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Facebook, AOL, and crumbling walled gardens

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In a phrase that will deservedly pass almost instantaneously to meme-hood, Jason Kottke says “Facebook is the new AOL.” Facebook has persuaded lots of Web services and sites to build applications on its platform, but the proprietary, walled-garden approach will ultimately grow tiresome:

As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet…

Kottke points his post back to an observation by Meetup’s Scott Heiferman about the AOL/Facebook parallel. But I also caught echoes of Jon Udell’s post back in February about “social network fatigue”:

Recently Gary McGraw echoed Ben Smith’s 1991 observation. “People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network,” he said, “but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.”

Dave Winer has been writing lately as well about social-network overload and the usefulness of arriving at a single, interoperable standard for identity:

Marc Canter and many other people think I’m full of it when I say the right number of identity systems for each user is 1. But I am right. And I know it…Here’s a hint. How many email systems do you use? RSS systems? Web systems? The correct answers are 1, 1, and 1.

This is a hugely important topic — subset of a larger one that I expect to devote some energy to writing about in the future. The common theme here is the centripetal force of the Internet. We start with services that help people do something important but simple (like: use email, build a web page, start a blog); those services fight for share by walling themselves off; eventually, the service that gets in the way least wins the most users, and those users are able to conduct their activities on the open Net.
[tags]social networking, facebook, world of ends, walled gardens, aol[/tags]

Hollywood vs. Napster, post mortem

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From Rolling Stone’s obituary for the music industry, June 19, 2007:

Even worse, the record companies waited almost two years after Napster’s July 2nd, 2001, shutdown before licensing a user-friendly legal alternative to unauthorized file-sharing services: Apple’s iTunes Music Store… Rosen and others see that 2001-03 period as disastrous for the business. “That’s when we lost the users,” Rosen says. “Peer-to-peer took hold. That’s when we went from music having real value in people’s minds to music having no economic value, just emotional value.”

From my column in Salon, July 27, 2000:

What will be the impact of the court-ordered shutdown of Napster? These projects — small, underground efforts that grew unnoticed in the shadow of Napster the company — will be flooded with energy… From the recording industry’s point of view, it is slaying one enemy only to seed the field with a thousand new opponents — opponents who are, not incidentally, its own best customers…

The recording industry is in for a long, fruitless siege if it sets out to shut down each little Napster clone or slap a writ on every individual who uses Gnutella. Ultimately, if it wants to stop people from engaging in Napster-like behavior, the only thing that could work would be to shut down the Internet itself. Good luck.

Instead of going to court, of course, the music industry could be figuring out ways to use Napster to sell more music. After all, here’s a piece of software that cultivates people’s taste for new music and that appeals to the most dedicated fans. What a sales opportunity!

But by treating Napster as the copyright antichrist, the industry is simply insuring that the vector of Internet technological development will move rapidly toward a lawsuit-proof, free-for-all distributed network of file-sharing…

[tags]napster, digital music, music industry[/tags]

The Facebook/MySpace class war

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The latest paper by danah boyd, concluding that “MySpace and Facebook are new representations of the class divide in American youth,” has been much noted already, and it’s worth reading for anyone interested in the acceleratingly complex mass society we’re building online.

According to boyd, Facebook’s clean interface and Ivy League origins have made it home for the collegiate set, where MySpace’s anarchic graphics and pop-music focus orient it more toward “alternative” kids, minorities, dropouts and outcasts. If you spend any time on these services you can find plenty of anecdotal support for her analysis. On the other hand, though Facebook is now growing faster, MySpace still dwarfs it, so this is one “alternative” environment that happens, for the moment at least, to be in the majority.

What strikes me is that this social division across technical or business boundaries is nothing new. In the early days of blogging, a free Blogger address had less status than a self-installed Movable Type blog at your own URL. Similarly, in the mid-to-late ’90s, during the homepage-building craze, a page on GeoCities or Angelfire usually signified something less cool than your own site at your own domain. Before that, your email address was the marker of your status: remember the outcry when AOL’s horde of unwashed millions plugged into the Internet proper?

