Jonothan Stribling

I really want to delete my facebook account.

I was enthusiastic about the idea after all the changes the Zuck made to “privacy” this year and then I read this polemic by Jason Calacanis about how facebook is evil and the Zuck has Zucked his way to the top.

I was kinda gratified because it meant that my suspicion and anxiety about facebook was felt tenfold over by an industry observer.

It meant that my doubts about the business model were in part justified because eroding privacy for commercial gain is clearly unethical.

And not being transparent about it is very unethical.

Privacy should NOT be opt-in.

A year ago I said facebook was (almost) doomed because of the difference between the sacred and the profane.

After facebook became the most visited US website for a week in March I thought I was completely wrong.

I wasn’t.

Running a massive website is expensive and advertising won’t generate enough of a return for the Zuck so he is monetising his biggest asset – you and me.

I don’t want my private data to be monetised and Zucked up. If I share publicly I use twitter. If it’s a private conversation between friends I might send an email, pick up the phone, send a text or just maybe use facebook.

The problem is that I need facebook. I need to understand if advertising and targeting is more cost effective for certain campaigns than Google.

I need to understand it, to use it for traffic generation, to observe it with a critical gaze.

So I guess I’ve been Zucked after all.

We all have.

Once watching the TV was a complete passive act of slovenly consumption. The evening show was watched while slumped on the couch all senses dulled by the blue rays of the box.

Now watching the TV is only one part of watching the TV. In face “TV events” can be enjoyed by hooking into the Twitter firehose and looking for the right hashtag.

During the Logies, an Australian TV award show for all US folks, I noticed that the digital hipsters at the event were tweeting, that people on the couch were tweeting, that journalists were tweeting.

Everybody was talking at the same time about the #logies. Cracking gags, being outrageous laughing at “the stars”.

And what for?

Comedian Wil Anderson (@Wil_Anderson) attempted controversy by alluding to John Mayer, herpes and his “white supremicist cock”. He passed comment about Michael Slater doing jokes, Sigrid Thornton looking like gollem and something about the Rogue Traders.

It was pretty nasty stuff. Funny when you’re pissed and wearing a dinner suit, not so funny the next day.

Wil Anderson wasn’t the only one trying to be real funny on twitter for free.

Catherine Deveny (@catherinedeveny), Melbourne comedian, satirist and athiest offered such gems as:

“Rove and Tasma look so cute … hope she doesn’t die, too”

“I do so hope Bindi Irwin gets laid”

She now claims that she has been taken out of context.

I am not massively offended by any of the logies comments by Anderson, Deveny or anyone of the other clowns.

In fact I think it’s great that celebrities can be taken down to size by anyone with an attitude, a twitter account and the right hashtag.

And this is just the start.

Twitter TV commentary is taking off in Australia.

The latest series of Masterchef has seen continuous tweeting.

Such was the volume of tweets during ABC’s live discussion show Q and A, that it now publishes selected and topical tweets as a way of engaging the home audience.

It is all a little fun.

What concerns me is that the greater the volume of tweets, the greater the tendency for some commentary to be mindless and involve badly executed irony, cruelty and thoughtless aphorisms.

There are gems to be found, but as Twitter grows they are harder to find.

According to Deveny, Twitter is

“a great challenge for us, to have a sophisticated response to the evolution of communication.”.

That implies that people are actually listening and engaging.

But they aren’t. They are too busy talking shouting.

As a means of cultural commentary Twitter is more like talk radio than the smart coffee chat. They only difference is that rather than being between a moron host and a moron caller there are a gazillion morons all saying the same thing, all crying out for attention, all hoping for a retweet from a celebrity.

If everyone in the room is talking loudly then the conversation is useless and boring.

Perhaps there needs to be a stop tweeting and listen campaign, real-time curation of TV and cultural events and an education program about satire and irony for Twitter to stay fascinating, beguilling and delightfully stupid.

Without that Twitter is doomed to become just a million moronic conversations.

Google just released Google Buzz which has demands that we “go beyond status messages”.

To me this appears to echo the feeling many people had, including me, when confronted with micro-blogging sites like Twitter – so what.

It represents a profound misunderstanding of what a status message actually is. Status messages are really:

• part of a conversation
• the start of a conversation
• a cry for help
• a complaint
• a grandiose aphorism about what’s wrong with the world
• a proclamation of love
• and of course a comedy.

Whilst twitter and Facebook might appear to a Google engineer to be merely a system that accepts, validates and publishes status messages, these sites are much more than than that.

