out loud. A voice lost in 2000 other voices. I get much more value out of the posts that are aggregated in Friendfeed than the discussions that take place below them.

The real-time web currently is a geek’s wet dream.  I’m sure it will eventually get to a point where people will find aspects of a real-time web useful enough to incorporate it in their lives. But for now I don’t think it is worth all the hassle. I don’t have a “need” for the real-time web. There are more important things in life then having access to a fire hose of unfiltered nonsense. How about getting me the right information at the exact right time!

Glubble for Families

[disclaimer: this post is related to my job at Glubble]

It’s taken months of making plans, thinking things through, building, and testing. And now we are live. The Family Timeline is here.

Glubble aims to provide families a private place to connect online. It consists of a private family page with a ‘twitter for families-like’ message wall, and sharing of events and photos. And we provide integration with Firefox so that family members are notified in real time of new events taking place on the family page. Small children can participate too, with our Firefox with Glubble kids browser. It lets parents teach their children good digital citizenship and social networking in a safe family environment.

The Family Timeline

The Family Timeline is the latest addition to the service. Born out of a frustration that I am not very organized when it comes to my digital photos. I have tons of images on my computer, but I can’t find or browse them the way I want. The Family Timeline is an attempt to make life simpler and more fun for families.

When you upload photos to the Family Timeline they are placed automatically on a visual Timeline that allows easy navigation of your photos.

Time is a powerful concept when it comes to navigation. Events are important, but for me time is something I can relate events to. Our vacation in Greece last year, the birth of our children, a party at a friends house. I might not remember exact dates, but the Timeline lets me find these images really quickly.

The service provides you the flexibility to organize things your way, and attempts to help you by reading in the dates the photos are taken. The Family Timeline also incorporates your Family Events and messages,  providing an online archive of your most important family memories.

A personalized web page to share your photos with friends

You can share photos outside your family if you want, you decide. No need to send big files through e-mail, instead a personalized web page where your friends can see and download the photos that you want to share.

We will add more sophisticated sharing options as we go along. One click posting to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter etc. But not by default,  you will remain in control. We will work on mobile uploads and importing photos you already have online.

For now, we provide a simple yet effective service. Your most important family memories and interactions online, visually attractive and easily navigated through time. It is a Freemium service. You can use it for free with some limitations, and upgrade to Premium if you  like the service. For $39,95 a year you can upload, store and share as many photos as you want, in high quality.

I would like to thank my team for doing a great job. A huge nr of volunteers that helped us test the service and improve it. And a special thanks to Steven Hodson who was there from the beginning, Robert Scoble and Louis Gray for hearing me out, providing excellent feedback and letting the world know what we are doing!

I’m really amazed at the great coverage too. TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, VentureBeat. There is more coming in all the time. The press release is right here. But honestly. The best post I’ve seen so far is right here.  A family giving the service a try. That is what this is all about!

If you want to give the Family Timeline a spin, you can register here.

The iPhone will not generate significant mobile revenues

Tomi Ahonen has written a very long post about the history of mobile phone development  in Europe and the United States. Tomi is a well known authority in the Mobile space and is the author of the well known Communities dominate brand book.

His post contains a number of provocative and thoughtful observations. The post itself is as long as an e-book, but I urge you to read it all the way. It’s excellent.

In his post Tomi argues that even though the iPhone has brought a revolution in smart phones it will not dominate mobile revenues with its current offering. the bulk of mobile revenues are not in App stores or the real Internet. Apple’s iPhone represents less than 1% of the mobile market, and it’s revenue generation is infinitely small compared to current real mobile Internet revenues. A quote from Tomi’s post:

So we come down to the applications. Tomi, its a smartphone. By definition, a phone that can accept applications? Why aren’t you talking about the Apple iPhone Apps Store. Yeah, sure, its important for us nerds and geeks, the early adopters of new technology, who have been envisioning a pocketable PC that could be perfect for the gadget freak. Yes, the Apps store is wonderful. A billion downloads, yeah. Except that the mass market consumer, your mother, your father, your sister and your brother, are not like you and me at this blog. They will not madly download tons of apps to any smartphone. The theory of “Crossing the Chasm” has been explained by Geoffrey Moore a decade ago and is not disputed. Techie-geeky appeal of ultra high tech does not translate to the mass markets, in fact in most cases what geeks want and mass markets want are diametrically opposed.

