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.
So Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington are calling for a Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web which can be summarized with 3 words: Ownership, Control and Freedom.
Well well well… How interesting! This is exactly what I have been writing about for the last 2 days and what we’ve been saying amongst ourselves for 4 years. It is so refreshing to see that people are waking up to this. I’m not sure where this will go but it is definitely a step in the right direction.
Following my post yesterday on my top 15 features for an Open Social Network, Al Billings writes “All of this is tied up in the problem of identity, communication or messaging between people, and the exchange of data.“. He is absolutely right but I would go one step further and say that in fact it is only about Sharing (and control).
According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, “to share” means to use, to experience, to occupy, or to enjoy with others. It also means to have in common
or to tell (as thoughts, feelings, or experiences) to others.
This definition to me summarizes perfectly the various activities one perform on any SN. I will share my identity (or some part of it), I will share my tastes, I will share some communication and finally I will share some data (photos, videos, etc…). On a Social Network, we are all peers (AllPeers…) engaging in some sharing business.
Most SN are very good at letting you create a sexy profile (a few fields in a database attached to some pictures) but they tend to fail miserably when addressing the sharing functions. On MySpace for example I can have a private profile or a public profile. Which means that as soon as I accept you in my private profile, everything I will share on it will be available to you. Do you really want that? I don’t. This is the same for Facebook just to name these 2. Likewise, I can create some photo albums and share a few pictures but try to share the 400MB video you did during your last vacations in Ibiza. Even if the service allows you to post a 400MB video, do you really want to sit and look at the file being uploaded to a server (bearing in mind that as part of that process you are giving the corporation managing the site full rights on your file)? I don’t.
Imagine a phone company saying to you: You can make as many phone calls as you want. As long as they are not more than 5 minutes long. Oh and by the way, your conversation can be heard by anybody.
So what’s my point here? Simple really. This is the reason why at AllPeers we have been focusing on solving the sharing problem by allowing users to share exactly what they want with exactly who they want (starting with files but this can and will easily be extended to information). By letting the user organize his contacts into specific groups and by giving him the highest level of granularity when it comes to deciding who can see what, we are putting the user back in control of his own destiny. By removing any limit to what people can share we are saying: explore your creativity, produce content, whatever it is, we’ll make sure we can transport it from your computer to your friends computer. By encrypting the communication between our users we are telling them: your communication with your friends is exactly that: yours.
There is still a long way to go before walled-gardens will collapse but we believe it to be ineluctable and we intend to make a modest contribution to that trend.
With all the talks at the moment about Decentralized and Open Social Networks, I thought I would compile my top list of features. This has been an area of interest to me for more than 5 years and the initial motivation to build AllPeers in the first place.
1- Store all my contacts from all the social services I use (including IM contacts) on my computer and make that consolidated contacts list appear instantly whenever I need it.
2- Let me access that contacts list from any computer.
3- Let me broadcast my presence status across all my services at once.
4- Run inside my browser (I don’t want another icon in my system tray).
5- Give me ONE way to send a message to a friend or a group of friends and work out the most efficient way internally. I don’t care what route it takes, I just want my friend(s) to receive the message.
6- Use a peer-to-peer network to allow me to attach a 500MB video or a folder with 100 files to a message without any size or format restrictions.
7- Let me manage multiple facets of my profile and more importantly let me decide who can see which facet or subset of a facet.
8- Let me retain all the rights to my data. It’s mine, not yours!
9- Let me create dynamic groups of people and allow me to put the same person in multiple groups for maximum flexibility.
10- Let me decide who I want to receive information from.
11- When I join a new service, use my existing profile and alert me if people I know are already members or when they join that service.
12- Let me create private sharing communities on-the-fly for friends to join.
13- Allow me to add new functionality using some form of add-ons/extensions mechanism.
14- Let me “do things” while offline and automatically push the data to my social graph when I come online.
15- Make the communications between my friends and me completely secure and private.
Of course, this is only a beginning of what my ideal service would allow me to do but it gives me:
- a single consolidated contacts list and user interface to friends.
