The Austin Chronicle has published my article about Facebook in its SXSW Interactive issue.
Are we watching a generation "slice in two," or are these sites making visible, and emphasizing, a division that already existed? Before the social Web, most of us didn't know we were part of social networks. We had friends, and we knew that our friends might know people that we don't, but most of us never thought to chart or analyze those relationships. Now we can make our networks visible and explicit and touch base with them every day through sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Are we any better off than we were before? Do we know the people in our networks any better than before? Can we manage more relationships than we did before? Looking at the darker side, will we be exploited by the operators of network platforms? Will everything we say and do actually, no foolin', become part of our "permanent record," tracked by Big Brother and his henchmen? Will the Internet become the next television, an instrument for programming consumers, pretending to be a channel for art and entertainment?MySpace Apps
Yes to everything. Yes, we're better off; there can be tremendous value in network exchanges and far more potential for productive collaboration and resulting innovation. We probably do know most of the people in our networks better; we can connect to them casually every day, like the Internet was a massive water cooler where everybody, and I mean everybody, can hang out. Can we manage more relationships? Sure, but that's deceptive: We have the technology to manage more, but that doesn't mean we can manage all the relationships that we "add" at any qualitative level. All the social-networking platforms caution you to add as friends only people you really know well. Real value depends on quality, not quantity, of relationships.
And yes, some people will be exploited, but network platforms that exploit will lose trust, lose users, wither, and die. Yes, everything we do online is recorded somewhere and probably retrievable somehow by somebody, and the intelligence agencies are probably crunching some of your data somewhere sometime. There's never been any real expectation of complete privacy online. On the other hand, it's impractical to think that Big Brother is watching. His eyeballs and his interests are constrained by an economy of attention, if nothing else. And the Internet's already become the next television, but it has a bazillion channels, many with ads, and many of the ads that do appear are unobtrusive. Austin tech consultant and entrepreneur Venki Iyer told me, "We all just need to get used to surveillance and practice good sousveillance [watching the watchers]."
Following Facebook's lead, MySpace is gearing up to accommodate third-party applications via the MySpace Developer Platform. [Link to MIT Tech Review article] [Link to Developer Platform page at MySpace]
Very interesting info from MySpace on the page that discusses their adoption of Open Social... tragedy of the commons:
While unrestrained CSS and HTML provided users with limitless ways to make their profiles look a certain way, it was JavaScript that allowed them to really plug into the MySpace experience. After MySpace launched, users began building JavaScript widgets that did anything from customizing friends lists to sending MySpace Mail. And applications they coded were not limited to their own profiles. Through a little known technology known as "cut and paste", users could "install" applications they liked on their own profiles.Jon L. at Social Media Club
Where did all this functionality come from? While no specific XML/JSON api was provided, users quickly wrote and disseminated scripts that used JavaScript to screen scrape the existing MySpace markup (in order to gather data), and to emit the proper http values to manipulate the data they gathered.
Of course, a completely open MySpace was a utopic ideal. The exploitation began. As nefarious people began perceiving value in having lots of illegitimate friends, causing mischief, and/or making a profit through spam, they began writing applications that broke the rules. While a well thought out, law abiding "send me a message" app would send messages only at the request of the user, an app built by a spammer would send as many messages as the user's bandwidth would allow.
As spammers propagated through the site, MySpace began blacklisting certain types of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. We tried very hard to keep as much JavaScript as possible, but slowly and surely illegitimate users hacked away at our filters until finally JavaScript was banned entirely. That left third party application developers with only one dyanmic alternative: Flash. Sites like YouTube saw their birth as widely disseminated Flash decorations for MySpace profiles. Unfortunately, by this time such applications were completely locked out of the MySpace data stream.
I'll be presenting at the February Social Media Club meeting in Austin (third Thursday, February 21). Join us! [Link]
The politics of FacebookTom Hodgkinson at The Guardian explores the politics of Facebook's directors, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. First, he makes it clear that he doesn't buy the premise of Facebook, regardless. Then he explores the philosophy driving its evolution, especially Thiel's neoconservative positions. [Link]
Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian". . . . This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."
So, Thiel's politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."
Read the rest of the article, there's quite a bit more. Is Facebook the Internet's version of television, i.e. a system that transforms a potentially worldchanging technology into a dumbed-down marketing machine? That's the thrust of Hodgkinson's argument... and it's applicable to other popular systems (I'm thinking Second Life).
