Wednesday, December 16, 2009

The most important things in life--christmas

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This image is taken from a Calvin and Hobbes comic book I have at home, called Scientific progress goes boink, by Bill Waterson. This has got to be one of the best Christmas poems I have ever seen in a comic book. I love Calvin and Hobbes and often wish I had this incredible imagination of Calvin.

I added a few lines to make the poem a bit more geeky. The coming days I won’t be writing about:

Or any of the other topics I’ve been writing about the past few months. Instead, I’m going to spend this time with my family and friends, so that we can enjoy our Christmas together and I can get new inspiration for new blog posts.Enjoy, and I wish you, your family and friends all the best for this coming Christmas. I will return after Christmas to write once again about this crazy and fun world we live in!

Categories: Bill Waterson · Calvin and Hobbes · Doc Searl · Michael Arrington · Robert Scoble · TechCrunch · Techmeme leaderboard · Uncategorized
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Tweeterboard: Yet another useless leaderboard tool

December 19, 2007 · 7 Comments

What is this obsession techies have with leaderboards. Everything we do gets rated. Everyone needs to be reassured who is most influential, who gets the biggest audience, who has the largest (whatever). Come to think of it, it human nature to try and figure out who is in and who is not. Not just a tech thing. But it really isn’t a big deal.

Today we see the announcement of a new leaderboard, this time in Twitterland. ReadWriteWeb reports it and they are excited about it, as is Jeremiah Owyang.

Marshall KirkPatrick of ReadWriteWeb writes about the importance of Tweeterboard:

On Tweeterboard you’ll find not only a list of the top 100 most influential users on Twitter – you can also look up any of almost 2000 users and see who they are conversing with and get some idea how much influence they carry in the Twitter ecosystem. Only a small portion of Twitter users are being tracked so far – but if indexing can be automated (!) then this could become a very important service.

Jeremiah has a much better angel at it:

Why is understanding who talks to me and vice versa important? Because you can see who influences me, and who I influence.

I like that argument already much better, because it isn’t about who has the biggest. It is about who influences you and who do you influence. Making it a personal tool. I actually have written a similar suggestion before in the blogosphere. Instead of Techmeme leaderboards I would like to see Newton’s Universal Law of Blog Attraction getting implemented.Now, lets think about this for a minute. Twitter is a tool that helps people to get into on-line conversations, although in probably 50% of the cases it is more a 1-way publishing tool of thoughts no longer than 140 characters. I like Twitter as much as I hate it.

I like it because it is a whole lot of fun getting into 140 character conversations with other people. I like it because it allows free flow of thoughts no longer than 140 characters. I like it because the people you interact with are likely to say smart or funny things when they have little space to use.

I hate Twitter because it isn’t opt-out. I want to be able to interact with the people I follow on Twitter, but if I follow a person, he doesn’t automatically follow me. That makes me a groupie instead of a friend and it sucks. Now this other person might just choose not to follow me (which is fine), but I’d rather have him actively block me (as would be needed in opt-out) than have him ignore me (which is now the case).

So why is Tweeterboard another useless tool? Because it helps you look at Twitter in a way it wasn’t meant to. Twitter isn’t about who is most influential, it isn’t about us all tracking the “whole”conversation. Tweeterboards leads to two unnecessary behaviors:

  1. It is narcistic for those who want to know how important they are (disclosure: I’m not important enough to be on it, I checked immediately ;-) ). Fun, but useless all together
  2. It gives those that want to analyse stuff the false illusion that they have a grip on who is influential and what they are talking about

Forget it. Not interesting. The Twitter population isn’t representative of the Web community. It isn’t even representing the techie community. It is only a subset of geeks and other weirdo’s like myself that are out there.

If a popular soccer player in the Netherlands says something weird on TV it’ll have more impact than the most influential Dutch Twitter geek. If Mr Bush decides to go to another war in some foreign country he’ll get more attention than Robert Scoble, on of the most fanatic Twitter users. BTW, I like Robert better than any other influential Twitter user. Why? Because he follows everyone that follows him, and he actually responds to tweets I or anyone else sends him. He is in the conversation, not above it.

Before you know it we are all looking at the same “influential” people again and then Twitter becomes a room with a lot of echo in it. And that would be sad, for it is a perfect way to interact.

But most importantly. I really don’t care that much what “influential” Twitter users say. I care about what Twitter friends say, that is, the people I follow and that take the interest to follow me.

Tweeterboards, TechMeme Leaderboards, who needs them. If you are interested in me or the things I write, you can find me here onTwitter. And I always follow you back ;-)

Categories: Newton's Universal Law of Blog Attraction · TechMeme · Tweeterboard · Twitter · leaderboard
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Current web 2.0 thinking is mediocre, lazy, and opportunistic

December 18, 2007 · 3 Comments

I had a great time reading though blog posts this morning. I am going to try and combine a few of the things I read and explain to you why web 2.0 thinking is becoming more and more mediocre.

Let’s start out with a TechCrunch post on a new product called MicroSocialAds from a company called Ads-Click. MicroSocialAds allows any Facebook user to display advertisement on his Facebook page, thus being able to spam any of the friends he might have left. There is an upside of course, you get a revenue share. Each time a “friend”clicks on an ad, you get a stunning 80% of the ad revenues. WOW. Erik Schonfeld from TechCrunch ends the article with:

In fact, MicroSocialAds are not limited to Facebook. The personal ads also work with MSN Messenger, and will soon be available on Twitter, Yahoo IM, Skype, and OpenSocial. If you have no problem spamming your friends, or if the ads could be micro-targeted by you to the point where they don’t feel like ads, but more like personal product suggestions, then they might actually work out. The concept, though, certainly blurs the line between the social and the commercial. They need to be social enough so that they are palatable to the people expected to add them to their social communications, but commercial enough that they offer a return for advertisers.

