Mark Zuckerberg’s mea culpa yesterday triggered a veritable tsunami of commentary on Facebook’s decision to atone for its sins by making its new Beacon advertising system less intrusive. The apology came too late to avert a medium-sized PR disaster, though I dare say there’s still plenty of life in them yet. And since the mere fact of piggybacking on a titular snowclone employed by the likes of Jobs and Zuckerberg makes me feel a teeny bit more important, I’ll chime in with a couple of thoughts of my own.
Now everyone knows that Facebook wants to be Google. Heck, everyone wants to be Google, but they’re the most plausible (or least implausible) contender right now. And that implies not just a great website and a lot of users but also an innovative, lucrative and scalable source of revenues. I can almost see their management team sitting down and brainstorming about the goose that would quack and waddle them forward in their quest for inevitable world domination amidst a pounding hailstorm of golden eggs. And what did they come up with? Advertising. Now where have I heard that before?
There are more than a few problems with this beyond the ham-handed way they handled Beacon’s rollout. As Tim O’Reilly points out, there isn’t enough ad money out there to finance the wholesale shift of media online. Facebook doesn’t share anything obvious with eBooks beyond the last five letters of its name, but I think the basic principle stills stands. Google has managed to go on minting ever greater sums to a large degree because its search engine drives such tremendous volumes of traffic. And that traffic is by nature intentional, as Alex Iskold rightly notes. I click on their ads because they might help me find that specific something I’m looking for.
Alex might be a bit harsh in condemning the whole notion of contextual advertising based on a flawed but ambitious product that is still only a few days old. But at the end of the day the whole idea that Facebook will justify its vaunted $15 billion valuation by pioneering the new new thing in targeted ads strikes me as unrealistic and facile. If I were them I would instead extend their application platform (which is truly innovative) to support paid services, taking a cut of partners’ revenues. I’m sure there are plenty of web developers out there who would love to take on eBay, Monster, iTunes and Match.com by leveraging Facebook’s gold mine of social features. Many would fail, of course, but who cares when the mother ship would book a percentage of whatever winning ideas an infinite number of monkeys scrappy startups can come up with?
On another note, did anyone else notice that Zuckerberg’s epistle of self-flagellation doesn’t mention the word advertising even once? Perhaps this is just another example of corporate spinmeistering at work, but I think there’s more to it than that. Ever since Jason Kottke’s seminal piece comparing Facebook to 1990’s AOL, freedom-loving folks (you know, the kind who wear sandals to business meetings and think they can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3) have lamented the rise of another online walled garden. How better for Facebook to counter this than to find a way to integrate their core functionality into the fabric of the web? The clever way that Beacon lurks in the background as you surf on other sites is an intriguing suggestion of the course they might take to make this happen.
One day I’ll write a business book describing the key maxims that I’ve picked up over the course of my career and adopted as guiding principles. Probably right after I learn Japanese, publish my first novel, break par over 18 holes, improvise a six-part fugue on a theme by Klaus Nomi and win the world backgammon championship. In the meantime, I can always pontificate about these pearls of wisdom here on Peer Pressure.
One of my favorites is the tendency of technology hype to peak far too early, causing folks to write off promising trends years before their time. By the time the hype starts to crystallize into reality, no one is paying attention since they’re already concentrating on the latest flavor du jour.
A particularly poignant example is the semantic web. This was all the rage back in the late 90’s, but I dare say most tech watchers have forgotten all about it as they work themselves into an AJAX-fueled, contextual advertising-funded frenzy. Meanwhile, clear evidence of its imminent emergence is starting to appear, as described for example in a recent blog post by Tim Bray.
The main problem with initial efforts to add structure and semantics to the web is that they relied on a big bang shift in the way web content is created, with no incremental path to adoption. The inevitable result is a classic tech catch 22: no one wants to create content that can’t be consumed, and no one wants to invest in tools to consume content that doesn’t yet exist. Perhaps the biggest driver of the future semantic web will thus be RSS, especially to the extent that this can be abused as a blanket term that also encompasses the far more flexible (and far less yucky) Atom. By bringing structured content to the masses in a way that’s immediately useful, RSS opens the door for a parallel web based on XML, with all the exciting possibilities this implies for more intelligent web applications.