I'm not feeling quite as negative and Hodgkinson about Facebook, and certainly not about virtual community – he despises the whole idea of online relationship vs alternatives, e.g. hanging out with friends at the pub or reading books. These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
Like any online community, Facebook will become what its users make it, regardless of the plans of Thiel et al. We're only susceptible to commercialization a la television if that's what we accept. I'm glad Hodgkinson's given us this background info to ponder, but it doesn't worry me. We get the communities we accept, just as we get the governments we deserve. If we don't make the effort to be better citizens, better community members, better people, that's our fault, and not the fault of manipulative neoconservatives.
I don't know Jay Deragon, but he's co-authored a book (with Scott Allen, an acquaintance of mine who's clueful about social network platforms and strategy) called The Emergence of the Relationship Economy that focuses on "relationship-driven commerce," a vision for online commerce that is similar to the approach Paco Nathan and I advocated via FringeWare, Inc. – in 1992, so this isn't exactly new thinking. Our vision for interactive commerce was buried in the industrial-strength broadcast-mode developments throughout the 90s, though the Whole Foods ecommerce projects I worked on had an interactive aspect. In fact, many ecommerce projects paid lip service to community, but they weren't what you would call "relationship-driven." I was part of a consulting team led by Casey Hughes earlier this decade where I strongly recommended just that approach – the company's model was an ideal fit – but I don't think they got it.
Back to Deragon – yesterday he made a post that asks the musical question, "Will 2008 be the Year of Social Commerce?" Social commerce, he says, is "the holy grail of economics." He's talking about commerce consulted on or via social network platforms. Okay, forget the tech platforms: do we ever see commerce conducted in social environments? Via social networks? When I was active with the now-defunct FringeWare project, I called it a street market in cyberspace. It made perfect sense that, with technologies that facilitate interaction, we could bring buyers and sellers closer together, which is how you would image markets have forming originally, as person to person trade, inherently social. We've been trending in this direction since 1991-92, when the web first appeared. These marketing folks (Deragon, Scott, and their other co-authors) are presenting this as a dramatic change, but to me it's old news, though we can certainly take it to another level given the evolution of the social web since 2000. My own consulting practice now is all about leveraging web presence and social network thinking to improve business and create targeting messaging and interaction, and though I don't see anyone else with just that approach, it doesn't seem new to me. But I'd like to hear more abut the specifics of "social commerce" – how do you sell through social networks? Does it mean, as I had suggested in the consultation I mentioned earlier, that members of a network sell to each other, and share the profits with the operators of the network? Or does it mean that social network platforms might be useful for the same top-down sales we all know so well – that the social network platform is a place to aggregate "consumers" so that they can buy the same way they've always bought. (This is where Second Life seems to be going.)
Blogger/Twitterer Susan Reynolds' bout with breast cancer created online community convergence and creative thinking about raising money - in this case for Making Strides, the American Cancer Society's breast cancer campaign. Connie Reece et al started the Frozen Pea Fund. What do frozen peas have to do with cancer? The answer's here. The whole story's posted at Tech PR Gems.
Thor Muller at Satisfaction has been researching the various reasons Facebook accounts are disabled, and has posted a list. Unfortunately Facebook is in a bit of a fix given its rapid growth – how to manage use and prevent abuse in a crowded, vibrant, rapidly evolving environment. They're disabling accounts without clearly explaining why, mostly to avoid the very real potential problem of spammers in the system. He notes that "you may be disabled for no clear reason at all," and posts this example from an Australian member:
"I was blocked for a little while because I was 'misusing certain features of the site' Naturally I closely examined their conditions of use etc for some insight as to what I must have done wrong. I couldn't for the life of me find anything...
"Upon request for clarification I was told that they were not at liberty to divulge which features or of course any thresholds of use. Then they warned me not to do it again or I would be banned permanently without recourse to reinstatement."
As someone in the comment thread points out, the Australian had mentioned that he was "poking a lot of people" – he evidently breached the poke limit. But the problem Thor's focusing on is Facebooks' termination of accounts without a clear explanation. He says that Facebook is listening, and he has confidence that they'll fix the problem. To me this represents the very real growing pains of a social system.
