Category Archives: social

The Social Web is Splintering (ftw)

August 28, 2011 – 6:30 pm

This past week, Facebook released a series of changes to the way it manages sharing and privacy controls. You can read more about them here.

The short story is that they are giving their users finer control over their sharing and how others tag them in photos and updates, and building the concept of friend lists more fully into the experience. One other interesting change, which made its way into the blog post as little more than a “by the way,” is that Facebook has removed the places feature from its mobile applications.

In response to these changes, Matthew Ingram over at GigaOm wrote a great piece asking, “Are Facebook and Google Splintering the Social Web?” His analysis focused on the much-talked-about Circles feature from Google, along with the similar changes from Facebook, and questioned whether or not people would actually use these features.

Are people really going to spend the time it takes to create groups or lists or Circles and then choose from a pull-down menu every time they want to share a piece of content? I don’t think so (even Mark Zuckerberg once said that people hate lists). And my fear is that people will share less as a result, or will turn away from these networks in confusion, or because the settings are too cumbersome.

I’m less concerned than Ingram is on this point, but to answer the question in his title: Yes, the social web is splintering, but it is not Facebook or Google doing the splintering – it’s Instagram, it’s Foursquare, it’s any network that is purpose-built for a specific behavior, a specific community, and a unique set of privacy expectations.

Facebook and Google are merely responding to the “splintering” that they are seeing outside of their walls. My friend Nina Khosla wrote a great post that neatly elucidates why this might be happening:

“Therein lies the paradox of the social network that no one wants to admit: as the size of the network increases, our ability to be social decreases.” – The Social Network Paradox

Size is one reason why these communities might be losing value in the eyes of users, but I think something else is at work.

Last year, when Facebook’s Places feature was released on mobile phones, I wrote that they would ultimately “lose location” to Foursquare, since on Foursquare we had the opportunity to rebuild our networks with location-sharing in mind.

Speaking more generally, I believe that social networks built with a purpose in mind have two distinct advantages over larger catch-all networks like Facebook:

1) Functionality: it’s easier to do one thing well than to do many things well (just ask Yahoo)

2) Social context: every type of sharing has a unique privacy expectation associated with it, and unique social context in which that sharing makes the most sense

Users have shown that they prefer the switching costs of rebuilding their networks elsewhere to the costs of managing their existing networks in order to make them more suitable for the kinds of sharing they want to do. In other words, users would rather build a network from scratch, with a particular use case in mind, than mold an existing network to make it fit one additional use case.

The bottom line: Users are going elsewhere to share their location. Users are going elsewhere to share their photos. Facebook will continue to do a few things well (birthday messages?), but they will more and more find themselves unable to compete with these smaller “splinter networks.”

Yes, the social web is splintering, and we should celebrate.

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It’s Time for a Social Network Neutrality

July 17, 2011 – 3:04 pm

The network neutrality / common carriage debate is one of the most important debates of our time. At stake is the freedom to innovate, the freedom to listen, and the freedom to speak. To date, arguments for or against common carriage have focused largely on the relationship between Internet service providers and content creators, but a new threat is emerging.

Companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have unlocked new ways for people to connect, curate, and consume. They have changed and continue to change how we interact with the web – how content is distributed, discovered, and delivered. But with the emergence of this new social layer comes a threat that rivals that posed by the great information monopolies of the 20th century – AT&T, the Radio Trust and the Motion Picture Patents Company, companies known for price gouging, anti-competitive behavior, and the stifling of innovation.

I recently finished Tim Wu’s “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empire.“ For anyone interested in network neutrality, this book is an incredible primer. Beyond presenting a thoughtful analysis and historical review of the information industry, Wu provides a compelling read – one might even call it a page-turner! If you haven’t yet, go buy it, and read it.

Network Neutrality

If you’re familiar with the basics of network neutrality, feel free to jump to my main argument below. If not, let’s start with a definition for common carriage.

At the heart of common carriage is the idea that certain businesses are either so intimately connected, even essential, to the public good, or so inherently powerful—imagine the water or electric utilities—that they must be compelled to conduct their affairs in a nondiscriminatory way.

As a simple example, if a man operates the only ferry over to town, that simple boatman is in a position of great power over other sectors of the economy, even the sovereign authorities. If, for example, he decided to charge one butcher more than another to carry his goods, this operator could bankrupt the one who didn’t enjoy his favor. The boatman is thus deemed to bear responsibilities beyond those of most ordinary businesses.

Wu, Tim (2010). The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (p. 58).