They are communications systems that helps people connect.

Much like email does.

I can see why the Google engineers and product marketing folks decided to use focus on doing more than updating and reading status messages. It is a good spin and a great reflection on Gmail’s strengths, which are that it’s very bloody easy to use and has a huge base of installed customers who are already having conversations.

What is missing from Gmail is a an ecosystem of third party applications which can help me share anywhere I like from practically any device I like.

Of course this wouldn’t sell any advertising.

And this is why I reckon Google wants to “go social”. The more people tweet or exchange Facebook messages the less they email and of course  Google has a reduced audience to display advertisements to.

After a long break from blogging which was sandwiched by two overhyped product releases, one from Google and one from Apple, I am feeling a little fatigued with product releases that are thinly masked market share grabs and do nothing to solve my problems.

And let’s not forget that Yahoo and Microsoft have had similar features for quite some time.

My first impressions from Buzz are that is pretty cool. The user interface is very slick and it is easy to do stuff like attach images, add people, comment, like, post links and browse posts.

My big complaint is that  I cannot update Twitter from Buzz although I can see my tweets in Buzz.

Since Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle introduced the term Web 2.0 five years ago, there has been an explosion of web tools and Internet-connected gadgets that foster conversations, interactions and discoveries.

In the past five years startups have built massive brands by harnessing communities and conversations. Brands like Twitter, Facebook, Stumble Upon, Ebay, Amazon and many others grew massive audiences by offering means for related and unrelated people to connect using Internet technologies. By crowdsourcing these brands provided platforms for collective interactions that create useful and cool tools like book reviews, movie databases, online encycopedias, map annotations, link resources .

There has also been a lot of chatter about what’s next. The teleological nature of the term, Web 2.0, lead some to focus on what web 3.0 might look like. Is it the mobile Internet? Is it the fast(er) Internet?

O’Reilly and Battelle see Web 2.0 simply as “harnessing collective intelligence.”

I always found the term a really useful rallying cry but overall a spurious oversimplification for what the web was always meant to be. Web 2.0 for me is a great epochal term expressing the evolution of how we use and interact with technology rather than a concrete real-world thing. And the danger with epochal terms is that we focus too much on the term, defining and justifying it, rather than the really interesting stuff that helps us understand the intersections between culture and technology.

In a new paper “Web Squared“, O’Reilly and Battelle write about how the web is on a “collision course with the physical world” through a proliferation of Internet-enabled devices, smartphones and real-time
microblogging platforms like Twitter.

For the authors Web Squared is “Web meets World” and they mount a compelling case for web technologies being applied to solve the problems of the world using the principles of “openness, collective intelligence, and transparency”.

I found the article to be both insightful and inspiring. The idea that the web is an entity comprised of devices and the collective intelligence of millions of users, which could be applied to the real problems of the world really speaks to my aspirations and vanity.

I can’t help think that O’Reilly and Batelle are speaking from a very privileged position as elites in the most webified economy in the world and that the global problems including hunger and poverty, drought, global warming, war, slavery, health, corruption and despotism are a long way from being solved by a bunch of well intentioned web developers, designers, strategics, venture capitalists and well-intentioned twitterers.

Not straight away anyway.

There is a direct line between the invention of the printing press and the breakdown of the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe. The opportunities offered by being able to easily and quickly distribute information meant that the monopoly the elite (the Church) had on knowledge was no longer tenable. The consequences of this “revolution”  took hundreds of years to emerge.

My point is that we’re too close, too involved, too emotionally engaged to really see whaat the epochal implications of the Internet revolution are. It is entirely possible that the Internet having been responsible for the breakdown of Western media empires dominance of the distribution of knowledge and information will be the catalyst for the breakdown of the Western economic hegemony. If 80% of the populations of China and India get access to the Internet and relative economic security the world and the web will look completely different. It will be dominated not by the privileged citizens of the West but by the “Other”.

The rise of the Arabic TV network, Al Jazeera and their release of broadcast quality footage from Gaza on a Creative Commons license puts this evolution in real context. I can’t see CNN, the BBC or even the Australian ABC putting their syndication deals at risk.

In fact it could be the case that the real revolution could be the emergence of a new global heterogeneity in the distributiom and consumption of knowledge, rather than the homogenous US dominated Internet. This has less to do with Web 2.0 than multi-lingual domain names and the rise of affordable Internet enabled mobile devices.

When we talk about conversations and interactions, most of us still have what Edward Said would have called an Orientalist point of view: “There are a lot of them and their economy is going well, but we invented Google and the iPhone”.