Let’s get one thing straight. Spamming “so-called” friends with advertisement is a bad, bad, bad idea. Not just because you won’t earn a decent living out of it (any fool can do the math on that, you would need HUGE amounts of traffic to earn a living). Not just because you would lose all trust and credibility from the people that are in your network and subjected to your ads (lets call them “Facebook friends” for the lack of a better description. And trust and credibility seems a bit important when a company tries to leverage “Facebook friends referrals”. Not because the company that brings you this marvelous revenue opportunity is named Ad-click. Ad-click, the name of the company probably describes their business model perfectly. Any investor investing in a company that optimizes ad clicks (unless the company is Google) should be rethinking it’s investment.

But the real reason this is a bad, bad, bad idea is of course that the ads within Facebook provide the user no real value. Making it the worst possible business model you could get involved in. A business model without the slightest idea of user value creation is a faulty business model. I was therefore relieved to find a posting by Howard Linzon who talks about a web 2.0 company that does understand user value. They have stayed away from the free but ad-based business model and actually charge customers. These customers are happy to pay of course, because they receive value. Can’t think of a better business model. And as Howard shows, they still have all the advantages any web 2.0 company has, like for example being able to create viral campaigns.

Then I read (yet another) great post by Doc Searl, one of the people I watch closely when it comes to envisioning the next step in web evolutions. He writes an excellent post called “the only real social networks are personal ones”. In this post he answers the question “should a brand join or create a social network?”. He says:

Forgive me for being an old fart, but today’s “social networks” look to me like yesterday’s online services. Remember AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve and the rest? Facebook to me is just AOL done right. Or done over, better. But it’s still a walled garden. It’s still somebody’s private space. Me, I’d rather take it outside, where the conversation is free and open to anybody.

And he continues with four reasons why social networks and brands don’t ft together:

First, I’m not sure a “brand” can get social at all. The term was borrowed from the cattle industry in the first place, and will never escape that legacy, now matter how much lipstick we put on the branding iron.

Second, the notion of “brands” either “building” or “joining” social networks strikes me as inherently promotional in either case, and therefore compromised as a “social” effort. Speaking personally, I wouldn’t join a social network any brand built, and I wouldn’t want any brand trying to join one I built. But that’s just me. Your socializing may vary. (And, by the way, if I wear a t-shirt with some company’s name on it, that doesn’t mean I belong to that company’s “network”. It means I’m wearing a t-shirt that was clean that morning.)

Third, I’m not sure social networks are “built” in any case. Seems to me they’re more organic than structural. Maybe I’m getting too academic here, but I don’t think so. Words have meanings, and those meanings matter. When I think about my social networks — and I have many — I don’t see them as things, or places. I see them as collections of people I know. The best collections of those for me aren’t on facebook or LinkedIn. They’re in my IM buddy list and my email address book. Even if I can extend those two lists into a “social graph” (a term that drives me up a wall), and somehow federate them into these mostly-commercial things we call “social networks” on the Web, I don’t see those “networks” as structures. I see them as people. Huge difference. Critical difference.

Fourth, the thing companies need to do most is stop being all “strategic” about how their people communicate. Stop running all speech through official orifices. Some businesses have highly regulated speech, to be sure. Pharmaceuticals come to mind. But most companies would benefit from having their employees talk about what they do. Yet there are still too many companies where employees can’t say a damn thing without clearing it somehow. And in too many companies employees give up because the company’s communications policy is modeled on a fort, complete with firewalls that would put the average dictatorship to shame. If a company wants to get social, they should let their employees talk. And trust them.

I think Doc is right about this. I have written before about the $16 Bln advertisement trap web 2.0 has gotten into. The free but ad-based web model is the most used web 2.0 business model, but if you are not Google, you might as well stay away from it. There are few companies that make a good living out of it and Google currently takes up 75% of that market. Not just because they execute so well. They provide the user with ads when it actually serves a purpose. The Google ad itself has user value. Ad-clicking is a terrible revenue driver, unless the use intentionally is looking to find or buy something.

Jordan Mitchel writes about the earlier released eMarketer figures saying that the on-line ad-revenues will increase to a stunning $42 Bln in 2011. Another eMarketer study also reveals that ad-spent in social networks will increase 37% to almost 4Bln in 2011. What strikes him, and me, is that the value of a click on an ad in an social network is very low.

Current web 2.0 thinking is mediocre and born out of laziness and opportunism. We have seen some companies growing remarkably fast in social networks, leading to crazy valuations. Web entrepreneurs all seem to have found the same holey grail. Providing a free service and stalk the user with ads, in the hope of becoming large and valuable very quickly and then getting the business sold to Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. While this certainly has helped a few of them becoming extremely rich, most businesses started this way are not sustainable. I’m not against ads at all. But you need to think about where to use them. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs seem to ignore the most basic rule to earn a living, forgetting to provide the user with value. And if you do that, you might just get other people to notice that and produce hilarious video’s (unfortunately with ads included ;-) ) about that. And that is sad, really.

Categories: Doc Searl · Facebook · Howard Linzon · Jordan Mitchell · SocialAds · business model · on-line advertisement · social networks · web 2.0
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Observing social behavior through a fishbowl

December 17, 2007 · 2 Comments

Is human behavior changing because of the way the web has allowed us to interact, or are we still following the same basic social rules as, lets say 10 years ago? My guess is that human behavior is affected around the edges, but no more than that.

The web has certainly lowered the transaction costs, or effort, to interact with others. Going from long traveling journeys to meet, smoking signals, snail mail and postal coaches, the telegraph, Morse code, radio, fixed telephony, e-mail, mobile telephony, SMS, the web, and now many different kinds of social networking tools and platforms, transaction costs for the user have dropped to virtually zero allowing us to interact like madmen. Human nature forces us to interact with others as much as we can. And as we are supported by this economic law of zero cost, that is exactly what we do. It is for this very reason punishment often comes in the form of captivity and taking away the ability to communicate. We do this with children (“Go upstairs to your room!”), but also with criminals when we send them to prison.