Microformats are another important step. The idea of dual-purpose content that can be processed by human brains while we wait for computers to make them irrelevant neatly solves the chicken-and-egg adoption dilemma.
Naturally we’re not there yet. Some sort of persistent client-hosted identity, for example, is a prerequisite for a true semantic web. And that still seems tantilizingly out of reach. But gadgetry like Techorati’s microformat search and Ray Ozzie’s brilliant Live Clipboard are clear signs that the tide is turning.
The following is an abstract from a talk I made a few days ago about AllPeers and its future evolution.
“I have been running large online communities for the past 10 years. In 2002, with my previous company, we were given the NewMediaAge award for Best Consumer Website in the UK just in front of the Guardian and the Observer. For that reason, sometimes people ask me “what is it with MySpace, why is it so successul?” The fact of the matter is that there is absolutely nothing special about MySpace and if you are old enough to remember the good old days of the late internet 90’s you will certainly remember Geocities which in 1999 had 35 million members before it was acquired by Yahoo for a share-only deal worth $4.5b. Geocities was a service to allow non-technical people to build a home on the web. Just like MySpace today.
MySpace, just like Geocities at the time, is about sharing. Sharing your identity, sharing your tastes, sharing your pictures, sharing your music, sharing your videos. It’s about existing online. The problem with MySpace is that it is built on a publishing platform called the Web. The Web was never intended for sharing but for publishing. As a result, the user experience is disastrous, the site at peak becomes slow and they have to keep on upgrading their infrastructure to keep up with the growth currently estimated at 250,000 new members a day.
AllPeers has been built from the ground up as a sharing platform. It’s like MySpace but on steroids. In 1999, the web servers used by Geocities were as powerful as today’s consumers’ personal computers. Almost 10 years later, we are using 0.0005% of that local power to browse the web and publish on MySpace. The idea behind AllPeers is to leverage the power of the user’s machine to allow them to maintain and control their online existence without the need to upload files to a remote server. Without the need to wait for pages to refresh. Without the risk to expose your private details to lurkers. With AllPeers, you decide who can see what and with the 20 pages long list of features we have, you will soon realise that it is about time that we rethink how we use the network and give the power back to the users.”
Om Malik’s guest columnist Robert Young in his piece entitled “Can MySpace be Beaten” (yes they can), says:
It’s safe to say that MySpace has essentially captured the entirety of Americas youth. Moreover, these kids have created their own unique MySpace profile pages that are, in turn, rapidly becoming their personalized dashboards to everything that is important to them in their daily lives. Currently, that includes social networks of their online friends, venues to communicate with them, and collections of their favorite music & videos.
But as they mature, and their hunger for new types of information, media, and social connections expand, they will want their dashboards to grow and morph with them, each personalized with only the items that they are individually interested in. At the end of the day, services like MySpace have the rare opportunity to become the ultimate console for consumer control (C3)
I fully agree with this even though the name “console for consumer control” is a bit of a mouthful. We also strongly believe the browser is the best candidate for this console as described by Matt but more importantly that the user’s machine is the best place to store this extensible online identity and the data attached to it.
This ultimately gives users more freedom but also more control over their online representation allowing the same individual to represent himself differently depending on the person looking. Are you a close friend of mine then I’ll share intimate information and a maximum of data with you. Are you a complete stranger then you’ll only have access to my most generic blog entries.
My first experiences with computing were on a VT100 terminal connected via a 300 baud modem to a DEC VAX at the local university. So I’ve probably followed the whole thick client/thin client seesaw for as long as most, fatting it up on a Windows machine with (gasp!) no connectivity in the early 90’s, then migrating more and more of my applications onto the network in the late 90’s and early 00’s (pronounced “naughties”, I believe).
The debate hasn’t gotten any clearer over the past couple of decades. David Berlind makes a compelling case for paying “less or nothing at all for someone else to worry about guaranteed headaches such as software upgrades, data backup and recovery, and system maintenance.” Jonathan Schwartz explains (albeit somewhat self-servingly) why it would be better to store all our data on a Sun grid while running our applications locally. And Joshua Porter provides a great illustration of why some data is better stored locally, even if the apps are remote. So what’s the deal… do I need to go Atkins on my PC or not?
