Tech IT Easy » Facebook

Overpopulation in Facebook

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 09:44:02 +0000

To fill my quota of social media posts for the year, here’s a post about Facebook’s user base and real-world statistics.

I was inspired by a post in a Finnish blog on social media about how the Facebook’s penetration rate in certain Finnish age groups is way over 100%. From its comments, I found that similar analysis was already done for UK and US with same results and with some explanation for the reasons. However, with the amazing Eurostat and Socialbakers‘ Facebook data, we can do this stuff for many other countries with interesting results! (To save time, I used Socialbakers data which is grouped by age and so doesn’t give as accurate results as going manually through Facebook’s advertisement tool would.)

The interesting bit is that there are big differences between the European countries. The Nordics are similar to UK and US, but that’s about it.

Facebook penetration rates by age group in Europe (click to enlarge)

(You can download the Excel sheet from here)

To solve the problem of above 100% coverage in age groups, there are two explanations that first come to mind and were explored in the both previous blog posts. The first one is Facebook’s age limit, which does not allow people below 13 to join Facebook. The obvious workaround is to round your age up to get in. The other explanation are the people hitting mid-life crisis and rounding their age down. I’m quite the combination of these two explains most of the bulge in the 18-24 age group.

At a glance, it would seem that the 18-24 bulge depends on the overall penetration rate. It seems that once the penetration goes high enough (say, 30%), it basically means that your older siblings’ got their Facebook profiles as well as pretty much everyone else in your real-life social network who’s above 13, and naturally you want it too. Doesn’t take long before someone figures out that the age check is easy to bypass, and like everything that’s age-restricted at that age (like 18+ movies and games) it becomes cool and once it gathers some critical mass, the social norm becomes to fake your age so that you can be on Facebook with your classmates and so on. However, why isn’t this phenomenon more global but just restricted to countries with high penetration rate? There are advertisements in pretty much all media telling how this and that is on Facebook and almost every new electronic device can access Facebook … and yet you, at 12, are forbidden from where everyone else apparently is.

As for other reasons for these age groups going over 100%, there are many. One cause is plain and simple fake profiles (for fun or spam), but I would have assumed young people are equally dorks all around Europe. One of the bigger reasons is business accounts. Then there are the duplicate profiles some people have for the multiple identities they have and want to keep separate. Also, as a pet owner I know some people made profiles for their pets but this can’t really explain the discrepancy at all. The need for sepearate accounts is now alleviated by the (not so) new Pages, which are much more suitable for some of the use cases which previously “required” a duplicate account (against Facebook’s terms of service). However, none of these can explain the tens of thousands of mis-aged accounts, but explain why Facebook has been pushing for people to use Pages instead (and why your interactions with a Page are almost at par with an another Account).

However, it would much interesting to know what explains the differences between the countries. My hypothesis is that the bulge at 18-24 correlates with high overall penetration rate (ie. <13 year olds feel the social pressure to join, faking their age) and high mobile usage in teen age groups. This overcoverage seems to happen when the overall penetration rate is over 30%. One explanation might be that in countries where broadband / mobile phones / social networks are more of a norm, people have started to have fun with Facebook whereas in places where internet usage is scarce, people take it more seriously.

I would have expected the Dutch to be similar to the Nordics, because they do share many other demographical features. Like many other countries, there’s a national Facebook equivalent in the Netherlands, Hyves. I’ve beent old it was very popular in the past, but a lot of Dutch people are migrating to Facebook, the one true social network. This happened in Finland as well, where IRC-galleria has been declining in the recent past due to the “old” generation of teen users “upgrading” to Facebook and the “new” potential teen population jumping directly to Facebook. Another question mark to me is Estonia, where I would have imagined to see similar results as in the Nordics.

On the other hand, both the German- and Russian-speaking world seem to have quite strong “local” social networks. The idea that the language is the biggest barrier between social networks is quite interesting, but I don’t have any evidence for it. The guys at Xiha probably know better. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future Facebook borrows ideas from Xiha in their quest to world domination; today Facebook is still very much a product of American culture.

Of course, comparing Facebook’s data against population demographics does not give you any indication what the actual penetration rate is. A much better approach, which was used in the Finnish study was to compare the Facebook penetration rates toh a national survey on social media use by age groups (in Finnish, but here’s a summary in English). The results of this number-crunching was that there can be as many as 200 to 300 thousand accounts with a “wrong” age. Or put another way, that’s more than 10% of Finnish Facebook users.

For further study, Eurostat does offer figures on many internet-related demographics, including “Individuals using the Internet for uploading self-created content to any website to be shared” and “Individuals regularly using the Internet” but these seemed not to be grouped by age, but could be used to better assess the situation. But so what? As baekdal put it in his analysis, age is just a number and “if a person who is really 34 is indicating that she is only 24, you must threat her as a 24 your old person. That’s how old she feels, and that is the only thing you need to know.”

Naturally, the empricial evidence of his users’ behavior goes a bit against Zuckerberg’s idea of your Facebook identity being your only one. As the old saying goes, on the internet, no-one knows you’re a dog.

What’s social, anyway?

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 08:19:04 +0000

The social networks are the latest Flash intro animations, the new tag clouds. They are everywhere. However, what is actually social about all these services? It’s a really valid question, because apparently everything is social these days.

One aspect to this is to consider the available social objects in the service and what interactions are available. As a simple rule, a social object is something that usually has an URL and is often serialized as an entry in an RSS feed. Also, often the actor who created these social objects is also a social object.

I just love this picture.

Let’s take Twitter, for example. It’s as “social network” as they come if you asked anyone. But once you start to think about it, it offers very few social objects and even fewer interactions with them. Basically there’s just two, the social objects are the tweets themselves or an off-linked thing in them. On Twitter itself you couldn’t really interact with the latter directly until recently with the new user interface that let’s you see some of the linked content on twitter.com, but that’s still hardly interacting with them. At least with the tweets you have two interactions: reply (discuss) or retweet (like).

In contrast, Facebook offers way more social objects and allows users to push many more into Facebook. However, the available interactions are often limited to textual interactions (discussing) and liking. Of course, the web is mostly a textual medium so it’s not a surprise that our interaction through it is mostly textual. However, the services and the technology and design in them really limit our interactions with social objects. You’re bound to fail if you just try to replicate Facebook and not think how people have traditionally acted in social contexts.

I would not count services where the only social objects are the users themselves as social networks. Because what you then have is essentially a contact list and e-mail and IM have been already done. In this way, I really liked Google Wave as it made the whatever the people were working on the main social object. It just wasn’t really good at it. Some of the “social” games qualify, only because they add a high score next to names in that contact list.

Another aspect is to consider the value to the user. It really isn’t enough just to depend on critical mass and then let Metcalfe’s Law do the rest, because Facebook already did it. This is probably the only reason LinkedIn is still alive – their value proposition is that being part of the network increases your chances with your career. Another example is last.fm, which promises better music recommendations. Ideally, the social network should allow the user to accomplish something regarding the social objects in a better way.

This aspect is also the one that is easy to get backwards. Adding a “social network” to a service doesn’t automatically add value to the service. It depends on the social objects and if the social network adds any value to them and the users. (As a sidenote, isn’t it a misnomer to say to “add” a social network, isn’t the social aspect always there, but you just “utilize” it?) Many of the various Twitter and Facebook integrations haven’t really increased a services value to me. For example, Spotify’s Facebook integration just lets me see somewhat useless information about what they listen to (unlike, say, last.fm). Also that the major Finnish newspaper shows on its front page what articles my friends have “liked” via Facebook has been less than useful for me so far (it just distracts). On the other hand, adding social features to a service like Nike+ sounds like it could improve a user’s motivation for running – there’s nothing like pure social pressure.

The third, and these days the most prevalent aspect is the value to the network’s owner. Of course, in the ideal world the network would be owned by the users, but we do live in a capitalistic system. The most blatant example of this has to be Apple’s Ping, which is essentially a social network to sell more songs on iTunes. The social objects are the songs, albums and artists on iTunes, which the users can interact to make them visible to their friends. And they can follow products (the artists). It’s just as sociopathic as you would expect from Mr. Jobs. One could argue that Ping is the “naked” social network, cutting all the happy-happy-joy-joy bullshit.

In addition to encouraging your users to pimp your stuff in hope of new business (like Ping and Zynga), the other value in the network is the value you get from an exit. Thanks to Metcalfe’s Law, your company is more valuable the more users you have – but you can also try to do something the others haven’t been able. No doubt many founders of the new, smaller social networks hope to have a feature that makes them the next YouTube, Friendfeed or Groupon. The danger here is of course fragmentation and the current players developing the features in-house (see Foursquare, Brightkite and others whose only magic component was location).

The most curious thing is that most “social” networks are forums where you limit the interaction of the social objects to a list of “friends”. The only way iTunes’ Ping really differs from Amazon’s venerable Listmania is that the latter is visible to all. Is it really social to narrow your world-view to just what your friends or companies who manufacture your favorite products share with you? Also, doesn’t it really bother you that these services are designed to let us socialize using their objects (products)?

Consider this blog post, for example. If this was a Facebook note, or a Buzz write-up, it would be mostly visible to just to people that I consider friends by each network’s definition of a friend. Even worse, the only people able to comment on this would be the aforementioned friends. It’s a brave new world.

The Annual Kari Silvennoinen is out!

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 07:21:16 +0000

I’ve been on the road recently with very spotty wifi access and that’s when Twitter really breaks down. You’re left without context because most tweets aren’t self-standing but a link to a URL shortener giving no idea what’s going on. If you’re not knee deep in the “social”, Twitter seems like a mish-mash of ideas and links and bot posts. Then again, that what the web is: links to other places. However, how we use it and what we link to seems to have changed.

Yo dawg, I heard you like news aggregation so I put a news aggregator in your news aggregator so you can read social media while you read social media.

People are using services that make Twitter a duct-taped-together activity stream. I prefer to hear people’s ideas instead of being carpet bombed with bot notifications from the social media service du jour. But this isn’t exclusive to Twitter, Facebook took this further with web-wide likes and Facebook Connect. Your activity on the web is a feature on Facebook and they encourage you to dump everything there. Fortunately I can’t control what other people do, but a little bit of the Web dies every time someone publishes that stuff. That’s how I feel, but that’s the beauty of the Web: It’s a playground for experimentation. Too bad it feels like there’s not that much experimentation going on except on the business case side of the Web.