- Fine granularity of control over who has access to what.
- Unlimited sharing.
- Leveraging of existing data.
From my perspective, the most interesting thing about the recent leak of Facebook source code is what a non-event it was. As such it’s one of the strongest arguments for open source that I’ve seen in a while.
The leak garnered a lot of attention to a large extent for the same reason that news wires light up nowadays every time that Steve Jobs breaks wind. Facebook is the hype superstar of the moment, so any story involving them is newsworthy. On top of that, a source code leak has the veneer of the illicit, another journalist magnet. But if we take a sober look at the possible negative consequences, none of them appears particularly daunting:
- Security. Someone could analyze the source code and find security leaks, hack into my profile and send my wife those pictures of me in a compromising position with a stripper, a circus clown and a underage tax accountant at my buddy Moose’s bachelor party. (If, of course, I were married and had a friend called Moose.) But these were the same arguments that were made about products like Firefox, and the reality has turned out to be quite different. It’s generally accepted nowadays that the widespread scrutiny made possible by open source yields more secure software.
- Competitive advantage. But surely a competitor will come along and steal all Facebooks good ideas! The truth is that the value of most web applications is more in the community, user experience and backend infrastructure than in the actual source code. User experience can be “reverse engineered” just by using the site. Source code is no help whatsoever in putting in place a scalable server park. And it should be obvious that building a community has everything to do with innovation, timing and network effects and nothing at all to do with specific lines of code.
- Business model. So maybe the source code will help me to strip out ads or otherwise undermine Facebook’s business model? Well, no. The source code that leaked (in PHP) is server-side code that is used to generate client-side code (with healthy dobs of JavaScript). For ad blocking it’s the client-side code that matters, and that’s open source by definition.
- Sloppy code. I might not want my source code to be subjected to public scrutiny if I’m ashamed of it. At the end of the day this is another argument for open source since it forces you to clean up your act. Sloppy code has its price whether or not anyone else ever sees it. In any case, the Facebook code looks pretty enough to me.
To my way of thinking there’s almost no downside to a site like Facebook publishing its source code. The upside is significant, not least the complete elimination of the risk of bogus “stories” like the source code leak attracting the media’s attention.
It looks like more and more people are waking up to the notion of Open Social Networks. I recommend you to read this latest article on Wired.
We have been advocating the need for a open decentralized Social Network for a long time. The opened extensible infrastructure of AllPeers is actually built so that anyone can extend the features of the current product to turn it into a fully fledge Social Network. Right now, AllPeers handles the trusted relationships between one user and his “friends” as well as the delivery of files he wants to share.
For us, an Open Social Network means:
* Fully grained control over identity, security and privacy
* Maintain full control and ownership over my data and information
* No limits for file sharing
* Much better granularity for all operations
* A single interface for multiple providers
* Single social graph with presence, multiprotocol chat, etc.
* Real-time alerts (no need to scour 10 different websites)
* Client-side mashups
* In the browser
* Extensibility on the edges
Can you think about other key characteristics?
And now it is time for our summer quizz (drum rolls): Of the 2 diagrams below, which one represents a Peer-to-Peer Network and which one represents a Social Network?
Figure 1:
Figure 2:
A couple of weeks ago, Jason Kottke published a couple of brilliants posts comparing Facebook today to AOL in the nascent days of the web. Like Jason, I’d like to stress that I have nothing against Facebook as a company. In fact, unlike every social networking app I’ve tried in the past, I find it entirely too addictive and check it at least once a day, more if I’m engaged in a cut-throat game of Roshambull.
I was blown away when Facebook unveiled their apps strategy. I’ve felt for a long time that a highly leveraged online identity is key to the next generation of web applications. Everything from matchmaking to job hunting to discussion forums to shared calendaring requires a strong identity and detailed user profile, with much of the same data (often including a list of people I know) needed for each app. Web apps also need to be much easier to install with a more consistent user experience. Facebook apps do all of this, installing with a single click, piggybacking on your existing profile and integrating cleanly into a unified dashboard with a sidebar, minifeed, etc.