The problem here is that there are two conflicting trends. On the one hand, bandwidth and storage are getting closer and closer to free, which favors remote storage and execution. On the other hand, processing power and, ehm, storage are getting closer and closer to free, so it’s just as cheap to have a supercomputer on your desk as a dumb terminal.
I think that, at the end of the day, the answer doesn’t lie so much in a finding a definitive Right Place for data and code to reside. Instead, it has to do with gaining the flexibility to make sure that stuff can migrate to the most optimal location depending on the precise factors at play, possibly in real time. For code, this means a combination of technologies like AJAX, Firefox extensions and Flash (and their future incarnations). For data, it means richer data schemas to replace the genericity of RSS and OPML so that we know what’s what, chunking data down so it can be easily transferred and replicated, and (most important of all) unique identifiers so we can keep track of what is where.
Oh dear, have I become an RDF convert?
In the conclusion to my very first Peer Pressure essay, written about a year ago, I speculated about what might be killer features for a next-generation web browser. Looking at this list, it’s clear that, while progress has been made on a couple of fronts, there’s still a long way to go to achieve the vision of a “Web 2.0″ browser. Identity management is a burning hot topic, but not much has happened yet in terms of real-world implementations for actual users. Editing capabilities are mostly in the same shambolic state they were twelve months ago (though, thanks to rich web browser-hosted editors like Flock, there’s some hope on the horizon). Peer-to-peer communication is still divorced from the web browsing experience. And browsers continue to speak HTML fluently but develop a thick foreign accent when forced to communicate in XML.
We’ve focused heavily on some of these areas in developing AllPeers 2.0, and some new ones have cropped up along the way. I’ve already talked about our RDF/XML capabilities, which are key to achieving data reusability. I’ll try to discuss the rest in more detail over the next few days, starting with identity.
Doc Searls has some interesting commentary on his blog about the need for decentralized identity infrastructure. I particularly like his assertion that a workable identity infrastructure will be bottom up rather than top down. To achieve this vision, however, you need to have some sort of decentralized, extensible framework.
Our approach to identity is to use a basic profile that contains almost no information: just your name and a unique ID. This profile takes the form of an RDF resource, so it’s easy to extend it by linking it to further resources. Each resource can be signed by a third-party to verify authenticity. Essentially, we’re replacing the built-in Firefox password manager with an analogous system based on digital certificates that is far more powerful and secure. This differs from systems like Microsoft’s InfoCards mainly in its braindead simplicity. We haven’t invented anything; we’re just serving up signed RDF resources on demand.
Strong identity on the client doesn’t just mean single sign on. It also means that you can build up a very rich profile on your own machine, instead of having bits and pieces spread across a thousand web servers (run, of course, by evil faceless corporations). This, in turn, opens up the possibility of plugging-and-playing remote services to produce cool new applications (imagine bolting matchmaking onto a massively multiplayer game, for example). We’re not expecting our system to take over the world, considering the massive competition, but hopefully it will serve us well until a clear winner emerges in the identity stakes.
[web 2.0]
So I wanted to be the first to break the momentous news that eBay has officially acquired Skype for $2.6 billion. What’s that you say? Someone else has already reported that? Everyone has?
Okay, so maybe it ain’t breaking news but I have a few things to say about this. The biggest question for me is why eBay, a company that has no obvious synergies with Skype, would be the one to take the plunge. This is particularly puzzling since the price can hardly be justified on financial grounds alone. According to the New York Times, Skype’s 2006 revenues are projected to be $200 million. Not bad, by any measure, but a thirteen-fold multiplier on forward revenues, not this year but a year hence, is pretty rich.
Are they paying for Skype’s user base? Skype has 53 million users, so that’s about $50 a pop. Not entirely out of the realm of imagination, I suppose, but consider that Microsoft paid about $20/user for Hotmail at the high of the dot.com boom. Besides which, how are they planning to turn Skype users into eBay users? Doesn’t strike me as particularly obvious.