I rarely cross-post what I share/do on the various services. I don’t assume you’re stupid, if you want to know what links I find interesting, don’t expect them on my Twitter feed but on my Google Reader. If you want to know about my runs, I’m on Nike+. If you’re interested in what I read, or something else – well, there’s an app that isn’t Twitter for that. Sure, that’s more work for you if you want to know about everything I do but I don’t expect you to be. I don’t have to promote myself on the web – I have a nice day job and as a Finn I’m quite introverted anyway.

Also, if you guys haven’t yet figured it out – Google’s social network is the Web. And it will fail on your usual Web 2.0 metrics, because people don’t want platforms – they want applications. This is what happened with Google Buzz.

I ran a mile! Then I spent two hours promoting it on the web.

As I alluded previosuly, people use Twitter and Facebook as a make-shift Activity Streams because they just work well enough. Google Buzz was an early attempt to the next gen, but it failed miserably. It was complex, it was a platform and no one got the point. It offered advantages over Facebook and Twitter only on infrastructure level, not for the user. I’m quite certain that Google continues on this path, because there’s no reason to make a yet another Orkut when it seems that the future of Facebook and Twitter are activity updates. Better to control those updates than the services where they are published. Also, most of that stuff is just noise. In the future, the real business is filtering and exploiting those little snippets of information, not just dumbly showing them.

This hopefully could also mark the end of the dark age of “social media”, where we ignored the complexities of human social behavior and assuming that before “social media” everything was asocial. When someone can go and say that the end of social gaming is near because all gaming will be social – are you fucking kidding me? At what point in time were games missing a social aspect? Or did these guys only play Solitaire and Minesweeper? The Internet is after all a tool. It’s a delusion to believe we have required social enlightenment through Facebook when a compelling case can be made be against it. Repeat after me: you are not how many friends you have on Facebook, you’re not your LinkedIn profile, you’re not your fucking tweets, …

For example, Facebook gives us just one identity. This is by design and Mark Zuckerberg believes this is the right way to go forward. He and Facebook prefers that identity is our most low common denominator identity, probably so that they can sell more eyeballs to “targeted” ads. That might be reason why Facebook is boring, everyone is just showing their most bland identity they are willing to show to strangers.

On the web, people don’t always want to be “themselves” – or even social. Play some multiplayer games, preferably a FPS on a console – like Call of Duty: MW on PS3 – and you’ll quickly see the dark side of human psyche, also known as Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Blizzard tried to solve the problem as an engineering problem and attempted to force people to use their real names, this was very quickly shot down by users. On the internet, some of us want to be DeathSpank, the Orc slayer.

The Internet does not make much sense… On pricing digital goods and other illogicalities

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:14:49 +0000

“From my cold, dead hands…” It’s something that came to mind as I was thinking about writing this post. The part that doesn’t make sense about the Internet, today and perhaps since ever, is that American concept of “Freedom,” of independence and lack of governance.

In my post on piracy, my point was not complete. YES, historically, there has been a trend in every industry towards eliminating inefficiencies and yes, in some ways making things digital is just another step down that line, but NO, as @ksilvennoinen pointed out in the comments, digital goods do have a value greater than zero, the question is how to find a way to recuperate that value from customers.

To me value equals investment, but that is not the way pricing works. Unfortunately, I managed to misplace my pricing bible some months ago and can’t seem to recall most of the rules of pricing, but there is a strong psychological component to it. And the psychological part is what I am confused about. To get another book in here, it’s just like “Positioning: the battle for the mind,” if online goods are ‘positioned’ against a never-ending slew of free content, how do you position yourself to be priced at a value greater than zero?

On the one hand, it’s not so hard. You position yourself in such a way that a comparison does not make sense. Let’s take digital books, an area I actually don’t consider as threatened as publishers and media-outlets would like you to believe. The reason is that as soon as you download a digital book and view it on a PC, it immediately becomes an inferior product. Unlike a TV-show or movie, which I can frankly watch on a post-stamp (no matter what David Lynch says), reading and eyes work best together on either paper or e-paper (haven’t tried reading on the iPad, though I really like doing it on the iPhone). Of course the real threat to e-books in a PC environment is websites, but that’s a story for another day.

To get back to it, e-books work best in a dedicated reading environment, which immediately creates opportunities for platforms and putting walls around those. Platforms ensure that there is a network effect of content, walls ensure that there is no inter-leakage between the quality-controlled inside and the dark-waters-of-piracy outside. And that mechanism allows digital goods to be priced to recuperate investment and more. But…

Where it gets confusing again is how very open the Internet is. This openness allows you to create an app in a day, it also allows you to jailbreak an iPhone (now with US-gov. support), and it allows for me to get a movie that Chinese kid 107-xg46-*** released 5 minutes ago on the torrentZ. Amazon was built on this openness, as was OS X, as was pretty much anything that was stolen out of the Xerox labs 35 years ago. While there is a trend of eliminating barriers in general, it is even more prevalent on the Internet.

So, what I am asking myself here is the following questions:

Is this 1969 again, where hippies roamed free, sex was consequence-less, and there is an Aids-epidemic on the horizon, which will make us go back to the 50s in terms of promiscuity?
Are platforms doomed? I’m just talking platforms, not walls around them. Twitter is an example of an open platform.
Are the walls around platforms doomed? So: iTunes & iOS-devices, Amazon & Kindles, Facebook & human relationships, every online retailer in the world…
Is pricing digital goods a logical thing when taking into consideration how it is positioned against other digital goods?
Should digital goods be free and prices be set for things that cannot be spread digitally: iOS devices, Kindles, Disk-media, other consumption-devices…
And many more questions…

Getting back to value equals investment in my third paragraph. In any chain that leads from idea to the user, there are value points, which come from some kind of investment. In the embroidery example, a strong value point appears to be the creator. Without that person, there would be no creation. And, of course, there are plenty of examples on that. In the case of iPhone, strong value points are both the conceptualisation (R&D expenditure) and the production costs. In the case of Amazon, the website (presentation, distribution, etc.) is a strong value point. The end-product can still be digital, as it is in the case of the embroiderer’s designs, the iPhone apps, and the Kinde-ebooks, but the investment in certain parts of the chain is very much real.

And the value to consumers, which the crux of the matter, is equally real. If I compare 2010 to 1995, we live in the era of digital convenience. From e-banking, to restaurant-reviews, to TV-shows, to software, we undeniably live in a better world, but one where, ironically, we are less willing to spend as much on it. But there is another side to this as well. Let’s say, everything that exists is walled off. You’d have to pay to get access to every blog-post, to every youtube-video, to everything else that is already being charged for. I would sincerely start to question whether it was all worth it.

The Internet continues to be confusing to me, part shopping bonanza, part free-for-all utopia. Writing this has brought a little clarity, but if you have stuff to add that clears it up even more, please feel free to share it in a comment.

URL as a metric for social object’s value (Weekend rambling)

Kari Silvennoinen — Sun, 30 May 2010 07:13:13 +0000

A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.

One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.

I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.

The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.

From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.

My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.

However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.

The value of Twitter vs. the value of Facebook vs. the value of having Neither [weekend ramblings]

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 14 May 2010 20:17:31 +0000

I think a value should always be weighed against the value of not having it, particularly when it’s hard to put a numerical value on something. This something is clearly Facebook and even more clearly Twitter, which still doesn’t compute for 100%. Why I love Twitter would be like saying why I love my dog or my Bengalese tiger, it’s hard to place a value on love. Not to say that I love Twitter, but there are few things that bother me about it. I tolerate it and it has nestled in a comfortable (but small) place in my life.

There are again ramblings against the status quo, or rather the status pecunia—the status of wealth. A few years ago, it was Twitter which seemed to show the Fail Whale more often then the “what are you doing now?” page. It lead to Friendfeed and various other me-too services that were dropped as soon as Twitter got its act together. There are again ramblings about evicting Facebook from people’s lives, though I’m here to tell you that if you want to have any kind of social life online, you’re probably better of keeping that account, though perhaps with less naked pictures or whatever you are worried about losing.

The value of Facebook is that it allows for richer connections between people that do not see each other every day. I care for my high-school friends that live in the UK, France, or Brazil, but since I can’t see them everyday, it adds value to my life to know that they are getting a kid or getting married. It does not add value to my life if people choose to leave Facebook, like some of my friends did at first when they were overwhelmed by all this publicity (something blogging prepares you for). And I’m really glad Facebook doesn’t delete accounts permanently as when people change their mind (they usually do), their friends are again there waiting for them (life is too exhausting to be-/de-/re-friend friends like most of the internet forces you to do).

The value of Twitter is like that morning coffee that adds a little (but not everything) to the quality of the moment you’re experiencing. No, NO, let’s not equate the value like that. The biggest value of Twitter to me is actually pretty much the same one as Facebook’s. I met up with a friend in Denmark a few weeks ago, who is also on Twitter, and I was able to finish his sentences because I read about his experiences ON Twitter. To me Twitter is more like a Second Life than Secondlife(tm) is. It allows for quick streams about people you care about or you “follow” because you respect them. If I had intelligent displays running Twitter on my sunglasses, I would wear them all the time while walking through life, that is how second life Twitter has become to (some of) my relationships. My business partner is going to China this week and I would love for him to update his Twitter-account while there to keep me informed of the cool stuff he’s researching for us (mobile operators better start catching up to this dynamic).

So, what, WHAT, could possibly be the value of Neither? Such a leading way to pose that question, as I’m clearly not on that side of the fence. I’m sorry that many of my friends decide against Twitter accounts because they don’t see the value of it. Those are usually the people that I see once every 6 months and our conversations are less deep because, well, we still have to get through the superficiality of “how was your day? What are you up to?” Questions that Twitter & Facebook both ask. And I’m sorry if my friends decide not to use Facebook as it not only allows them to post their thoughts, but pictures of their Bengalese tigers or their latest trip to hell, and even status updates about Farmville, which I previously stated, was an imperfect way of showing of your virtual garden to your friends.

