DISQUS

See, that wasn't so hard ;-)

Don't worry about keeping up the pace or knowing what it is about. You can always respond using personal experience, just like you just did. Good to see you are joining the conversation on Social Media, don't get lost in it. :-)

Steven, well written and you are right I believe. If we are to believe even half of the doom stories about the Internet breaking down over our social media consumption then someone is bound to start charging both providers and consumers to keep it alive. There is an obvious parallel here in the Mobile World.
Then again, if I'm correct, one of the biggest and most influential infrastructure owners in the world might try to balance out this eagerness to create more revenues by force of the cable companies. It might come as a surprise to some, but I do believe Google has its tentacles out everywhere in the infrastructure. They own fiber cables, immense data warehouses, uncountable servers. I wonder if they would be able to fight of this threat or at least put in some counterweight, as they are in need of a free Internet to run their business model.

Fred thanks. You started the conversation, I just added the interaction to it ;-) We will see more of this in a next evolution of the web. An evolution that will be more User Centric instead of destination centric

Wow, thank you for such a great response to my post! I'm truly honoured you like the stuff I write. Can't get a better compliment from someone who I have been following myself for quite a while now ;-)

I think you did a great job dissecting my post and adding your own views on it. You are absolutely right that freenomics has many, many advantages. Ensuring everyone can have access to services is just one of them (an important one).

"The fact is that I and a large percentage of the people who are on the web don’t have credit cards which is the principal method of payment accepted by any service wanting to be paid. Even today we are locked out of services like iTunes store or many other services that do business strictly on the web. Then as a subset of that there are also people who don’t have any money beyond what they need to keep them floating at the poverty line. Should all these people be excluded from being able to use the web to its fullest?"

Steven, one of the issues on the web is that there isn't a fully integrated payment system that allows anyone to pay when needed. Credit cards are not the way to go on the web imo. There is some innovation to be done there. Just look at the mobile ecosystem. People are used to paying for calls, SMS, they can upgrade prepaid cards, use SMS to pay for services etc. The billing is integrated, but more importantly, we pay because we get value.

I definitely agree with you that there shouldn't be a have and have nots split on the web. But lets run some math here. Lets assume that a social site that does really well on advertisement gets anywhere between $5-10 ad revs per user per year. The question is, if the service really provides value, would a user be willing to pay that amount per year instead of being locked into the advertisement business model? The advantages would be obvious, no more walled gardens or data hogging, but the focus of the service provider would be on user value only. His innovation capacity would be spent on creating new user value. There could be a split between light and heavy users, or a free and premium service. A person with a moderate income could maybe have 5-10 or even 20 of such services running a year.

Another, not so obvious model would be to use the social data as input for the 2 actions where advertisement makes sense. When I'm searching ro buying stuff on the web. Facebook could easily remove ALL advertisement on its site but still monetise the data they have collected from their users. The service would remain free for the users, but Facebook leverages the data in the background as you search or buy things.

"Sorry Alexander - you might like the idea of paying for services but I like having my access to the web and all the services that it lets me use even if that means I have to see ads and companies like Google get even richer. At least now we all have a level ground to work on rather than staring at each other from across the chasm of the technological divide."

This is a perfectly OK choice of course. I don't think or want the next evolution f the web be one where everything should be paid for. But the important services, those that provide user value could benefit from other business models than the current advertisement business model. If Tim O'Reilly gets his social operating system then I can't see the current advertisement model remain the mainstream business model, because the walls of all social service would be taken down and destinations wouldn't be as important any more. Good response!!

I hardly ever write post with less than a 1000 words. I get carried away I guess ;-) Haven't noticed a difference in traffic. There is one exception to this. The posts that really drive traffic are those that discuss the habits of the tech elite. And that always makes me a bit sad. It seems we are more interested in our own little world than about the average web user who gets all these services thrown at him without the slightest clue what to do with that.
But in the end it always works out best if you blog about the things you are passionate about. If it gets you a lot of readers that's great. If it doesn't, well, does it really matter? Traffic is never a good driver for good posts, it's got the be the other way around. So I definitely agree with you on this Colin. Good post.

