Monthly Archives: June 2010

Internet

Mashup your content!

June 25, 2010 –

Imagine the following: you are a designer and wants to make and sell your stuff online. You use a myriad of services available like the ones from Ponoko, Shapeways or Etsy. How do you go about that?
That is a real life question which I hear a lot and is definitely one worth looking into. A lot of services create their own little universe around their specific content or market. But the needs of users go beyond those little universes. But what can you do?

Another example: you have your own blog, you post your photographs on Flickr and you keep everybody up to date on your life on Twitter. But if friends ask you where can I find your photographs or read your blog posts, do you want to point them to you each of these individual services? Or how about your wishlist on Amazon, your favorite bookmarks on Delicious or your movies on YouTube.

A smart person will shout Facebook! right about now. But Facebook is definitely not the answer. It is just the same approach from a different angle. Facebook tries to do everything, but is not that good at anything particular. If you compare Facebook videos or Flickr photographs the service of Facebook is not even in the same universe. Whereby YouTube and the likes offer great services but are quite limited. They only do one thing great.

I am waiting for a service which enables users to bring content together. This service unlocks the content of individual users and enables them to mash them together to create their own little universe. Like Facebook it would enable groups of users to connect their content together create user groups. Just imagine families share their photographs of their last family day or hobbyists working together on their latest project.
While this aggregating mashup service connects content together it also let the content stay at those great services. Because those great services exist because sometimes you want to find content while you do not know the group or individual. You are just interested in the content. Then you would start at YouTube or Flickr to get respectively your video or photo fix.

A lot of the earlier mentioned services offer options to get their content and host it on another site. But there is no standard way of doing this. From a technical point of view there are different options available but there are also terms & conditions to consider. Services just do not allow to use their content in just any (commercial) setting.
To make this happen content should be made available through using standard protocols and interfaces. This is the easy part. It takes convincing and a compelling business case to make this companies move.
But the bigger challenge is to get the internet at large to agree on fair use of that content. Question mark number one is to determine who owns the content? Does YouTube own your video and can they decide what you can do with it while it is on their service or is the other way around and can you determine how YouTube should use your content. Without reading the terms & conditions of YouTube I can guarantee it that they are different than those from Flickr, Delicious, Blogger or Lastfm.

The next barrier of the internet is to break open the little — or in some cases large — universes created around services and enable users to mix content together to create new content. This would stimulate a lot of new innovative content to be created and make the web a more coherent space to live in. The internet now feels like you have a car parked in the next street, your bedroom is at the neighbours and your garden is 5 kilometers away. And I am curious how this will evolve in the future.

Imagine the following: you are a designer and wants to make and sell your stuff online. You use a myriad of services available like the ones from Ponoko, Shapeways or Etsy. How do you go about that?