The value of Neither is a type of emptiness that may be good for meditation, but it is no longer how the world works. It’s like seeing my parents struggle with emails or internet banking when no one sends snailmail or goes to a physical bank anymore. The world without Facebook or Twitter no longer exists. I don’t care about privacy issue 1 or 0, because it’s really your business what you put on the internet and what you don’t and you should never put stuff on there that you don’t want people to know about. I care about connections and about the empowerment that they bring to interpersonal relationships.

I have met 80 people on Facebook that I never expected to see again after graduating from high school, from university, or from leaving the coolest job I had as a tween. I am so grateful to the site for that that if Zuck were here, I could kiss him. Facebook isn’t perfect, and we should protest against these imperfections until they are fixed. Whether we should leave social networks and abandon all the possibilities they have brought us, that is like starving yourself in protest against war: Nobody cares!

This post was brought to you by TigersInPoolsHellYES. Donate via the paypal button on the right.

Facebook’s power grab of the social web

Kari Silvennoinen — Wed, 12 May 2010 07:55:27 +0000

Seems like Facebook is teh new evil. The new Microsoft of the nerd epic. The biblical mark of the beast, the Windows-logo, has been replaced by Facebook’s like-button on a website.

But seriously. Facebook’s grab of their users is getting quite out of hand. Exposing more and more of stuff that could be argued to be personal information, pimping that stuff to other sites and companies… it’s not cool and it’s pretty dark in the grey area of abusing their users’ respect. The “evolution” of Facebook’s concept of privacy was best illustrated by Matt McKeon’s neat infographic.

You know these pics as lolcats, but majority of Facebookers just think they are cute.

If you look at the new things Facebook is developing it’s easy to start thinking what are the real benefits to users? It’s all just exploitation. But that’s just the business model for web 2.0 social. Companies are willing to pay a lot to know what their target demographics like and how they behave and lots of other metrics that supposedly make their marketing more effective. They also want to have “presence” on the “social”. I have no experience with marketing industry so I’ve no idea how well this works.

Many internet pioneers were against any first legislation involving Internet, because the Internet was somehow “different”. They felt that these laws would restrict the “freedom” of the whole Internet. Yet, it’s clear that at least our consumer protection and privacy laws are not good enough. The German Federal Minister of Consumer Protection sent a letter to Facebook where her threat was that she’d get out of Facebook if Zuckerberg and his company don’t start to respect users’ privacy more. Seriously, is this how toothless even European consumer protection agencies are against Facebook’s rampant power grab?

One of the weaknesses of Facebook is that they’re centralized. This is why Google, Yahoo et al are working hard on social web that’s distributed. The problem is that this is not a competition where the best technology wins. So what if “web industry leaders” are quitting Facebook? Most of the Facebook’s userbase don’t know who they are and don’t care.

The strength of Facebook at this point is that it’s what pretty much everyone and their parents know how to use on the web. Even otherwise computer illiterate people feel at home with Facebook, like the ReadWriteWeb’s article on Facebook that people ended up when they searched for “facebook login” on Google demonstrated. Whatever the pioneers, early adopters, or any other web power users do to create “anti-Facebooks” does not matter, especially on the short term.

The internet has always been a scary place for newbies and it’s a shame how easily scammers can use Facebook as an attack vector. All the groups and pages that advertise free Farmville cash or an iPad for just doing these simple steps that compromise the whole computer… The problem is that it is difficult to distinguish these from the marketing agencies’ competitions on who can create the most “liked” “viral” astroturfed page and also by the simple fact that people tend to trust their friends’ judgment so these scams can get easily spread through the “social”.

From the web power users’ viewpoint the future is either a more interactive web, or the wet dream of every SEO and internet marketing expert – a web that stinks and where its users are just a crop for marketing analytics. We are idealistic and tend to believe in the power of technology, but the web is a commercial venture. Google isn’t exactly our friend (not even using the web 2.0 definition of the word), but it looks it is in their best interest to push for the same cause – a more open web.

It’s not that Google and others are doing this out of kindness for web users. It just makes business sense for them, Google makes money when more people use the web. And it’s not like Facebook is inherently evil – the exploitation of their userbase is a natural progression for any social network business, especially because their users are not willing to pay for the service in any direct fashion.

We can’t bluff Facebook about quitting our accounts, because we are not going to hurt ourselves here and they know it. For its users, Facebook does add value. But, there are limits on how much they can exploit this fact. What Google and others are trying to do is make Facebook redundant, unnecessary – but they’re still far from this goal.

This is why I would expect more from the people we have appointed to take care of our personal information in the society, the different national and international data protection agencies. Not just empty threats like Mrs. Aigner’s.

Social web for the long-term

Kari Silvennoinen — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:53:31 +0000

Now that the biggest waves of Buzz hype are hopefully behind us, it’s a good time concentrate what Google Buzz actually is and what it isn’t. I have followed Buzz with great interest and I’ve previously talked about Jaiku, feeds and discussions on the web on general here. I even pushed Plaxo at one point, but they are pretty much dead in the water right now. I was couple of years off and a technology wrong with my prediction of sort-of real-time web in 2008.

In a way I view Google Buzz as a reference platform, like Google Wave Preview, instead of a finished product. Of course, because Buzz is right there in Gmail’s interface, it’s Buzz deserves to get all the critical comments about its launch it got. It could be argued that without exposing it to the larger public at start, it would have been impossible to get all those great ideas to make it better. One interesting thing to note is that most requested features for Buzz are UI-related. However, I’m more interested in what makes Buzz work behind the scenes, because if Google can get the critical mass behind this, things are going to be great.

It was again a sad example of the sorry state of technology blogging when Buzz first hit the web. In that little world that’s so enamored with Twitter, Facebook and status updates, it never occurred to anyone that Google was aiming much higher. One of the worst offenders was the serial-troll Lyons. He was followed with lots of others who came up with as lame puns in their headlines without actually figuring out what they were looking at. Instead we got petty lists of “fails” in Buzz. Yeah, on the surface that these Techmeme all-stars barely skim, Buzz might resemble Twitter, but the differences are pretty obvious from the start.

The attention spans are so incredibly short that that they have completely forgotten that even in this age of agile Web 2.0 iterative processes, things take time. This was probably best illustrated by this post, where the author totally oblivious to the lineage of Buzz claimed that

As always, time will tell whether this is a game-changer or just another Jaiku, the Twitter competitor that Google bought but never found a way to leverage.

In their defense, even Ars Technica got it wrong.

The only reason I can come up with why people associated Buzz instantly with Twitter was the simple user interface. Much more interesting comparisons would have been with Friendfeed (which kind of tried to do this in simple way), Yahoo Updates (which kind of tried to do this in a difficult way) or it’s genetical ancestor Jaiku (which kind of did this LBS twitter thing in a pretty nice package a good three years ago).

While I agree that Buzz is a rather odd combination of product/platform/project, I do find it exciting that Google has the resources to just try things. We are so early to this social web thing that if someone pretends that they know what exactly works, they’ll be proven wrong in a fortnight. Sure, I do agree that Google might be forgetting that what people want are applications and not technology (a mistake Nokia keeps on repeating, and one reason why they are so incredibly lost in the technology woods. Or like Yahoo, which just pumps out nice web tech with no apparent apps or revenue streams). Google has the money to experiment and the mindset to test things on a large scale. That takes balls. That’s what the whole world wide web was about in the first place, experimentation. You have to be pretty clueless if you take anything on the internet right now as granted.

Seriously, take a long view here. Even on the internet, you need some time to lay out the groundwork even when you’re working in the application layer. If you think about the 2,5 year timeline between Jaiku’s acquisition and Buzz, there were little hints along the way in many of Google’s products. To be able to have something like Buzz, Google had to first come up with a friend/follow system and a location system. You know like following other people on Google Reader and Google Latitude? The ADD-riddled tech bloggers were pretty hyped about Google Latitude and how it was going to kill Brightkite, Foursquare and other LBS services, but somehow Google Buzz failed to generate a single comparison to these services?

But all this is just technology. What about the revolution that I hope Google can pull with Buzz? What’s the beauty in Google Buzz? You only need to check Google’s API page for Google Buzz and you’ll soon realize that all the stuff behind what makes Google Buzz work are open standards, which enable pretty ground-breaking integrations that could just solve the mess discussion on the internet is right now.

As a sidenote, when tech bloggers complain how they can’t add this and that twitter stream to their Google Buzz timeline or how the tweets are not in real-time and all that, they would only need to look at that API and realize that because Google looking at the whole thing at much higher level, it’s actually the publisher who needs to find a way to enable a thing awkwardly called PubSubHubbub, and in that instant all the content is pretty much real-time. Of course, I have no idea if it is at all feasible to use PubSubHubbub in the scale of Twitter, but the point is that Google is not planning to have custom pipelines to Buzz, but to play with common, open protocols and APIs. Another point is that once your content works with Buzz, it works with any aggregator/social app that has decided to have that same common, open infrastructure.

So, instead of trying to centralize every user, every piece of content to their site, like Facebook and Twitter, Google has had the guts to try and harness all the discussion on the web to their service. It’s going to be a happy day when this post right here and all the discussion and the comment this might generate are all happily syndicated in Buzz.

The open nature of Buzz is not all news to some creatures on the web. On Twitter and Facebook you can follow and be followed by inanimate products and abstract brands and they can have pages and whatnot, but right now, to be able to take part in Buzz you need to have a Google Account and that means that you have to be a natural, real person and you shouldn’t have more than one account. This is pretty bad news to all the “SEOs” and other “internet marketing experts”. It is also excellent news and pretty amazing on this forcing-marketing-down-your-throat in this “social” happy place we call the web 2.0. Simply, that means real people and real feeds that try to integrate the real discussion on the web. All those @’s and #’s? What about real discussion with real threading and real topics? What about a renaissance of long-form personal publishing? (If you didn’t follow any of the previous links, please read this. I’m totally with DeWitt Clinton here).

The trick to make all this work and where Friendfeed and Plaxo failed is critical mass. I’m pretty sure that the guys at Facebook are really looking at Friendfeed again and rethinking what parts they should chop off it instead, because if Google can truly pull this off and make this pipe-dream of semantic and social aggregation nirvana that plumbs everything out of what it can get it social graph on work, Facebook has no other option than to open up and that’s pretty much the end game for them right there.