The difference today, it seems to me, is not that social class divides extend from the offline world into online space, but rather that online interaction has assumed such a central place in the lives of young people that the divisions now matter far more. For teenagers trying to figure out who they are, the choice of social networking site has become one more agonizing crossroads of self-definition.

Farhad Manjoo has more over at Salon’s Machinist.
[tags]facebook, myspace, social networking, danah boyd[/tags]

How does the Web feel?

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I loved this article about information designer Jonathan Harris — even if it did use for its headline the same phrase that is the title of my book.

Several years ago, Harris created the 10×10 Web site — a snapshot of the moment’s hot news presented in the form of an image collage. He now he works as design director at Daylife. He’s a specialist in creating visualizations of Web-based pools of information — like his current project, We Feel Fine, which scours the Web for statements by bloggers and others that take the form “I feel [X]” and presents them in a novel interface that you can explore and also filter according to multiple criteria.

But these sites are best explored rather than explained. Have a look. Perhaps you will feel, as I did, happy to see such creative reuse of the Web’s expressive bounty.

UPDATE: I meant to highlight this quote from the end of the piece, with its perspective on digital storytelling:

Trying to depict everything is a fool’s game, and ultimately not that interesting — because it’s just as confusing and complicated as life. So then the task becomes limiting your scope, and within a limited scope providing amazing complexity and depth. That’s this process of ‘lens making’: coming up with a lens that you can point at all of reality but that only lets through certain things. That process is digital storytelling. It’s a process of exclusion — not a process of mimicry.

TV, phone, or computer?

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I was catching up on old Times Business sections over the weekend and this chart, accompanying an article about video for mobile devices, jumped out at me. It shows Forrester research that asked people in different age groups, “Which device do you most feel you could not live without?” The devices in question were computer, TV and cellphone.

Easy enough for me to answer: I watch almost no TV. (I know people have a hard time accepting this, but it’s true.) I have a cellphone but it’s a clunky old thing and I use it only for utilitarian things — parent/child coordination, business details. My computer, on the other hand, is my lifeline: Source of information, social networking tool, information store, creative device, and more.

So I just had another birthday — I’ve moved into that zone of the ’40s that can’t be considered anything but “late” — and I figured that this particular set of gadget-preferences must mark me as an incipient codger. Kids these days live for their cell-phones and think e-mail is something to use when they want to communicate with those over 30, right?

Hah! Turns out I have the techno-preferences of a teen. My profile matches that of an 18-26 “Generation Y” type: they’re the only ones to rank computer first, cellphone second and TV last. My own generational cadre (“younger boomers”) puts TV at the top of its list. The accompanying article is all about how ESPN wants to put video on phone screens. It quotes one exec of a “cellphone video network” saying: “For the younger generation, the mobile phone is their most relevant device.”

But that’s not what the chart shows! Isn’t the news here that, for the consumers of tomorrow, as for me, the computer, far from being a stodgy old thing, is the desert-island device?

Semel, Yahoo, and the bet on media

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I have little to add to the flurry of coverage of Terry Semel’s departure (or should we say semi-departure) from Yahoo but this bit of historical perspective. (Apologies in advance for a certain amount of over-simplification! I’m writing today in between family events…)

Semel took over Yahoo during the worst of the dotcom downturn, an era largely forgotten in today’s Web 2.0 euphoria. His hiring there needs to be understood in parallel with the AOL/Time Warner saga. During the same time that Semel was retooling Yahoo in Hollywood’s direction, the Time Warner brass were conducting their counter-revolution against the AOL upstarts who’d seemed to have snookered their shareholders.

At that moment in industry history, everyone was making the same bet: the Web as a technology platform was a money-loser. Cash was king. You had to charge for services if you could, and keep selling ads if you could; if you could do either, you’d be OK, and if you could do both, you could prosper. The future, in other words, lay with those who bet on media, not on technology.

For Time Warner, it was patently clear that, as the dotcom debris gathered and the Web seemed to be something that could be blissfully forgotten, media represented the only future that mattered. (Since AOL was never a great technology company — its triumph was marketing — it would be hard to quarrel with that call.)

