Entries Tagged 'Punditry' ↓

Like pretty much everyone in the Internet world I’ve been following along somewhat with the long drawn out Microsoft/Yahoo merger attempt. It would be laughable if there wasn’t so much money involved. Mostly I find it funny that Yahoo seems to be reacting emotionally - “Microsoft is evil. Anything would be better than Microsoft.” - rather than making rational business decisions. Yahoo’s latest move - exploring outsourcing their search marketing to Google - is Yahoo practically saying they’d rather die than merge with Microsoft.

Yahoo’s Powerful Brand

Yahoo has an amazingly powerful brand due to their history on the net. I first started using Yahoo when it was simply a directory of websites hosted on Yang’s Stanford student account. I actually remember the shock of Yahoo getting their own dot com domain name. From those early days until recently I’ve been an admirer of the company and a regular user of their tools. Recently however the bloom has faded and my Yahoo use is becoming increasingly rare. My search activity has moved almost entirely to Google - mostly via Firefox search. My home page has moved from My Yahoo to Google Reader. My bookmarks have moved out of Yahoo into Google again courtesy of the GMarks Firefox plugin. I still have a Yahoo e-mail address but I’m moving away from that as well into GMail.

Why Yahoo is Fading

So why am I moving away from Yahoo? I like the brand clearly. I actually have a rooting interest in the company - I’d like to see them succeed. And I even own a few shares of Yahoo stock (bought at it’s peak). The two biggest driving factors are Firefox and blogs. When I moved to Firefox it suddenly because so easy to do Google search via the browser that the primary reason for visiting the Yahoo home page disappeared - I also very rarely go to the Google home page but Google really doesn’t miss me there. When I started to move more into consuming blogs it quickly became apparent that Google Reader was far superior to My Yahoo for following blog feeds. These two major factors are essentially industry changes. It’s not that someone built a better competitor to Yahoo’s products (though in the case of search Google clearly did) but rather that my needs and behaviors changed and Google tools better served those new needs and behaviors.

The Industry is Always Changing

All this leads to the question I posed in the title - Are tech businesses inherently temporal? Google appears to be king now but remember that Yahoo was king and before it AltaVista. The most interesting thing in the Microsoft/Yahoo deal was the analysis that Microsoft’s business might be dying. People have been predicting the demise of desktop computing for a long time but in recent months it’s starting to become more likely. Increasingly the browser is the operating system. In such a world Microsoft’s operating system business goes away. If the office applications - word processing, spreadsheets, presentations - successfully migrate to web based versions then Microsoft will be left with very little business indeed.

Innovate or Die

In the rapidly changing world of tech companies clearly cannot rest on their existing products if they wish to survive. It’s long been a criticism of Microsoft that they’ve created very little that’s new. They allow others to innovate and buy up companies. It’s probably a good business strategy but I wonder if it can sustain a company through a complete paradigm shift such as the world moving from desktop to webtop computing. You have to wonder if Microsoft can thrive even if they do manage to buy Yahoo. Perhaps the tech industry is just one where companies will always just come and go - making way for the next generation.

My last few posts have been about changing the paradigm for social networking sites and how a distributed and open social networking scheme would avoid a lot of the issues we see today. The distributed scheme I propose solves a lot of problems but creates a few new problems of its own.

Standards Problems

One of the problems that any open and distributed platform has is that it requires good standards that are agreed to and followed by all participants. For something like this distributed scheme to be a reality someone will need to step up and take leadership of creating the standards. Standards and open APIs are slow to evolve and often suffer from not being able to adapt to changes. With the social networking space being so new and so rapidly changing the standards would need to be updated very quickly and done very well in order for participants to stick with them and not create lots of little proprietary extensions. Google has suffered some criticisms of its Open Social APIs based on the fact that the APIs are both not finished and don’t provide all the functionality that developers are looking for.

Transition Problems

Transitioning from one way of doing something to another way is always difficult. This particular transition would be made more difficult in that some of the changes would be forced on the individual end users. For example a key feature of what I propose is the idea that you can tag relationships with different attributes and then control distribution of your information to that group - some info to co-workers, other info to relatives, etc. This would require manual intervention- individuals going through each of their “friend” relationships and tagging them appropriately. There’s also the big issue of people who currently have multiple profiles needing/wanting to consolidate those profiles into one. While under my scheme a MySpace user can “friend” a Facebook user I can’t imagine that Facebook would be too thrilled with transferring all of someone’s friends to their MySpace profile.