The technical challenge is really complex and it’s going to take some time until all the pieces are in place. Google has put their thing out in the open and it is now the publishers’ turn to do some back-end changes so that this discussion utopia can get its legs. I’m not expecting the social web to turn on its head in a day, but this is some serious stuff for the long term. The reason why I think Google can pull this off is that Google just needs to show ads on the web to make this worthwhile, Facebook et al. need to monetize every inch of their userbase. Google can, and it is in their advantage, to utilize open systems and not lock people in. And, hey, maybe things don’t pan out. Google has the cash to try something else.

FarmVille is a role playing game

Kari Silvennoinen — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 07:52:34 +0000

As I argued in the comments in Vincent’s post about FarmVille, FarmVille is a role playing game (RPG). And pretty bad one at that. Like most RPGs, you don’t actually need any skills or develop any skill playing it yourself as your success is solely dependent on the amount of time you sink into it. You can get pretty good at FreeCell, but no matter how much time you spend in FarmVille, you won’t get “better” in it. But what most RPGs have at least is a story – even if most these days have left the ending pretty open. Contrast this to FarmVille which isn’t trying to tell you any story. In this sense it resembles a simulation, but that genre is usually characterized by depth and strategy which are nowhere to be seen in FarmVille, unlike, say, in SimFarm from 1993.

Free range animal farming at FarmVille

It is way too easy to categorise FarmVille as a “casual” game, but “casual” doesn’t need to mean games where you can’t lose, games which have zero learning curve and games that don’t offer challenge. A good example of “casual” game that always ends in the player “losing” and (hence?) offers a lot of challenge is Bejeweled. If I remember correctly, Bejeweled was the previous title holder to the biggest casual game ever.

The only challenges are achievements – and now collections. But there’s little, if any, social value in achieving them – unless you count boasting about them on your Facebook wall. And, unfortunately, the game doesn’t have level 13 Pig Warlocks.

There’s some irony that the main reason people play FarmVille, boredom, is also a main reason why people quit it. This boredom kicks in at about level 20 or so, where you start to realize that you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The only thing left is the grind.

There are, of course, shortcuts to simple grinding. You can use farm machinery to do your activities faster, but they consume fuel (that, until recently, you could only refill by real money). Also, spending money allows you to get many benefits before non-paying players. And this is a problem, because many people don’t consider this “fair”. Offering players to pay to save time, however, is pretty crucial from business logic. The trap here is that the players who don’t feel comfortable paying start to feel that the only way to progress in the game is to spend real money.

FarmVille follows the RPG formula that the higher you have leveled, the more effort (= experience points) you need to reach next level. Granted, you have access to new things that might increase your “productivity”, but the mean time between levels is increasing. However, and this is the problem, the reward of leveling up remains pretty much the same. At some point, the perceieved benefit/effort ratio falls short. The trick is that at this point, the player has invested so much into the game that they might be more willing to pay real money to make advancing easier… if the rewards of leveling up are worth it.

The business logic of FarmVille dictates that the more you play, the better player you are for Zynga. It’s the curious logic of taxing your good customers, the discrimination for the information age. This is most evident if you look at how the experience points you get from crops depends on their harvest time. The shorter the harvest time (and so, how many times the player “needs” to play FarmVille), the more experience the player can gain in given time. As you can see, the relationship between these two variables follows an exponential distribution with pretty high correlation.

Harvest time is strongly correlated with experience points you can get in FarmVille

There's not much correlation between profits and harvest time, though.

As an interesting side note, the correlation between Harvest time and profit isn’t nearly as high and there’s a lot of variation. This neatly illustrates how the main metric in the game (from game designer’s perspective) is not profit, but experience points which are tightly tied to player retention. This also means that while there’s a wide variety of different kind of crops, there’s only a handful that makes any sense to use as the rest are strongly dominated. Oh, and the trees and the animals don’t make any sense given how scarce the land is and how much more profitable the crops are. The only reason to have either is for achieving ribbons – or self-expression (which you might have already guessed was pretty low on my priority list).

The other thing in FarmVille is that your game progress is also aided somewhat by the amount of friends you have. Whether these friends help you or not, is not necessasry, as only retaining a certain friend amount gives you benefits. The most important of these is access to larger farms. The social aspects of FarmVille can be divided into self-expression (how one designs one’s farm) and a coordination game of sharing gifts and other “loot”. The game design trick of “free gifts” is pretty clear after the player realizes that he or she needs a bigger farm to accommodate all the gifts. Contrast this “social gaming” to the title-holder of “most anti-social game ever”, World of Warcraft, in which (as far as I’ve understood) it is possible to “complete” the game alone, but playing with others is a key element to enjoy the game. In WoW the higher level players can help out lower level players, but in FarmVille the higher level players can gift some items to lower level players that lower player level players can’t gift. So, for some time the reciprocity logic didn’t really work in gifting, but this was recently fixed by introduction of “Mystery gifts” that are pretty much the only thing that makes sense for lower level players to send to higher level players.

So, what you are left in a more competitive sense of “social gaming” is the amount of ribbons you have collected, the level you have achieved and how pimped out your farm is. The element of achievements that you can accomplish as a group is zero.

I’m not entirely sure that Facebook is the most fertily grounds for games, as the dominating functionality seems to be “the social” and exploiting one’s userbase. Game mechanics and social dynamics come second. This is why I believe that to experience “true” social gaming, one needs to invest some real money to buy a game. The “free” gaming model seems to denigrate too quickly into nickel-and-diming, see for example what happened with EA’s Battlefield Heroes – where again some of the players didn’t see the real money elements as “fair” after certain point.

The problem with FarmVille, in short, is that the business logic dictates the game design too much. The revenue incentives of Zynga make the game experience worse for the players, who are looking for more than killing time.

How Social Are You? An Insight to Social Technographics

Anand — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 23:33:15 +0000

Have you ever noticed, the increasing interest of your old Aunts in facebook or other social networking websites? Have you ever noticed, people updating their status messages (provoking conversations and chitchats). I have observed these kind of behavior and sometimes participated in these conversations as well. But where am I heading with all this? Letme ask you a question, How social are you?

Answer comes from a researcher Josh Bernoff who noted a “new behavior” in patterns of social technology usage by the people, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

They take a close look at the social and demographic structure of the social web population ( To be more exhaustive and close to accurately model the user behavior, they analyzed the profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors). The categorization of users is different than Technorati’s statistics which mostly focus on raw blog growth numbers and structural features of the blogosphere.

: The Segmentation

P.S: Note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with the participation at other levels — so the ratios sum up to over 100%.

I am trying to explain as well as compare the increase and change in the user behavior for two years of their research. Results for previous year research can be found here.

Creators publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 24% of the adult online population. Creators are generally youngsters the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. This percent in year 2007 was just 13%.

Critics participate in either of two ways commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics represent 37% of all adult online consumers and on average are several years older than Creators. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Collectors create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors represent 20% of the adult online population and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Joiners use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners represent 59% of the adult online population and are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 59% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Spectators represent 70% of the adult online population and are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. This percent in year 2007 was just 33%.

Inactives. Today, 17% of online adults do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them. This percent in year 2007 was 52%.

What we see from the above classification is a drastic change in behaviour of online users in last two years, most changes are directed towards the Inactives and Spectators. So now next time if you see your aunt updating her status message in Facebook, consider her among the new Joiners to the world of social networking.

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

Unlike

Thoughts on Farmville, an addictive but flawed Facebook game

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 07:20:54 +0000

I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.

What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.

Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.

Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.

Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.

You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.

Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.

For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).

The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.

I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.

Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!

I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.

Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.

End review.
Vincent

The lowest common denominator online: the written word

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:31:20 +0000

A few months ago, I wrote to you about an experiment I was conducting regarding collecting videos from people that could not make it to a reunion I was organising for my high school. Out of the ca. 300 people that signed up to our Facebook group, only ca. 100 can make it in the end (this weekend). Many of them live all over the world, hence it made sense to try and involve them in some way.

Just like you guys couldn’t offer me much of a suggestion regarding how to arrange this distributed video system, people were fairly unresponsive to my request to send me greetings by video or audio. Even pictures from the good old days were apparently too much to ask for–us “oldsters” used analogue cameras back in the day and no Flickr in sight.

This all changed however just last week when we decided to focus on what I call the lowest common denominator in organised activities like this reunion and also business. Focussing on the simplest possible solution to solve a collaborative problem.

We asked everyone that couldn’t make it to send a short text to say hi, etc. And the responses came rolling in. Within 2 days, we already had 30 and they keep coming.

It just shows you 2 things: 1. really K.I.S.S. (keep it simple & stupid) is the best way to deal with most problems. And 2. we are really not ready for a video-based messaging system. Sure, there’s Youtube and more, but you also need to record, you need to look good on the recording, you need to convert it to flash, you need to upload it, the receiver needs to convert it back, edit it (a super-big hassle!), and then present it in a usable way. Far from K.I.S.S.!

Vincent

Unlike

RSS is far from dead, long live web feeds

Kari Silvennoinen — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:51:09 +0000

Recently another round of discussion has started on the web about how RSS is riding to the sunset. I think there is some irony that most of us were alerted to these posts either from our feed reader or other aggregation site like Techmeme.

Your newspaper doesn't show unread count, so why does your feed reader?

This time the debate originate from a blog post at ZDNet. And I think that as long as the title of the post was that RSS readers are becoming meaningless, the post makes some sense. And it’s true, there’s not much innovation in RSS readers these days and some of the design mistakes were listed here. The idea that a user imports a RSS document and reads just it, that’s dead. We’re still far from what’s possible when computers work on feeds.

Another thing this means is that as feeds become more and more part of the web’s infrastructure (see for example Google’s GData), it’s not really interesting for end-users. This in turn means that there just isn’t any money in it. For certain websites, this of course equals to that tech being dead.

One of the blunders in feeds was the dichotomy between RSS and Atom standards. While the former is used today as an umbrella term for feeds in general, it’s really, really inferior to the latter. The problem with Atom is that it came late to the game and while it can be as simple as RSS, but it can also be used for many other things than just blog posts and most RSS readers couldn’t be bothered. This is why the RSS format is dead in the water. The Atom format is much more flexible and is used in many other ways than just one-way polling (see above-mentioned GData for example).