For Yahoo, born of the Web, the choice was tougher: Yahoo’s was always an ad business, but the company was justly proud of its technology, too. Semel’s background and focus sent the message that the Web was calming down into an online version of broadcast: gather eyeballs and sell them. That worked, up to a point; Semel did help rescue Yahoo from the bubble-bust, and the company survived to become one of the industry’s leaders.

On the other hand, it also missed the boat on the biggest change that was incubating throughout that era. Google’s extraordinary new business was entirely technology-based. The bet Semel failed to make on the technology side proved to be the one that mattered most. And the smart but relatively small moves Yahoo would later make to try to catch up — investments in Flickr and so on — couldn’t make up for that big miscall.

The boom-bust cycle that governs the Net world enforces a short-term amnesia: When a bubble is on, everyone thinks technology is all that matters, and when a bust is on, everyone thinks cash is all that matters. As in any market, the best returns are captured by those who make smart (and smartly timed) counter-cyclic bets.

To this outsider, Semel doesn’t appear to have been the Hollywood idiot some now see. But he steered Yahoo with the cycle. And that just wasn’t unconventional enough to produce the biggest sort of win.
[tags]yahoo, terry semel, web industry[/tags]

Google Reader gets amnesia

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I switched to Google Reader a couple of months ago when I got tired of Bloglines’ habit of forgetting my “unread” posts. Mostly I’ve been happy with it, after the brief period of culture shock.

Today, though, Google Reader suddenly lost my entire list of 100+ feeds. The only feed it still shows is one I added in the last 48 hours or so.

That’s the bad news. A bunch of other posts in the user forum make it sound like the problem is at least widespread, if not universal. The good news is that the Reader team got a post up immediately in the same forum, saying that they’re aware of and working on the problem.

Crossing my fingers…

UPDATE: That was fast. Appears to be fixed now. (Somebody plugged in the power cord — er, database!)

Nice speedy response, anyway. Ironically, this follows a recent post by Scoble about how lame the Bloglines plumber is, and how Google doesn’t need one because Reader never breaks…

[tags]google reader, rss[/tags]

“Intertwingled” quote, nabbed

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In the context of Chandler’s effort to escape the confinement of tree-based models of information organization, I quoted Ted Nelson‘s famous line about “intertwingularity” in Dreaming in Code:

People keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.

This quotation can be found on many Web pages, bbut when I went to source it for the endnotes, I couldn’t locate the authoritative original statement. I found the same quote in David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous, and — knowing that Weinberger is a scrupulous attributor — I asked him if he knew its original source. He, too, found it hard to pin down, but now reports a definitive answer (courtesy Frank Frank Hecker — more details on Weinberger’s errata page).

It turns out it’s exactly where I first looked for it, in Nelson’s book Dream Machines, the 1987 revision, on page 31. (Nelson only used “deeply” once, the second time; the word doesn’t appear before “hierarchical” in the original — it must have crept in across multiple reuses.)

I spent hours hunting through Nelson’s volume — a reissue of both Dream Machines and Computer Lib in one book, with one starting from the front and the other from the “back”, upside down. I guess I should have looked harder.

On the other hand, my failure to locate the quote might also have been the result of thei books’ unconventional format. These books are true miscellanies, examples of the havoc a fertile mind and a page-layout program (or an X-acto knife) could wreak on the conventions of book design in those heady early days of desktop publishing. (Think of the old Whole Earth Catalog, if you’ve seen that.) Chunks of text are scattered in different typefaces, mixed up with graphs and hand-drawn flowcharts and ALL-CAPS EMPHASIZED TEXT. It is a format designed to frustrate the simple linear quest to attribute a quotation.

This whole tiny story is, in its way, a tribute to the “intertwingularity” of Nelson’s work itself. You have to give the man credit for finding a form that matched the content of his digital-liberation ideas — even when he was stuck using paper.
[tags]ted nelson, intertwingularity, david weinberger, everything is miscellaneous, dreaming in code[/tags]

Should journalists learn to code?

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David Cohn is a smart young journalist who I met through my association with NewAssignment.Net. Today he has posted an argument for supporting the teaching of programming to journalists (this comes in the wake of a scholarship fund set up for programmers to learn journalism).

