This article was originally posted at the I Shared What?!? blog on 29 November 2010.
Voluntary personal information sharing is most beautiful–and most powerful–when freely shared under circumstances chosen by the information holder. Today, however, we severely limit our power when we choose to share our information in closed sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and others. In those cases, we’re limited to sharing under rules set by those sites, and only to people who also agree to those closed practices.
Those sites are holding our information hostage, and the advertisers and marketing industry is paying wildly to keep this arrangement as a new status quo. This isn’t where we started though. Tim Berners-Lee reminds us that the web was built from “a profound concept: that any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere.” In a Scientific American article entitled Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality, Berners-Lee states,
Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently. Cable television companies that sell Internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.
While these sites offer a social networking benefit, they jail us with inconveniences and rules that disallow the sharing of our lives outside of their fortress. We at I Shared What?!? look forward to the days when we’re empowered to share according to our own rules, in our own ways.
This article was originally posted at the I Shared What?!? blog on 19 November 2010.
One of the beautiful things about voluntary, personal information sharing is that we have the option to interact with our friends and colleagues–as part of our social network–using a variety of tools and Internet services. It’s often a harsh reality check to be reminded that some of those tools and services don’t really want us to share in ways that we would like.
So it goes with sharing between service providers Google and Facebook. Each of them have useful collaborative, content sharing tools such as Facebook’s walls (telling in subtle ways) and photos, and Google’s docs, groups, and YouTube. Both providers also have ways to use your login as a single sign-on with other services (Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect).
What’s new: Google is reminding us that sharing your contacts with Facebook is a one-way street. It’s helpful to have a reminder that our sharing is not just about us, but often includes details and data about our friends that they may or may not wish to share about themselves. It’s a messy world while we figure this out.
On this panel: Kara Swisher, All Things D, moderates panel with Jim Adler, Chief Privacy Officer, Intellus, David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google (Plus), Roger McNamee, musician and Elevation Partners, and Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures.
Kara: We’ll be talking about implications of social sharing for business. Where is the business of social sharing? Fred: Facebook plus, FB is the largest platform but not the only. There will continue to be lots of important social platforms outside of FB. Roger: period of rapid adoption for first 2 years, FB has won the largest share. Cost of entry is high, social is everywhere. David: once things are that way they tend to stay that way? We didn’t name Google Plus “new, now, here” – two things we wanted to do: existing products could be done better, we saw a lot of our products would be better with baked-in sharing. Wanted to improve overall connected state. Jim: things swing from open to closed and back. Fred: top things include Tumblr, wouldn’t be in the picture but for… Mobile is really important. It’s not game over. FB is dominant but market is not devoid of opportunities. Roger: web as an app, number is going to 70% (of what?). Who is going to control the user experience? Things are not shipping on mobile. FB for many people is going to be the platform; connect then identity. Jim: we’re in the process of mapping humanity online. This is a big one. It really does a disservice to say it’s done. How are we mapping? What’s appropriate? rights? mapping social rituals. Of course there will be platforms, and we’re just getting started.
Kara: what are the key critical trends? Jim: we’re going through a new reality, reputation online, a 360 view. You can now reach across time/space. It takes a village, and we’re doing this one hut at a time, building intimate connections. David: I agree with mobile, always on. Shift to living in a world where we’re always on, leaking and sharing, what do we do with that? Kara; continuous partial attention? David: yes, how subconscious should we be? Shift to assuming the camera is always rolling. Jim: this is something we need to get use to. David: there are “many publics” (Kevin Marks said this first). Fred: Tablet is interesting. People are starting to build natively for tablets. More companies are coming to us where FB is the only login experience. This will accrue tremendous value to FB, that’s not really a good thing, especially for the developer (or the users!).
Kara: mobile platforms? Roger: Facebook and Yelp as mobile. Time to market. The thing that really scares me: we’ve lived in a world where people have not been honest with each other for too long. Income gap based on proprietary access to opportunities. Big corps (including telcos) are absolutely using our data. Jim: we’re moving through a threshold. FB is assumed to be public but it’s mostly private. (?) Social media has been like Lake Wobegone, was powerful but there’s going to be interesting consequences: what do people know about me? New product where people can know what we know about them. Too voyeuristic, not narcissistic enough.