The lowering of transaction costs is (partly) responsible for the enormous amounts of e-mail, SMS, IM messages, phone calls, pokes, nudges, friends, social networks people use every day. But it comes at a cost (free always does). Not only have we increased the number of times we interact with others, the amount of useless communication has increased to a level beyond comprehension. There are predictions that more than 90% of all e-mail traffic is SPAM making e-mail a lame duck in communication. Join any social network and within seconds you have friends you never knew you had (or perhaps ever wanted).

Does all this technology lead to different communication behavior. Sure it does. People contact each other and call each other friend from all over the world without ever meeting physically. They send each other virtual gifts, even paying for some of them, send each other meaningless messages (to the observer) and communicate just because they can.

Dana Boyd writes some nice observations about this in her article called “valuing inefficiencies and unreliability”. One of her observations is that it has become easy to spam your friends. the example provides is Facebook Causes. I fell for one of those a few weeks ago when I joined the Movon.org protest against Beacon. And now I’m being asked to protest against President Bush, and a few other “important” causes. Another observation form Danah is that people tend to try to find excuses to blame technology when they do not want to communicate with others. “My cell phone was out of reach”, “I never got your e-mail” etc. This has become increasingly difficult as the technology is becoming more reliable.

I have seen some different behavior with teens. While my parents were socially trained to always answer a phone call and I am used to answer any SMS I receive, teens can easily ignore calls or SMSes they receive. Not only do they not bother to think up excuses for not responding, it is a completely accepted behavior by their friends. The receiver instead of the sender decides what importance the interrupt get.

But even with the endless possibilities to interact with each other some things in human behavior do not change. We still love story telling, the troubadour or bard of the middle ages has become the blogger everyone loves to read. We value the opinions from a friend more than that of a stranger. We value communication that has taken effort more than that which cost us no energy. Danah provides us with nice examples again. Teens start regarding Facebook applications as spam after a while, even if it comes from a friend, because it takes the sender no effort at all to send it. Comments are valued much higher, as it takes the sender time and effort to write one. It is exactly for this reason I always like it when people take the time to comment on my blog. Not only have they taken the time to read it, but they also have taken the time to respond. Out of this interaction new things arise.

Facebook is now providing scientists valuable information on the way people socially interact. Harvard scientists are now following all students from an entire class at one college to study how personal taste, habits and values affect social interaction. Facebook provides the academic researchers with an enormous amount of data. Data which wasn’t available at such low transaction costs before.

While this sounds great I cannot help but feel that the researchers are really only observing a very small part of human interaction. People do crazy things on Facebook. Mostly because it is so easy to do crazy things. The costs of interaction are zero with massive amounts of waist as a result. Facebook slamming, profile rating, spam, hatemails, the worst in human behavior arises when people interact on-line. Does that mean that teens are a-social beings? I doubt it. I am sure that teens are slowly getting used to a different meaning of the word friendship in different contexts. But I also think that in the physical world these teens aren’t so different from an older generation when it comes to human interaction. We are still bound by basic social rules in which tell us how to respond to another person. We like to interact, love, care, listen, be heard.

But due to technological possibilities we often tend to forget about human nature. Technology provides us capabilities, and because of that these capabilities will be deployed. It is easy to forget about human nature, about human needs when we design all these great new services. The sexier the technology, the more easily we forget about the most important actor, namely the user. Rolf Skyberg wrote a nice post about that called “Why innovation”. In this post he describes how meeting real customers changes his perception on his role as disruptive innovator at eBay. Rolf intuitively knows that technology isn’t what eBay’s innovation should be about. It is about doing the right things for the eBay user, allowing technology to make life easier.

The trap almost any marketer falls into is thinking he knows what is best for the customer, without actually ever meeting one. Using massive studies and research reports the marketer of today is armed with so much information about social behavior that he can easily be fooled into thinking he knows what is best for the customer. I am not saying customers know what is best for them. But meeting them and interacting with them provides so much more value than reading a report on their behavior.

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(image taken from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benjius/1174865875/)

It is what I call observing social behavior through a fishbowl. You can see the person, even see what he is doing, but you also be sure that what you see is a distorted version of reality. Human nature isn’t all that difficult to understand. It is around us, all we need to do is look for it.

Categories: Danah Boyd · Facebook · Harvard research · Rolf Skyberg · fishbowl · human behavior · social behavior
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Wikipedia, KNOL, who needs them?

December 14, 2007 · 6 Comments

The Internet provides us an overwhelming amount of information. Search engines, with one that binds them all Google, provide us easy access to whatever we want. So far this fairytale.

Search engines are fine to find very specific pieces of information. But they really suck at most of the things I am looking for. Let me provide you with a few examples of where even the mighty Google isn’t able to help me out:

  • I’m looking for a specialist on the subject of<>
  • I want to learn to write a Javascript program
  • I am looking for a vacation for my whole family. We are with four children, so we need an apartment for 6 people (wow that narrows it down). I want to book a flight, sit together, get transportation to the apartment and enjoy ourselves at the beach for 14 days
  • I want to know if product x is any good
  • I am in need of a computer specialist. Who wants to come work at my company, here is the CV I’m looking for
  • My 5 yr old child is looking up information for a school project about pussycats (ooops)
  • Why do people use Facebook, or Twitter, or MySpace, or Skype, or,… why?

I could probably go on for ever. Search engines either provide me with a gazillion results which no human can possibly go through to find the answer they are looking for. Or the search engine isn’t capable to provide me with an exact answer (take the holiday or specialist example). The main reason for it is that search engines are actually pretty dumb. They process text, to see what is written somewhere, look at images, links, and have some fancy pagerank calculation to decide if a piece of information could be important. But, despite of all the smart algorithm, they really suck at interpreting information for us. I just tagged this article with the word influenza. I’m not really writing about it, but Google will find it for you if you want to know something about it.

Humans are in that specific aspect much better interpreting machines. We don’t have the time or processing capabilities to index and remember the entire web (neither does Google), so we are stuck with machines to do the work for us.

Many initiatives have been taken to overcome these issues with search engines. We now have too many vacation portals, where you can book vacations (but not for 6 trust me, you are suddenly left with almost no choice). There are product portals with “user experience” reports. But who can I trust?