Security and Spoofing

teadrinkerSecurity in my scheme relies on the identity of the profile viewer - if you’re going to show different information to a co-worker and to a relative you need to know who the viewer is. This would present a tempting target to some shady characters who could attempt to present themselves as you closest friend to gain acces to your most private info. Within the APIs, verifying that the request really does come from a particular viewer isn’t terribly difficult. But with the open nature of the scheme users and profile providers would need to take special care to ensure that rogue sites didn’t come along and masquerade as another site. When you get that request from Jessica Alba at Facebock to be your secret lover you’d need take steps to ensure that the request really was from the lovely Ms. Alba and notice that this request wasn’t exactly coming via Facebook.

Bandwidth Issues

Under this scheme there’s a lot of addition traffic flowing around the net and the bandwidth and processing costs that come along with that traffic. Unfortunately for the sites this additional traffic isn’t something they can monetize so it becomes a pure cost. The traffic is caused by all the remote lookups a site would need to do when seeking to present profile information that’s hosted on a different site. If my profile is at Facebook and yours is at MySpace and we’re friends, when you view my profile at MySpace it would require MySpace to obtain my info from Facebook before sending it along to you.

Business Issues

Probably the biggest issue with this scheme is that it’s going to be a difficult pill for the social networks to swallow. These sites benefit from being closed and proprietary. The fact that if you want to friend someone on Facebook you need a Facebook account drives people to register at Facebook. It would seem that its not in Facebook’s interest to allow a MySpace user to friend their users and thereby lose those additional users. It’s a tough sell to convince companies to spend a lot of money developing something that in the end may cost them more money. For the distributed scheme to work it will require that enough of a critical mass be reached that the established sites are forced to join in and support the effort.

Will it Ever Happen?

So will this ever become a reality? Likely not in this form. Though I can’t help but believe that some limited form of openness will eventually come to the social networks. In the old days we had online BBSes that allowed messaging to other users on the site. This evolved into messaging across sites within the network and into email that works across the whole Internet. Closed systems like all the current instant messaging systems are slowly showing signs of opening up to allow communication across the various providers. I think that as social networking matures the users will very naturally demand that they not be forced to maintain multiple profiles to keep up with all their relationships and slowly over time the social networks will be forced to evolve in a more open and distributed direction.

In my last post I looked at an idea for distributing social networking profiles and how that would be an alternative to data portability. Now I want to continue to look at what Scoble presents as the roadblocks and see if the rest can be solved with distributed profiles.

Deleting a Profile

“What if a user wants to delete his or her info off of Facebook.” In the data portability world the profile might be copied onto various other sites which might not agree to delete the info. In my distributed scheme your profile only resides at one place - the profile provider site - and therefor you can delete it once and rest assured that it is gone from everywhere.

Now it’s not really quite that simple. Once the information is distributed it can be cached in various other sites and if they don’t handle the caching properly your data might still persist after you delete it from the provider. In this distributed social networking world your profile provider will only distribute your profile to trusted third parties. Sites that don’t comply can be shut off from the feeds. Of course this same carrot/stick approach can be used in the data portability world as well. With the distributed model you can add one further scheme - remote content. If you (or your profile provider) don’t quite trust a third party site you can allow them to display your profile information remotely - via iframes or the like - rather than giving the third party the data to display. In this use however the third party would be limited in the use they can make of your profile information since they don’t have direct access to that information.

Noisy Systems

credit: cosmonautirussiSome people are sensitive to the amount of email sent by various sites and while you might be happy with the control your profile provider gives you the third party might make use of your email that you don’t want. My distributed profile scheme adds an element and that’s the profile viewer. What this means is that the profile information that is available depends on who is looking at it. You can present one set of data to family and close friends, another set to co-workers and still another set the the general public. You can also determine what information you want available to applications which tend to be a big source of email noise. You can use this to prevent those applications from having access to your email address. Now again this only really works with other sites that want to play nice and follow the rules. A site might obtain your email while showing your profile to a friend and then use that email address for other purposes. Sites that do that would be excluded from the distributed social world but that might not help you once your information is in the wild.

