Today WSJ announced that it has built a news publishing platform that lives inside Facebook - effectively outsourcing their core website to the Social Networking Giant.
The number of reasons this is a bad idea is staggering. I’ve tried to summarize them in a spreadsheet comparing a FB approach verses an Open Web approach.
Please feel free to contribute
Read MoreThere’s a lot of fury on the web right now about ‘Real Names’. FB is trying to use it as a unique feature of their comments system claiming it reduces trolling and low value comments.
Of course that isn’t really true. For one, any commenting system could force FB login. Two, users will troll with or without their name attached and, worse yet, many legitimate users won’t participate for any number of reasons if they can’t use a pseudonym. There are plenty of better ways to increase quality in your comments including participation from the content creators, game mechanics, community moderation and more.
The real debate, however, is about G+ trying to copy FB’s stance on Real Names. They are insisting all user accounts use them and are actively shutting down accounts that violate the policy. They are being so heavy handed about that even people who ARE using their real name are getting notices of violation – most notable Violet Blue.
I’m not really an expert on pseudonyms, shared contexts and anonymity so I’m going to stay out of this debate.
The real question for me, however, is what is Google’s strategic business reason for this policy. There must be a long term plan/reason for it otherwise they wouldn’t be insisting so hard.
My assumption is that it’s related to their intention to become a canonical people directory and identity provider on the internet to compete with FB in this space.
FB, after all, does not just get it’s power from news feeds and photo apps – it gets it from the deep roots it has laid down into the DNA of the internet as the provider of 1st class identity infrastructure and identity information.
In this sense, FB’s social contract has served them very well, and Google’s attempt to copy it is a hint that they understand FB is not just a .com feature set, but a powerful identity utility. They must (and in some cases seem to be) understand that strategy and it’s aggressiveness if they are to properly compete with the monopoly. My only hope, however, is that they are coming up with their own inspired counter strategy rather than just copying the moves they see on the surface – because that’s doomed to fail.
Read MoreIt’s certainly very slick, but it’s a few years behind FB.
I mean that not just in timing and network effects, but in the much more strategic sense of platform ambition. FB.com was the FB strategy 4 years ago. FB is now going for the rest of the web. It’s reach and role as an identity provider and social infrastructure player makes it much more important (and harder to beat) than launching a cool new service. So hopefully the Google+ team is thinking WAY beyond this as a destination site when they are thinking Google Social Strategy.
So far the broad ranging announcements from the +1 button to Google Analytics adding Social bode well for this being a company wide, product wide refresh. The key to success will be in thinking about the need to compete with FB beyond the walls and products of Google.
The key to that, of course, will be to get deep adoption by major sites.
Update: Upon thinking about it a little more. Google has once again missed an opportunity to play to their strengths. With the document web they played the role of aggregator and algorithmic signal detection system. With the social web, their ideal strategy would be to build the ultimate social inbox. A place where I can navigate, consume AND interact with Facebook + Twitter + Foursquare + Quora +++ in one place.
Instead they created yet another content source.
Read MoreOver the last few days I have been debating the NYT pay wall on a private email thread of friends.
I didn’t feel the need to post it on my blog because I thought that pay walls were so obviously a losing strategy that it was a waste of time to comment.
But combined with the recent law suit against the Huffingon Post and Arianna Huffington’s eqloquent response yesterday, I felt it was worth while to re-publish my thoughts here. Most of them are based on thinking and writing that I did many years ago around Attention. Most of that old writing has been lost in the blog shuffle. Hopefully one day I will dig it up and re-post it in a safe place.
On to the issue…
I believe that people have historically paid for the medium not the content.
They pay for ‘Cable’ not for ‘CNN News’. They pay for ‘The Paper’ not for the content in the newspaper. They pay for ‘CDs’ not for the music on the album.
Also they paid a lot because the medium was perceived to be scarce (scarce materials, scarce shelf space, scarce advertising dollars), scarce talented people.
Consumers are not stupid, they understand (if only somewhere at the back of their mind) that the COST of creating and distributing things has been deflated by a growing list of converging trends.