I was looking for a new espresso machine on the Internet. I checked a few machines and then went to these comparison sites to see what other users thought of the machines. Total waste of time. Everyone contradicts each other, the very positive ones sound like a commercial written out, and the negative ones are usually dissatisfied customers with one bad experience, or employees form a competing product that want to nail the competition. So, I ended up going to a store and listening to the sales person there. He let me taste different coffees made in different espresso machines. This experience can’t be beaten by anything on-line.

And we also have Wikipedia. Wikipedia probably needs no more introduction as the best know on-line encyclopedia build by anyone that wants to contribute. For that very same reason you may want to be a bit skeptical about the content it provides. Not everyone is an expert, and numerous examples of censorship and pranks have been noted when analysing who is actually contributing knowledge to Wikipedia. It contains a fast amount of information on an almost uncountable number of topics.

Google has decided to build their own version of that. They call it KNOL or a unit of knowledge. The idea behind it isn’t just to provide us with more information, it is a tool to help people share information. And while I welcome the initiative, I already know it won’t answer any of the questions that really matter. It will be yet another great source of information, structured, probably written by people that are experts. But as will almost anything on the web, there will be too much of it. And pretty soon we need the Google Search engine and pageranking system to find anything on KNOL.

I have found a much easier and better way to get answers to the questions that really matter. I use Google to find the address and phone number of a vet I rarely visit. But if I want to know more about something that really matters to me, I always turn to people. Friends, family, colleagues from work, people I know from the web, or my blog. Anyone. There are 2 reasons why I always get better results there.

  1. I trust the judgement of people I know or have interacted with before. Not only because they are knowledgeable, but also because they know me! They act as a filter to the fast amounts of knowledge they have access to and filter out that information they think might be interesting to me
  2. Finding information is good, interacting with someone about it is better. I find that if I talk to a person I always gain more knowledge than simply reading about it. It is good to hear a friend tell me about his experiences with his family when he went on holiday to a destination I might go. Or to hear an expert in Social Networks explain to me what is really important underneath them. You can’t find that using a search engine.

I did an experiment once in a research facility of the company I work for. We got the consent of a number of people and, fully automated, we used some artificial intelligence algorithms to analyse what they were mailing to other people. The idea was to see if their communication patters could provide us a knowledge profile about that person. Not surprisingly we found that people tend to interact on things they have knowledge of, or have questions about. While the information might not directly answer you question, it does help you to find an expert on the matter.
So my advice to you is simple. When you need something fast and it isn’t really important? Go ahead, use Google. When you need more in-depth knowledge? Wikipedia, KNOL or any other information gathering site is fine. If you want understanding, or need something you care about? Forget the above. Call a friend, Skype or Twitter a person you know, go to conferences, meeting places, have a coffee with a total stranger and be prepared to learn things you didn’t know before!

Wikipedia, KNOL, who needs them?

Categories: Google · KNOL · Pagerank · Wikipedia · influenza · search engines
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Twitter needs to be opt-out instead of opt-in

December 12, 2007 · 1 Comment

Scott Karp leads a TechMeme discussion when he confesses he has stopped using Twitter. Not because he doesn’t like it, but because there are downsides to it that outweigh the upsides. The addictiveness and relative ease to post and follow tweets lead to distraction of work. Furthermore he doesn’t like the signal-to-noise ratio, or in other words, the number of silly or non-interesting tweets outnumber the number of relevant and interesting tweets. Scott also notes that you often can only follow half of a conversation, as you might see the tweets of someone you follow, but you don’t see the tweets of the people that follow the person you are following.

It is this asymmetry that I do not like about Twitter either. It is very similar to hearing someone talking through a mobile phone in a public area. You can hear half of the conversation (even if yu don’t want to) and this becomes annoying. Better to hear nothing than half a conversation.

Twitter has another annoying feature build in. You can follow anyone you want, but the other person can chose not to follow you. Although this sounds the social thing to do, letting the user decide who he follows and who not, it has the drawback that you can become a groupie instead of a friend. Not much fun in that. I follow some really interesting people on Twitter but because they do not follow me, I’m unable to participate or react to anything they tweet.

You might now say, grow up dude, the guy doesn’t want to follow you because he doesn’t know or like you. But I don’t think that is always the case. The follow request can easily get lost or ignored in tons of mail. Leaving me with the fan status.

I am not a fan of opt-out as a default option but in the case of Twitter I would argue opt out is much better than opt in. By default everyone who decides to follow another person should be followed back by default. This has the advantage that true interaction is possible if wanted. At the same time the possible dislike or misbehavior of a person following you can easily be mended by blocking that person.

Twitter is a micro messaging tool. It allows free flows of ideas, words, sentences and conversations. If you don’t want to be part of that, simply ignore it. And if someone is a nuisance, just block him. But don’t ignore a follow me message. It is a compliment if someone is willing to listen to what you have to say! You can find me on twitter, and I ALWAYS follow you back!

Categories: Twitter · microblogging · scott karp · web 2.0
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Freedom to the people (part 2)

December 11, 2007 · Leave a Comment

In a previous post I talked about some major changes I would like to see happening to the current web. The most important aspect of that is to provide the user freedom again. I said:

More than 2006, when Time Magazine unfortunately called YOU the most important person of the year, I think and hope 2008 will be the year where the user gets his long-wanted freedom back. 2008 will be a year in which we will see the first brand/portal/network/social graph/device- agnostic services pop up. What does all of that mean? It means that the portal or network concept we are so used to is slowly replaced by initiatives where the user isn’t locked in, but viewed as a traveler reaching a place where service is required.

To reach freedom for the users we need new business models. No one will freely remove the existing “customer or advertiser lock-in”, walled gardens, locked user data unless there is a new economic engine that can really set the user free. At the same time we might question the user’s comprehension of what it means to be locked in or set free. Millions of people are already locked into walled gardens and exploited for advertisement reasons without really knowing it or even caring about it. The same thing holds for advertisers. They are locked into a promise that a new era in media has arrived and that it will bring endless new possibilities to reach a targeted audience using tools like Beacon and SocialAds on Facebook.