Ensuring Privacy

“You want your closest Facebook friends to know your birthday, but not everyone else.” Is this even possible on most social sites today? I think this is a major failing and one that’s caused by grouping everyone into a “friend” relationship. If sites provide fine grained privacy controls you might be forced to allow or deny every piece of information you have to each of your friends. If however they add the concept of defining the relationship type in the friend request/acceptance then the user can apply privacy controls based on relationship type. Family members get my birthday information. Co-workers get my birth date but not the year. The general public gets no birthday info.

What Data is Yours?

The question of what data belongs to the user and what belongs to the site is a good one and not really addressed via distributed vs portable data. The distributed world needs a standards body to work out how profile information is requested and used and what data goes into that profile would be part of that standard. The profile provider could of course give only a portion of the data if they chose to take the stance that not all the data belongs to the user. But the big benefit of the distributed and open model is that the user if free to chose their profile provider. Say Facebook doesn’t want to share photos you upload across other sites. Certainly another profile provider will be willing to do so. And you can use that other provider and still retain the ability to “friend” Facebook users.

The cross site nature of the open/distributed model also allows for some things that “don’t make sense” in the closed/data portability world. Scoble mentions a comment by a Facebook user not making sense on Flickr. I imagine this is because the Facebook user might very well not have a Flickr profile of their own. But since in the open world the Facebook user can “friend” a Flickr profile or comment on Flickr directly it really doesn’t matter.

Multiple Profiles

Scoble also talks about the complications that arise if someone want to share their profile information across multiple sites but have some bits different - eg. use a different email on Flickr and and Facebook. You can of course solve this in either the data portability or distributed world by allowing overrides - even if you profile is hosted a Facebook you can override some of the profile information when that profile is displayed at Flickr. Overrides aren’t the greatest solution because they re-introduce the problems of having dozens of profiles to update across dozens of sites when you want to change some information. A better solution is to allow - and encourage the use of - multiple profiles. In my own case the main reason I’d want to use multiple email addresses or different profile information across different sites is to segment my world. There’s Solo the entrepreneur, Solo the dad and Solo the poker player. Each of these could be separate profiles - either with different providers, with different accounts at the same provider or by a provider allowing different profile information depending on the relationship of the profile viewer. Just as you might give a different email address to a family vs a business contact so might you give different profile information to a public viewer based on site. Flickr that don’t have a relationship to Scoble would get the Scoble-the-photographer view while those on Facebook might get the Scoble-the-dad view.

No Easy Solutions

I’ve shown here that an open/distributed social networking scheme can work and can solve most of the problems of difficult cases that Scoble brought up. Such a systems is a much more drastic change from the current world than even the data portability model and that makes it even less likely that such a scheme will be adopted any time soon. The key points of this model are:

• openness - can “friend” across sites and use foreign profiles
• more nuanced relationships than just “friend”
• information controls based on relationship with the viewer of the profile

While the distributed/open model solves some problem (and I think is just plain better than what we have now) it does introduce some new problems of its own and I’ll address those in the next post.

Top bloglebrity Robert Scoble has long been a proponent of data portability on social network sites. He’s a heavy user of many social sites and was famously booted from Facebook when he ran a script to extract his friend’s data. He recently posted about the roadblocks to data portability that raised some good points and I’d like to see if I can address them through my distributed/open/inside out social network idea.

Scoble’s proposed solution to the issues with multiple closed social networks is fundamentally different from mine. He (and this isn’t just Scoble I’m just using him to represent this camp) proposes data portability which means data that you enter on one site would be able to migrate to other sites. Update your profile picture on Facebook and that change would propagate to MySpace. Follow someone on Twitter and also “friend” them on Facebook.