If we are to have a rallying cry to use the web to solve the worlds problems then it needs to be grounded in those radical ideas that provide the economic tools, including the Internet, to the world’s poorest peoples.

When I was 15 my chief concerns were sneaking cigarettes and my hair. I didn’t read the newspaper, rather I watched the TV news with my parents as bored as hell.

The Berlin Wall was to stand for another 5 years and Ronald Reagan was talking about God a lot, even though he didn’t go to church.

I was opinionated and selfish. Like most teenagers.

The announcement last week that some research about how teenagers consume media released by Morgan Stanley and written by a 15 year old intern was received with breathless excitement.

This kid had apparently clearly and succinctly identified the problem with media and worried European analysts who may or may not have just bought social media stock.

The kid, I may call him the savant, had claimed that teenagers do not read newspapers. Wow! Apparently they watch TV or get their news on the Internet.

Also, the savant and his friends reckon that advertising is “pointless”. Another amazing revelation!

He also claimed that Twitter is for old people not 15-year-olds.

The kids these days do not buy music, the download it for free – because they can.

They also love texting, or sexting if teenagers are still obsessed with sex the way I was.

The “old” media of TV, radio and newspapers are doomed according to the report. Shocking!

The young have always been cynical consumers of media. The fact that the “old” businesses are not relevant to them is a reflection of the short-sightedness of analysts and journalists. I know plenty of twenty, thirty and even forty year-olds who would consume media in the same way that our spoilt son of a banker.

The real issue is that newspapers, radio and to a lessor extent TV do not engage and entertain as much as You Tube, fmylife.com, the XBox or PlayStation or movies.

The “new” media places me in the centre of the universe, firmly in control of what I choose to engage with.

The old media could never offer this. It functions according to an elitist model of control and delivery. All consumers are passive subject, not active participants.

And the process has been happening for at least 10 years when our savant couldn’t spell consume, media or overblown hyperbole.

Sometimes something seems really really good but it’s actually really really bad; stupid in fact.

So stupid that when you realise that it is so, you feel like bashing your head against a wall and cursing the gods while shaking your fist at the sky.

Or something like that.

A “personalised internet address”. Wow. Are you excited. And guess what, you can get one from Facebook. Wow again.

So what does this “personalised internet address” look like? Well, it looks like a facebook URL as in facebook.com/yourusername. Mine looks like facebook.com/jonstribling and I am proud as punch.

Hang on I hear you say, isn’t that just a Facebook URL with a username appended?
And hasn’t Twitter had them for years?

And doesn’t MySpace have usernames and “personalised internet addresses” already?

And can’t I register my own “personalised internet address” as a domain name?

The answer is yes, yes, yes and yes.

That didn’t stop 500,000 people registering usernames in the first 15 minutes and 3 million registering in the first 24 hours.

That is impressive!

So why the excitement?

Perhaps it is simply the fear of missing out and the shameful memory of having to choose a hotmail address like garyrocks97@hotmail.com.

Perhaps it is the wisdom of the crowd (mob)?

Perhaps it is the next big thing in Internet marketing? Will this be the transformative event for Facebook pages?

Perhaps it is just hype and we all feel a little shamefaced, much like the feeling after a huge night out on the rails.

There is no doubt that for companies using Facebook to promote to consumers this may be a good thing. The pages may be more easily found using search engines and some might get lucky with direct type-in traffic.

But for most of the 67 million members all it may do is invite more SPAM and put their privacy at risk. Those folks who haven’t done so should get a their own domain name, get a blog through a good web host, add some Facebook widgets, add their CV and start publishing. Really start personalising the Internet.

The only “personalised internet address” is an address I own the license as in jonstribling.info or markzuckerberg.com. A URL provided by a company which then effectively ‘owns’ my content is not personalisation, it is bloody clever marketing.

Oh, get your real personalised internet address here at registerfree.com.

When I was a kid I loved to surf. Now cruising to the beach with my thruster and catching a few waves was not an easy thing to do when I lived in the middle of the country five hours from the beach. It was frustrating that my nascent surfing skills would develop over summer and then slowly wane during the year. Each beach holiday I would need to learn again.

Google obviously had a window into my frustrations about catching waves, recently announcing Google Wave, “a new model for communication and collaboration on the web”.

Cute metaphors aside the wave looks very promising offering a new way of interacting with others on the web. The Wave offers live editing of documents and chats so you can see what others are typing at the same time. Much like my stop-start surfing career this prevents the sometimes haphazard chats where multiple topics can be confusing and difficult.