At best an advertiser reaches a semi-targeted and somewhat ignorant audience. But most likely these new ways of reaching targeted sets of people will lead to indifference by the user. A new business model or economic engine isn’t enough, we also need to show the user that being free has advantages over being locked in. We need to show the advertiser that advertisement only makes sense if the advertisement itself provides the targeted user value. And we need to convince service creators to work on user value monetization instead of network value monetization.

What would such an economic ecosystem have to look like? What benefits should it address? Difficult questions with difficult answers. Chris Messina points this out very well when he says:

We need instead to frame the discussion in terms of real-world benefits for regular people over the situation that we have today and in terms of economics that people in companies who might invest in these technologies can understand, and can translate into benefits for both their customers and for their bottom lines.

The discussion is continued with Anne Zelenka at GigaOM.

Real-world benefits for the user

What could be real-world benefits for the user to be free? Although some obvious advantages like data freedom and privacy control come to mind immediately, we might need to look beyond that. Let’s face it. There are currently hundred of millions of people locked into social networks like Facebook and MySpace and they do not seem to care that their profile data, friends data, relationships and interactions aren’t their own. It is impossible to export any of that into another service thus providing the user choice. But he doesn’t seem to mind much. His privacy isn’t guaranteed and his data is being used to target advertisers onto his profile. Users are often described (and often behave) like ignorant, lazy, “entertain me” like people. Some even predict it is human laziness that will burst the web 2.0 bubble.

I am a more positive thinker about human nature. People need to interact, and they want to do this as conveniently as possible (we are a bit lazy right). Freedom is about having a choice. Being able to say I can choose it the way I want. I believe that if a user is offered choice between spending time within walled gardens or traveling around as a free man, the choice will be on freedom. Freedom would provide the user the possibility to integrate real-life experiences with “cyber” experiences. In a way that is convenient to him.

I wrote about the web being a surrogate of real-life interactions. But if you can integrate real-life interaction with the ability to share and interact with people who are not physically present it would add value.You should be able to decide how, where, when and with whom you would have that interaction. Regardless of device, technology or platform. That is what freedom is about.

You can use Facebook and the friends you have there, but if you want to do something else, then it should be possible as well. Without you losing the ability to interact because some platform locked your friends away behind some wall. And freedom is a blade cutting 2 ways. If you have the choice to interact in the way you want, a service provider that wants to service you needs to provide value. For it is only that user value that makes you want to use that service provider. So freedom for the user leads to user value innovations, everybody wins.

And with this freedom comes the ability to be able to identify yourself anywhere with one means, and the ability to perform transactions anywhere using a simple mechanism.

Benefits for the advertiser

If a user is free he will choose to interact with a brand or an advertiser. It will be a positive choice, one of free will. It provides the advertiser with a meaningful interaction with the user, providing him valuable opportunities to build a brand, advertise or sell stuff that matter. The advertiser can learn more about the user in a way more targeted than a Facebook profile or Beacon message.

It means letting go, stop waisting enormous amounts of advertisement spendings on large groups of users. Instead the advertiser will have to learn to interact on an almost individual basis with users. Microbranding. Scary, but also potentially very powerful. It also means that advertisers will have to deal with the user being on the move (for he is a traveler). It will focus the attention of the advertiser to add value to the experience of the traveler. Not just broadcasting a message to him, but understanding what the travelers needs are when using a service, and adding value to that user experience by providing brand or advertisement that actually matters.

Benefits for the service creator

If the service creator would be able to let go of the concept of “customer lock-in” and think about his business in terms of serving a free traveling customer he would be forced to think in terms of user value. There is no need to put up walls and lock customer or advertiser within those walls, as the user is free to go wherever he wants to. Instead he needs to work on his main competitive advantage, providing the user more value than a competitor could do.

Service creators need to let go of their proprietary platforms, the lock in of users and their data, the free but ad-based business model. They need to participate in a user-centric web, become a gas station next to a freeway servicing the traveler passing by.

There are clear benefits for the service creator. Most importantly, instead of providing services for free and creating revenues through ads, the user will pay for the value he obtains. This leaves the service creator to concentrate on user value and monetizing that. It implies that the service creator should not focus on page rank, page views and user clicks but instead focus on meaningful interactions of the user via his service. Interactions to buy or sell things, to find help or provide help, interactions with friends or strangers, search information. Each of these interactions can be monetized if they provide the user value. We are happy to pay for sending an SMS because it allows us to interact with our friends. We pay for a professional Flickr account because it provides us more freedom and value than a free account. We should be paying Twitter when sending an SMS for it adds value to my interactions with others.

This is not an easy step to be taken by the service creator. Right now he is in control, he owns the platform, the data, the social graph, the connections to the advertiser, and yes, even parts of the user in some way. They have to believe that freedom in the end benefits us all. A user that willingly chooses to go to a service creator will be more valuable than a user that is (unwillingly) locked into the service by the service creator. As Milton Friedman, Economics Nobel prize winner, has said rightly:

“Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of believe in freedom itself”

I have only provided an outline or framework in which an economic engine might be redefined allowing the user to become free (and taken too many words for it already). More and detailed work needs to be done to define the benefits for all. Then again, courage and the willingness to start is all it takes to set the user free and and the same time making huge amounts of money on the monetization of user value. Any takers out there?

Categories: Alexander van Elsas · Beacon · Data Portability · Facebook · Flickr · Real life · SocialAds · business model · freedom · interaction · on-line advertisement · privacy · social networks · user centric web · web 2.0 · web 3.0
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The web is just a poor surrogate of real-life interactions

December 10, 2007 · 3 Comments

happy-couple.jpgThis Saturday my wife and I celebrated our 12,5 years of marriage together with our family and many friends and neighbours. We had a great time living towards the party while remembering lots of things from the the past years. The party itself was incredible. It is so good to be able to have everyone you care about around and have a great time together. We hired a great band and heard music from the 80s all evening. Brought back many memories from our youth! I even played a few songs with my own band, and ended up playing one song solo for my wife at the end of the evening. Why am I writing about it on this blog? Well, because I was thinking about it this Sunday and while I was remembering it and reliving the emotions, I realised there isn’t an on-line experience that even closely matches what we experienced the past days.