It’s hardly surprising to see innovation like this happening in the walled garden of a high-powered startup rather than in some smoky back room at the W3C. Nonetheless, Jason is absolutely right: the things that make Facebook apps cool will be so much cooler when they are available on the open web. I want all the zero-registration instant installability and harmonized user interface of Facebook apps, but with the ability to deploy my application on my own domain, in the programming language of my choice and without the permission and oversight of another company. I want to be able to contribute at the platform level. And I want much more inter-application integration (implying a common data model of some sort, something Facebook sorely lacks).
Nick Gonzalez spots the trend and hypothesizes that Plaxo’s “social graph” could be the basis of an “open Facebook”. Perhaps, but I feel strongly that the right place to mediate between web apps and web services is in the browser. The obvious candidate to bring us strong identity and a social graph that can be leveraged across applications is Mozilla, whose stated aim is to promote choice on the web. Any walled garden is the natural enemy of this mission. It’s a heady time of change in the web world right now, and I’ve been inclined lately to contend that Mozilla’s primary competition is AIR and Silverlight, not IE and Safari. But maybe, just maybe it’s actually Facebook.
John Battelle posted a short “wow Facebook is hot right now” piece which is basically an extended introduction to an intriguing question: why is Facebook so damn hot right now?
I think the answer is related to the well-known technology hype cycle. (Mark Andreesen had a funny take on this recently, and I’ve talked about it in the past.)
Everyone sees the social networking space as a winner-takes-all-proposition. So what will determine the winner? Well, usually it’s the player who managed to generate the most hype and excitement. Facebook has done a great job attracting attention, and has now crossed a notional threshold where people see it as the most likely eventual winner. At this point a virtuous cycle takes over. The more hyped the site is, the more obvious it is that it’s going to be the last man standing. This results in even more hype and an ever-ballooning potential valuation. Rinse, soak, repeat.
I am not sure why we did not do this before, but we now have an Official AllPeers Group on Facebook. So if you are a Facebook user, feel free to join us there.
Next we will see how we can use their newly released Facebook API to integrate your AllPeers account into your Facebook account. Stay tuned.
Of course we are still on MySpace with 285 friends at the time of writing this post.
UPDATE: As mentioned in the comment, there is also an AllPeers Group in Last.fm
When I first checked out Twitter a couple of weeks ago, my reaction was a hearty “wuh!?”. Why would I care what anyone, friend or foe, is doing every minute of the day? And more to the point, why would anyone out there care what I had for breakfast and how my digestive system is handling it (a carb-ridden ham/cheese sandwich and quite well, thanks for asking)?
But since people won’t shut up about it, particularly my new favorite gym companion, I’ve been inclined to give it another shot. The last straw was when I saw that the WHAT WG HTML 5 draft has a Twitter ID for following changes to the spec. There’s a there there, folks, and like all social software the only way to really grok it is to use it.
I’ll be making an effort to keep a stream of AllPeers news going, so if you’re interested sign up and be my friend (insert plaintive tone here). My ID is “plasticmillion”.
UPDATE: So far I’m not that impressed, plausibly because the service has been down almost continually since I posted this. When up it seems to drop most updates. I’ll try again in a couple of days and probably give up at that point if they haven’t solved what are apparently stability issues.
UPDATE: Service seems to be running stably now, but I still have only 5 followers. Does that mean that no one who reads this has Twitter, or does nobody love me? Just in case it’s the latter, I cried myself to sleep last night.
Some weeks ago during the Monaco Media Forum I was participating to a panel entitled “What lessons can we learn from MySpace?”. I took offense to hear that there is a revolution going on as proven by the fact Internet users are moving from a passive role (readers) to an active role (writers).
There is absolutely nothing new in the user’s hungry desire to produce content. From the day the web started to become more and more popular (around 1996), users were keen to create content. Around 1998-99, the second most trafficked website was Geocities, the ancestor of MySpace which was later sold to Yahoo for $5b. Geocities (and its clones) was a set of tools to allow people to start publishing on the web. At the time it was just text and pictures but people were creating their homepages quicker than you can say “Tom is not my friend”.