We live in a world of abundance (in the area of digital content anyway). Shelf space is infinite (database entries), any kid in a basement can make content and there is no physical media anymore so cost of distribution has disappeared as well.
The scarcity now is on the consumption side – Attention is the scarce resource. Value is derived from scarcity.
That’s why on the Internet, Attention allocation systems (Google Search, FB News Feed etc) are attracting traffic, engagement and ultimately profit.
In this new world, the price of content must be reduced significantly as shakeouts and rebalancing occurs – because the cost of producing it is approaching zero.
The more the Music, TV and News industry fight this, the more they leave themselves open to disruption by Google, FB, Twitter and the rest of silicon valley.
This is not even to mention that everyone is producing content now. Tweets, Photos, Videos – it’s abundant. Of course most of it isn’t very ‘good’ by J school standards – but that’s irrelevant. The world has never rewarded good with any consistency.
Also just because content is not good, doesn’t mean it isn’t personally meaningful.
For example, I care more what my child (theoretical child of course) posts to FB than the most important journalist in all the world says on CNN.
But please don’t confuse my dispassionate assessment of the issue as pleasure or happiness at the demise of mainstream media though.
I am simply stating the facts because without understanding those we can’t begin to change them (if that’s what the media world decided to do).
In terms of making a judgement of those facts, I think that curators who weave and summarize a broader narrative in the form of ‘reporting’ are critical for an informed citizenship and a functional democracy. I believe in it so much that I have dedicate my life to helping mainstream media companies staying relevant and co-writing things like this: http://aboutecho.com/2010/08/18/essay-real-time-storytelling/
But I also believe that mainstream mass media broke an ancient (and by ancient, I mean as old as rudimentary human communication) pattern of people telling each other personal stories vs. getting all their stories/news from editorialized mass broadcasts.
The Internet may just be restoring the balance. The result is some massive restructuring of inflated budgets, processes, offices, costs etc. While we’re in the middle of that restructuring, it looks like a media apocalypse. Until it settles down and a new equilibrium is found.
Here’s what Arianna wrote on the subject:
The key point that the lawsuit completely ignores (or perhaps fails to understand) is how new media, new technologies, and the linked economy have changed the game, enabling millions of people to shift their focus from passive observation to active participation — from couch potato to self-expression. Writing blogs, sending tweets, updating your Facebook page, editing photos, uploading videos, and making music are options made possible by new technologies.
The same people who never question why someone would sit on a couch and watch TV for eight hours straight can’t understand why someone would find it rewarding to weigh in on the issues — great and small — that interest them. For free. They don’t understand the people who contribute to Wikipedia for free, who maintain their own blogs for free, who tweet for free, who constantly refresh and update their Facebook pages for free, and who want to help tell the stories of what is happening in their lives and in their communities… for free.
Free content — shared by people who want to connect, share their passions, and have their opinions heard — fuels much of what appears on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Yelp, Foursquare, TripAdvisor, Flickr, and YouTube. As John Hrvatska, a commenter on the New York Times, wrote of the Tasini suit, “So, does this mean when YouTube was sold to Google that all the people who posted videos on YouTube should have been compensated?” (And Mr. Hrvatska no doubt contributed that original and well-reasoned thought without any expectation he’d be paid for it. He just wanted to weigh in.)
Update
And here’s a bit of ‘Free Content’ – A conversation I had on Twitter wish someone who disagreed with this post.
Read MoreThis year, like many years before it, has been one of immense personal growth for me. I have continued 2009′s transition from one who is best known and suited for talking about ideas to one who focuses much more on turning ideas into product and business process at scale. I still have a lot to learn!
For that, I continue to thank my friends and colleagues at Echo for their patience, collaboration and wisdom.
In keeping with this transition, this year I have mainly been head down at Echo working on our product, marketing and business roadmap with the team. Much of our work has not yet seen the light of day and I can’t be more excited for it’s eventual release.
The result is I’ve missed a lot of parties or conferences I love to attend, but it has also given me a great opportunity to stay at home and get to know an amazing woman, Nichole. Meeting her has been surprising. And I am rarely surprised.
That being said, though, I feel like I’ve become closer to a core set of amazing people – friends – who continue to inspire, irritate and elevate me. Like all good friends should!