There has been a big buzz around collaboration for as long as the web has been around. The web itself is a massive collaboration tool, as is email, social media, email, SMS. The difference with The Wave is that it appears to have the potential to transform how we interact and work with colleagues on documents, how we comment and interact on blogs, how we make a smart arsed comment about Darren’s status update.

Google have made interaction synchronous bringing the fantasy offered by a multitude of tech sci-fi films even closer. The problem with many models is that they are asynchronous, all participants must be equally invested in the conversation for communication to be effective. The Wave doesn’t make it as easy to interact as me having a coffee with a colleague but it makes it easier.

Google Wave is a play that may provide Google with a means to aggregate and ‘own’ social media. It changes the game massively.

Details are still scant at this stage but I’ve signed up for a trial and will be watching The Wave very closely.

Last Friday when Oprah tweeted that she was joining the 21st century some Twitter folk lamented the gentrification of twitter. If Oprah tweets then her legion of middle American fans will tweet and suddenly I don’t look so cool or edgy anymore. Bugger!

The truth is that twitter was already mainstream – Ashton Kutcher and Brittney are not quirky underground artists, they are celebrities through and through.

The concern appeared to be that with Twitter becoming more mainstream it would be harder to become a twitter star. You would actually have to do something in order to be famous for more than 15 tweets.

That’s right there is a real tangible world outside the twittersphere.

In this real world people do stuff, they are experts because they really know a lot about a particular topic like open heart surgery. In this world people engage in business transactions that hopefully make each of them money.

Twitter is simply the brand new thing, and soon it will be yesterdays news. When it is the Warholian twitter experts suspicious and envious of Oprah will need to find another way to be famous.

I first came across Twitter in 2007 and dutifully created an account. Then I looked at the question “What are you doing right now?” and thought “I am mindlessly looking at Twitter”.

The question was a tough one, being a somewhat private person the idea of venting my most personal thoughts online was unthinkable.

A friend joked that the best response would be “having a shit”. He may have been right.

That Twitter could evolve into a rather nifty PR tool, a DM tool (sorry but it’s true) and customer engagement tool did not occur to me. I wish I could demonstrate that I’m smarter than the average bear by having amazing foresight for the Twitter trend, but I can’t and there are enough people doing this already.

I’ve been experimenting with Twitter a little more recently and here are my quick tips.

Work out what you want from Twitter

Is it a research tool, a PR tool, a customer service tool or a tool to tell your mates you’ve been drinking Long Island Iced Teas and need to be picked up from a pool of vomit. Who you follow and the tools that you use will be dictated by your objectives. If you want to use Twitter to research stuff you will have to search for the thought leaders in that field and follow them. Twitter search is a great way of finding interesting stuff.

Don’t be a slut

The tendency for those intending to use Twitter as a PR and lead generation vehicle is to follow as many people as they can in the hope that 50% will follow back and grow their audience. This is SPAM. Looking at the type of businesses engaging in this activity there are a bunch of self-proclaimed gurus, affiliate marketers and get rich quick drop-kicks. These folks have a legitimate place but I don’t want to look like one of them online or on Twitter. I reckon that the old fashioned way is the best way to build your Twitter audience.

Give people a reason to follow you and you will generate better results.

Twitter is not email

If you do a lot of direct mail the tendency is to approach Twitter as a really fast direct marketing tool. This is quite legitimate but needs to be handled in a slightly different way to email. Tweeple expect something instant and of real value. Expecting tweeple to complete a lead gen form on the back of a post will not work. Offering something really engaging and of real value with a lead gen form probably will work.

Variety

Vary your posts so that the people following you are amused, engaged, interested, alerted, informed, alarmed and tickled. The Tweeple following you are just like your website audience and are a bunch of different personas and each will be persuaded differently. Unfortunately I do not know of a great many tools that will help you find out who’s clicking on what and when they do it.

Play nice, but don’t obey the ‘rules’

Twitter is really very simple. You post stuff in under 140 characters and people read it. A grammar has been created by various tweeple to make communicating more effective. Hashtags (#haiku) and retweeting are great examples of creative responses to optimising those measly 140 characters and making twitter more useful. Some people can be a little uptight about the ‘correct’ way twitter should be used. Forget them, there is no bright shining path of correct twitter usage. The only thing you need to remember is that just like you play nice in life you should play nice in twitter.