A couple of weeks ago I posted about group relationship management, "entity-based social networks," identity 2.x, p3p etc - thoughts about decoupling data about you and your social network from specific applications so that you an control it and use it across the web. OpenID was a start, a way for you to store your identity in one place and authenticate against that, as opposed to creating a new identity for each application. OpenID is a great step but not very robust.
Meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook has been talking about the "social graph," which is "the network of connections and relationships between people on the service." So the social graph is the bundle of who you are/who you know data some of us had talked about making portable; now a couple of major players, Google and Six Apart, are going to move in that direction. This is significant; it takes us so much closer to the Web 2.whatever sense of web-as-social-operating-system. (Good news for my new company, Social Web Associates; it gives us more to work with in helping our clients establish and extend web presence).
Brad Fitzpatrick, formerly at Six Apart and currently at Google, published a problem statement that's a good summary of what's up:
There are an increasing number of new "social applications" as well as traditional application which either require the "social graph" or that could provide better value to users by utilizing information in the social graph. What I mean by "social graph" is a the global mapping of everybody and how they're related, as Wikipedia describes and I talk about in more detail later. Unfortunately, there doesn't exist a single social graph (or even multiple which interoperate) that's comprehensive and decentralized. Rather, there exists hundreds of disperse social graphs, most of dubious quality and many of them walled gardens.
Currently if you're a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it'd be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing "Social Applications" is too much work.
Facebook's answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps. While Facebook is an amazing platform and has some amazing technology, there's a lot of hesitation in the developer / "Web 2.0" community about being slaves to Facebook, dependent on their continued goodwill, availability, future owners, not changing the rules, etc. That hesitation I think is well-founded. A centralized "owner" of the social graph is bad for the Internet. I'm not saying anybody should ban Facebook, though! Far from it. It's a great product, and I love it, but the graph needs to exist outside of Facebook. MySpace also has a lot of good data, but not all of it. Likewise LiveJournal, Digg, Twitter, Zooomr, Pownce, Friendster, Plaxo, the list goes on. More important is that any one of these sites shouldn't own it; nobody/everybody should. It should just exist.
Image: Brad Fitzpatrick's "social graph" sketch.Blogs
My latest Worldchanging column, Understanding blogs, has just been published.
Proponents of professional mainstream media argue the need for authoritative sources; they say that blogs don't fulfill that need because they're created by amateurs. I've discussed this at length with PR professionals and journalists, and I totally get their point. Journalism has a set of standards, practices, and ethics that supposedly ensure the authority of professional news sources. However if you've ever been close to a news story, you know that this is questionable. I've been close to many, and I've never seen a published account by a professional journalist that didn't include factual errors, and too often complete misperceptions. I would never argue against the very real value of and need for professional, tranined journalists, but I would never forget that they are human and inherently prone to error. I would argue that we should forget the myth of the authoritative source and consider the real power in having many voices, many perceptions, many records that are non-authoritative but that contribute to a clearer sense of the news. Our assessment of authority for the "truth" of any account will inevitably derive from the reputations of sources, and a professional journalist may be the more credible source, and the key provider of information and perspective. However bloggers, especially those who are experts in relevant fields, can make a signficant contribution to public perception and understanding of the world du jour.
Face to Face
Facebook has famously opened its platform to application developers; since then, the "social operating system" has picked up more than 2,000 apps for a target audience that "is, by its nature, viral and active." The various apps are so popular that Facebook has limited invitations you can send to ten a day to prevent the perception that the system's becoming a spamorama. Interesting to consider where this will lead.
Dave Morin, Facebook Platform's marketing manager, says that as the development of applications for Facebook matures, he hopes to see applications that are more deeply integrated with Facebook and provide mechanisms for deep and surprising forms of social interaction. Many applications, he says, forget to take full advantage of Facebook's News Feed--a system that notifies people about what their friends are doing. A concert application, for example, could post an item in News Feed telling a user, "Ten of your friends are going to the Smashing Pumpkins concert. Do you want to go too?"
At Polycot, Bill Anderson and I are the Facebook enthusiasts; we figure we'll incorporate it into our toolkit as an essential support for peering and social network development for consultants and small companies. LinkedIn is more focused on business, but Facebook is sufficiently robust to accommodate business and personal uses. I noted that one of my clients stopped emailing me recently in favor of Facebook messaging.