Reflecting on Wu’s review of information monopolies, one can extract two primary tendencies manifest in countless examples throughout history. First, like all institutions they follow a law of self-preservation. If the ferry owner senses a threat to his monopoly in an innovation outside of his control, he will do everything in his power to acquire or squash it.

See:

AT&T blocking third party innovations like Carterfone and Hush-A-Phone
RCA blocking the emergence of FM Radio
NBC and the FCC blocking the emergence of television

Second, information monopolies will always act to maximize profits, and will often do so at the expense of their “riders.” If a passenger on the network is seen to reap significant profits on the back of the network, it is in the short-term interest of the monopoly to ransom network access for a share of those profits.

See:

The Motion Picture Patents Company consolidating control over film production and distribution by ransoming access to patent licenses and buying up independent theaters, ultimately leading to the independents’ flight to Hollywood.
RCA buying up nascent radio networks to create a single national content creator and distributor.

The tenuous relationship between distribution channels and that which is being distributed is summarized neatly by Wu:

You cannot serve two masters, and the objectives of creating information are often at odds with those of disseminating it.

Ibid., p. 306.

Social Network Neutrality

So what does this have to do with social networks like Facebook or Twitter?

Distributors, owners of “the pipes,” will always have an incentive to maximize profit by way of price discrimination, or, if they choose to produce their own content, to prioritize their own goods ahead of or instead of those of their competitors.

Social networks are a critical layer of infrastructure for a wide variety of applications and content. Unlike physical networks, opportunities for lock-in emerge not at the physical layer but at the social layer: our connections. In other words, they do not wield monopoly control by dint of massive up-front fixed costs but rather by the accumulated value contributed by users in the form of the social graph!

Without access to our social connections, applications like Zynga, Turntable, and Spotify face significant barriers to entry – both in terms of the product experience that they are able to deliver and their path to adoption via access to social promotional channels.

But will these social networks really exert their platform authority at the expense of competitors and users? The answer is that they already are.

Take the social gaming company Zynga, for example. The pace of Zynga’s growth has been mind-boggling. A significant portion of Facebook’s users spend a significant portion of their time on Facebook within Zynga’s games. When Facebook sensed a competitive threat emerging on their platform, they chose to reduce that threat by exerting their platform authority. Zynga was forced to give up 30% of their revenue to Facebook so that Facebook’s users could “benefit” from one standardized currency experience. How’s this for a Risk Factor, from Zynga’s S-1:

Facebook is the primary distribution, marketing, promotion and payment platform for our social games. We generate substantially all of our revenue and players through the Facebook platform and expect to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Facebook and other platforms have broad discretion to change their platforms, terms of service and other policies with respect to us or other developers, and those changes may be unfavorable to us.

Facebook has even gone to battle with Google over data portability. The most recent challenge coming by way of a Chrome Extension that allows you to import your Facebook friends into Google’s new social network, Google+.

Playing the white knight (or social underdog), Google has tended to act in the interest of data portability, but Google’s policy of “we’ll let you import our contacts if you let us import your contacts,” reeks of data protectionism, and should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism, given Google’s own checkered past.

Google and Facebook are not alone. LinkedIn recently shut off API access to third party developers that they deemed competitive, including Monster and BranchOut, among others.

Not to be outdone, Twitter recently called on all third party developers to stop building Twitter clients. Said Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver:

We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way. This is already happening organically – the number and market share of consumer client apps that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking.

A “less fragmented world” sounds like code for “consolidation.” Can Twitter really innovate faster than thousands of third-party developers? Can LinkedIn replace the value that companies like BranchOut and Monster were planning on providing to businesses and users? We’ll never find out, because Twitter and LinkedIn can respond to any such emergent innovation by shutting down access to their API.

What happens when an information monopoly attempts to centralize innovation? No organization has done it better than Bell Labs. They were so successful that they invented magnetic tape, used to power the computer revolution, as early as 1934!

“The impressive technical successes of Bell Labs’ scientists and engineers … were hidden by the upper management of both Bell Labs and AT&T.” AT&T “refused to develop magnetic recording for consumer use and actively discouraged its development and use by others.” Eventually magnetic tape would come to America via imports of foreign technology, mainly German.

But why would company management bury such an important and commercially valuable discovery? What were they afraid of? The answer, rather surreal, is evident in the corporate memoranda, also unearthed by Clark, imposing the research ban. AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.

Ibid. p. 106.

As a result of AT&T’s coverup, magnetic tape would not be “discovered” until the 1990′s. Holy crap! Anyone else terrified?