Feeds are here to stay, they are not Web 1.0 stuff, but an integral part of Web 3.0. They just can be so much more than “seeing what’s new”. A site like Techmeme could not exist without feeds. It’s just that we haven’t unlocked the potential. It’s not sexy and it might negatively affect web ad revenues. This is why I think Techmeme shines, just like Friendfeed; they follow the “River of news” approach to new items that was proposed early on. Other readers, like most desktop apps and Google Reader, put new items into an inbox, pretending that each new item has an equal value to us.

Feeds are really immature technology, we’re still unsure about formats and how to consume feeds. And, on top of it all, how could we use this technology the improve the experience of having a discussion on the web. I propose we take a look to ancient computer history.

Before the Internet, on the dial-up BBS services it was a common due to the call costs to download all the new discussions on that box’s forums to your “offline reader” and disconnect. One could then peacefully go through and answer to any threads that were interesting and upload these back to the BBS. But it wasn’t limited to just one board, an offline reader was one inbox for all your discussion on all your BBS boxes. The Usenet newsgroups could be “consumed” using a similar logic. But, today, as Diaz says, our “sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web” and this approach doesn’t work right now. But it could in the future.

I’m not sure that we can stop and concentrate on discussion anymore, because Facebook and Twitter have made “discussions” move so quickly that concentrating on just one is impossible. But if we could go back to those more peaceful times, I’d like to have these “offline readers” back. Of course, they wouldn’t need to be offline today, but real-time.

Discussion on the web is not in good health. It’s scattered and disjointed. I’m not calling for a centralized solution, I’m looking for a standardized solution – something that’s already possible with Atom. We subscribe to blog posts, but we don’t subscribe to the comments. It’s a hassle even if the blog you read happens to use WordPress’ e-mail subscriptions or Disqus, Intense Debate or some other solution.

There are some major obstacles, one of them being that the income of sites are tied to ad impressions. The other huge problem is that we need to lay down the infrastructure first. Pretty much all sites support the one-way RSS today, but only a handful support Atom Publishing Protocol (which is a different thing from the simple feed itself). Also, none of the forum software, as far as I know, support anything like this. Instead of using the web interface, it would be possible to access the discussions using another, more suitable interface. Most of blogging tools are APP aware, though.

We don’t listen to music by going to individual bands’ websites, we have collected our music to a single source (be it iTunes, Spotify, Winamp or something else). I don’t know about Google Reader’s long term roadmap, but it wouldn’t surprise me if something like participating to comments is there. Yes, you can “like”, “share” and “comment” the posts there, just like in Friendfeed et al., but you can’t participate to the discussion on the original site.

We can rebuild discussions on the web. We have the technology.

Image by FastIcon.com

Unlike

The Future of Television, Facebook it isn’t.

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:31:57 +0000

I don’t know if anyone of you caught the CNN+Facebook stunt two days ago, where the, I guess burial (?) of Micheal Jackson was shown live on CNN.com, next to a stream of Facebook status updates on the same screen. If I say “Micheal, we LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went. The CNN-part was beautiful, don’t get me wrong, Stevie Wonder was singing and he rocked. But somehow those two, Social Media with Old Media, didn’t seem to mix at all.

In the Netherlands, when I grew up, we had a TV-station, called The Box (later bought up by MTV, which now has a Music-TV-monopoly in the Netherlands), which allowed people to sms in and request songs. That later evolved to a system, that still exists, I think, of sending messages via sms to the channel, which would play while a song was playing. If I say “Dutch boy or girl, I LOVE you,” I think you get the general idea of how that went.

I can see the attraction. It must be incredibly addictive to try and get your message on the air, to get your 140 characters of fame. And it felt exactly the same with the Facebook+CNN thing, where it seemed more like Facebookers were competing for air-time with themselves and with the unforgiving flow of the live-video station.

As a TV-sceptic—I’ve stopped owning a TV as an adult, and switched to the more geeky (I know…) XBMCs and the internet—I would be more than happy to see this medium go, but I also understand that this 79 year old tradition of sitting absolutely still with a TV-dinner will not go without a fight. The Micheal Jackson + TMZ scoop aside, Big Media still has a higher budget to be quicker and (maybe!) more relevant than small & new Media alternatives are.

Is the Internet the direction to take, however? I think I just made a case that the, still addictive quality of a few seconds of fame (Twitter is the perfect example that we haven’t evolved passed that yet), makes for a somewhat effective marketing strategy for Big Media.

I think that TV is also relentless and monotonous. It does not allow you to switch contexts, it’s a non-stop flow of information, and it doesn’t care about making you waste 15 min. of each hour with senseless advertising. In that sense, it is the complete anti-thesis of the Internet, which has already delivered on the promise of complete user-control (compared to the Old status quo, at least). TV doesn’t care about you, except for your continued presence in front of the tube, and while Internet companies really want the same, we at least have found ways to get around that.

In that sense, I think that anyone with some sense of wanting to keep control over their own life, will continue to turn away from TV. I like watching it, don’t get me wrong, but on my own time and without commercials. The future of Television will either to stay unchanged, reserved for the traditional folk too tired to want to think / interact, or it will be a mash-up of video (e.g. I have 3 min. to waste, I want Stevie Wonder only, without the MJ burial thanks, and on my watch television.)

End musing.
Vincent (can’t stop signing my name, sorry, (my) blogging feels more like writing a letter than anything else.)

Unlike

Blogging’s not dead, but it’s pretty damn unrewarding

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:47:29 +0000

In the last two years, I’ve seen more and more people in my social circle starting blogs. Most of which were focussed on a micro-topic, including travelling to South America, to Japan, having a baby, self-help topics, and team-dynamics. All of them with merit, but about 80% of them ran out after a while. What is the problem? How about: finding the inspiration, not getting (m)any comments, balancing it with your actual job, etc. etc. Also, the baby eventually grows up, you eventually return from your trip, and there’s only so much to say about self-help (in my opinion).

But while our perception of blogging has changed over the years, particularly if you listen to early adopters, you could say that in a way blogging has become a mainstream phenomenon. Mainstream not meaning that everyone does it, but that everyone can do it. And the reason for that is I think the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, which is a gateway onto other services (incidentally, not many Facebookers I know that started a Facebook-only blog).

Sure, many companies have entered the game, several blogs have become companies, and many personal blogs have been closed or abandoned. Consolidation and commercialisation often means that there is no more space for the little guy. But, who cares right? You could still set up 10 blogs in the next hour and nobody would stop you. It’s just, nobody would probably read you, unless you write a really good blog + advertise it a bit. But while traffic is clearly a currency of blogging, as are comments, it does not seem to be driving the adoption of blogs in the short-term.

Looking at the current blogging landscape, I can only conclude that blogging is far from dead. But is is perhaps best to be aware that every blog is not the same. Just take a look at the following categories that I have identified, which I am sure is not a complete selection. There’s:

The micro-topic blogs, which get started every so now and then, run out after a while, but don’t discourage others from starting their own.
The small business blogs, for professionals and SMEs seeking to differentiate themselves. Whether these blogs can continue to exist, I think, all depends on whether they can reconcile their short-term profit goals (and needs) with the long term benefits of blogging, which are far from clear (please don’t take 37 Signals as an example that all SMEs should blog).
The small media-blog, which is what the Techmeme 100 is all about and which will never go away, as it’s a low-cost competitive approach towards battling/replacing big media.
The big media-blog, which is really a hybrid of journalism and opinion, neither of which will ever go away.
The corporate blog, which, similar to the small business blogs, still needs to find a raison d’être for itself. Exceptions are companies that already work on the web, like Google, IBM, Microsoft, O’Reilly.
The small and large (web-)celebrity blog, which for some is just ego-stroking and for others is an artistic outlet, both of which are justifiable, not only to the people who write them, but I think is also a big driver for the new blood in the blogosphere.

Clearly, no matter what people may say about the rise of micro-blogging and social networks, the blogosphere has become a complex beast, one that continues to attract attention, whether it’s in the form of traffic, comments (those 2 aren’t correlated on Tech IT Easy), or perhaps simple hype.

Blogging is dead, yay, now let’s get blogging!

Vincent

P.S. This marks the 5th anniversary of my blogging, which started in the Summery of 2004. How the time flies by.
P.P.S. Picture is of the St. Louis Gateway Arch, and is meant to be symbolic.

Unlike

Is it time for a more responsible internet?

Vincent van Wylick — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 20:39:35 +0000

On Friendfeed, we were discussing the hate that Micheal Arrington has been receiving and what caused it all. My stance was that, while I really have nothing against Arrington and think he’s an intelligent human being, the fact that he writes often opinionated posts on Techcrunch, one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, means that he will be exposed to much criticism.

I called it “many little needles can make for a sharp object,” and it made me wonder about whether it is even possible to avoid doing this to people. Some of use have gotten used to posting much of our thoughts and opinions online, so much so that we may eventually and unconsciously be provoking a powerful reaction that we are not expecting.

In a way, it’s very easy to distance yourself from other people online. On Twitter, you can unsubscribe from people who tweet too much or the wrong content. Same on other social networks. On blogs, you can easily insult other bloggers, or post an insulting comment anonymously. People are, by their nature imperfect, but to manage information overload (my excuse) we seek to find the perfect individual, who will only post interesting content. No such person exists, except maybe as an organisation, but those are few and far between.

On the other side of the fence, I wonder about Arrington’s words today, where he notes that people are starting to become more open about their insults, using their own name (ironic, since his own post could be construed as such). And how a few well-placed insults can quickly lead to a mob-like movement.

Will we eventually reach a threshold? Will something drastic happen that will make us all just shut up? Will the “social” internet implode at some point because someone got fired, or worse, dies? Who is watching the watchmen—the watchmen being you and me, who are supposedly, by our clicks, diggs, comments, and “voices,” regulating who is being read or not; is someone regulating us?

OK, enough insidious posting for one evening, which is, incidentally, not my style at all. I kind of fear getting an answer to these questions.
Vincent

Unlike

What I'd like: a spoiler-and annoyance-free web

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:06:14 +0000

I seem to have made some people upset by a comment thread I started on Friendfeed yesterday. My stance was as follows:

The reason being that Friendfeed has become very forum-like with people forming relationships, writing how Friendfeed changed their life, how they just had triplets, etc. etc.… all stuff an a**h*le like me doesn’t care about.

