Tag Archives: facebook

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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Internet

The next trend on the internet

April 10, 2010 –

The internet is one of the major achievements of mankind in the last decades. It has changed our lives significantly. I cannot even imagine how life would look like or how to manage without it.
As the internet develops or reinvents itself every 4-5 years I see new trends popping up and this post I would to give you my view on how the internet developed and what my take is on the next big trend on the internet.

Data exchange age
When the internet was invented is primarily data exchange network. The US army and (mostly) North American universities used it to exchange data with each other. I call it the data exchange age. The internet population mostly consisted of academics and military personnel.

Communication age
In the 80s the internet changed to a communication network. Users used E-Mail and IRC (chat) to communicate. Standardized communication protocols were implemented to facilitate the communication. In these years the internet expanded rapidly from a primarily US-presence to the rest of the world. It was the communication age. At this time the internet population was still mostly composed of academics and military personnel. But above that students started using the internet more frequently.

Communication age
After communication age came the information age. It started with the invention of the world wide web in 1990. Companies were promoting their products online. The digital brochure was born. Simple websites were setup all over the world and the first web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape appeared. Also the first internet providers opened their doors to offer the internet service via dialup for everybody. This changed the internet population dramatically.

Commerce age
In 1995 Amazon started selling its books on the internet and in 1996 Dell its computers. These events started the commerce age. In the commerce age companies started selling their products over the internet. At this time Microsoft started offering their web browser as standard part of their Windows operating system.

Interaction age
Next came the social networks like MySpace (2003), LinkedIn (2003) and Facebook (2006). I call this the interaction age. In this age people start to interact with each other on the internet. Using these social networks people brought their private life to the internet. Before it is was limited to some personal web pages, email and chat. The social networks made it easier to reach other and connect and keep up to date with your social life.

Cooperation age
In upcoming age will be the age of cooperation. Interaction brought to the next level. In this age people start creating together on the internet. And like with any new major age you see the first signs popping up all over the internet. A few examples:

  • NikeID where customers can design their own shoes which Nike will make
  • Dell IdeaStorm where customers can make recommendations and vote on ideas to make Dells products better
  • Lego DesignByMe where customers can design and create their own Lego kits
  • Wikipedia where users work together to make the best encyclopedia in the world
  • Reddit, del.icio.us and Digg where users work together to make the best news sites

The cooperation age enables users to create and work together to make better products and services. These can be in cooperation with commercial organizations like Dell or Nike, but it can also be without commercial involvement like Wikipedia.
The best example of the cooperation age is the open source movement. Programmers develop computer applications and share them freely on the internet. They work together in groups to create large software applications. Great examples are Linux, GNU and Apache. In these groups thousands of developers work together to create the best software possible. These groups are composed of spare time hobbyists on one side of the spectrum to professionals on the other side of the spectrum. Nobody owns the software and everybody is free to use them in their own products. Linux runs now several mobile phones from companies like Nokia, Samsung and Motorola. It runs on televisions from Sony and several brands of netbooks.

Another example is co-creation where designers work together with customers to create new personalized and customized products. These products better fit the need of the customer since they were involved in the creation process. And of course this is not applicable for every product currently available, but a regular BMW 3-series is available in more than 1 million permutations straight from the production line. You can design your personal car on the internet and order it with your dealership. In these are one on one cooperations between a company and their customers. Combine that with cooperation’s between multiple customers, designers and companies and the options are endless. Companies like Ponoko (2007) and Shapeways (2008, my company) are in this arena. I see the creativity of customers designing on a daily basis and it is exciting to see how they use the options we make available to them.

The next trend on the internet will be the cooperation age enabling groups of people working together to create new products and services. This will be another major impact the internet is going to make in our daily life.

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Internet

Future of SMS, MMS, IM, Email, Tweets

February 28, 2010 –

The last decade the number of types of messages we can send has exploded. We have email, SMS, MMS, IM and, the newest kid on the block, Tweets. All these message types are linked to specific communication media. SMS is typically send via a mobile network like GSM, same for MMS, IMs and Tweets use the internet and email is available on a wide variety networks.

Twitter, Facebook, Instant Message, email

In the end it is all about the communication and each message type has its specific purpose. You do not write a newsletter in SMS and at the same time you do not Tweet personal messages. The purposes of each message type can be summarized as follows:

* long and short messages
* instant or non-instant
* targeted or broadcast

The purpose demands the selection of message type and network. Instant messages are better delivered to a always-on mobile platform but non-instant long messages can be delivered to a sometimes-on non- or semi-mobile platform. A message can be targeted to a person or a group of people. Another option is to broadcast it like a “What are you doing” message on social networks.

To communicate we have a myriad of choices of applications and networks. These networks are non-coupled effectively creating closed ecosystems. Skype users cannot reach MSN users or the other way around. At the same time you cannot SMS Skype users. These boundaries are the biggest threat to any network. Without internetwork messaging users will select one platform as a winner. All others will lead a niche life.

Services like Twitter are completely useless in the future. Their role will be taken over by others. There is really no compelling reason to use Twitter except their large userbase. But the user base of Facebook or Gmail is larger. It is no problem for them to move into this type of services and Twitter becomes the Netscape of messaging.

It is in all networks interest to work on internetworking and focus on standardizing message types. Then they can compete on user interface, quality of service and delivery platforms.

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Internet

Future of online identification

February 6, 2010 –

Identification in the online world is still a mess in 2010. The average internet user manages more than 10 online identities. Each identity is disconnected from the other. The management of these online identities and especially the associated user accounts is getting a nightmare. Users use the same passwords for the same identities or write them down in agendas or digital textfiles. They simply are not capable of remembering so many username / password combination and worse the requirements for these identifications are different for many sites. Some sites take your email address as the username and others take any alphanumeric sequence. But you cannot always use your email address because the username is often also the online nickname and publicly visible to others. And some users would like to keep their email address private.

Some companies have tried or are trying to push their identification system to others. The most prominent example is Microsoft and their Microsoft Passport service. By tightly integrating this into their own services (think Hotmail.com) and at the same time delivering integration solutions with their IIS webserver software they tried to open this market.
Of course this failed for the several good reasons. The most important reason is that not one company in the world should maintain the major identification system. A commercial company can simply be not trusted to own and maintain that information.

At this moment Facebook is trying the same. You see their identification system being used on other sites like Digg.com. And although their push is less visible and maybe even more driven by a pull market strategy the reasons why it will not be omnipresent are the same.

There are also legal implications. Private information about people is protected by country laws. These laws are not designed to cope with this situation. Companies who use an external identification system which is located in a different country than their own service create a problem when legal issues arise around a user. Especially when commercial transactions are involved or (very) private information is leaked. When this is the case there is no other option for these services to build and use their own identification system.

The only solution is public governed system of online identification. A public governed system has the advantage of trust and public governance. At the same time privacy laws can be designed and maintained in line with the identification system since they are governed by the same entity. The system can be designed in the same way internet domains are governed. The responsibility to maintain the local internet domains like .nl for The Netherlands is delegated to a local Dutch institution. Through this delegation countries can implement and enforce local privacy laws and protect their citizens data. At the same time all citizens in the world only have to maintain one indentity and identification. Through a standardized system users can release information to commercial entities when they desire but at the same time also retract that information again when they want to.

Of course such a solution requires the cooperation of a major number of countries to gather enough strength in the market to push this solution to all internet service companies. The only option would be to involve a major alliance of countries like the European Union or United Nations to make an initiative like this happen. Up until now this has never an agenda topic. But such a system makes sense and it is only matter of time it will happen. It can of course take a decade or two.

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