So what happens next?

Certainly these companies should be able to reap the rewards of the network that they’ve built, but when those rewards come at the expense of the user experience, the troubling effects of lock-in become apparent.

This is just the beginning. What happens when Facebook or Twitter decide that it is too ‘confusing’ for users to see photos from Instagram posted to their network, instead of through Facebook Photos? What happens when Facebook decides that Foursquare check-ins next to Facebook Places check-ins are detrimental to the user experience? Or that Groupon’s daily deals shared through the Facebook platform are confusing for users who are most eager to find Facebook’s deals?

As these networks settle on and begin to expand their business models, the definition of “competitor” will expand commensurately. Monopoly power of these large networks, as owners of our now primary channels for distribution and communication, will only increase as they become an ever larger part of our lives.

It’s time to stop seeing these companies as mere applications. They are the 21st century version of AT&T, of RCA, of the Motion Picture Patents Company. The infrastructure of the social web has been consolidated into the hands of a few. With consolidation comes control, and with control comes an incentive to wield it over those deemed competitive threats to the ultimate prerogative: preservation of control.

Government agencies responsible for policing antitrust clearly have these companies on their radar, but history has shown that government is as capable of enabling information monopolies as it is of squashing them. Users must stand and be counted. We must demand portability, and we should vote with our attention when it is not delivered.

At stake is the future of the Internet, and if the Internet is social, then there is no less at stake than the future of social.

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The Slow Hunch (Part 2): Discovering Serendip

April 24, 2011 – 3:36 pm

After reading Stephen Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (which you should buy and read, now), I was inspired to take his advice and “write everything down.” Here’s my first try.

I wrote a few months ago about the evolution of the web, with its “long steady march towards the holy grail of discovery – consumption without intent: content that you don’t even know that you want.” I end the post with a dramatic flourish that probably requires a bit more thought:

…the social web…has replaced intent with context, and so while wading through the stream, we are left with a feeling of serendipitous discovery, as we stumble blindly into content that we don’t even know that we want.

Serendipity is an interesting term. It’s universally perceived as good, but beyond that, I’m not sure that it is so well understood. Since writing this post, I came across a few explanations that I found incredibly useful:

First, the origin of the word. Johnson explains:

First coined in a letter written by the English novelist Horace Walpole in 1754, the word derives from a Persian fairy tale titled “The Three Princes of Serendip,” the protagonists of which were “always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” The contemporary novelist John Barth describes it in nautical terms: “You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously”

…your discovery may well be interesting and informative, but it will not be truly serendipitous unless it helps you fill in a piece of a puzzle you’ve been poring over.

Yochai Benkler, in his brilliant book “The Wealth of Networks,” never actually writes the word “serendipity,” but speaks to the concept eloquently in his rebuke of the Babel objection (i.e. information overload) – bolding is mine:

We, as individuals, also go through an iterative process of assigning a likely relevance to the judgments of others…. By a combination of random searching and purposeful deployment of social mapping-who is likely to be interested in what is relevant to me now-we can solve the Babel objection while subjecting ourselves neither to the legal and market power of proprietors of communications infrastructure or media products nor to the simple judgments of the undifferentiated herd…We do not degenerate into mindless meandering through a cacophonous din. We find things we want quite well. We stumble across things others suggest to us. When we do go on an unplanned walk, within a very short number of steps we either find something interesting or go back to looking in ways that are more self-conscious and ordered.

Yochai Benkler. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (pp. 173-174). Kindle Edition.

Finally, in no more than 8 words, Jeff Jarvis neatly summarizes the concept: “Serendipity is not randomness. It is unexpected relevance.”

Serendipity, in other words, is a form of passive discovery. It describes relevant information that is pushed to the user, in contrast to search results, which are pulled via the act of explicitly surfacing one’s intent. It replaces the exchange “I want this: ok, here you go” with “I thought you might like this: thanks, you’re right.”

Serendipitous discovery has found its most meaningful delivery mechanism today in Twitter. On Twitter we benefit from, in a very literal interpretation of Benkler’s words, “an iterative proces of assigning a likely relevance to the judgement of others.” The asymmetric follow system allows users to iterate through the set of curators that push them content. Further, lists and search allow us to provide a light layer of content categorization or social context on top of our streams. We become meta curators: actively curating a set of curators based on social proximity and perceptions of relevance to our constantly evolving interests. We optimize our streams to deliver content that we will find valuable – in other words, we position ourselves for serendipitous discovery.