Other “thoughts” were about the super-spammy #spymaster tag…

Apparently this spymaster is the new hot techcrunch-worthy thing on the internet…

…and about the problem of avoiding spoilers about movies when the inter-continental release-date are so drastically different:

I hate, hate, hate it when people spoil movies or books or anything really.

What all of these problems have in common that the web is a fairly unfiltered mess of vocal thoughts, opinions, and of course spam. With user-generated content far surpassing regulated media (you know, the kind where you need a degree and sources to write an article…), it’s nearly impossible not to come across something annoying.

What I’d like:
Simply: an extension for Firefox (I guess…) that prevents you from seeing things that you put on a block-list. It has to be a little intelligent. For instance, if before seeing the Star Trek movie, I’d like to not read about it, it should be able to identify whole paragraphs or blog posts that deal with this topic.

More simply, banning any tweet that mentions the #spymaster tag or otherwise, etc. etc. And more complex, the ability to ban content about babies and all things that evil people like me don’t want polluting their rss-feeds.

Too much to ask? I don’t know. Too rude to ask? Probably… Logical? Definitely.

Vincent

Unlike

A (Sci-Fi inspired) vision of Facebook's (or equivalent) future

Vincent van Wylick — Thu, 14 May 2009 08:40:07 +0000

OK, admittedly I’ve gone a little Facebook-crazy, ever since I joined the service ca. 2 years ago. Not Twitter-crazy, as in adding millions of friends, but an infatuation based on real value, the ability to organise activities and communicate with long-lost friends. And definitely not as crazy as the future I envision for Facebook or what I call *real friend*-based social networking™.

Phase 1, five years from now: Real-time

Imagine Google talk’s new innovation, video chat through the webplayer. Also imagine perhaps the most annoying internet-phenomenon of all: “voyeur TV,” made most famous (to geeks) by the likes of Justin TV and other Lifecasters, not to mention Survivor and Big Brother.

Where I see Facebook going in just a few years, is that you tune into a profile and if your friend allows it, you see a live feed instead of a static picture. Already, when I met old friends in Maastricht a few weeks ago, I thought how cool it would be to track a person’s physicial changes real-time on Facebook, instead of seeing what they *want me to see*.

The flaw: most people aren’t that comfortable showing unfiltered feeds. The opportunity: everyday, we’re becoming more accepting of the lack of privacy that the internet provides. The reality: probably a mix of both, where users give consent and only operate the camera when they feel like it.

Phase 2, ten years from now: in your living room

Picture the two innovations that Apple has essentially made mainstream. One, a camera in every electronic device. Two, training users to abandon the keyboard, through the iPhone and now multi-touch gestures. Repeating something I wrote before: this video-review, where a journalist compares typing on the EEE PC vs. the iPhone, at insane speeds in an all-terain vehicle, was really eye-opening how well that “virtual” keyboard works on the iPhone. So much for my first post on the iPhone app-store, that “the iPhone is just for games“…

My vision of a connected society in 10+ years is not that we all become experts at typing. The PC has always been designed by and for geeky engineers and we’ve had to put up with it because there was simply no other choice. Instead, I see every TV, every device perhaps, internet-enabled, in which we manipulate by simple gestures, a shake perhaps, the push of a single button…

In the future, I see people turning on their TV and tuning into Facebook and chatting with their friends as if they came for afternoon tea.

Phase 3, twenty years later: holofriends

In “Avatar,” the new movie by James Cameron, 13 years in the waiting, the story is that people use avatars to explore strange new worlds. In the real world, James Cameron is developing technologies that can capture actors’ facial expressions to the nth degree, and offer a real time preview into how that would look like post-production. Take that together with ca. 2000 cinema screens in the US that have been converted to 3D and perhaps you see where my thinking is going. In a few decades, both the motion-capture technology and the 3D one will become affordable, already 3D filming is a matter of tying two HD-cameras together, and eventually 3D screens will come to our living rooms,… perhaps enabling us to see and interact with hologram friends from Facebook?

Imagine, jogging with a Facebook friend, having your mom “virtual hug” you after you were dumped, having virtual se… ok, now I’m going to far!

Phase 4, fifty years into the future: I’m alive, I’m alive!!!

In the future we will be able to speak to dead friends and family members. Morbid? Perhaps it’s better expressed as, in the future we will live forever, at least digital versions of us.

But perhaps the 300 MB sized data encompassing our brain, as envisioned in the Battlestar Galactica sequel, Caprica, isn’t quite so realistic. Instead, a $100 million Paul Allen foundation, called the Allen Institute for Brain Science, is using digital technology to slice, dice, and capture what our brains are made of. It’s quite sad, because so far they are finding that the data is so excessive and so “personal” (every brain is different!!!), that they don’t yet know when, if ever, they will have finished capturing the brain.

But what is certain is that, eventually, we will develop an understanding of what makes us tick, and perhaps, perhaps, develop technology to transfer our memories to a machine. And when that happens, what’s to stop people from signing up to live forever? And imagine the pressure then coming from friends and family members to experience those memories one last time, and again, and again. It would be the rebirth of a more morbid social network, finally.

Final thoughts

None of this has to be Facebook-powered of course. But there’s no denying that wherever the internet is going, it will be built on more interactions between people, between real people, not these quasi-friendships strangers make on Twitter, mostly for selling and customer support purposes. And right now, as far as those *real* relationships are concerned, Facebook is king.

The end… or the beginning?

Vincent

Unlike

The reason why I love Facebook so much

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 05 May 2009 07:33:34 +0000

Arguably, my case is one in a million. Being the man with “no nationality” (that’s the way Jeremy introduced me on this blog), I’ve spent the larger part of my childhood being in international schools. There’s a funny aspect to those kinds of schools, something I’ve only seen reproduced in certain multinational companies and when going on an exchange year at uni. It’s that a type of island forms around a community and regardless of the class or social circle you’re in, you start forming deep bonds with people. I’ve considered many of high school classmates family members, even now, many years after graduation, but those bonds have to carry across national boundaries, continents, and different time zones.

Facebook has been an amazing tool in this process of re-discovering past bonds with classmates and, to some degree, continuing my more recent relationships. It doesn’t strengthen that which was never there—people in my contact-list, who I’ve not exchanged more than a few words with in the past, don’t automatically become better friends on Facebook. Instead, it’s little things, like seeing someone’s holiday pictures, the status update of a friend buying a hat (is that a mid-life thing?), wishing someone a happy birthday and back, and writing long, reminiscing private messages, all of which create a series of anecdotes, which, when you actually meet your friends physically again, bring much laughter to those moments.

When I started coming on Facebook, we used it to set up two groups for Tech IT Easy, one internal, one external, neither of which worked very well. Why, when we already have this blog + an effective email system?

Now, more than a year later, I use it to set up a reunion for people I haven’t seen in over 10 years. The group isn’t seeing much activity, apart from the membership-numbers, instead we use Facebook’s messaging system, Google’s free survey-tool, as well as Skype and email for the organisers, to manage this medium-sized event of ca. 100 people coming from all over the world, at, so far, zero cost and minimal effort!

This truly is an amazing innovation, perhaps best appreciated by someone coming from a time where we didn’t have personal computers (until I was 15), the internet (until I came to uni), or mobile phones (until I was 20). Whatever the case is and whatever negative things people have to say about Facebook, I am very glad it has come to my and my friends’ life.

Vincent

P.S. My next post: envisioning a science-fiction like future for Facebook.

Unlike

Favourite Web Tools to start 2009 with

Vincent van Wylick — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:32:34 +0000

I’m going to be a little unoriginal and echo Michael Arrington with this post here, where I generate a list of my main web tools for 2009. My list is actually a lot shorter than his—for one, I’m not that “social” and also still seem to be hooked on working through desktop apps on my Mac.

The list:

Twitter is still hard to define for other people that ask me about it. I don’t use it as a chat-client much, rather I use it as a push-mechanism, that aggregates all links from my blogs and bookmarks, as well as some micro-thoughts.
FriendFeed is more of a chat-client for me, I like the centralised comment interface, love the rooms, and also use it to feed all content to it. It’s also a big source of news for me, while I read Twitter less and less (except for those people I pulled into FriendFeed, of course).
Delicious is mainly for bookmarks that I can use through the great Firefox extension, but I also feed the ‘techiteasy’ tag to the @techiteasy channel on twitter for instance. A secondary bookmarking system is Netvibes and FriendFeed likes.
Netvibes is my rss-reader of choice, because it isn’t linear like Google reader and allows me to get a quick overview of what’s playing in the world. I also use it to read my mails and have twitter, friendfeed, facebook, etc. clients embedded in widgets.
Facebook is my address book for friends, a tool I use to arrange meetings, and to check what’s going on in the lives of people that are close to me. I rarely use apps on it, except for a birthday calendar one.
Gmail is a reliable mail-client, period, and one I use as a backbone for even my own domain-mail.
WordPress is Tech IT Easy. I personally never use its dashboard, preferring to compose posts in Marsedit for the Mac.
Blogger is all of my other blogs (at the moment 2, previously around 4) and a very reliable service that doesn’t annoy me with script-blocking or similar. Some would call it blogging for kids, of course, but I don’t mind. I see it more as the gmail-version of blogs.
Picasa is the backbone for publishing pictures on blogger, I don’t really do web-based picture collections anymore, except through Facebook.
Google.com, I nearly forgot. It is, next to netvibes, the most visited website for me and essentially what connects me to every website out there.
I’d like to list a list of news sites, unfortunately I feel that rss and Twitter/Friendfeed have commoditised the idea of news sites and severely restricted my loyalty to only a few aggregators and sites, including BBC news, Techmeme (less and less), and Hacker News (more and more).

The following list consists of tools that I use online, but much more infrequently.

Last.fm and favtape.com for music
Tinyurl for rickrollling people
Printwhatyoulike.com for ink-efficient printing
Google docs, mostly for designing surveys, though the paid version of surveymonkey.com is much better
Youtube and Google Video, for music-videos mostly
Translate.google.com, a very handy tool to translate websites and the occasional work-doc.
Twitterkeys for talking like this: The ♨ of success does not always = ✌, ♥, and ☯
Search.twitter.com, mostly for finding out who said something about @vincentvw.

What are some of your favourite tools for 2009 and why do you use them?