No matter what stats you see for Apple iPhone Apps Store success, whatever the stats, the total market share of Apple is 1% of the phone market. It is exactly at the pointed end of that Crossing the Chasm theory that Moore talked about. This is NOT a mass market, and CANNOT BECOME one if the same model is repeated. Understand what I say. Even if you are able to make a success out of your app in the Apps Store today, it CANNOT translate to a mass market success, using that same model. its not my theory, Moore’s theory holds near unanimous agreement by all technology marketing gurus. Do not kid yourself.

The problem with the iPhone is that it has been developed with a pc in mind. It is a pc device that can also call. This is exactly why I wrote a post about a year ago explaining why the iPhone is probably one of the worst mobile phones I have ever used. It comes with downloadable applications that let the user customize his device. But that is exactly why it will not be adopted by the mass market.

Yes there is a big opportunity for apps to be sold to smartphones. Yes, it is a very significant market, when viewed from the angle of the software applications industry. But it will always be – always be – only a niche. Do not allow yourself to be delusional about this. We do not buy – and the mass market will not ever buy – smartphones so that they could install some apps to it. The vast majority of users will be contented with the apps that come pre-loaded, and then they go to web based services to get their additional benefits.

The real value (in terms of revenues) lies in the mobile web. This is not the real web displayed on a high end handheld like the iPhone. Instead it is the ‘walled-garden’ Internet that is build and maintained by the mobile carriers. Sounds totally unbelievable right? The facts and figures however are indisputable. Again, a quote from Tomi:

That is where the big opportunity is. Not apps that we install onto a smartphone, but the services that we deliver via the network. Mobile premium services, what could be called “mobile internet” and by this I mean a superior, better, money-making internet than the old legacy dumb internet we have on the PCs. So I explicitly do not mean “the real internet” onto the phones. That is as dumb as putting a real horse to power your car! We have a BETTER engine in the car. And now, yes, please understand, the “mobile internet” is the far better internet than that horrid old creaky stupid cheap “advertising-led” “get-me-more-eyeballs” internet which we all use today. The internet is for good reason called the 6th mass media channel and obviously mobile is the newer, 7th mass medium.

No, while that will be there, and yes, there will be millions and millions of users on “the real internet” on our smartphones, that is peanuts. PEANUTS. The far bigger opportunity in mobile is in the 7th mass media type of mobile internet, the better, smarter and richer money-making and magical mobile internet. That is where the opportunity is. To see how vibrant and lucrative it can be, one need not look further than this decade and Japan and South Korea, where the mobile internet really thrives already. Application developers have a hard time making money selling 1 dollar apps on the Apple iPhone Apps Store. You have to be very lucky to make the top 100 apps listing to have any chance of recovering your development costs. A very risky development path.

But in Japan, they offer the service on the mobile internet, take a subscription of one dollar per month (100 yen) and pay 10% to the carriers/operators and the service provider gets to keep 90%. Rather than one dollar from one customer once, the customer is charged 12 months, 12 times per year. 12 dollars, and the content owner gets to keep 10 dollars and 80 cents of it. Which is better? A dollar or ten? I rest my case, milad.

Worldwide the mobile data market is a much bigger opportunity than pc based Internet. There are more users, more devices, payment is integrated on every device (no need for credit cards). In another great and long post Tomi estimates these markets:

The total mobile premium content industry is worth 71 billion dollars and the mobile messaging industry adds another 130 billion, giving the total moblie phone based data services industry a size of 200 billion dollars for 2008. Now, consider the internet. Even as we add not only all content revenues, and all advertising revenues on the internet, but also the access revenues for broadband and dial-up narrowband internet access, the overall size of the internet business is about.. 200 billion dollars. In half the time, mobile has grown to same size.

Mobile is the bigger internet. Mobile is the stronger internet. Mobile is the money internet. Mobile is the faster-growing internet.

It sounds counter intuitive to us geeks, but the smart phone market is a niche market. No matter how sexy and cool we think it is. The SMS market alone is bigger than the current pc based Internet content market. Premium mobile data services add extra growth that can’t be matched by the web. On the web we are stuck with inefficient, crappy old-fashioned web 1.0 based business models. In the mobile data market every bit transferred represents real revenue. Twitter could have done it, but they didn’t pursue the biggest revenue generator.