Twitter has created yet another online diversion. Whilst it can be a great way of putting work off it is also an extremely flexible platform that allows you to quickly connect with an audience, find out information or just be amused.

Tweet you later.

Think about where you played as a kid. It may have been a local park, a suburban street for games of cricket or hockey, a local oval for football, a local pool in summer, a small creek in the country, or in your bedroom hunched over an early gaming console (for me it was the Atari 2600).

Now think about your childhood adventures in the mall or at the movies.

One activity represents an idylic childish innocence and the other a slightly less innocent commercial sphere. To completely bastardise French anthropologist Emile Durkheim one is sacred and the other profane. For Durkheim the sacred is the transcendent and the profane is the everyday.

The contrast between the trascendent and the mundane everyday provides a good metaphor for why I think that Facebook is doomed and social networks do not as yet have a viable business model. Like MySpace before it, Facebook’s spectacular growth will stagnate and it will be overtaken by some exciting new social network.

And it is in the fissure between the sacred and the profane which provides a good example of why Facebook is doomed. Well not actually completely doomed but way over-valued and unable to continue the spectacular growth of the past 5 years.

So why is Facebook doomed?

Originally Facebook was called The Facebook and it provided a new way for college kids to interact, share links, upload photos, express themselves, flirt, vent their spleens, winge, cry and fight.

Being restricted to College students and High School students, Facebook was a non-threatening relatively safe space without the rampent commercialism of MySpace. Plus with the focus on function it looked a hell of a lot better and worked a hell of a lot better than MySpace. As a startup with funding Facebook didn’t have to worry about cluttering their UI with ads.

In 2006, the Facebook people also created a community for application developers called FaceBook Developers who released a myriad of tools to foster the play. Now you could take a quiz that told you which Star Trek character you most resembled.

This play occurred in the equivalent of an idyllic childhood space. Facebook was purely a space for interaction and play. It was the sacred. A place where a bloke from Euroa Primary School found me after 20 years. We didn’t have much to say to each other.

As Facebook got more popular everyone got on board. Kids received friend requests from their parents and workers received friend requests from co-workers they barely knew. Facebook was still a place for play but more a mix of a company BBQ and a music festival sponsored by Scientologists.

With the number of visits skyrocketing in 2007 people started to get very excited about Facebook.  Stumble Upon had been bought by ebay for US$75 million and online valuations appeared to be driven by audience size not revenue or balance sheet. Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share in 2007 for US$240 million theorectically valuing Facebook at US$15 billion. In 2008 Facebook was valued at around US 4 billion.

In 2007 as they hunted for something to do with their massive audience and fulfill shareholders expectations of being bigger than MTV, Facebook stumbled. They forgot about the sacred and shunted into the profane releasing a feature that told my friends when I clicked on a link and bought condoms, laxitives or a present for my girlfriend. Suddenly Facebook was no longer an online space for pure play, rather a tedious food court in a giant mall where my every action was broadcast on a billboard.

Needless to say it bombed. Facebook apologized and continued to rely on text ads and display ads to monetise their audience. Given the audiences focus on play, the ads had a very low ROI. It was a cheap source for traffic but Facebook visitors had a very low conversion rate. If I am stalking my ex-boyfriend I hardly want to click on a get out of debt now link. I’m in stalker mode not save my financial arse mode.

What does work are the Facebook pages. The BurgerKing Whopper Sacrifice campaign was a lot of fun. The thing is that a new page can be setup on Facebook for free. Facebook gets nothing.

Last year Facebook released Facebook Connect which I think is a really useful tool but really only a copy of similar tools from Microsoft and Yahoo. It doesn’t do anything really different.

Facebook recently announced they were going to become the largest market research company in the world. Why not? They have a huge audience of consumers so it does seem a logical way of monetising the poor suckers. I don’t think it will work. I suspect that the analysis provided by FaceBook will not have quite the same authority as the well respected market research companies.

Facebook recently opened their API to allow status updates and queries. This is being seen as a Twitter killer. I am yet to be convinced Facebook just doesn’t have the ‘cool’ that Twitter has.

I suppose it all comes down to the idea that what is sacred must stay sacred and once profaned it is always profaned. Social networks will always have trouble making any significant money because in order to do so they must commercialise the playground and the kids are too savvy to be conned like this.

The problem is that having a huge audience and a great product doesn’t build a great business if you have been giving that product away, Google notwithstanding.

As a user of social networks like Facebook and Twitter I have a vested interest in their success, but as a fan of the transcendental I have deep concerns about their long term future.