Vincent

Unlike

LeWeb '08 Conference sucked big time

Jeremy Fain — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:19:56 +0000

I attended LeWeb, a conference dedicated to…the Web industry, almost 2 weeks ago in Paris. I apologize not to have blogged before, but December was a frantic month, business-wise, and I wish I could blog during the conference but as you may have read on the blogosphere, there was no Internet. On top of that, I wanted to leave some time before I blogged to check whether my words would soften.

I arrived at Le Web, investing a lot of time (2 full days) and money (more than EUR 800, that is to say around USD 1100 – which is a lot of money for what I got), with very high expectations, and I have to say that this conference was a huge disappointment to me. Actually, it was more of a disappointment: I actually found Le Web ’08 conference to be a huge piece of crap. Here’s why.

The organizers: Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur

Prior to the conference, I was a big fan of Loïc Le Meur. The guy looked like Midas to me: everything he touched became gold. The guy gets people lining up to invest in his startups (look at his list of investors in his last startup Seesmic here, impressive). Loïc understood that blogging was going to be big before everyone, and positioned himself accordingly (a huge blogger and founder of Six Apart, the editor of TypePad). Loïc is also an early investor in LinkedIn, my favorite web app, and recently founded and funded Seesmic that I find to be a very cool video conversation platform. Well, the guy seemed to be the perfect investee for VCs, and the perfect investor for entrepreneurs. However, when it comes to organizing conferences, I would tend to say it’s not there yet. Loïc and his wife Géraldine have been organizing the Le Web event for something like four years. Last year already, criticism had emerged, but overall comments were positive. Well, after attending one Le Web conference, I can only blame myself for not having due diligenced better: I wasted my time and my startup’s money.

The theme

Love. This year’s Le Web conference was about love. At first sight, I found this theme brilliant – too bad the idea wasn’t well executed. Love is a universal value that is only discussed in novels and Vogue. Plus, Love is the perfect theme if you want to think an outside-the-box conference program. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case at all. Although there were a number of supposedly quality speakers, most didn’t actually mention the theme, and I guess some didn’t even know that the theme was Love (Marissa Meyer of Google, Didier Lombard of France Telecom, Maurice Levy of Publicis, to name some of them…). I think it’s a big waste, because having a truly deeply-thought consistent program around Love, with at least some continuity between speakers, could’ve made of Le Web a truly mainstream event rather than just a reunion self-proclamed visionaries.

The speakers

Speaking of self-proclamed visionaries, I had a hard time looking for new ‘stars’ on Le Web panels. Or even just interesting content.

Paulo Coelho is a brilliant man, but he had nothing to do at Le Web: his speech didn’t bring anything new, it was self-promotion, and an uninteresting one as a matter of fact. Same with Susan Wu from Ohai, preaching her church (virtual goods): boring slides, boring intervention.

Didier Lombard was absolutely out of scope too. He basically paid to get on stage. And you could feel it.

I was very disappointed by Maurice Levy from Publicis (and by the questions asked by Loïc Le Meur: boring) – the guy could’ve given us interesting insights on web advertising. Instead, we had a boring “fireside chat”, as they say. I liked one thing about Maurice Levy though, he publicly gave his email address saying he was looking for startups to invest in.

Startup competition updates were extremely repetitive; the only thing you could here was “despite the crisis, there are still a lot of innovation around; I’m thrilled by what I saw in the startup competition room”. Except that when you looked at the jury in the room, they were all on their Blackberry or iPhone aswering emails.

I liked Yossi Vardi, Chris Anderson, John Buckman (good tips for entrepreneurs), Marissa Meyer (a few insights on the Google roadmap, like wanting to take Chrome out of Beta) & Joi Ito though.

The sponsors

Le Web’s official sponsor was no company else than Microsoft, the tech giant that probably least understands the Web provided the very poor quality of its online applications, like Hotmail, or its total absence of the collaborative web apps landscape outside its expensive minority stake in Facebook. The good news is, Microsoft folks are smart asses and let some selected startups (some of them embedding no single Microsoft technology) demo their applications rather than demo Microsoft products. Microsoft alone paid Le Web USD 110,000 or EUR 80,000 to get its brand on top of others, rent a lounge space, and get speaking time.

Google also was a sponsor of Le Web – they had Microsoft move first when it came to getting the “official sponsor” title. Google had a special room dedicated to presenting its own stuff during day 1. Nothing new there, except that Google brought in speakers on a number of topics like Adwords, APIs, etc. I guess the fee also included the 2 keynotes Google got. If I were Google, I would, to ensure a maximum buzz around my brand, not attend or sponsor Le Web. That would make the entire conference speak about the absence of Google whilst the whole web revolves around the Google search engine. Google being a sponsor amongst others makes of it a regular company. Too bad.

There were other partners, like SwissCom that sucks big time (they had a booth, and did not manage to make the Internet work during the entire conference + Loïc Le Meur says they got paid more than USD 100,000! to make nothing work), Facebook (?), SixApart & Seesmic who got it for free obviously,…and a number of others that are not worth talking about in this not-so-long post.

The budget, the price

1,400 participants x an average of EUR 1,000 per entrance

Sponsoring & demo room for at least EUR 200,000

The overall budget for this 2-day conference amounted to EUR 1,500,000. Yet, there was no wifi running, definitely not enough food for all participants (I had to go grab a sandwich each 2 days), no consistent editorial line, a crowd of people investing time and a lot of money to listen to the same self-called visionaries on stage.

I haven’t paid myself in one year (I live on my fiancée’s salary), every since I started Verteego. I bought myself a ticket to Le Web almost as a Christmas gift, hoping to enjoy a lot. It was a sort of sacrifice (EUR 850 + 2 days of turnover for Verteego – I’m the sales guy there – is hell of a lot of money! the price of a superb laptop or a great long weekend, say, in Venice) but I was plenty of hopes. The least I could say even 2 weeks after the conference is that I have a very angry feeling at myself: I feel I’ve been financially abused. And I lost two days of hard work during an important period.

The place, and the temperature…

Well, it was free-zing. Which is okay for me, except that with so many people inside, there must have been a sort of natural warmth, which wasn’t the case. I felt this place had the worst energetic efficiency in Paris. This absence of environmental awareness stroke me: the second day, it was warmer. I couldn’t believe how much energy was used to heat the place. I am very disappointed by the overall lack of consciousness of web entrepreneurs for environmental issues: if you are really about changing the world, then you should think about measuring their environmental footprint and take action to reduce it from one year to another & compensate the remainings. But they sure didn’t. And I’m not writing this just to sell Verteego Carbon here: I just don’t understand entrepreneurs to pretend they want to change the World and who don’t care about behaving socially & environmentally responsibly. I think that Le Web, an event that took place in Europe at the same time as the Poznan conference (pre next Kyoto talks in Poland) AND which theme was Love, was just perfect place to ensure Social Responsibility and Sustainability became buzz words in the blogging, startups & VC microcosm. Géraldine & Loïc completely missed the train here.

The startup competition

I didn’t apply to the startup competition. I felt it wasn’t right to make startups pay EUR 1,500 for just a pitch. I was wrong in doing so. The startup competition was probably the only interesting thing during this conference. I paid, as I said, EUR 800+ to go to Le Web Paris ’08 and basically meet with friends. It would’ve been worth paying the double to try and get 7 minutes to pitch Verteego in front of around 300 people. That makes it 5 euros per viewer’s attention, + the backlinks, visibility, and blog coverage you could get later on. Not applying to the startup competition was perhaps my only regret. And that would probably be the only reason I would attend next year.

The food

It was a shame. There’s no other word for it. I could get no food at all, not during the first day, not during the second day. The first day because there was none left. The second because there was no vegetarian food! Both days I went outside for a sandwich. I could then make friends because people were coming to me to ask where I had gotten this.

Worse: during Day 2, I needed to drink water during the day because I caught a cough during Day 1, because of the cold. And I was basically given a negative answer, because the bar was opened neither at 11am, nor at 3pm (which actually made me leave the place). You get 1500 people pay EUR 1000 on average, and there’s no food, and no water???

The Internet

There was very little Internet during the whole conference. Here’s a recap of this lousy situation: not only were you locked in with boring old speakers & because of the price you paid, you couldn’t answer client requests, or blog because of this.

Loïc Le Meur wrote an apologetic post, but I found this post actually ridiculous for him: Le Web gave EUR 100,000+ to SwissCom not to get a service. The excuse is: no provider is used to so many attendants. This is untrue: the very week before Le Web, I attended a huge (20,000 visitors per day!) Trade Show, Pollutec, in Lyon. And there was perfect Wifi.

The attendants

Obviously, I met with many of my existing friends, and I was glad to. I also met with new people from everywhere around the world. Lots of great people there, from everywhere around the World. But come on, at what price…Furthermore, the mindset was rather negative: people weren’t ambitious or optimistic. They should be: the crisis is a great opportunity to move fast whilst remaining lean.

The TechCrunch party

It was so-so, I was disappointed and angry: 1) I had bought my business partner (who hadn’t attended Le Web) a EUR 30 ticket, to be told at the entrance that a pass to Le Web was worth 2 entrances. I think it should’ve been explained somewhere because I basically wasted EUR 30 with no possibility to get a refund. 2) I waited for 30 minutes outside, in line, to get in. And during this time I saw 2 groups of people showing up in front and squeezing the line: I found this very abnormal, because the Web is about democracy, having all the same access to information. 3) the place was very small, but this is less of an issue.

Conclusion

For the price I paid, I got very little value back (basically, the only benefit of Le Web was that I got to see many of my friends in very little time). Rather than apologizing, and provided the HUGE profits this conference made, I believe not reimbursing participants for providing no wifi, no heating, and no food services is irresponsible at that cost. I repeat: rather than blame their food supplier, Swisscom or the Cent Quatre (for the heating), I think Loïc & Géraldine Le Meur should’ve refunded participants for providing such a low standard service rather than making this huge profit (I also think they should display publicly the P&L of the conference). This is the least they could’ve done since giving me back 2 days of work isn’t physically possible. Loïc and Géraldine Le Meur didn’t show any social responsibility here, no respect for their customers.

Last, but not least, those who are not going to complain about Le Web ’08, both in terms of organization and content, are either those who didn’t pay anything to attend, or those who paid so much that blaming the event would make them look stupid.

Unlike

Are web businesses above the law?