Facebook missed that one too.In 2007 I wrote a post entitled “Mark Zuckerberg, when in doubt, follow the money”. I said then:

But there are 2 aspects to a mobile phone that are of huge importance when thinking about next generation web services:

1. The mobile phone platform has billing capabilities
2. The mobile phone user pays to interact with others

Think of the US on-line advertisement spent 2006 ($16 Bln) as a small hill,

think of the worldwide spent on SMS as the Mount Everest (btoh images taken from Wikipedia). It is estimated that the SMS market alone will be $ 67Bln in 2012 (or 3.7 trillion messages a year!) .That is excluding Mobile Internet services. In Japan alone more than $ 1 Bln revenues are generated from mobile data services. So stop thinking ads and start thinking payed services.

The mobile business model is the most User-Centric I can think of. It provides user value and the user pays directly for that value. There is nothing more powerful than that.

A pretty walled garden

There are walls all around us. We live our lives realizing that we have to live with rules and limitations. We have laws to obey,  values to live by, families we are part off, countries we live in, services we make use of, gravity that pulls us down, freedom of speech, natural resources, food, water, money. Everything we do in life comes with a set of rules.

The existence of some of these boundaries is something we tend to ignore. We are taught to aim for the highest, get the best out of our own potential, be a winner. There are no problems, only challenges. Can you see an athletic coach explaining to the world fastest sprinter that it is impossible to sprint 100m in 4.5 seconds? No way. You need to train harder, overcome your fears and doubts. You can accomplish anything if  you really want to. Work hard until you reach your goals. Just do it!

We don’t like it to be captured. If we bump into a boundary we will try to get around it. If it is a problem, we will try to resolve it. If the wall is bigger then ourselves we will try to mobilize others to help us.If we don’t deal with a wall that stands in the way then at least we will complain often about it (dissatisfied customers that can’t leave a service).

It seems to me that we sometimes act very differently online. Sure, if there is something to complain about we harness the power of all the publishing tools and cry outrage. But when it comes to the core of our online presence, our personal identity we willingly accept the boundaries that the big web companies have set for us.

There is a war out there, a battle to own your online identity. Driven by network value based business models service providers aim at unlimited growth. We get sucked into the best web 20 services. It’s free and it’s cool. Big service providers fights to get you in and then never let you out. It’s like a black hole. You, your personal data, your interactions and friends.

We seem to accept this a a fait accompli. That is the way the web works. Nothing we can do about it. We give away our online identity for free and in return accept the boundaries and limitations the service providers give us. Google shows you their web, which is different from Yahoo’s web, or Facebook’s web for that matter. We let Social Networks own and exploit our personal data, our interactions, our family and our friends. We create the value of those networks ourselves yet accept that these networks impose (sometimes ridiculous) boundaries on us.

All effort goes into enlarging the network, the data, and few big service providers put as much effort in setting you and your data free again from that very service. Don’t get me wrong. It isn’t all bad, or even intentional. And the value we get in return can be very high! I’m a happy user of many web 2.0 services and I am amazed at what technology can do for us. There are many services, organizations and individuals out there that have a user value focus.

However we are often blinded by the coolness factor, the joy, the zero cost participation, hype created by the media, following the crowd, getting sucked in by friends (that’s called viral growth, which in itself doesn’t have a very healthy sound) we join everything and accept that our online identity isn’t ours. But at what cost?

The biggest threat in my opinion is that in this process we let a few very big service provider decide for us where the walls are build. What boundaries and rules we need to live by. We are giving away our online identity for free in order to be able to participate.

Tim O’Reilly nailed the web 2.0 definition when he said:

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.

It has become part of our history books now. The network effect Tim mentions has lead to an undesirable side effect. Driven by network value business models some service providers are not just viewing the Internet as a platform. Instead they are aiming to ensure that their own platform becomes the Internet!

That is a boundary I’m personally not willing to accept. Why should I be confined to one network, or accept that my online identity is not only scattered but not even my own? In a true service provider model, the user is in control of his identity, his data and his interactions. The user needs to be able to define his own ‘Terms of Service’, which are to be respected by the service provider. It’s web 2.0, inside out.

It is something I am passionate about. It’s why I write about it often. But that isn’t enough. I can’t complain about it if I am not really contributing to changing this. I feel I should take my own responsibility and join those that are already working on it, no matter how small or insignificant my contribution is.

It means professionally that I’ll be spending as much time and effort on letting users control their own identity, data and interactions, as I spend time on getting these users in the first place. It means changing the ‘terms of service’ from protecting a business (model) to serving the user. It means embracing standards like OpenId to let people decide where they create their online identity. It means supporting efforts to define solutions that will put the user in control of his online identity.

