DISQUS

Hey Robert,

this is where Glubble will help you. We provide parents the tools to support their children discover the web and social networking. Instead of locking children or the computer down, or trying to be the experts for parents, we let parents take the responsibility and build a safe and fun web for their children. This way parents can teach their children to be good citizens in the online world. Glubble is directly integrated into Firefox and comes with safe browsing, search, fun content, twitter, and photo sharing for families, and more.

You can check it out here: www.glubble.com
Or look at this video: http://www.glubble.com/learn_more

Sorry for the plug, but it fits the discussion.

Chris,

I do not consider myself a futurist or an early adopter. My passion lies with First Use. I follow and think about new technologies and I can get excited over the capabilities. But for mass adoption it boils down to a simple question :

Is a user willing to put in the effort to learn about this new technology and incorporate it in his current habits?

The answer to this is that we need a whole lot of perceived value before this will happen. The examples you provide may become true at some point, but right now there isn't any clear indication that it will be the case. The market will decide. I write bout First use a lot, and didn't want to plug a post on it here, but this one fits the topic so to say.

http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/just-b...

Sleep well :-)

Chris,
Sorry but I do not see the advantages other than having another cool app on my mobile. I'm probably not being imaginative but there is no real value yet to be found. This technology has a "coolness" factor to it, but that will wear off as we start using this. Location Based services have been around for a long time. If we get past the "Hey I can watch my friends", or the idea that Retail can spam the hell out of me to bring me an offer when I walk by the store, we currently do not have a clue yet how to make this useful.
As for your story telling or friends annotation example. That will surely be valuable to a specific group of people. But for mainstream users to start changing their daily habits and incorporate this service more value will have to be found.The First Use experience is simply not valuable enough at this point.
We tend to get excited over new technology and Google releasing great things, but forget that the rest of the world doesn't care at this point. The simple question at this point would be if a user would be willing to pay to get access to such a service. I doubt it in its current form.
This could be the start of something new, but that is up to the market to decide. For now, it is just another cool app.

Steven,

an excellent post. It makes me think (again) and I like that. I'm beginning to understand the complexity of the issue you are addressing. I think it is well worth a followup. You have triggered some thoughts I think I will be writing down in a post myself ;-)

Allan, Glubble for Families is very different from a family tree service. We provide parents convenient tools to support their children for their first steps on the web and in social networking. Just like you learn your child to ride a bike, we feel it's important that families have the tools to learn their child to have a fun and safe web experience.
Parents can pre-approve content conveniently from a huge selection of pre-selected fun and safe kids web sites. Children have their own personal Kids Page and can access over 2500 safe and pre-approved web sites. They can search the web, browse, and still be safe. They can chat with the family, play, learn and discover about the web and social networking without the possibility of getting into contact with a stranger.
By extending Glubble for Families into an on-line activity center for families we are evolving the web from a personal activity into a fun experience that involves the entire family. Moms, dads, children, grand parents, cousins and others

Alexander van Elsas
Glubble

Here is a pointer to an article in Scientific American that shows how "easy" it can be to get into someone's bankling account simply by scanning the web for personal information. Scary stuff. (original pointer to me by http://twitter.com/Daan83)

http://tinyurl.com/5lp7m6

Hey, you are on a roll here ;-) Good job, keep those passionate posts coming, that's what I like best about your blog. One thought that comes to mind after reading it is whether you should be looking for new tech companies or technologies. I have found that engaging with a passionate entrepreneur or geek or whatever always leads to great insights. You might try (although you do that often already ) to put focus on the person in the story you tell, instead of the technological capabilities that are being developed. Why is he building it, what makes him tick, where did the idea come from etc. ;-)

So how many people have been paid by Apple to go stand in line there suggesting there will be a run on the product ;-)

I touched it but didn't say it. A perfect complementary train of thought here Steven. Great post! It will be so interesting to see developments in this direction. Really hard to accomplish, but someone will try and have a go at it. What makes it especially hard in my mind is that PageRank s just that, a rank for pages. You can write clean algorithms that. A social media rank needs to take human behavior into account and that makes it more difficult. It is not just the "like" in Friendfeed or the digg of some piece of content. It needs to capture the fragmented conversation that arise around persons or content. The interaction. Sounds like a pretty interesting ranking challenge ;-)

Stephen, congratulations on joining Mashable. Good move Mark ;-)

I believe that for now this type of mobile service is entirely technology driven. We can use GPS, so lets think of a service to go along with it. There isn't a user need for it (unless you are a very cool early,early,early web x.x adopter writing on cool early adopter blogs). Localization technology exists for more then 10 years and there hasn't been a single break through localization service that made it to the masses.

Until someone figure out why we actually need it, I suspect there will be more technological developments, but less mass market appeal.

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!

Off course Twitter isn't used by Silicon Valley people only. But I doubt there are many Twitter users that do not have an Internet or technology background. Which is fine BTW. Twitter will definitely become mainstream because it serves a need. But many web 2.0 services will never make it mainstream, no matter how may early adopters like it.

Robert, good reply. I didn't write the post with angst in mind ;-) What interests me is that so few services ever make it out into the world beyond the early adaptors. The article was more an observation that too many of these services are trapped within the early adopter scene, never to get out of it. Every service needs early adopters to mature and become mainstream. But few actually do. Too many follow the path of hoping someone buys the company once it shows it can hook up early adaptors. And that, in my opinion, isn't a very good business model. Getting it mainstream is much harder (also more profitable in the end).

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.

Sounds like your problem isn't distraction, but too many friends sending you e-mail ;-)

Well, a not so obvious solution to many of these problems would be to leave all data where it belongs. With the user. No need for data portability then. Only a simple agreement on how a user would identify himself to a service that he wishes to make use of (even temporary). If you put the user in charge and let him decide which info he shares with others and which not, it would put most current web 2.0 walled garden social graph data hogging services out of business. We would get a user centric web. A web where you are in charge of your own interactions with others. And social networks would simply become means to interact. I could use any means I want as I have my friends with me.

Good one robert. Was thinking if I should comment on you blog or on FF, I decided on both (which is a shortcoming of FF really);-) I believe that services like friendfeed and Twitter actually help the good stuff appear. In a blog you need lots of readers to be able to spread your message, otherwise it might never be seen. That is why anyone non-professional can't compete with the pro's. But FF and Twitter allow us to send our message across way beyond the number of blog readers. If it's good, someone is bound to hear it and pick it up. It's putting the power back in the hands of the readers really. What happens is that we now are forced to compete on quality and great stories instead of on traffic (the breaking news everyone already knew about), which is a great thing!

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.