All else equal,* serendipitous discovery is a fundamentally more valuable form of discovery than search.

What do I mean by value? Think about it at a basic level – for what service would you pay more? The tool that helps you get your questions answered whenever you need it, or the service of having your answers delivered before you even ask? A service that anticipates intent is more valuable – to the user (and yes, to the advertiser), than the tool that merely responds to intent.

I strongly believe that Twitter, and the ecosystem around it, are on the verge of building an industry that at least rivals what Google has built in search.

Ode to a Purpose Built Social Network

March 5, 2011 – 2:48 pm

Facebook has a big problem. Facebook’s big problem is Facebook.

Social networking applications are not like other businesses. In other businesses, new products built within an existing infrastructure and delivered through existing marketing and distribution channels benefit from economies of scale that help generate higher profits than would be possible on a standalone basis.

Yes, social networking applications benefit from economies of scale in production, marketing, and distribution channels, but they have a unique property that presents a unique challenge: the network itself.

There are two reasons why no single company will ever “own” the social web:

First, social behavior online, as offline, is largely informed by the context of that behavior. Am I conducting this behavior in front of my family, my friends, my co-workers, my best friends? Photos, videos, events, locations – the success of an application on a social network depends as much on the composition of the network as it does on the feature set.

In other words, my connections and the default privacy settings used to mediate my interaction with those connections can contribute as much to the value of an application as the design and functionality.

A location sharing feature is meaningless to me in the context where the default is to share with the 459 friends I’ve accumulated from who knows where on Facebook. Facebook could design the greatest location sharing application ever invented, but I’d rather recreate a social network on Foursquare, specifically for the use of that feature, than attempt to navigate the myriad privacy options on Facebook to more appropriately control my sharing.

Second, it’s easier to do one thing very well, then to do many things very well. To get a sense of what I mean, download and play around with Instagram. This application is 100% purpose built for mobile photo sharing. It integrates with Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, and Facebook. There are no other distractions in the application, no other purposes than to take a photo and share it with a group of people that you believe would find that photo relevant. It’s a great experience – just ask one of the one million users who signed up within the first two months of the product’s existence.

Taken together, these two arguments lead us to the fundamental point: the value of the user experience in the purpose built application, both in terms of functionality and appropriate social context, easily outweighs the cost of switching and rebuilding that context from scratch.

Facebook isn’t going anywhere, but they will never “own” the social web. They will forever be limited by their generality.

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Curating the Curators

January 12, 2011 – 12:34 am

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about content discovery online, and how the social web effectively turns the people that you’re connected to into your very own personal curators. I wrote that “the social web enables users to iterate through a group of curators who provide relevant content by way of social proximity and temporality.” This type of curation could be called ‘distributed social curation,’ since the consumption experience 1) is different for every participant/producer/consumer and 2) is inherently social – meaning, a necessary condition is your participation in an online social graph.

I came across two articles tonight that highlight that very same trend. Twitter’s Ev Williams describes the potential impact of distributed social curation in a conversation with GigaOm’s Om Malik:

“There’s too much stuff…We just need to let them find the right stuff. We have been going in this direction. It is just not necessarily obvious. For example, the native retweet (RT) is a way to share best stuff more widely than that account’s followers. It sort of adds an editorial layer.”

In “Curation is the New Search is the New Curation,” Paul Kedrosky writes:

“the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation — not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) — and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.).”

While my post focused primarily on the type of social curation that Williams alludes to and that Kedrosky mentions first, Kedrosky adds that we will also see a sort of ‘expert model’ of online curation, where a small group of informed editors make content selections by hand that are relevant to a specific audience type (think Techmeme).

I don’t see these two models as equals – neither in quality nor in potential for adoption at scale. In fact, in the expert model, quality and scale are necessarily inversely correlated. The broader the audience, the more difficult it will be to produce a slice of content that is relevant to all participants. With distributed social curation, however, that same relationship (between size and relevance) is not even contemplated.

In the distributed social web, all audiences have the size of 1, and no single audience experience is ever the same. In other words, unless you follow the exact same people that I do, your content experience will be different from mine. My personal curators might share a particular article with greater or less frequency than yours, and we will both naturally, and as frequently as daily, adjust our social graphs to optimize for the most relevant curated experience.

In the distributed social web, where every participant is a content producer, the audience must curate the curators!

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You Don’t Know It Yet, But You Want It

November 21, 2010 – 3:57 pm

Since inception, the web has seen three major waves in the evolution of relevance: portal, search, and social. These waves manifest typically by the examples of Yahoo, Google, and Facebook/Twitter, and otherwise known as Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and the real-time/social/next/3.0/whatever web.

Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, did a great job of framing that history in his talk at TechCrunch Disrupt in September. I’d like to borrow his framework but take a slightly different approach to the question. I’m probably short-changing this topic, so feel free to continue the conversation in the comments.

The goal of any system of content distribution is to present relevance as early as possible in the process of intent, search, discovery, and consumption. The earlier in this process that a system can present relevance, the greater the opportunity to provide value to the user, and, in theory, the greater the opportunity to monetize that value. The history of relevance on the web is therefore the history of a long steady march towards the holy grail of discovery – consumption without intent: content that you don’t even know that you want.

Each system described below uses the same essential building blocks to produce relevance:

Predisposition
Intent
Human intelligence

Web 1.0 – The Portals – In the early web, the mechanism for discovering content was based on static human-built information hierarchies (Puppies is a category in Dogs which is a category in Pets). The opportunity to present content that you don’t even know that you want was confined to the moment after discovery, and so the value was minimal. Think: recommendations and advertising alongside content in the Teen Portal in AOL – you would have already reached your destination by the time you were presented with recommendations. Relevance was determined by assumed predispositions based on the demographic that had in the past consumed that content (in this case, teenagers). Intent as a predictor was not truly captured.

Web 2.0 – Search – The search paradigm introduced a major step forward for relevance, where the mechanism for discovery was based on dynamic and implicitly social intent-optimization. Whereas in the age of portals, the best you could hope for were recommendations alongside the content you were already in process of consuming, by basing relevance on user intent and an informed human curation via PageRank, Google was able to present relevance prior to the process of consumption.

PageRank, Google’s system for ranking relevance depending on inbound links to a particular piece of content from other publishers, is fundamentally human (it takes people to link to other pages/people), and its emergence foreshadowed the coming influence of the social web on discovery.

The Social Web – Facebook/Twitter – In the emergent social web, discovery has taken on passive characteristics, resulting in a model of consumption that occurs without search, and often without intent.

Consider the patterns of content discovery and consumption prevalent on Facebook or Twitter. Discovery is based on the stream paradigm, where relevance is determined implicitly along three dimensions:

Time (real-time = conversational)
Social group (work or friends or school, etc.)
Social proximity (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd degrees)

Networks will expand along these dimensions, as users tend to follow or focus more of their attention to those streams that present the greatest relevance (think Twitter and Facebook lists). The social web enables users to iterate through a group of curators who provide relevant content by way of social proximity and temporality. It has replaced intent with context, and so while wading through the stream, we are left with a feeling of serendipitous discovery, as we stumble blindly into content that we don’t even know that we want.

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Facebook Will Lose Location: The Location-Flawed Social Graph

August 18, 2010 – 5:17 am

Facebook Places is finally here. Within hours of the announcement, many of the usual suspects have already relegated companies like Foursquare and Gowalla to the ‘niche’ pool.

I think (and yes, hope) that Facebook fails in this latest endeavor. Ok, with an ‘installed base’ of 500MM users they certainly won’t fail fail, but I would argue wholeheartedly against the following statement from Silicon Alley:

Facebook will now become the platform on which other check-in applications like Foursquare will be built.

What is the first number that comes to your mind when I ask how many people you are interested in sharing your location with? On average? I bet it’s not 120.

120 is the average number of people the average Facebook user is friends with on Facebook.

As in the offline world, for each social group (family, friends, work friends, colleagues, gym friends, classmates, etc.) and for each social object (photos, videos, locations, news, tweets, status), users will rightfully demand unique privacy profiles to limit access to only those most relevant and appropriate connections. For example, I may want to share videos with classmates but not family; I may want to share location with gym friends but not colleagues.

Foursquare has in part been successful because, along with the emergence of a new social object (location), it has given users the opportunity to build (from scratch) a set of connections particularly relevant to that associated privacy profile.

My friends on Foursquare are only those people with whom I am willing to share my location. They tend to be in New York and they tend to be close friends (especially when compared to the 474 people I am “friends” with on Facebook).

So fear not ye social web start ups! The location-specific social graph is not easily replicable and the social graph subsystem of the Internet OS is only just beginning to mature. Purpose-built social applications that are subject to privacy policies outside of Facebook’s core competency will remain safe from the grasp of Goliath (for now)!

For more crusading against Facebook, see some of my prior posts here and here.

For more on social segmentation, see here, here and here.

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