That is a real life question which I hear a lot and is definitely one worth looking into. A lot of services create their own little universe around their specific content or market. But the needs of users go beyond those little universes. But what can you do?
Another example: you have your own blog, you post your photographs on Flickr and you keep everybody up to date on your life on Twitter. But if friends ask you where can I find your photographs or read your blog posts, do you want to point them to you each of these individual services? Or how about your wishlist on Amazon, your favorite bookmarks on Delicious or your movies on YouTube.
A smart person will shout Facebook! right about now. But Facebook is definitely not the answer. It is just the same approach from a different angle. Facebook tries to do everything, but is not that good at anything particular. If you compare Facebook videos or Flickr photographs the service of Facebook is not even in the same universe. Whereby YouTube and the likes offer great services but are quite limited. They only do one thing great.
I am waiting for a service which enables users to bring content together. This service unlocks the content of individual users and enables them to mash them together to create their own little universe. Like Facebook it would enable groups of users to connect their content together create user groups. Just imagine families share their photographs of their last family day or hobbyists working together on their latest project.
While this aggregating mashup service connects content together it also let the content stay at those great services. Because those great services exist because sometimes you want to find content while you do not know the group or individual. You are just interested in the content. Then you would start at YouTube or Flickr to get respectively your video or photo fix.
A lot of the earlier mentioned services offer options to get their content and host it on another site. But there is no standard way of doing this. From a technical point of view there are different options available but there are also terms & conditions to consider. Services just do not allow to use their content in just any (commercial) setting.
To make this happen content should be made available through using standard protocols and interfaces. This is the easy part. It takes convincing and a compelling business case to make this companies move.
But the bigger challenge is to get the internet at large to agree on fair use of that content. Question mark number one is to determine who owns the content? Does YouTube own your video and can they decide what you can do with it while it is on their service or is the other way around and can you determine how YouTube should use your content. Without reading the terms & conditions of YouTube I can guarantee it that they are different than those from Flickr, Delicious, Blogger or Lastfm.
The next barrier of the internet is to break open the little — or in some cases large — universes created around services and enable users to mix content together to create new content. This would stimulate a lot of new innovative content to be created and make the web a more coherent space to live in. The internet now feels like you have a car parked in the next street, your bedroom is at the neighbours and your garden is 5 kilometers away. And I am curious how this will evolve in the future.
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Internet

Internet wants to be free

June 20, 2010 –

StarBucks announced this week they will start offering free internet in their coffeeplaces later this year. McDonalds already offers free internet in their restaurants. Several hotel chains offer free in-room internet. Internet access is used as an incentive to bring in customers.

Internet access at home is very affordable nowadays. This is also part of the reason why those $10/hour WIFI networks simply do not work anymore. People are not prepared to pay for internet access. It is as cheap as electricity. Know a hotel where you have to pay for your electricity usage?

The major challenge is how the economics around internet access will work out. I see 3 relevant parties on the internet:

  1. content provider
  2. network provider
  3. site provider (physical location of internet access)

The telco’s should better be prepared to become the electricity companies of the 21st century. Their role will be relegated to building and maintaining the network. Content will move more and more outside the reach of the network providers. As long as net neutrality is kept intact there is nothing they can do about it.
The site provider owns the physical location of the internet access point. They pay for making the access point to the internet available.

Value is only created on either end of the internet connection — either by the content provider and the site provider. For most site providers the internet access is a service they provide to their customers. But like StarBucks there is much more opportunity to make money from internet access. StarBucks offers a physical location enabling to mix online and offline marketing. Via affiliate marketing StarBucks can get extra revenue from their internet access point.

Internet wants to be free. In the near future the internet will be available everywhere without or for very low costs. Google gladly wants to pay to get people on the internet. They have to because that is how they make their money. More people on the internet are more people which use their service and see the ads. Google is a content provider and they are not the only one. Amazon, Facebook and all the other major destinations are content providers too and without internet users they cannot make money

The next 5 years will be very interesting. Question is will it be a rocky road — like with the music / movie companies — or will the companies part of the internet ecosystem adapt?

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Hardware Internet Software

Companies who are control freaks

June 13, 2010 –

One of the major drivers behind innovation is openness. Through openness knowledge is shared, reused or build upon to create bigger and better things. And this openness is at risk. Companies – but also universities – are becoming control freaks trying desperately control the use of their knowledge, products and content. This is a serious risk for keeping pace with innovation and moving society as a whole forward. The examples are abundant: In this article I will highlight some of them.

One of the most visible examples is digital rights management (DRM). You will find it everywhere. It is part of every television sold, every copy of Microsoft Windows, ebooks and game consoles like the Playstation or Xbox.

Using DRM companies control the use of content. The user does not own the content anymore but buys a license or right to use it. The user may only use the content based on license bought. This seriously restricts the options the user has for the content. Without technical circumvention a user cannot for instance copy a DVD to their Ipod for viewing on the go.