This is not a new trend. What is new though is the availability of better tools. MySpace, Vox, Flickr, YouTube are just making it easier to publish content and since the number of internet users is growing everyday one should not feel amazed to see the level of user’s generated content increasing. Just like the invention of the pen gave hordes of people the opportunity to produce content, these new online tools are helping everybody and anybody to produce content.
So what lessons can we learn from MySpace? None. It’s just another tool. It became the most popular one but at the end of the day it’s just a modern pen. As I said during the panel: “We are all pens manufacturers” 
Later this month, I will be speaking twice at the Monaco Media Forum. This is an invitation-only media event, put together by Publicis Events Worldwide, with a large number of executives from the media world, with a small twist of entrepreneurs, VCs and the like.
I will first participate to a workshop entitled Learning From MySpace with
Karl Jacobs, CEO Wallop;
Dan Whiley, Sr Vice-President MTV International;
Chris Michel, CEO Affinity Labs;
Cedric Maloux, CEO AllPeers.
This is actually one of my favorite subject, let’s call it Social Network 3.0 - where 1.0 were online communities in the late 90’s and 2.0 the MySpace and MeToo services.
My second panel is about innovation.
“New Waves 2″: Sharply focused presentations from the leading edge of digital innovation.
Tariq Krim, CEO NetVibes;
Cedric Maloux, CEO AllPeers;
Chase Norlin CEO Pixsy.
Introductions by Spencer Reiss, Wired Magazine
I will certainly talk about Digital Rights Managements and new business models for the Media Industry.
We have about 2 weeks to go before the event, so I’d love your suggestions for more examples about what lessons we have learnt from MySpace (and I’m not talking about bad design!) and how you see the Social Network space evolve. Thanks.
Alex Rowland of Democracy in Media delves into the reasons why Revver, with its innovative compensation model for video uploaders, is being absolutely trounced by YouTube.
His analysis, as far as it goes, is sound. Using Revver is a good deal more inconvenient than using YouTube because you need to sign up for an account (to get paid) and use a special app to upload. One might suppose that earning money would effectively compensate for these factors, but in this case the potential payoff is far too low. A commentor goes on to note that Revver doesn’t even stack up well against YouTube on a feature-for-feature basis. I would add that the success of any such website, which relies enormously on network effects (who wants to upload videos that no one will see?), is dependent to a large degree on luck and timing. It might be the case that YouTube just happened to gain momentum at the right time and rapidly became the destination of choice for sharing and watching online video, with success breeding more success. After all, by all accounts it’s even more popular than Google Video, which is largely an equivalent offering from company that enjoys widespread adulation.
I disagree somewhat with the implications of Alex’s conclusion, however. He seems to be sounding the death knell for business models that compensate content creators, explaining that “the hive doesn’t participate because they’re getting paid, the hive participates because it likes to hear the buzz of the crowd.” The devil is in the details, however, and Revver is struggling is because it ignores the dynamics of this type of community. Very, very few people are capable of creating a video that strangers want to watch. And only they are worthy of compensation. So a model that seems to be premised on a more or less symmetrical relationship between creator and consumer is bound to fail. And yes, advertising is generally a poor mechanism for monetizing this type of content, just as most bloggers (even superstars) find that they don’t earn enough money from AdSense to bother with it.
The right model is to charge for the videos directly. Yes, this puts a huge additional burden on the consumers, but people are obviously willing to buy content, even online (witness iTunes). If a site is designed to let the cream float to the top, I’m sure that a lot of people would be willing to shell out a buck or two for the latest white-hot viral video. Only the elite few are capable of creating content that compelling, of course, but once you wring out all the inefficiencies inherent in advertising, they will be able to earn a lot of cash indeed. So offer free video with the occasional gem available for a fee. This seems to be the approach taken by Google Video, and while it’s yet to register a blip on the web giant’s balance sheet, I dare say any startup would be happy to have its revenues.
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.
|
|
|