Considering the fact that the scads of large companies that do have obvious synergies with Skype weren’t willing to pony up the cash to, ehm, outbid eBay, one might be tempted to conclude that they’ve become bored of the staid world of online auctions and paid through the nose for a bit of sexy Web 2.0 goodness. I have a better theory, presciently outlined here on Peer Pressure last week. I theorized that Skype might be in a strong position to create the universal identity infrastructure for the web. To support my theory, I drew an analogy with none other than eBay’s number one son, PayPal. And mind you, this was before I heard the eBay acquisition rumors.
Does eBay want to leverage its humungous user base, with strong reputation management features and (wait for it) built-in payment infrastructure, to create a more generalized identity mechanism? Uh oh, that almost makes sense.
On Monday I wrote a bitchy rant about why I didn’t believe that a large software vendor or industry consortium would be the one to create the much-needed identity infrastructure for the web. So who, you are probably asking, is going to make this happen?
Glad you asked. I believe that a good precedent might be the rise of PayPal for online payment. PayPal had a number of characteristics that enabled them to succeed where others (including behemoths like eBay, who eventually bought them) failed:
- They were a small company who could focus on the problem at hand without attracting the ire of large competitors or drum-beating consumer activists.
- They provided a useful service that was dead simple to use (in this case by using email as a transport).
- They focused on a niche (eBay auctions) that enabled them to achieve critical mass without having to take on the whole world in one fell swoop.
- They were lucky as hell.
I believe that the winner of the identity wars will have to fulfill all these criteria. Of course, the solution might come from the open source world, but innovation has never been the forte of that particular crowd. In addition, the need to focus on a specific application area is probably not well-suited to the way traditional open source software is marketed.
Of all the companies on my radar, I see Skype as having the strongest claim to becoming the PayPal of online identity. They are a small company with a very good reputation. They definitely have a killer app in the form of VOIP. If they can figure out a way to make identity information available to third-party providers in a super simple way, they could start to build up critical mass for their solution. For example, imagine that you could register for different websites in real-time using your Skype ID, instead of having to request and respond to an email. It seems like they are moving in this direction with the SkypeWeb and SkypeNet APIs, although the details are still hazy at present.
Of course, it’s not necessarily going to be Skype, but any plausible contender will have to follow this model. Especially the part about getting very, very lucky.
I’ve been thinking about Google Talk, what it indicates about Google’s overall strategy and what it means for the software industry in general. It doesn’t fit particularly well with Google’s stated mission of providing access to the world’s information, and to some extent I believe that they might just be flailing in an attempt to keep up with the Joneses Yahoos. With essentially limitless resources, why not just throw a bunch of stuff at the proverbial wall and see what looks good next to the new drapes?
But let’s give them a bit more credit than that. Back in the early days of Peer Pressure I theorized that what will eventually lead to consolidation of the highly fragmented instant messaging space is identity. With all these disparate, loosely coupled web applications cropping up, there’s a widely recognized need for some sort of portable identity that lets me, the user, plug and play different services together to create my own personal killer app. A simple example is outlined in this Skype Journal post about mashing together Skype and Flikr. The author hits the nail on the head, although in my view this particular nail is a lot bigger than he suggests. I’d like the same, please, but tie together all my various IM applications, del.icio.us, local bookmarks, email, calendar, LinkedIn, my blog, everyone else’s blog, IMDb, Wikipedia, all my media files, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree. Thanks.
Whoever manages to own the universal identity infrastructure is going to rule the web of the future, so it’s no surprise that all the big players are stepping up to the plate. Microsoft has a strong contender with InfoCards, which the Liberty Alliance Project aims to counter with a massive industry consortium. Could Google Talk be the vanguard of a major foray into identityland by the search giant? After all, it allows (nay, forces) you to use your Gmail user account when you sign up.