My plan is a bit different in that I don’t distribute the data to be hosted by the various sites you use. I have a profile provider which gives the data to a profile consumer on demand and based on the credentials of the profile viewer. It’s OpenID on steroids. You want to update your profile picture so you go to your profile provider site - say Facebook - and update it. You also have pictures posted on Flickr. When someone visits your Flickr profile, Flickr software - under the covers - requests your profile information from Facebook using the credentials of the viewer - in this case it might be an anonymous unregistered user. Facebook then sends to Flickr the profile information you have marked as publicly available - which includes your new profile picture.

Would this scheme solve the problems that Scoble and his Facebook engineer friend raise? Lets look at them and see.

Multiple Profiles

credit: Arkansas ShutterBugThe first problem that Scoble raises that he’s trying to solve is the issue of having multiple profiles across many sites and the pain that causes when you try to update profile information. “this year I wanted to change my email … Doing just that simple action is a pain in the behind.” In my scheme it’s a piece of cake. You don’t have profiles on the dozens of sites you use you have one at your profile provider site. Change your e-mail there and it’s automagically changed everywhere

From Facebook to Email

“When a Facebook user … gives you his/her email address it’d be nice to have that automatically placed into your favorite email client”. Not quite automatically placed in your email client but automatically available to your email client. You login to Gmail using your profile and therefor your profile’s contacts are available within Gmail.

Friend Discovery

When you visit a new social networking site you need to find which of your friends are also using that site. No longer. Under this scheme your relationships are cross site. A Facebook user is able to friend a MySpace user. And if both of those users are on Twitter they are automatically friended there. They way it works is this:

• Every user has a unique id based on their profile provider - could be the url to your Facebook profile
• When you sign in to a new site you sign in via your profile information ala OpenID
• That site - the profile consumer - requests all your information from the profile provider which includes your list of friends
• The new site now automagically knows about all your relationships and can connect you with those who are also users

What exactly consumer sites do with your relationship information would be up to the sites (and the user). You might determine that you really don’t want to follow all of your Facebook friends on Twitter so Twitter might instead present you with a list of your friends who are also Facebook users and allow you to chose which to follow.

The Low Hanging Fruit

So far I’ve addressed - I think successfully - the problems that Scoble is trying to solve via data portability but in this different distributed profile way. That’s not a huge accomplishment though since data portability Scoble’s way also solves these same problems. Next time I see if I can address the issues that Facebook raised along with some new issues that arise out of this distributed scheme.

Continuing with my post yesterday about how social networking sites miss the mark with their “friend” relationships I’d like to look at the number of faces you have (or would want to have) online and the implications that has on your relationships and how you use online communities.

If you’re like most people I know you can’t classify everyone you know as “friend”. There are family members, co-workers, neighbors, parents of your kids friends, people who share your hobby and if you’re lucky some long time personal friends. And that’s just the people you know in real life. If you’re active online you likely have “friends” that you’ve never met who participate in some online community.

Exposing Yourself to Your Friends

photo credit: akegThink carefully about how you interact with the various people you know in real life and you’ll see that you present many different faces to different people. How are you doing? To a neighbor it’s almost always something like “Not bad. You?”. To a close friend it might be a complaint about your job or some personal news “We’re expecting our second child.” People who you know only through a particular hobby will generally get an answer related to that hobby. Ask a poker player how they’re doing and you’ll hear something like “Took a couple bad beats but I’m still grinding out a small profit.”

photo credit: EVAN BAYHWhen you publish personal information online (through a blog, participation in a community or via a social networking site) you’re putting a certain face on yourself. On a community related to a hobby that face is generally the one you’d use within that hobby - on the poker forum you’ll go by your poker nickname and your identity will be tied to what you reveal about you poker playing. On a community based around your working field you’ll likely adopt something closer to a professional face. On a social network however your typically going to be revealing more details about your personal life and should be aware of who that information is exposed to. For example I don’t necessarily want to share details about my kids with just anyone - my poker buddies would be bored to tears and the general public contains some number of “bad people” who shouldn’t have access to personal information.

About Face

If you’ve determined that you need multiple online identities to handle the various aspects of your life how do you go about doing it? Do you run multiple blogs? Do you control access to your blog? If you use a social networking platform how do you go about expressing the nuances in your different relationships? While some online sites actually do allow you to segment the information you publish, most do not. For the most part if you want that separation you’re going to need to either run multiple blogs or multiple profiles in your social network. Beware also that some services might not support multiple profiles or if they require you to use your real name you might not be able to segment the areas of your life as neatly as you’d like.