The industry too has gone through some amazing transitions.
Apple’s iOS, once thought invincible, has gone through the inevitable re-balancing against a more open alternative, Android. Facebook, once thought a fad by some, has solidified it’s place as the winner of the destination social networking space through a series of very smart decisions, a total lack of competition and free pass from all the tech media.
Twitter, on the other hand, seems to have continued to struggle to find its place. From simple SMS service, messaging bus of the web or media power house; this year they seemed to drop the ball on all fronts.
Wikileaks has forced us all to think about ultimate transparency and has shone a brilliant light on the media’s inability to understand its own role (particularly the 24 hour broadcast news networks). Transitional media thinking has truly failed us in this new century and will continue to fail as long as they cling to out-dated business models and false drama.
I’m glad that Jon Stewart has taken a more active (even serious) role in this message – however slightly.
I am, however, optimistic for the mainstream media. Many of the executives I have spoken to there (which is many) understand the transition and are fighting each day to lead it.
Overall though, for me personally, 2010 was primarily a year of contentment. A rare feeling for me. For that, I am grateful for all of those who contributed. Past and present.
I can’t wait to see what 2011 brings. I only hope my luck holds out!
Read MoreJust wanted to share with you here that I wrote a guest post on Mashable last week about Facebook’s world view. Be sure to check it out here.
Read MoreAre these blunders a series of accidental missteps (a combination of ambition, scale and hubris) or a calculated risk to force their world view on unsuspecting users (easier to ask for forgiveness)? Only the executives at Facebook can ever truly answer this question.
What’s clear, though, is that their platform is tightly coupled with countless other websites and applications across the web, and their financial success is aligned with many influential investors and actors. At this stage, and at this rate, their continued success is all but assured.
But so is the success of the rest of the web. Countless social applications emerge every day and the rest of the web is, and always will be, bigger than any proprietary platform. Through its action and inaction, Facebook offers opportunities for us all. And in the dance between their moves and the rest of the web’s, innovation can be found.
The only thing that can truly hurt the web is a monopoly on ideas, and the only ones who can let that happen are web users themselves.
For whatever reason, a new project called Diaspora is getting a lot of attention at the moment. They are four young guys who have managed to crowd source $100k+ to build an open, privacy respecting, peer-to-peer social network.
A number of people have asked me what I think, so instead of repeating myself over and over I thought I would write it down in one place.
First, I don’t think Diaspora is going to be the ‘thing’ that solves the problem. There are too many moving parts and too many factors (mainly political) to have any single group solve the problem by themselves.
Second, I don’t think that’s any reason to disparage or discourage them.
When we launched the DataPortability project, we didn’t claim we would solve the issue, but rather create a blueprint for how others might implement interoperable parts of the whole. We soon learned that task was impractical to say the least. The pieces were not mature enough and the politics was far too dense.
Instead, we have settled for providing a rolling commentary and context on the situation and promoting the efforts of those that are making strides in the right direction. We also play the important role of highlighting problems with closed or even anticompetitive behaviors of the larger players.
The problem with the DataPortability project, though, was not its ambition or even it’s failure to meet those ambitions, but rather the way the ‘old guard’ of the standards community reacted to it.
The fact of the matter is that the people who used to be independent open advocates were actually quite closed and cliquey. They didn’t want ‘new kids on the block’ telling them how to tell their story or promote their efforts. Instead of embracing a new catalyzing force in their midst, they set about ignoring, undermining and even actively derailing it at every opportunity.
Despite my skepticism about Diaspora, though, I don’t want to fall into the same trap. I admire and encourage the enthusiasm of this group to chase their dream of a peer-to-peer social network.
Do I think they will succeed with this current incarnation? No. Do I think they should stop trying? No.
While this project might not work their effort and energy will not go to waste.
I think we need more fresh, independent voices generating hype and attention for the idea that an open alternative to Facebook can and must exist. Their success in capturing people’s imagination only shows that there is an appetite for such a thing.
What they might do, however, is strongly consider how their work might stitch together existing open standards efforts rather than inventing any new formats or protocols. The technologies are getting very close to baked and are finding their way into the web at every turn.