In a word: yes. But I don’t believe that any of the above will be successful in this effort. In a way, the identity struggle is a macrocosm of the instant messaging space. None of the bigger players is willing to work too hard for interoperability because they’re all secretly hoping that they’ll find a way to control the infrastructure. With the Redmond juggernaut slowly down somewhat, they don’t even have the threat of total annihilation to force them to work together. That’s what made CORBA such a success, after all. (Yeah, I’m kidding.) Nor is a walled garden going to cut the mustard. Yahoo has done a heroic job of tying together its various services around a single Yahoo ID, but they’re not even vaguely close to achieving critical mass when you consider the entirety of the World Wide Web.
So if it’s not going to be Microsoft, Yahoo, Google or a lumbering coalition of the wheeling and dealing, who is going to create the future identity standard for the web? I’ll reveal the shocking answer tomorrow Wednesday.
Since yesterday’s post I’ve been haunted by the question of what will drive instant messaging vendors to adopt a unified standard. I started off convinced that there must be some new feature so compelling that it would enable one client to gain a preponderant share of the market and impose its protocol on the others. But the simple reality is that IM is very straightforward: I send a message, you receive it. Without completely changing the paradigm, no feature, no matter now appealing, is likely to cause a wholesale reorganization of the market.
When I mentioned this to Cedric he looked me straight in the eye and said, “Identity.” And he’s right. If we believe that a distributed system for managing online identity will eventually prevail, this would provide a powerful motivating force for converging on a single instant messaging protocol.
Currently the profile required by IM clients is extremely limited, consisting mainly of basic personal information like name, address, maybe a thumbnail photo. This means that the pain incurred when registering for another client is minimal. This doubtless explains why people are more inclined to use several clients simultaneously than to install a metaclient that supports multiple networks.
Now imagine that your profile is linked to a whole slew of valuable information that you have built up painstakingly over a period of time: blog, photos, reputation (for trust management), consumer profile (for recommendations), community memberships, media library, etc. To the extent that this information can be leveraged by an IM application (and I believe it can), this will make it much less attractive to move between different clients.
Of course, the big online players are already attempting to lock users in by linking their services to a rich profile, as I explained in my very first blog entry. I argued that this is unlikely to succeed unless the profile is owned and managed by the user, who choses explicitly to share it with other users and services.
This gives us a much clearer picture of the future of IM. The market is not going to consolidate until you can leverage your IM account to do a lot more than just chatting. A good example of where things are heading is Google’s acquisition of Picasa. Google’s explanation for this move, namely to facilitate uploading of photos to their Blogger service, strikes me as pure hokum. Much more convincing is the theory that Google is planning to make inroads into the IM market, leveraging Picasa’s Hello.
I’m not one of those who believe that Google is going to magically become the king of IM just because they happen to have the hot brand name du jour. But the principle is valid. At the end of the day, instant messaging is a feature, not a product, and when it starts to be encompassed into a much richer environment that is open, extensible and exploits available synergies, then we’ll find a way out of the current IM morass.
When the New York Times launched its online edition in January 1996, it started a trend, albeit one that lay dormant for several years. Although free, Nytimes.com required that users fill out a registration form with personal information before accessing the website. The primary purpose of this policy was to make the website more attractive to advertisers, as explained in a February 20, 2002 presentation given at a Seybold conference by none other than Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. himself, chairman and publisher of the Times:
What advertisers are also discovering is that we can help them speak to very specific segments of our audience. For instance, one of the basic premises of NYTimes.com’s online registration philosophy is the notion of user acquisition, targeting and retention. Our proprietary decision support system allows advertisers to precisely target those categories of users who fall into the demographic and psychographic profiles most relevant to their marketing objectives.
In my recollection, the Time’s decision to require registration did not provoke many objections at the time, beyond a certain amount of passive-aggressive griping on Slashdot, where any reference to Nytimes.com is still followed obsessively by the disclaimer “registration required”. Eventually other publications followed suit, with biggies like Chicagotribune.com (March 2002) and Latimes.com (April 2002) leading the charge.
The result is a bit like a virtual tragedy of the commons, where the “commons” in this case is the willingness of the public to spend time filling out the same damn web form on every news site they visit. When it was just Nytimes.com, people were prepared to put up with the aggravation, but their precious patience was quickly used up once the Poughkeepsie Post and the Boise Bulletin jumped on the bandwagon.
