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PII 2011: Social Sharing and the Data-Driven Economy

November 15th, 2011
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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.

Questions.

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IIW XIII: Connect.me and the social vouch-a-thon

October 19th, 2011
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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.

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Trust, and Using You

August 10th, 2011
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Steve Woodruff's tutorial (graphic steps)

Click for Steve's tutorial

Steve Woodruff brings us a quick tutorial on how to reset LinkedIn’s new “Social Advertising” setting:

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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Project Neck Pain

March 11th, 2011
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In order to have the capabilities we might want in the future, a lot of tools, pathways, and “plumbing” need to be created first. Phil Windley and his company Kynetx is one of the tool builders working to create some of the connecting parts. They made a great video called Project Neck Pain illustrating how their tool helps connect our needs. Check out how smoothly this works:

Coaching moment: Two of the assumptions this video: 1) that our guy in the video has a Personal Data Store, and 2) it’s based on the existence of curated references (like the list of doctors) that you might “subscribe” to. Some of these lists may be compiled from the resources of your friends’ networks (a la Facebook, but user-controlled). Others will need to be created, and will be used as people find them valuable. Do you have resources in your network that you’d speak positively (or negatively) about? Would you share that with the world?

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Platform vs Relationships

February 15th, 2011
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A little while ago, Scott Adams wrote his thoughts about FutureMe and how it might  become a Facebook killer. Adams pointed out that information about our past–what we’ve already done–is useful, but less so than what we’re looking to do in the future. He suggests a new fourth party (user-driven) service:

The interface for Futureme is essentially a calendar, much like Outlook. But it would include extra layers for hopes and goals that don’t have specific dates attached.

For every entry to your Futureme calendar, you specify who can see it, including advertisers. If you allow advertisers a glimpse of a specific plan, it would be strictly anonymous. Advertisers could then feed you ads specific to your plan, while not knowing who they sent it to. The Futureme service would be the intermediary.

Now imagine that you never have to see any of the incoming ads except by choice. If you plan to buy a truck in a month, you would need to click on that entry to see which local truck advertisements have been matched to your plans. This model turns advertising from a nuisance into a tool. You‘d never see an ad on Futureme that wasn’t relevant to your specific plans.

The biggest benefit of the system could come from your network of friends and business associates. Suppose you post on the system that you would like to see a Bon Jovi concert sometime in the next year. Now your friends – the ones you specify to see this specific plan – can decide if they want in on it.  Maybe someone you know can get free tickets, and someone has a van and is willing to be the designated driver.  Maybe someone has a contact that can get you backstage passes. By broadcasting your plan, you make it possible for others to improve your plan.

Conversely, if you plan to do something stupid, your contacts have time to talk you out of it or suggest a superior alternative.

The great thing about Adams’ plan is that it shows how our data and online presence can be user-driven–meaning we make choices about who gets to see what. Moreover, by identifying Futureme as an intermediary on the user side, Adams has described a fourth-party service. (I’m guessing that Adams is intending this to be on the user side, or it can’t really live up to the promise of being a “Facebook killer.” I don’t know of any way at this time to be a perfectly neutral intermediary, so he likely has to fall on one side or the other.)

Coaching moment: I’d like to point out a significant distinction here between platforms and relationships. Adams is apparently describing a platform for social interaction and commercial services. This is also the Facebook model. On Facebook, someone else (the shareholders of Facebook) owns your user data and service usage logs. Facebook is in control. As we’ve seen before, it’s one thing to set your privacy wishes, but if Facebook is calling the shots, the rules can be changed anytime. Moreover, you’re always under surveillance whether you knowingly agree to that or not.

Now consider the idea of personal data stores where you control your data in any way you wish, using software tools that you choose, on hardware that you own (or not), at any time or under circumstances that you want. Nobody gets access that you don’t authorize. Wouldn’t that be something?

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