We all need to do our part to embed them into every project we’re working on so that peer-to-peer, interoperable social networking will become a reality.
Welcome to the party Diaspora team, don’t let the old guard (who have largely left for BigCo’s anyway) scare you off.
Read MoreLast week Elias Bizannes and I wrote a post Assessing the Openness of Facebook’s ‘Open Graph Protocol’.
To summarize that post, it’s clear that Facebook is making a play to create, aggregate and own not only identity on the web, but everything that hangs off it. From Interests to Engagement – not just on their .com but across all sites. To do this they are giving publishers token value (analytics and traffic) to take over parts of the page with pieces of Facebook.com without giving them complete access to the user , their data or the user experience (all at the exclusion of any other player). In addition, they are building a semantic map of the Internet that will broker interests and data on a scale never before seen anywhere.
In the face of such huge momentum and stunningly effective execution (kudos to them!), aiming for (or using the word) Open is no longer enough. The web community needs to up it’s game.
The same is true for data portability – the group and the idea. Data portability is no longer enough. We must raise the bar and start to aim for Interoperable Data Portability.
Interoperability means that things work together without an engineer first having to figure out what’s on the other end of an API call.
When you request ‘http://blog.areyoupayingattention.com’ it isn’t enough that the data is there, or that that its ‘open’ or ‘accessible’. No. The reason the web works is because the browser knows exactly how to request the data (HTTP) and how the data will be returned (HTML/CSS/JS). This is an interoperable transaction.
Anyone could write a web server, create a web page, or develop a web browser and it just works. Point the browser somewhere else, and it continues to work.
Now map this to the social web. Anyone could (should be able to) build an open graph, create some graph data, and point a social widget to it and it just works. Point the social widget somewhere else, and it continues to work.
As you can see from the mapping above, the interaction between a social widget and it’s social graph should be the same as that of a browser and a web-server. Not just open, but interoperable, interchangeable and standardized.
Why? Innovation.
The same kind of innovation we get when we have cutting edge web servers competing to be the best damned web server they can be (IIS vs. Apache), and cutting edge websites (Yahoo vs. MSN vs. Google vs. Every other site on the Internet) and cutting edge browsers (Netscape vs. IE vs. Safari vs. Chrome). These products were able to compete for their part in the stack.
Imagine if we got stuck with IIS, Netscape and Altavista locking down the web with their own proprietary communication channels. The web would have been no better than every closed communication platform before it. Slow, stale and obsolete.
How do we become interoperable? It’s hard. Really hard. Those of us who manage products at scale know its easy to make closed decisions. You don’t have to be an evil mastermind – you just have to be lazy. Fight against being lazy. Think before you design, develop or promote your products – try harder. I don’t say this just to you, I say it to myself as well. I am just as guilty of this as anyone else out there developing product. We must all try harder.
Open standards are a start, but open protocols are better. Transactions that, from start to finish, provide for Discoverability, Connectivity and Exchange of data using well known patterns.
The standards groups have done a lot of work, but standards alone don’t solve the problem. It requires product teams to implement the standards and this is an area I am far more interested in these days. How do we implement these patterns at scale.
Customers (i.e. Publishers) must also demand interoperable products. Products that not just connect them to Facebook or Twitter but rather make them first class nodes on the social web.
Like we said on the DataPortability blog:
In order for true interoperable, peer-to-peer data portability to win, serious publishers and other sites must be vigilant to choose cross-platform alternatives that leverage multiple networks rather than just relying on Facebook exclusively.
In this way they become first-class nodes on the social web rather than spokes on Facebook’s hub.
But this is just the start. This just stems the tide by handing the keys to more than one player so that no one player kills us while the full transition to a true peer-to-peer model takes place.
If the web is to truly stay open and interoperable, we need to think bigger and better than just which big company (s) we want to hand our identities to.
Just like every site on the web today can have its own web server, every site should also have the choice to host (or pick) its own social server. Every site should become a fully featured peer on the social web. There is no reason why CNN can not be just as functional, powerful, effective and interchangeable as Facebook.com.
If we don’t, we will be stuck with the IIS, IE and Netscape’s of the social web and innovation will die.
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