I signed up for Google Health and immediately found it handy with news about each of my conditions. My wife wondered why anyone would use it and risk health data becoming public.
But my life is already an open blog and I’ve already talked about most of my conditions — mainly atrial fibrilation — and received benefit for it: support, links, resources, others’ experiences.
So why not talk publicly about our health? Fear. We fear losing a job or not getting insurance or, with certain conditions, being stigmatized. That is what we should address. With universal insurance and laws to prevent discrimination on health, we’d have no need to fear. Stigma, I can’t do much about.
There are other benefits accruing if we talk publicly. The more we share experience and create data, the more doctors can learn about our conditions and perhaps what causes them. The more we support each other, the more helpful it is for each of us (see Patients Like Me).
Do I trust Google with my health information? Do I trust you? The key is to make sure that I have control over my data. Just as with Facebook, control is the issue.
: Just as I finished writing this, I see that Fred Wilson agrees. Note that his father and I have shared our afib experience and I found it very helpful.
There’s a debate going on in the halls of my publisher and with me out here over the title of my book. So I thought I’d ask your advice.
The title as I presented it is: WWGD? (What Would Google Do?)
Some people at the publishing house don’t like having what they see as a double title. They want to truncate it to What Would Google Do?
My argument has been first and foremost that that loses the joke. And second, I think it flattens the title (read it in a businessy monotone: What… would… Google… do?… Well… let… me… tell… you….). I had in mind a Seth Godinesque title that make you cock your head like a dog and sniff it. Every single time I’ve said the title in a group, it gets a laugh.
Their argument is that it’s going to be hard to say in promotional appearances and it’s repetitive.
I’ve been hanging very tough on this. Tell me what you think. Doesn’t mean I’ll listen. Also doesn’t mean I’ve stated the debate fairly. But I want to open the discussion and I’m asking for your help and advice.
(International note: I am pretty sure the joke won’t work in other languages; I’m just talking about English and perhaps even just the U.S.)
Get it through your thick corporate skulls, folks: Communities are owned by the community. You can’t wish to attract people to build homes around you and then just bulldoze them.
Steve Baker at Business Week is reprising and revising his cover story from three years ago about blogs. The editors have asked some of us bloggers to talk about the past and future of social media and they might excerpt some of the discussion for the story. So as I was thinking about what to say, I realized that Business Week itself is a good illustration of the changes. I witnessed that three weeks ago when I was asked in to hold an all-morning blogging workshop with 60 staffers at the magazine/site.
Three years ago, blogs were still a curiosity to a business audience, new enough to warrant a cover story, strange enough to require explaining. But now, blogs and social media are not only better understood and accepted but they are coming to be seen as a necessity in media and more and more in business. I’ve written three stories in the magazine about business using social media to rebuild relationships with customers — Dell blogging and collaborating with customers and Starbucks opening a platform for customers’ ideas.
Business Week itself has a score of blogs and when I went there for a blogging workshop, what struck me most was that I did not hear the usual objections to blogging that are thrown at me when speaking with a group of media people: that blogs are not professional and thus not reliable. One staffer who came late did fret about the amount of crap out there but her fellow staffers argued her down; I didn’t have to. The meat of the discussion was, instead, no longer about why journalists blog but instead about how to blog better, how to be more involved in the conversation.
Next, I think, Business Week’s writers and readers will move beyond the conversation to see that social media are changing their fundamental relationship with customers to be less about serving and more about collaborating. No, I don’t mean that every product will be the product of a committee. But customers who want to talk will and smart companies will not just listen but will engage them in decisions. This will have an impact not just on PR and image but on product design, marketing, sales, customer service — the whole company.
Three years from now, I predict that Business Week’s cover won’t about about blogs or tools but about companies as communities.
: ALSO: Forgot to mention that the magazine is moving to collaboration. See online editor John Byrne’s blog that asks readers for their story ideas; he promises to cover some of them. It’s very MyStarbucksIdea of them, wouldn’t you say. I’ll be watching this process with interest. For I do think that the readers should be able to tell the journalists what they want to know. As my students have asked, why shouldn’t the public assign us?
Chris Matthews — who has been downright spiteful in his coverage of Hillary Clinton — reports that she is attacking back. But David Shuster, the correspondent, explains it all away: “Attacking the media is not new. Presidents and politicians have been doing it for a long time, usually to deflect their own problems, often to tap into a perceived voter hostility towards journalists. The problem for Hillary Clinton is that her charges may reinforce concerns about her credibility.” His illogic: Clinton says that some in the media want her to quit. Shuster says that though they have declared her campaign over, nobody asked for her to quit. And besides, he says, the continuing campaign is good for ratings. But then he then goes on to declare himself, “She will not win.”