Very true. But while we might find that in Twitter and FF, the next generation will definitely find its own way. They will take part in public interactions, but I am inclined to think there will be a "revival" to much smaller, more intense, and more immersive communities. But hey, it's just my opinion, can't look into the future ;-)

Hutch, no offense, but your kids will think you are an old fart with weird habits by the time they are teens ;-) Do you really think they will even remotely want to do the same things as their dad :-)

Colin, thank you for writing such a in-depth response, I really like it. Writing about a possible future isn't about trying to make the right predictions. it's more about presenting thoughts so that a conversation about it can start. Well done!
I totally agree with you that the public conversation will not stop. I focused a bit more on my initial thought that once everyone can interact in a public manner, we might see a move back (or forward if you will) to smaller communities. I should have balanced this a bit more with the observation you just made. An interesting side point to this is that I believe that the mainstream web 2.0 business models (freemium and free ads based)are build for large communities. You need to scale big, to the size of Facebook and beyond to remotely become successful with it, or you need to have a targetted niche community. Once the web becomes more social, destinations such as Facebook become obsolete (not the service, just the portal). From that point on, business models need to deal with much smaller and targeted communities. That will enhance the user experience and provide the user and his friends even more value. Well written response!

Good one Mathew. I agree with you. I wrote a post about this a few days ago, in which I argued that web 2.0 technology has made the cost of starting a web service drop to almost zero. That allows anyone with an idea (it doens't have o be a good idea) to start a business. But lowering the thresholds to create new services doesn’t make the process of creating a great service ANY easier. It still requires craftsmanship. Web technology has brought us democracy, but it comes at a cost.

Hi Andrew. Very good analysis. I like it. It helps me understand better how relationships evolve over time. But it also leads to a thin line many services cross in asking themselfes the wrong question. Facebook is doing that too. It shouldn't be about who has the best data or the best representation of relationships. That question originates from a desire to monetize that data, as walled garden services like Facebook are doing. And althought hat sounds great for an investor or service providers perspectinve, it doesn't provide the user any value.

There is a tendency to try and monetize the social graph figuring that the personal data and relationships between people will lead to better advertisement. At the same time this business model enforces walled gardens and a war over data.Again, not in the interest of the user.


There is an obvious but not so simple solution to get out of that advertisement trap. We should be concentrating on the creation of user value, and monetize that, instead of monetizing a social graph. The whole social graph thing is a techie created problem anyways. There is already a place where all your social data is at. It is in your head, and in your daily interactions. You know exactly who is and isn't your friend, how important he or she is to you, and you use all the different means to communicate with them. E-mail, Facebook, phone, anything. A central "address book" might be handy for that, but users cope with that problem already so it isn't a big issue. I feel we shouldn't be focussing on the social graph, we should be focussing on provinding value and facilitating the interaction between people. That is where the money is at.

Hi Mathew, just wanted to let you know I used your ring metaphor and added a small warning to it in a post yesterday. Thought you nailed it really well, nice one!

Well, I'm starting a countdown on the downfall of Facebook as they are going to focus even more on network value instead of user value Increasing ad pressure on the user will turn them away to better and more open alternatives in the end:
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/counti...

Hi Mathew, in relation to this, I like the concept of a river of information that you can plug into if need. I saw a few posts related to this the past few days, so it seems to trigger thoughts all over the web. Doc Searl wrote about it, as did Dave, but also Anna Zelenka wrote a nice article on how the concept of a river flowing stops the idea of us having to deal with an information overload.There are so many ways in which we can discover new information and it seems we are not using half of them effectively yet. link.

Hi Mathew, I was going to write a lengthy comment to Josh but I couldn't comment on the article at the Fortune site itself. But I agree with you that he lacks substance in his arguments. Actually, he has gotten it all backwards. Facebook is NO match for Google. In my opinion Google has been working on a good strategy to become the social web OS, I call it "Google everywhere" for lack of a better name. They have Orkut which drives traffic (especially in Asia, think (payed) mobile services here), they obtained Jaiku adding mobile presence features to social networking sites like Orkut. They have a major stake in RSS with Google reader (and mobile RSS with Jaiku), they can leverage many different platforms for ads, whereas Facebook has only 1 closed system. Note that if Facebook will try to leverage their user-created network with ad pressure, the users will not like that. Google is working on the Gphone, a direct attack on the Microsoft mobile platform, there is talk of a Google PC, need we go on.... Forget Facebook. They won't be able to monetize worth $15Bln (they do about $30mln a year now right, which is ridiculously low for such a large user base). If interested, I wrote about the Google strategy earlier:
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2007/10/09/facebo...