Another factor is the growing popularity of news aggregation websites like Google News. I used to read one or two online papers regularly (NYT and Wired News, which has never required registration), as well as hitting the big news network or newswire sites like CNN and Reuters. Now, I just breeze over to Google News and check out which headlines sound most interesting. So I end up reading papers like the Kansas City Star and Detroit Free Press which I previously never even knew existed.
The bottom line is that the need to constantly register for this and that publication and keep track of the resulting 4 zillion passwords has become unbearable. This leads us to:
Gertner’s First Law: Any sufficiently annoying problem will be solved immediately by technology, provided that there is some way to take advantage of network effects.
File sharing networks are a good example of this. All of the successive generations (Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, Bittorrent) have been extraordinarily sensitive to network effects, i.e. the value of the network is directly related to the number of users (or rather to the square if we believe Metcalfe’s Law). As a result of this and the tangible desire on the part of consumers to have access to an open file exchange (as opposed to subscriptions or DRM-crippled content), all of the above-mentioned systems have been stupendously successful.
With little fanfare, a website appeared last November to combat the increasingly onerous online registration system. Bugmenot.com also exploits network effects by making login credentials entered into the system available to all other users. So the more people use it, the more valuable it is. As predicted by Gertner’s First Law, its popularity has risen exponentially, with over 22,000 sites now tracked according to their homepage. There are even Bugmenot extensions for Mozilla and Internet Explorer that make bucking the system even easier.
The seminal cartoon by Peter Steiner has inspired a veritable cult movement (and even a theatre production) with its humorous take on the effect of the internet on human interaction: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Published in the July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker magazine, the piece offers an admirably prescient view of anonymity in the wired age.
Besides the cute play on words, the illustration is funny because anthropomorphizing animals is funny. (I’m reminded of the old joke where two horses, having returned to their stable in the evening, engage in heated discussion about their strenous work day, at which point the farmer’s dog pipes up with some comment. The astounded horses turn to each other and exclaim, “Holy shit, a talking dog!”). But the popularity of the cartoon isn’t due only to the fact that it tickles the funny bone. The author managed, several years before the dot.com boom, to sum up the thorny issue of online anonymity in an amusing buzzphrase that perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s. Anonymity on the internet was perceived as a resounding positive, liberating us from our canine constraints to project an image onto the world of ourselves, not as we are but as we would like to be.
But it didn’t take long for the flip side of our newfound incognitos to become apparent. Most obviously, particularly in light of the turbulent world events of recent years, the internet holds the potential to hamper severely law enforcement and intelligence activities. Baddies, armed with strong encryption and speed-of-light connectivity, can free themselves from the prying eyes of those whose job it is to protect us. As with so many of life’s pertinent questions, there is no right or wrong answer as to where to draw the line between the enhanced civil liberties furnished by the net and the need to curtail these freedoms in the interest of security. It’s a judgement call bound to give rise to a broad continuum of perfectly defensible opinions, ranging from virtual anarchy to mandated cryptology chips that provide law enforcement with a “backdoor” to decipher all encrypted correspondance.
But let’s drop that hot potato. Internet anonymity raises an intriguing technical dilemma as well, one that lends itself more easily to analysis. The plain fact of the matter is that sometimes we want the parties with whom we interact repeatedly on the net to recognize us and remember certain pertinent details about us, including our relationships with others. This works today in certain microcosms, as with one-click shopping on Amazon. But we’re still forced to maintain a menagerie of address books, buddy lists and passwords that we turn to in various contexts. Cookies and password managers help, but your identity ends up tied to your web browser, and God forbid you should purge your browser cache or switch computers.
One serious effort to rectify this has come from Microsoft in the form of its .NET Passport. The idea is that you create an identity that resides on Microsoft’s server and can be beamed to whatever website you are visiting, so you only have to log in once and you never have to fill out Yet Another Registration Form. The service has encountered only mild success, to say the least, and this isn’t only because no one trusts Microsoft as far as they can spit. The whole premise is totally misguided: people want to own and control their online identity, not relinquish it to a multinational conglomerate.
|
|
|