Incredible. He says she can’t be credible accusing the media of bias because he says the media aren’t biased and he says you can believe that because he’s credible and so she’s not.
Mark today in the history of media. In today’s NY Times, we hear an ad guy praising networks over portals (and by portal, we don’t just mean Yahoo, we mean any closed media property, including TV networks and newspaper sites). Networks used to have cooties; they were supposed to be nothing but aftermarkets for unsold inventory — or so the big media properties wanted us and media planners to believe. But networks are quickly becoming more targeted, more efficient, and more economical. From the Times:
Some of the ad dollars that in the past had been spent at portals are being spread around instead. Ad networks, which fan out ads to thousands of sites, are adding targeting and are signing up reputable sites, making them more attractive for advertisers.
“There was a time when we would go out and buy inventory on the portals,” said Quentin George, global head of digital media and strategic innovation at Universal McCann, which plans media for clients like L’Oreal and Sony. “Portals make it easier for us to buy and place media on behalf of our clients. But as time continues and as analytics capabilities increase, you find that your media dollars can work better elsewhere across a range of different sites.”
Michael Hayes, senior vice president and managing director for Initiative Interactive, which handles digital spending for clients like Home Depot and Bayer, said that advertisers might be turning away from broad buys and looking for more targeted campaigns on smaller sites.
“This is hurting the portals,” he said. “There are more options.”
This is why I say that the Glam model — whether that includes Glam itself or not only time will tell — is a key business model for the future of media. Welcome to the post-scarcity post-media economy.
I have been the greatest fan and booster of Facebook but I have to wonder whether they are leapfrogging the shark by cutting off Google Friend Connect — not because it is evil but because it is closed, limiting, wrong, and not in their own self-interest, a key and possibly fatal strategic mistake.
The essential question for Facebook is this: Do you want to be a closed site or an open platform? Do you want to be a closed social network or enable the open social network the internet already is? Clearly, it is better to be the platform. But Facebook is being strangely blind to that.
At the same time, I’ve become less addicted to Facebook because there isn’t enough there. That could be because I hang with old farts, who’ve cooled on the fad. But it’s more likely because Twitter has become a more meaningful platform for keeping in touch with friends (though that, too, could change). Though Facebook still has more functionality enabling me to organize those friends, Twitter is better at distinguishing acquaintances (the followers) from friends (the followed). That is, whereas on Facebook, I have — I’m sorry to say — 1,030 ignored friend requests, on Twitter, I have 1,765 followers. Twitter has learned from Facebook’s mistakes. So has Google.
Facebook should have asked — pardon the plug for the book — WWGD? If they had thought like Google, they would have tried to figure out how to use what they had built — an organizing system for friendship — and turn that into a platform we can use — and control — anywhere on the internet.
Google has quite cleverly done that as they explain on their code blog. They used Facebook’s API by all appearances legitimately. They give us control of how we use our data (and our friends are our data). They also kluged it a bit so they don’t retain data (which also means that other sites can really manipulate it, losing some potential functionality but keeping Google on the safe site of the line).
People find the relationships they’ve built on social networks really valuable, and they want the option of bringing those friends with them elsewhere on the web. Google Friend Connect is designed to keep users fully in control of their information at all times. Users choose what social networks to link to their Friend Connect account. (They can just as easily unlink them.) We never handle passwords from other sites, we never store social graph data from other sites, and we never pass users’ social network IDs to Friend Connected sites or applications.
Google is only doing what Facebook should have done: open up to be more useful across the entire internet. Now Google is giving Facebook the opportunity to do that — the dare to do that — and Facebook is chickening out. Big mistake.
I wrote back in 2006 that the internet is the social network. The winner will be he who brings that — to use Mark Zuckerberg’s own words and credo — elegant organization.
But the truly valuable network, the network of networks, the unbreakable bubble of bubbles, will be the one that manages to bring people together wherever we are, not just on MySpace (read: RupertsSpace), not just in Flickr or Del.icio.us, and not even just in the blogosphere, but everywhere. The internet doesn’t need more social networks. The internet is the social network. We have our identities, interests, reputations, relationships, information, and lives here, and we’re adding more every day. The network enabler that manages to help us tie these together to find not just connections or email addresses or information or songs but people — friends, colleagues, teachers, students, partners, lovers — across this open world, that will be the owner of the biggest network of them all: The Google of people.
I’m no mathematician or scientist, so I have to express this in words, but here’s the way I calculate the value of networks:
The Law of Open Networks: The more open a network is, the more control there is at the edges, the more the edges value the network, the more the network is worth.