Sometimes this leads to very odd situations – especially from the consumer point of view. A prime example is what happened with the ebook 1985 of George Orwell sold by Amazon. At some point it was determined that Amazon did not have the right to sell this ebook. Amazon promptly send out a recall command to all their Kindle devices which erased the ebook from these devices. Just imagine you were halfway through the book you thought you owned and then it suddenly disappears. Of course this led to some very disappointed customers and Amazon had to apologize publicly for their mistake. But it also showed clearly the problem with licensing content and not owning content.

In the past you could lend a book to someone, but this also not possible with ebooks. The companies selling the ebook restrict the copying of ebooks. This is a serious restriction for sharing knowledge. And overall ebooks are sold for the same price as regular books which you do own and can lend to a friend.

Another example are closed ecosystems around products like you see with Apple products or in the game console market. The barrier of entry to create an application (like a game) on a platform like Sony’s playstation or Microsoft’s Xbox is quite high due to high cost of their software development kits. It is just not that easy for a developer to create an application for these devices.

And although the openness of the Apple product line (mainly Ipods, Ipads and Iphones) is much higher than in the game console market developers still need to pass the nod of approval to be able to offer their software through Apple AppStore. The requirements to get your application approved are not very clear and applications are rejected for unclear reasons.

Companies create these closed ecosystems to control the use of their own products.

But industries grow based on openness. Standards and open platforms enable other companies (or organizations or individuals) to take part of the ecosystem. Perfect examples are GSM standard for mobile phones or MP3 for digital music. You can buy your music at one store and play it on different players. Without these open standards the industries would have grown much slower.

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Internet

Successfactors internet rating systems

June 7, 2010 –

Every selfrespecting internet service has a rating system in place. On YouTube you can rank their videos and Ebay you can rank sellers and buyers. Rating is a very powerful crowdsourcing tool to help users to decide. But not every rating system is very succesful. In this article I would like to get into these successfactors.

I start with two examples of rating systems; a successful and unsuccessful one. One of the most successful rating systems is employed by Ebay. Ebay lets their users rate both buyers and sellers. It is successful because Ebay users actually use this information to decide if they want to buy from a seller or not. Therefor it is essential for sellers to have a high rating to be successful on Ebay. Due to this interaction the quality of sellers is very predictable on Ebay.
To me the rating system of YouTube is a complete failure. You can find lots of videos with the number of views in the hunderd of thousands but with only a couple of votes. YouTube users cannot really rely on the rating to determine if they wanna watch a video or not. If less <1% of the users vote the rating is not really representative for the group.

So what does determine the success of a good rating system? I identified three of them:

Sense of purpose to vote

Rating makes only sense when the rating has a clear purpose in the context of the users. If you take the YouTube example the reason people are not voting because there is no real use to vote. The rating on a video does not tell the user anything about the relevancy of video for him or her. The person giving a rating could be watching the video for an entirely different reason than another person. You cannot compare these ratings.

Sense of purpose of the vote

In line with the previous successfactor the rating has to have a real need for the user. Take for example the seller/buyer rating on Ebay. This rating has a clear goal for users. They can use the rating to determine if they want to buy or sell with a particular person.
Without a clear sense of purpose of the vote users will not use the rating system because it has simply no use.

What’s in it for me?

To entice a user to vote you need to be able to answer the question “what’s in it for him or her?”. Users do not rate just because they can. They rate because it gives them or others benefits as with the Ebay example.
You see that on YouTube rating is not really used because there is no point to use it. It does help you find new videos or determine if a video is worth watching.

Conclusions

Any rating system to be successful should take into account these three successfactors. A unsuccessful rating system is even worse than having no rating system. It confuses users and sets wrong expectations leading to disappointment.
The internet is full of rating systems and every selfrespecting internet site has some form of rating system. But most of them are pretty useless.
Examples of rating systems I like are:

  • Ebay – their buyer/seller system
  • Last.fm – recommend songs based on your ratings
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