Joining discussions already taking place. Helping the big service providers change their strategy. Making sure that the Internet isn’t confined to a single platform. Choosing business  models that leverage user value instead of network value. And perhaps most important of all, educating those unaware of the importance of their online identity. It’s an effort for the long run. I don’t expect fast changes or revolutions over night. But any journey start simply by taking the first step, and by writing this down.

I’m taking my first and I’m joining those that have already gone down this path.

A beautiful bird cage

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.

In the online world customer lock-in is even worse. Here is where Tim O’Reily’s definition of Web 2.0 lacks a user dimension. Tim says:

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.

Just like in the physical world

I was just reading this CNET post on wave. Rafe Needleman and Stephen Shankland (both working for CNET) answer questions about Google Wave in an attempt to explain what it is.

Sadly, they don’t really get past the Google Wave demo itself. In my opinion, the demo itself, although remarkable, is not very important. Google Wave isn’t impressive because Google build a cool demo. There are 10 other reasons why Google Wave is more important than that. Google set a vision that will change the way we will communicate online.

What I find remarkable about this vision is that Google is breaking through some existing boundaries that hold web 2.0 progress back so far. I could repeat my 10 points made earlier, but I would like to focus on a subset.

Google has not only unified different types of online communication (e-mail, instant messaging, SMS) into one paradigm (wave), but they have also ensured that it can run fully distributed and can integrate with most of the things we have. To understand what that means I urge you not to see Google Wave as a new service, but as a new service layer.

Whereas services like e-mail, instant messaging and social networks always have been build on the premise of a walled garden business model, Google Wave can become the new communication structure services can develop upon. It is set up from the start as an open source project with a clear focus on development API’s. I’m sure that Google will launch a Google Wave service at some point that will attract many users. But it also allows any other service to use that same paradigm to implement unified online communication.

Google has not only spent time and energy making sure Wave can suck content into the platform, it has spent as much time and energy making sure it can get out too! Farewell destination based business models. Farewell walled gardens. If Wave gets adapted, it will put the user in control, and that is exactly what we need to do to break out of our current web 2.0 boundaries. That is what makes this development so remarkable.

Google just did some major plumbing on the web, and honestly, they were probably the only ones that could do this. They, unlike other companies, do not need walled gardens to make lots of revenues. After all, their walled garden is the entire web, and beyond

Image taken from: http://www.pinkfloyd.co.uk/insideOut/

What are the most important aspects for a User-Centric web to me? In a User-Centric web:

• I get to own my data and my interactions
• I control my privacy
• Services travel along with me, instead of me traveling to those services
• I do not perceive walled gardens, I can take my data with me and (re-)use it wherever I want
• Services connect to me in a standard manner, allowing me to (re-) use my data (think friend list, unified messaging, interaction, privacy control etc here)
• Services read my privacy policy and terms of use, and agree to my terms when connecting

It basically changes the balance of power inside out. Instead of putting control at the web service, control should be with the individual user. If we switch to this perspective you will find that a lot of the issues we currently see on the web would be solved quite naturally. We would not need destination-based business models (with complementary user-lock-in and walled gardens). It would solve the biggest web 2.0 tragedy as service providers would have to compete on user value, instead on network value. And privacy, or the lack of control, of it, would be solved automatically, as the user decides what to do himself. that doesn’t imply that everything will be locked down. It just implies the user explicitly can decide what to do, including the option to share everything.

The problem with this concept is that it takes plumbers to realize it. You need development effort to focus on the core aspects of the way the web works. It isn’t about creating a new Facebook or Twitter. There is no glorious, unique business model available to make this happen. It really isn’t even about technology. we already have the technological capability to make it happen. The real issue is revenue. Unless we figure out a way to generate revenue  in this User-Centric web, we won’t see it happen easily. There are movements working on this.  OpenID is a great example. But we will need commercial companies to embrace this concept and bring it to life. Unless there is a revenue generating perspective they simply will not do this.

The exception is obviously Google. Google is not only the largest revenue generating machine on the web, they are by far the biggest plumber too. Their recently announced Google Wave is a typical example of this. They have just provided us the mean to re-invent the way online communication works. This is going to have a huge impact on existing communication and social networking services if adopted. Google wave to me is one of the first initiatives that will allow us to develop User-Centric services.

Maybe we should simply revert to a very old business model, even older than the current web 1.0 models we upgraded to web 2.0. Maybe we should ask users to pay for the value they receive?