It made me wonder why it isn’t possible (yet?) to relive such moments on-line.

Certain parts of the experience can be supported on-line. For example, we looked at pictures and watched our wedding video. This could be done on sites such as Flickr or YouTube. But the experience wouldn’t be quite the same. Why? because the Internet is mostly an individual thing. I sit behind my computer as I type this, and no one is around looking at me. We could look at wedding pictures on Flickr, but the effect would not be the same unless we could do that together with the whole family (and no, I haven’t connected my 42 inch flat screen in the living room to the Internet, call me outdated if you want).

To support the emotions coming from the interaction with family and friends during a party is just impossible! It made me realise (again) that the Internet and the interactions we have through it are a very weak and surrogate version of the real world. Through real-life interactions we create, share, live, and remember emotions and friendships that are much more powerful than any profile, picture, or on-line interaction could ever provide us. A good example of a tech blogger that doesn’t get this is Duncan Riley who tries to pull a humorless joke on nobel prize winning Doris Lessing. In my humble opinion Doris Lessing understands very well what the Internet has and hasn’t brought us.

Is that a bad thing? Of course not. Actually here lies the chance to make things better (Stole that quote from Factoryjoe :-) ). Interaction and emotions are powerful drivers for us. It is what makes us tick so to say. I have written many times about this already and I am a firm believer that it is the interaction that creates the greatest user value. So if we want to create user value, and at the same time make the user pay for it (getting rid of the often mis-used free but ad based web 2.0 business model), we should be focusing on emotions and interactions.

How about making web browsing a social thing? Surfing and interacting together. How about if I not only upload the pictures of my party to Flickr, but can also agree to look at them on-line, together with a few friends while we talk about it again (haven’t figured out how we can also have a beer together on-line to go with it). I certainly need to talk to my band members about a few misses we made during the second song (well, it was pretty difficult playing Coldplay’s In My Place, what a great song!).

What if I don’t use my Facebook profile to show people what I did this weekend, but instead I invite all my friends and family to this one place within Facebook where we could actually interact to relive these precious moments again. Where everyone could not just observe but add to that experience.

What if we could simultaneously look at the recording of the band playing, and pinpoint exactly where we messed up or played a particularly difficult part well! What if we could hear back the songs the band I hired played for us, legally, and without ads!, making the record industry distribution emotions instead of music. Or download them all together as a package.

What if we could look at all the presents we received, hearing all the stories of those that gave them to us back again, understanding why someone had picked ut that particular present for us?

What if we could tweet about it together, even if not all people that were there had a Twitter account? We would want to Twitter about it! Not because we needed to update the number of tweets, but because we all have one thing in common. We were all at the same party having a great time and want to share that. No need for a Twitter account to do that, just a place where we can relive that moment. this can only become possible if Twitter would become the plumbing of the web, if service owners would service travelers instead of locking in customer (profiles).

What if we could make our digital experience look a bit more like our real-life experience? Wouldn’t you want that? Wouldn’t you even be willing to pay for that? I know I would! But until then, we are stuck with the crippled tools we have available right now.

So the best thing for me to do is to plan my next big party. We’re definitely throwing one when we are married 25 years, in the mean time I’ll think of a few excuses to organise a few more :-)

Categories: Facebook · Flickr · Real life · Record industry · Twitter · YouTube · distribution of emotions · interaction · web 2.0
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Freedom to the people

December 7, 2007 · 2 Comments

We are nearing the end of 2007 so human nature forces me to look back and forth, thinking about things that happened and things to come. I am by no means a good trend or technology predictor, but here’s my take on it.

Looking back the most talked and blogged about subject is probably Facebook and it’s plans with monetization of their build up social graph. The story remains a top item on TechMeme, and it is a controversy as most either love or hate their Beacon attempt. Now that we are slowly recuperating from the privacy backlash they received, the next thing already being discussed is the possible inflation of visitor numbers or even the stealing of people from other companies. Facebook is now getting payback for the hype that was created around it. This almost seems Dutch behavior. In Holland we tend to talk anyone down sticking his head above the play field. Facebook is in that league now and I predict for 2008 that they will get into more trouble than they are already in right now. Not because they might be doing things wrong, but more likely because they are becoming too popular and the blogging community seems to be smelling blood. And that isn’t good. Fear isn’t what Facebook needs now. It needs leadership and making the right choices together with its users.

Looking forward towards 2008 I feel that the time is there to make some major changes in the current web. We need technological barriers to be taken down by developments such as Android, openSocial, OAuth, and OpenID. It will take time, but in the end the user wins. I’m not going to worry too much about the technology needed, it always finds a way. More interesting is to think about human nature and the needs that we might need fulfilling in 2008.

More than 2006, when Time Magazine unfortunately called YOU the most important person of the year, I think and hope 2008 will be the year where the user gets his long-wanted freedom back. 2008 will be a year in which we will see the first brand/portal/network/social graph/device- agnostic services pop up. What does all of that mean? It means that the portal or network concept we are so used to is slowly replaced by initiatives where the user isn’t locked in, but viewed as a traveler reaching a place where service is required.

If you think about the user becoming a traveler instead of a profile in a network or social graph then you quickly realise that current service isn’t all that fit to service the traveler. We have walled gardens, locked data, privacy issues, spam, free but ad-based web business models, crappy mobile to Internet solutions, locked mobile phones and networks, a total lack of standards, competition on the network and profile layer instead of on the application service layer, customer “lock-in”, advertisers “lock-in”, iPhone wannahaves, Beacon, DRM, etc. Essentially things that are meant to keep you locked into a specific place, instead of letting you move around wherever you want to go.