Kara: what is sharing now? Fred: when you go out on Friday night, there’s a tremendous amount of sharing going on. Social media is doing the sort of the same thing. This morning was sad about Zucotti Park, human nature to want to share. My kids are much more aware of how to use the technology. David: the way my kids use “stalker” has become a casual term. Fred: I stalk my kids on FB every day, they know it. Jim: Kids know the difference between public and public/private spaces, they’re much more nuanced about how they approach the world. Fred: we’re doing this hire, looking at all of the social media resources of potential candidates. Next generation is using tools to make “resumes” more interesting.
Kara: If FB is the main stalking platform, what are the main business opportunities? Roger: social is today what “new media” is in 1987. My sense: new environment (half cell phones, half computers) is “hypernet” with totally different economic players. Running out of wireless bandwidth, need to replace infrastructure in cellular. Apple’s position is really unstable, capturing the value through hardware. HTML5 has opportunities to change the rules of the game. Safari gets 100% of development today, but notion of one company capturing all the value needs to change. Gigantic change wave of the hypernet, based on whitespace and digital TV spectrum. Instagram is fun but not important.
Kara to David: Google Plus? Tried to have a quiet debut. “We shipped plus, now we’re shipping the Google.” Two things we want to solve: one is how can we make YouTube, Blogger better by making it more social. Fred: Socialization of Google and mobile apps: eventually they’ll get it right but it’s crazy to think of it as a Facebook killer. Roger: maybe a Twitter killer, because they captured the “twitteratti” early on. Costs zero to add a Plus button. Jim: the big opportunity is what you can do with data. Focus on private data becoming public: more frictionless sharing. Understanding data is hugely disruptive. Use cases, danger is in inappropriate use. How do we use the public data to infer amazing things about each other?
Kara: Are you investing in data companies? Fred: we like to invest in platforms that have a lot of data and can use it to do things natively on the platform. We’re not investing in capturing data for 3rd party things. Kara: How do you look at Twitter? Fred: my favorite platform of all, but not as an investor–I connect to people there (@FredWilson has over 200K followers). It’s all public, everyone knows that.
Roger: two things that Apple did wrong: 1) fight with amazon over one-click, 2) if they get AppleTV right, all they have to do is in-app purchases back. Fire is not a great tablet. Fred: it’s a Kindle with the web on it. Roger: yeah. Nook is much cooler.
Connect.me is a socially verified reputation system in which people vouch for other people using customizable tags. This is called social vouching. The whole system is based on it, so someone has to vouch for another person to join the network. The purpose of this session was to help a group of people get their initial vouch and learn how to use this new network.
It works in conjunction with/on top of Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. If you follow or are connected to someone in one of those networks, they show up in your network as someone you can offer a “vouch” for. For example, I vouched for Drummond with tags “digital identity” and “trust frameworks,” which are both areas that he has done considerable work in for years. I also vouched for Kaliya (one of the organizers of this event) with tags “identity” and “digital identity” because she’s known widely as “identity woman.”
People can refer to others on this site by their reputation, as represented by their tags (what people know them for). One of the tags I’m known for is “early adopter.”
Much of this session was working through some of the user interface glitches and idiosyncracies. This was a great opportunity to see how things work with more people doing the testing. Once we got past some of the early work-in-progress, it was clear that there is a good networking resource in the making.
For anyone at IIW who wants to start using the network, you can either: 1) have anyone that is already using it — and that you have a link to on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn – vouch for you (and then you’ll be sent a custom invitation link), or if you’re not at IIW, 2) go to http://connect.me, sign up, and then either give the username you registered to Drummond (or send it to him at drummond — at — connect — dot — me ) and he will vouch for you as an early adopter to get you into the beta.
Apparently, LinkedIn has recently done us the “favor” of having a default setting whereby our names and photos can be used for third-party advertising. A friend forwarded me this alert (from a friend, from a friend…) this morning.
Since Facebook has been such a good model of creative “reuse” of our personal information, and consequent destruction of personal trust in social settings, it seems corporately fitting that LinkedIn would try the same.
Coaching moment: Doesn’t it bother you when people make self-serving assumptions about what you want to share with others? True, you did voluntarily share this information, but shouldn’t you be able to express clear limits on how this shared information is used—before it’s misused? I think so!
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