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:50:32 +0000

Meet AddressBookSync, a simple Mac-app created to synchronise pictures and trivial (birthday) data from Facebook with the local Address book the Mac. This is about as much as you could possibly get out of Facebook, without infringing on the terms of agreement that you agreed too (probably without reading) when signing up to Facebook.

And meet my other friend, LinkedIn’s AddressBookExport, which allows me to place all of my contacts into the, again, more useful Address Book on the Mac.

Now, I can take that address book and import it back into Facebook. But I cannot do it the other way around.

Maybe I’m being too European about this, but it seems logical that this should be a law. These are your contacts; there’s a mutual agreement between both parties to come into contact. That same agreement might not exist regarding me importing their addresses into Facebook (Still have to read those TOCs), but Facebook still allows it.

We all get why they don’t allow the opposite. They don’t want me to take my contacts with me to some other social network. Because it isn’t a utility like LinkedIn, but more like a gym-membership, with lots of fun activities to do onsite.

But seriously, shouldn’t this be a law, and if so, why isn’t it being implemented?

Vincent

Unlike

My morbid mission for Facebook !

Vincent van Wylick — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:06:09 +0000

Just briefly! Just spoke to a long-lost friend of mine who called me out of the blue and tried to explain it to him. I feel very strongly about Facebook, not because I think it’s a great service—it’s no surrogate for real friendship, that’s for sure—but because it works well for people like me who have moved around a lot internationally over the years.

Everyone I collect in Facebook—and I sometimes do feel like a coin-collector—is someone that I have shared an experience with. Whether it’s my family, kindergarden-friends in Germany (none yet, I’m afraid), highschool-friends in the Netherlands, uni-friends in the UK, bloggers on Tech IT Easy, etc. etc. I want to keep a life-line connected to all of them.

Why? Well, I have a master-plan, which is that when I die, you will get sent an invite to my funeral !!! As a matter of fact that would make a great facebook-app, I think!

Now it really is the weekend! Enjoy it, folks!

Vincent

Unlike

Why people "UnFollow" me on Twitter

Vincent van Wylick — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:56:51 +0000

Some time ago, I promised to stop writing about social networking, except if there is some tangible data involved. Well, I’ve been using Twitter for over a year now, FriendFeed for a few months, and a new service, called Qwitter, for a few weeks. Qwitter’s raison d’être is the topic of the day today.

What Qwitter does is tell you when people stop following you on Twitter. I fear that many people won’t be interested in using it, as there is a natural bias towards the positive. And Qwitter’s core-business is providing you with negative news.

Still, I saw my follower-numbers (currently at ca. 120) going up and down regularly, and I was curious about why this is happening. And the answer is pretty simple:

What Qwitter does is send you a mail-message with the name of the person “qwitting” you, as well as the message that may (or may not) have been the instigator. So far, I received 8 of these, with one person unsubscribing from me three times (!), and one celebrity unsubscribing from me, Guy Kawasaki.

The one that “got away”

Why do I say that people unfollow me, because I don’t follow them? I think the data says a lot.

Subject 1, let’s call him J., follows 2,447 and is followed by 2,393. He unsubscribed from me, when I said: “@ksilvennoinen welcome back to the internet!“
Subject 2, let’s call him G. (has been trying to subscribe to my LinkedIN and Facebook as well, btw. He follows 1,868 and is followed by 1,132. The Twitter-message: “P.S. to my blogpost: 2nd Antarctic explorer turned public speaker that I’ve heard. Superb motivational speakers. Living life 2 Xtreme rocks!”
Subject 3, let’s call him R., follows 2,225 and is followed by 2,106. The Twitter-message: same as above.
Subject 4, let’s call him J3. (the guy who unsubscribed 3 times), follows 219 and is followed by 331. The Twitter message: “sipping Bacardi and writing a presentation for tomorrow.“
Subject 5, let’s call him M., follows 1,611 and is followed by 1,482. The Twitter message: “Today, German shepherds with machine guns on their backs killed me 34 times. Guess what game I played?“
And, the cream of the crop, the Alltop-guy, Guy Kawasaki……… follows 24,104 and is followed by 24,058. The Twitter-message: “I long for the day where the letters PeeCee stand for P**sEasy (no joke).“

Now, you may notice three things. One, that my Twitter-messages are pretty entertaining… Two, that most of these guys follow a lot of people. And three, that there is nearly perfect parity between their followers and who they follow.

What is your problem?

“What is your problem?” you might ask. “Following back is only polite.” I agree to an extent, and I appreciate if people follow me back. But I don’t expect it! For one, why do I use Twitter? To keep track of things, like my friends and news-items. Some pretty interesting links come across my screen every once in a while. If I need to talk to people, I’ll say stuff, but those people I want to talk to, I have their email-address. Talking on Twitter is not my motivation.

The other side of the coin is that if someone follows 24,000 people and you are 24,001, you get a very tiny portion of the attention that you deserve as an individual. It’s nearly the same as saying as “I don’t really follow you at all.” Imagine what that person’s screen must look like? 3-4-10 messages per second? So, I don’t, on principle, follow anyone that is following more than let’s say 200 people… Unless they actually say something meaningful as well.

Many people who follow 1000s though are a. in social media/marketing, which automatically makes them less interesting to me (because there are just so many of them), and b. respond to so many people that I find it very hard to judge the quality of their “original thinking” by looking at their Twitter-feed.

Why do I write this post?

Because I want to make people aware that if you do follow me, please don’t expect me to follow back automatically. And if you want to get my attention, a good start is to *talk to me,* you know, use the @-symbol!? And third, if possible, make the content original. There’s so many social media marketeers out there, it’s not even funny. Be original, be fun, talk to me, I’ll be there.

The irony of it is, do I really expect someone that treats their Twitter-follows & followers with so little respect to read my blogpost?

Unlike

Google Chrome and when vertical integration rocks

Vincent van Wylick — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:47:56 +0000

“Ouch, it hurts, it hurts!” … “Oh yeah, that feels good, so good!” Guess which one is all other browsers moaning collectively (Microsoft & Firefox no. 1), and which one is the geeks…

Let me start by saying that Google Chrome rocks! OK, it crashed about 2 mins after I started it, and I think it has a process running in the background, which speeds up the launch, but which I hate, and it is Windows-only, which I hate 100x, but… it rocks! It’s simple, love that, it completely takes in all the bookmarks you had in Firefox, love that, and Gmail, man, Gmail loads like lightning! The browser loads like lightning too, because of the background process, can’t be any other reason.

Gmail’s loading speed confirms it: Google Chrome is Not a browser. Repeat: it is not a browser. It is a Google app-launcher. It is meant to bring the Google ecosystem to Joe Schmoe on Windows, who may know Google, but hasn’t thought about using its calendar, office-suite, or email, for that matter.

It is, to use a buzz-term, an in-the-cloud facilitator, bringing us one step closer to no longer needing computer-processing and storage, but just doing everything (essential) through an internet-connection. I don’t think, I’ve been this excited about a browser since Phoenix (what Firefox used to be called), which was in 2002, 6 years ago.

What’s different? Or what did Phoenix and now Chrome have in common? Phoenix had tabs, it introduced extensions, it blocked the pop-ups that IE never would. It was an evolution over the status quo. Google Chrome is just a browser, built on Safari’s Webkit-engine, with no extensions, but it helps us do what we were already doing, better. Because the world has evolved from the extension-model, it has gone way beyond what a company like Microsoft has even imagined. We live in a world where web-services matter!

I don’t use an rss-reader, I use Netvibes. I don’t use a mail-app, I use Gmail or Facebook. I don’t use a blogging-app (well actually I do, but the majority doesn’t), I use WordPress.com. I don’t use MSN, I use Twitter or FriendFeed. When I’m on my PC, I’m in fact on the web, and the desktop only exists for work-documents and multimedia.

Google bites right into that trend, it executed well (ok, unstable browser, but localised in my language), it is a window in a world that 100s of thousands, if not millions, have accepted as their modus operandi.

Strategic angles

The love for strategy is really just the love for competition, disguised by fancy words.

Microsoft’s unbreakable chain?
Microsoft’s strength in the 90s was its software-platform. It was strong on multiple levels: market leader in OS, market leader in Office. And consequently, and still, market leader in browsers. It was able to build all these pieces of software on top of each other, tie them together, so that it would be an automatic choice to use them all. This is still the case today, as it is, by default, installed on 80% of computers out there (don’t quote me on this). Backwards integration, which also made it the number one choice for businesses, who like having the same software installed on 1000s of machines at once. And forward integration, through Office and IE, which add functionality in the value chain towards the consumer. From IE, Microsoft could build towards ActiveX and .Net, Silverlight, and other web-services that it was selling/giving to consumers.

Displacement by Firefox?
Yes and no… For displacement to occur there needs to be some kind of commercial angle. Firefox was built on top of open source principles, which is definitely disruptive, but it wasn’t until Google came into play, that Firefox became a commercial success. Google, these last few years, became the cash-cow for Firefox and other browsers, through affiliate fees it was paying for the use of the search-box.

While that’s cool, it also placed Google into a power-position. It knew that there was money to be made with browsers, it knew how much money there was to be made, so it just had to make the right move at the right time.

Google power
I already raved on why I think Chrome rocks, but for Google, the situation is actually pretty similar to Microsoft, except from the web towards the desktop, instead of the other way around. It is the market-leader in search, which some say is the operation system on the web. Nothing happens, without it going by Google, which can make or break a business. As is the case for browsers depending on Google cash as well.

Where Google leads is the web, and it has a pretty good read on where user-models are evolving too: web-services, with some anchoring on the desktop. So building a browser makes sense, it’s a step in bridging the value chain from web to desktop. Where it gets scary for Microsoft (which also collects Google cash through IE, I think), is when Chrome-users start getting the hint that Gmail works great, that Google Docs will hopefully work great (offline), etc. etc.

And I’m completely leaving Android out of this, whose future I still find hard to read… but I’m hopeful. Chrome definitely proves that Google can build software.

Doesn’t vertical integration rock? Doesn’t Chrome rock? I think they both do.

Vincent, the fanboy. Out.

P.S. I’m also not commenting on Firefox’s Ubiquity, it’ll be interesting to see where that goes… also largely built on Google-tech.

Unlike