Many who inhabit the world of blogging and social sites believe that they should openly expose all of their lives to anyone who cares to - see Scoble tweeting the birth of his child. Certainly that’s a viable option for some but think about both the implications of sharing your information widely - will anything you say hurt your chances to get a job or a future relationship - and also the needs of your reader - how many of Scoble’s reader really want a minute by minute account of childbirth?

Youth Culture?

I think some of the problems with social networks (or at least the ways in which they fail to meet my own needs) is caused by the fact that social networking is created by the young, for the young. At 38 I’m old in Internet terms. When I was 24 “friend” would be a good descriptor for nearly anyone in my life. Now that I’m over the hill the term fails to convey what I need out of my relationships. Do you find yourself wanting more nuanced relationship management online? And if so how do you deal with it?

It seems to me that today’s social networking sites have things all backwards. Yes, I too would like to build a backwards company with a valuation greater than the 2007GDP of Jamaica but let me explain.

Social networking sites are all the rage these days. MySpace and Facebook are top 10 sites and are mentioned in every other Internet related blog post. Clearly a lot of people use and enjoy these sites, but I really don’t get it.

According to Wikipedia social networking sites “provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on.” That’s all fine but there’s nothing new there. In fact the services provided by social networking sites are either a poor copy of previous services (compare MySpace blogs to Wordpress) or closed versions of previously open protocols - messaging within a site vs e-mail for example.

In today’s crazy spam filled e-mail world a closed messaging system has some merit I suppose but why would someone chose a messaging system that only lets them communicate with a small portion of the people they know vs one that allows them to communicate with everyone? There’s also some value in integrating a number of services that people would have to get through multiple other sources - combine your Flickr photos, YouTube videos and Wordpress blog in one spot - but I still think not enough value to justify the popularity of these sites. Clearly the appeal of social networking sites is not just in these services. So what’s the innovation that social networking sites provide?

The Social Graph

The social part of social networking comes not through the simple fact that you can do messaging and share photos but through the expression of social connections. The sites allow you to declare that someone is your “friend” and if that other person agrees the relationship is expressed on both profile pages. Once these relationships are expressed the site can use them for various purposes to either limit access to information - only friends can send you messages and view your profile - or to push information - automatically alert you of the actions your friends take.

Even though these social relationships are the key innovative feature of social networking sites, I still think they miss the mark and quite widely. Namely in the fact that there are many more social relationships in the real world than just “friend” and the access to information that we’d want to apply varies so much by the type of relationship. It’s natural - and good - to want to present a different face to a co-worker, a parent and a college drinking buddy. The lack of this fine grained control over what you share about yourself can create problems when you leak information from one area of your life to another where it might not be appropriate.

So Why Backwards

Perhaps social networking sites have their flaws in the services they provide and in the way the express social relationships and control information but why would I say that they’re backwards? Social networking sites of today create their own little walled off community and allow the communication and expression of relationships only within that community. Maybe I’m idealistic but the basis of the Internet in my mind has always been standards and openness. Social sites do provide a useful function - they’re a place where people can create a profile. Even though there are many places where people can create a profile most people don’t bother to do so. Even though people can get a better blogging platform a better photo album or a better chat system elsewhere most are served with the limited functionality and ease of use that they can get at a social site.

Why though should the relationships that you express be limited to relationships with people who also host their profile at the same site? Wouldn’t it be much better and much more in keeping with the “spirit of the Internet” to express those relationships in an open way that crosses site boundaries? The current situation requires that people either join multiple social networks to connect with all of their relationships. On top of that it seems that every other site is building social network functionality. Wouldn’t it make more sense to allow people to create a profile in one place, use it across the web communities they participate in and express their relationships profile-to-profile regardless of which site hosts that profile?

It seems to me that eventually users will come to the realization that their relationships extend beyond the users of a particular site and they’ll demand that their relationship and communication tools extend beyond the users of a particular site as well. There are movements underway to work toward this goal with things like the distributed social project and standards based expressions of relationship like FOAF. It’ll be interesting to watch this area and see the kinds of opportunities that will develop.