But a traveler really doesn’t need all that. What would you take with you when you go on a trip? Basic needs probably include:

A passport that identifies you at all destinations, a traveling bag where you can keep your personal belongings, money, food, drink, a good map for the area you travel to, a language guide, and easy ways for you to: obtain relevant information/keep track of/meet/interact with friends and strangers.

It is a very basic and simple list of needs. Translate these needs onto the (mobile) web and we can easily come up with services that address these needs. Entrepreneurs need to think more in terms of running a gas station on a freeway waiting for a car to arrive and servicing the traveler, instead of becoming an amusement park owner, letting children drive a Donald duck car, but only if you visit Disneyland. This sounds easy enough, but with it comes a radical change in business models. Not based upon page views or clicks, as these are easily inflated, but based upon user value.

As Rolf Skyberg puts it, the network should become the commodity. The question is, who’s going to do the plumbing?

My hopes for now lie with new initiatives like OpenSocial, and Android, because they do the open “talk”. Let’s see if they can do the “walk” too. Let it be noted that I could care less about the Social Graph, web 3.0, or whatever you want to call it. It is time to free the people, who will take the first step in 2008?

Categories: Android Mobile OS · Beacon · Facebook · Google · Mobile Internet · OpenSocial · business model · freedom · iPhone · social networks · web 2.0 · web 3.0
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We need a revolution in Mobile UI thinking

December 4, 2007 · Leave a Comment

A few days ago I was fiddling around with my mobile phone (a Nokia N95) and it occurred to me (yet again) that the current mobile phone user interface just doesn’t work for me. Yes, the screens have become much bigger, it has impressive functionalities, a camera which is almost as good as a regular digital camera, it has HSDPA, WiFi you name it. But it just doesn’t work. The mobile phone interface is a phone interface with some application extra’s. It isn’t really a USER centric interface.

Just take the most basic mobile functionality you can think of (no it is not calling), messaging. I have several (technical) options to send a message to another person. But the phone forces me to resolve the technical details. I have to think about whether I want to send an SMS, e-mail or MMS (yes, I am one of those users that actually use MMS). People will obviously SMS most of the time, but with our physical and Internet world becoming connected in so many ways this will not remain to be the obvious choice. Once I have made a choice I need to wade through several menu’s in order to enter the message content, select the receiver and finally send the message away. It gets worse when I receive messages. Not only do I have several different types of inboxes (SMS, e-mail, MMS), but the notification mechanisms really suck. An SMS or MMS alert draws all my attention away from the thing I was doing. E-mail isn’t noted at all. If you don’t think this is a problem I recommend you try out Twitter and get it to send your tweets to your mobile phone for an hour or so. You see instantly why this messaging mechanisms doesn’t work. It floods my inbox and it distracts me constantly. I have to perform too many actions to read all the messages and then delete them again.

Nokia and other manufacturers are constantly working on their user interface. But they are simply improving on an old concept. Wiht the increased graphics and computing power I hoped they would not improve, but thoroughly redesign the user interface. It isn’t a phone anymore. It is my remote control of life. It needs a user centric interface where not the mobile phone functionality takes the central place in design, but the way I want to use that functionality! I want freedom, instead of being trapped into a user interface that limits my options. But they haven’t. And that is one of the main reasons I think mobile Internet will not break through to the masses yet.

I haven’t mentioned the iPhone up to this point. I don’t own one and only played with it a few times so it wouldn’t be fair to draw conclusions about it based upon a few observations. I can say that based upon first impressions Apple has done a great job in providing us with a totally new UI element when they introduced the touch screen. They have put great effort into usability. But I can’t help but think that even on the iPhone, the UI paradigms haven’t been as disruptive as I would have liked them to be, even if it stimulates mobile internet usage.

Readwrite web reports today that the mobile phone penetration worldwide increases even more than predicted, with currently over 3.3 Bln mobile phone subscriptions. I’m not surprised at that. With more and more strong developing countries now being covered by mobile networks, people in China, India, Africa and South America people fall for the very same being connected trap we all fell for. The mobile phone makes it possible to connect and be connected whenever and where ever we want.

In the article Richard McManus points us to a recent study by Nielsen that reveals that 35% of US teens (8-12 yr) now own a mobile phone and that 5% sometimes uses it for Internet. Richard feels that this is enough evidence to show that the mobile Internet is finally ready to take off.

I’m not so sure about it. The breakthrough of mobile Internet has been predicted many times. But it isn’t there yet. The most important indicator to me that it isn’t there yet is the ever increasing SMS traffic. Why use such an outdated and cumbersome messaging protocol instead of using the possibilities the web has to offer? It isn’t just price, although that is a major barrier to be resolved. I think a lot has to do with usability. Sending an SMS has become easy for people to use (even with the flaws mentioned above). Firing up the Internet anywhere (and I don’t mean just in places near a WiFi point) isn’t simple. And once on-line we are limited within the technical barriers of the mobile phone. Browsing the web doesn’t work on such a small screen.

And instead of thinking about entirely new metaphores for mobile Internet we start moving around this issue and develop solutions that aren’t really solving the problem. One way is to redefine the ENTIRE web (yeah right), by creating special mobile pages. These pages are smaller, need less data transfer and are basically optimised for the mobile phone browser. While this might sound like a good solution it really doesn’t work. First of all, it would take an impossible effort to rebuild the entire web to make it usable for the mobile phone, and secondly, it leaves the user with the task of solving complexity. Do I go to www.flickr.com (which I can remember), or do I need to try m.flickr.com. And how do I upload my picture there?

Another option is to develop a touch screen and really cool zooming and moving around functionality to handle these big pages. Apple did just that with their iPhone. They are providing us with a intuitive solution to handle big amounts of data, but they aren’t fundamentally solving the problem.

In my opinion we need a revolution in mobile phone UI thinking. A revolution that puts the user and his intentions central in user interface development. We need to understand what users do with their mobile phones. We shouldn’t be thinking in terms of releasing technical functionalities with nice graphical interfaces. We need to think in terms of the remote control of life, supporting the user in his interaction needs. If we let go of the current UI and browsing paradigms who knows what becomes possible. Let’s not rebuild the entire web to make it mobile, let’s not even come up with even better alternatives for the iPhone touch screen. Let’s first think about what the user wants to do with his phone, and then come up with an interface and a mobile web concept that supports his actions, regardless of the technology.