This discussion comes against the backdrop of massive business disruption in the newspaper industry, most recently with the announcement that 100 editorial employees of the San Francisco Chronicle are losing their jobs. A dozen managers got the boot this week (also here), including several I knew from my decade at the SF Examiner — the staff of which ended up working at the Chron when Hearst essentially combined the two papers in 2000.

The fear, plainly, is that print journalists are becoming the hand-loom weavers of the 21st century. But it’s not the craft of journalism that is in danger today; that remains a reasonably valuable skill. It’s the business structure of the newspaper industry (along with broadcast TV, magazines, and more) that is in trouble. Journalists are largely the drive-by victims of a media-industry transition that started to unfold in the early 90s and that could take another 25 years to play out. Society still needs their work, but for the moment, at least, its system for paying their rent is broken.

Cohn writes: “I am convinced the only thing holding me back from organizing the type of web based network journalism I want to do is my lack of coding skills.” He might be right, if his vision goes far beyond what existing software can do. But is it really going to be easier for him to thoroughly learn programming than to learn just what he needs to communicate his ideas to a pro?

In fact, I don’t think most journalists trying to find their way across the new media landscape need to acquire deep programming skills — any more than most programmers trying to write new-media applications need to master the fine art of headline writing or the arcana of copy editing. Sure, it’s great that occasionally a cross-disciplinary polymath turns up to shake things up — and if that’s what Cohn aspires to be, more power to him.

But the pressing need is not for people who can write code with one hand and stories with the other. What journalists do need is working digital literacy. They need to understand something about how the technology that’s reshaping media works, how it’s built, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and how to harness it. Journalists don’t need to study object-oriented PHP in order to do that; yet it’s helpful for them to be able to mess with a WordPress template without running in terror.

When an entrepreneur starts a company and decides to rent an office, she might need to learn about the commercial real estate market and become familiar with what’s available and what it might take to remodel a space and even how to read a floorplan or blueprint. But she doesn’t need to master all the building trades herself.

I think Cohn is on the right track in advocating more support for the retraining of a population of displaced professional journalists. I just think they can contribute in all sorts of ways without having to feel they must add programming to their resumes.
[tags]journalism, media, programming[/tags]

Lucas, circus, and art

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George Lucas drew a distinction for the crowd at D earlier this week that became something of a refrain for the rest of the event.

Lucas said: there’s circus, and then there’s art. “Circus is random and voyeuristic. What you see on YouTube right now — I call it feeding Christians to the lions. The movie term is, throwing puppies on a freeway. You don’t have to write anything or do anything — you just have to sit there, and it’s interesting. Like American Idol. Just put a camera on your neighbor’s window and see what happens. Then you get to art — where a particular person contrives a situation and tells a story, and hopefully that story reveals a truth behind the facts. With voyeurism all you’re getting is the facts.”

Lucas is a brilliant man who has told some great stories in his day. And I think he intended to defend the enterprise of making art, which we can always applaud. But with this generalization he has cast a great slur on the circus world.

I spent several years of my life as a working theater critic in San Francisco during the heyday of what was once known as New Vaudeville; I witnessed the work of pioneering Bay Area institutions like the Pickle Family Circus and saw the rise of “new circus” institutions like the Cirque du Soleil. And I do not think it’s going out on a limb to say that George Lucas is dead wrong in defining circus and art as opposites.

Circus is art. It doesn’t “just happen.” The people who perform in it spend years or lifetimes perfecting their skills.

Lucas, perhaps, really meant “sideshow” — where they used to put the freaks and the mutant animals and the geeks who would bite the heads off animals. In that sense, sure, YouTube is often a sideshow.

The videos Steve Jobs highlighted as he showed off AppleTV’s new YouTube connection were, essentially, sideshows. Mentos in Coke is sideshow. The “human slingshot” is sideshow.

But surprisingly often, YouTube is art. And when you experience a really great circus performance you encounter a kind of truth, too.
[tags]george lucas, d5, d conference, circus, youtube[/tags]