Does it Work for You?

What’s your take? Do you find yourself wanting to express relationships outside of facebook? Do you need more nuanced expressions of those relationships and finer grained controls over access to the information you share? If it doesn’t work for you give some thought to what would work and how you can either influence existing services in that direction or seek out new services that will work.

Scoble responds to the question “how is the web screwed up” by talking about how there are a number of individual services that he wishes would work together.

This is a great response and a fair complaint. Most Internet sites (even the most social of them) work in isolation creating little enclosed worlds of their own. It’s something that isn’t so apparent in the traditional publishing and web 1.0 world - you don’t really expect the New York Times to be intimately interconnected with the Washington Post - but becomes readily apparent in the web 2.0 world where sites become far more personalized and more about you.

How many of the sites you use on a regular basis are really about you? Well your blog or Facebook page is about you. Then there’s your Flickr account. Your Google Reader page is about you to a certain degree - by choosing what feeds you subscribe to you customize the content on that page. I frequent a number of different forums on varying topics and the topics I participate in and the sub-communities I’m involved in on those sites are about me. It’s natural when you see a site as being about you that you’d be able to join all these pieces of yourself together into one unified whole.

But one of the problems that we see on the web 2.0 world is that these sites remain individual islands and they do so for several reasons.

Probably the most predominant reason is that they feel that keeping their systems closed is vital to their economic success. It’s hard to get loyal customers (even on the web) and it seems pure insanity to then offer up those customers for free to other sites when you get no economic benefit from doing so. Offering strong, deep connections to other services may also limit the things you can do in the future - if Facebook is tightly integrated with Flickr why should Facebook have it’s own image gallery. And there is at least the perception that a closed system will encourage additional users through the network effect - sellers use eBay because that’s where the buyers are, buyers use eBay because that’s where the sellers are. If a site like Facebook is completely open then your friends can stay on MySpace but since Facebook is closed those same friends might be encouraged to sign up to Facebook as well so they can interact with you.

In addition to all the economic incentives to remain isolated web developers face the very simple proposition that there are a lot of services out there that are potential integration partners. Some of those services have APIs, some don’t. Even the ones that do have APIs typically use proprietary APIs. Lets say that Twitter decides to develop a tight integration with Flickr - well what about all the Twitter users that prefer Smugmug? Then there are those on Picasa web. And it goes on and on. I appreciate the desire to have all the services you use tightly integrated but the reality is that a provider could easily spend all of their time working on integrating with others leaving no time to further develop their own service.

I suppose it’s possible to create a sort of universal API for integrating web 2.0 properties in some sort of lightweight way that may provide at least some of the integration that users seek. I’ll have to think about that some more (though I can’t imagine that it’s something I could ever launch perhaps Google will come up with something).

In the meantime there’s a need and an opportunity for providing services that work across different web 2.0 properties or services which integrate a user’s web 2.0 usage. There are a number of ideas here I’d like to explore further in the future.

The site that made me an entrepreneur was something I started in my “free time” back in 1999. This was pretty close to the peak of the first dot com bubble and since everyone else was getting rich I figured why not me.

The first dot com explosion was decidedly web 1.0. I’m sure that many of today’s startups look back at what was happening then and laugh. Oddly though my site was based on user generated content. All you kids today need to remember that many of us have been doing web 2.0 things way before there was even the term or the need to add version numbers to something as large as the web.

What was different however is we didn’t have the huge explosion of “social networking” sites that we see now. I’ll cover my skepticism around some of the big names (Facebook, MySpace) at a later time but clearly this is a big change in the nature of the web. Part of the reason I want to do this blog is because I’d like to do some things in support of this new world and need to be part of it to help me understand it.

5 or 6 years ago as my site was growing I remember commenting that there was a limited window of opportunity for small startups to create new sites and grow them to a reasonable size. That’s come true to a certain extent. What I did then was find a niche that was underserved and look to serve it. Finding that underserved niche is nearly impossible today since there’s just so many sites out there and so many startups jumping on every new opportunity.

Still I think it’s a fun world to operate in and look forward to trying to navigate these new waters and figure out the new rules. I hope to eventually get a few readers along for the ride.