I’ll give away one idea for making things better. Why not get rid of the whole inbox-outbox messaging paradigm. It sucks on a mobile phone. Instead convert the entire paradigm into a life stream, similar to the way Twitter and Jaiku work. It fits human behavior much better. We don’t always want to look into or respond to every message we receive. Showing these messages as a constant stream allows me to look at it whenever I want to. It doesn’t call for my attention whenever a message arrives, but I get to decide when I wish to give the message my attention. It allows me to pick up things that are important, and it also provides me easy ways to respond to on ore more people. And it lets me ramble my thoughts to whoever is willing to listen to them. Maybe I’ll ask Chris Messina to create some designs for this particular idea. He does a pretty cool job designing nice interfaces.

We need to let go of current paradigms, and ask ourselves, what is a user going to do with his phone in this social networking age? It opens a new world of possibilites, a world without mobile web browsing, a world of freedom for the user. So who is going to free me from the limitations of the mobile phone and give me my remote control of life? Or maybe I should start something myself, anyone interested to join?

Categories: Apple · Jaiku · MMS · Mobile · Mobile Internet · Nokia N95 · Twitter · e-mail · iPhone · remote control of life · revolution
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The art of becoming successful

December 3, 2007 · Leave a Comment

Fred Wilson has written 2 excellent posts on his personal success/failure rate as a venture capitalist, and on the reasons why early stage ventures fail. It is good reading material, especially if you are not in the venture capital business yourself. His most important reasons why ventures fail are:

1) It was a dumb idea and we realized it early on and killed the investment. I’ve only been involved in one investment in this category personally although I’ve lived through a bunch like this over the years in the partnerships I’ve been in.
2) It was a decent idea but directionally incorrect, it was hugely overfunded, the burn rate was taken to levels way beyond reason, and it became impossible to adapt the business in a financially viable manner.

He goes on and talks about his most important lessen drawn fro these failures:

So it’s pretty clear to me that most venture backed investments don’t fail because the business plan was flawed. In my experience at least 2/3 of all business plans we back are flawed.

Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered. That scale/burn rate becomes the cancer that kills the business.

There is so much truth in this. Most of us have had a “great” idea before, thinking this would change the world we are living in now. I know I have, many times. But the interesting thing about it is that it really isn’t about the idea or the business plan that matters. It is about execution and discovery. Willing to let go of your initial idea’s and discovering what actually works. Setting up a successful business is really an art. It takes great skill and adaptation to become successful. While I write this, I’m listening to Michael Hedges in the background. Talking about skill, check out the way he masters his guitar.

One of my favorite books is “Good to great” written by Jim Collins. In his book Jim explores why some companies are able to make the leap from being a good company to becoming a great company. One of the things I always remember about this book is the idea that great leaders first create a great team of people, before they figure out where the bus(-iness) is going. He goes on and describes 3 key characteristics of companies that made the leap, in a concept which he calls the hedgehog concept:

More precisely, a Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deep understanding about the intersection of the following three circles:

1. What you can be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at). This discerning standard goes far beyond core competence. Just because you possess a core competence doesn’t necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at it. Conversely, what you can be the best at might not even be something in which you are currently engaged.

2. What drives your economic engine. All the good-to-great companies attained piercing insight into how to most effectively generate sustained and robust cash flow and profitability. In particular, they discovered the single denominator—profit per x—that had the greatest impact on their economics. (It would be cash flow per x in the social sector.)

3. What you are deeply passionate about. The good-to-great companies focused on those activities that ignited their passion. The idea here is not to stimulate passion but to discover what makes you passionate.

I was thinking about these things this morning, after a long weekend of Facebook backlashing. Mark Zuckerberg and his team are having a hard time at the moment, and a lot of bloggers are getting into the “after success comes the backlash” modus. I wonder if Fred, who is not very hard on them, would consider investing in Facebook a success or failure. My guess is that it is a success, given the enormous growth and valuation of Facebook. But It might become a failure if Facebook isn’t able to turn the sentiment around.

Their main concern shouldn’t be the user walking away at this point. Their concern should be advertisers turning away. Advertisement is the main business driver for Facebook, and if companies like Coke are now “reconsidering” others might follow. And what to think of the questions Dana Boyd asks herself in “who clicks on ads and what might this mean“. In her post she writes about a study done by Global Advertisement Strategy:

What did we learn? A lot. We learned that most people do not click on ads, and those that do are by no means representative of Web users at large.

Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks.

Who are these “heavy clickers”? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners, with some concentrations in Mid-Atlantic States and in New England. What kinds of content do they like to view when they are on the Web? Not surprisingly, they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers.

What does all of this mean? It means that while clickers may be valuable audiences, they are by no means representative of the Web at large. Focusing campaigns to optimize on clicks means skewing campaigns to optimize on middle-aged women from the Midwest. If these folks are not your target, then you should be ignoring the click-rate and looking deeper, to what audience your impressions are being delivered, and what audiences are converting (there is a large body of evidence that shows that click-rates and conversion rates rarely correlate with each other).

If your business model is about advertisement and click throughs, then you better figure out a way to extend this to other populations than just middle-aged women from the Midwest.

I have always felt that the metric itself is becoming less useful. With all of these things in mind I wonder if Facebook has the strength to work on their own hedgehog concept. They are already a good company. Few have seen such an incredible growth rate in such short time. But the question to be answered is, will they become a great company? I think they have a lot of great things in place. An incredible user base, application API’s, great people on board. And there is a huge advertisement market in place, where unfortunately Google right now takes up 75% of all ad revenues. All they need to do is figure out where to take their bus. If SocialAds and Beacon aren’t it, they better figure out what it should be. I vote for opening up their platform and resetting the balance between user value and advertiser value. That is really what their business should be about. It’s a balancing act.

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