This is a huge development. Techmeme is going wild over Google Wave. Google has focused on the one thing that is important in the web, communication. They have taken apart and reinvented, and integrated all forms of communication and build a clever cross platform integration of it.There are so many things to discuss that it’s hard to know here to start. I would advice you to watch the entire video, eventhough it is an hour long.

10 reasons why this will change the way we communicate and use the web:

1. It integrates all communication methods into one paradigm
2. It will be open source, and can be decentralized
3. It provides as much possibilites to take data out of the system as it can pull in
4. It solves communication first, and integrates everything else around that (instead of the other way around)
5. It comes with developers API’s to make sure that a whole ecology of extensions and totally new services will be build on top of it
6. It isn’t burdened by a destination driven business model
7. It will fundamentally change destination driven services like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.
8. Google has yet again proven that they are willing to do the plumbing in the web
9. It works on the web, mobile, and it fully integrates with other key services Google provides (example google maps). And it can be integrated into any other (social networking) service
10. I don’t think it will work on IE right now. Sounds to me like Google will crush IE between Chrome and Firefox, leaving Microsoft with a blow that will be hard to recover from

These are just a first set of quick thoughts. This sounds like a huge step towards a User-Centric web to me. I will take some time and work some of these thoughts out. What do you think? Did Google just deliver disruptive technology?

Who am I?

Yesterday I tried logging into a service I hadn’t visited in a while. I couldn’t remember my user name or password. After a few frustrating and unsuccessful attempts I gave up. Recognize this? Happens to me all the time. Currently, my best bet is to search my mailbox to see if I can find the information I need to get access to services.

It is a problem we all face. For safety and security reasons we need to have unique ID’s and hard to remember passwords. But humanly it is nearly impossible to remember all these combinations. There are tools out there that help your resolve this issue (take 1password as an example). But the tools mask the underlying problem. Why do I need a new online identity for each new service I sign up for?

OpenID addresses this problem. It let’s you sign in to different services using one identity. Several big sites, including Facebook, now support OpenID. You can now, for example, use your mail account to get access to Facebook.

To me, OpenID only solves the initial problem that I described above. It provides me a simple way to get access to different services, without the need for me to remember user names or passwords. But I would like to take it a few steps further. If I can have one identity, securely stored, and usable across different services, then why not store my online profile there as well?

Every service I sign up for requires me to reveal some aspects about myself. It could be anything ranging from name, address, phone, gender, birth date, icons, preferences for movies, books, friends. It could be information linked to my profession, to my free time. I need to set preferences. How open do I want my data to be? There is privacy settings to consider, e-mail addresses to be filled in. The list is endless. The problem is that this information doesn’t change all that often. I might decide that I want to reveal more or less of myself but all this information is stored (in my head, my computer, my address book etc).

But each of these services force me to enter this information in order to serve me a better experience. It’s no fun on Facebook if you do not indicate who your friends are. At the same time, the fight over data has become an important economic factor. Services exist and have economic viability if they can ‘own’ my data. This economic force creates the boundaries often referred to as walled gardens. By locking in users, services can fire up their economic engine. By locking in more users and more data the engine continues to run. While it seems to make perfect sense to have one identity and profile across different services we have to understand that the economic reality of today is that there is no business model available that supports such a radical change. In other words, companies like Facebook will have a hard time justifying their economic value if they didn’t lock in users and own their data.

Technically, by swapping the current balance of power from the service provider to the user we could easily solve this one identity – one profile issue.The Diso project, started by Chris Messina, tries to address these issues. However, this balance of power can’t be swapped until someone figures out a way to make it economically justifiable to do so. I’m sure service providers are willing to do the right thing, but only if it positively affects their bottom line. It is my believe that we need to solve this economic problem first, before we can solve the one identity -  one profile problem. A User-Centric web will only be conceived if it is accompanied by business models allowing service providers to generate revenues without being in control of the user’s data.

The value for the user is evident. Instead of monetizing networks, the service provider needs to monetize user value. Instead of focus on growth, there will be focus on user value. Service providers wont be competing on ‘who is the biggest’ but they will have to compete on delivering value. I’ve been complaining a lot about service providers locking users in, about not respecting privacy, or control over user data. But I’ve come to realise that it isn’t fair to be complaining about this, if we don’t address the economic issue at the same time. If we can develop business models that facilitate a User-Centric web, we will have optimal conditions to make it happen. This is a case where economic innovation needs to proceed technological innovation. Forget about technology for now. We already have the technological capabilities to make it happen. We need smart people to focus on defining the business models that will enable this transition to happen.