The business lessons from this: Any choke point of control, via ownership, decreases the value of the network. Enablers increase the value of the network. The network will abhor and find ways around choke points. The network will value enablers and that is the point at which value may be extracted from the network. The value in networks in the open future is not in ownership and control but in enabling others to control.
Facebook put a chokehold around our data about our friends. Huge mistake. As Steve Gillmor said in his excellent Techcrunch analysis:
Facebook finally has a real problem to deal with - an exceptionally rational and well-thought-out strategy by Google that puts the leading social media cloud in the path of a wave of angry users. The only thing Facebook has going for it is that said users don’t yet know they’re angry.
Umair Haque has been purposefully over-the-top calling Facebook’s act “evil” (a few Twitter folks said his language gets in the way). But when you dig down, Umair, as is his habit, finds a brilliant and new law at work here:
What’s really going on here? There’s a massive tectonic shift rocking the economic landscape. All these players are discovering that the boardroom’s first and most important task is simply to try always and everywhere do less evil. In the dismal language of economics: as interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits.
Let’s repeat that and dub it Haque’s Law: As interaction explodes, the costs of evil are starting to outweigh the benefits.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Google is really talking about when it promises not to be evil. It is not a campaign pledge (”Yes, we cannot be evil!”) or a geeky Bible lesson about good and bad (open unto others as they would open unto you) but a cold, calculated business rule:
When the people can talk with, about, and around you, screwing them is no longer a valid business strategy.
Be warned, cable companies, airlines, insurance companies, real estate agents, ad agencies, and governments: choke points are evil and evil is bad business.
This is — sorry for the second plug — at the heart of my book. Interaction turns control over to the public and that fundamentally changes business and society. Oh, I know, that drives various curmudgeons, cynics, and polemicists nutty but I do believe it is true. Google has found (not created but exploited) a new economy and only a fool would not try to learn from that and follow its lead if at all possible.
And I can’t believe that Mark Zuckerberg is a fool. I’ve said in the past that he makes mistakes, but he makes mistakes well — listening, learning, and changing quickly. Well, he’d better change quickly on this one. And the lesson here is no different at all from the lessons he learned with the botched announcements of Facebook’s news feed and ad program: It’s about control. We want control of our data.
But there’s a bigger lesson here: It’s about being a platform instead of a service (or portal). Last year, I disagreed with friend Scott Heiferman when he said that Facebook was the new AOL — and, indeed, Scott quickly disagreed with himself. But Zuckerberg may be proving him right after all. If he tries to build his business by attracting us to his garden and then fencing us in, if he doesn’t give us control and let us use Facebook and our identity there as a platform for our lives, then he is turning it into the next AOL when it could be the next Google. And that would be tragic. Tragic.
This is the critical moment in Facebook’s history. This is the moment when they realize that they have to give control to us and to the internet and become a platform. If they do, I’m likely to use my Facebook identity as my key identity only because it is tied to my social network; that is precisely what makes it more valuable than others. I don’t think that Twitter will be that but it may be the best second choice and it is tied to more dynamic information from my friends. Whether friend or follower, I want to link with people online. Who will help me? Who will stop me? He who helps, wins.
: LATER: The irony of Google, of course, is that it’s open when it’s fighting closed systems (advertising, media, Facebook) but its instinct is closed. They wouldn’t even let the NY Times give them harmless publicity for their Lego logo. Don’t need it, they say. Would rather hide in a dark room.
: LATEST: This is why I don’t bet against Zuckerberg. Already, he says he wants to meet with Google and work it out. Smart.
Here’s my latest Guardian column about Twitter as news (it got trimmed in print — damned scarce paper — and so here’s my draft):
Last Monday, when an earthquake struck China’s Sichuan province, word of it spread quickly from witnesses on the shaking ground via Twitter, the mobile-and-web microblogging service where users share brief, 140-character-long updates with friends. Prolific blogger and Twitterer Robert Scoble at scobleizer.com insists he saw news of the quake on Twitter minutes before the US Geological Service posted the temblor and an hour before CNN and other news sites reported it.
Twitter is becoming the canary in the news coalmine. It stands to reason: If you’ve just gone through such a major event, you are sure to want to update your friends about it. If enough people are all chattering about an earthquake at the same time, that’s a good and immediate indication of a major news story.
Developers at the BBC and Reuters have picked up on the potential for this. They are working on applications to monitor Twitter, the Twitter search engine Summize, and other social-media services – Flickr, YouTube, Facebook – for news catchwords like “earthquake” and “evacuation”. They hope for two benefits: first, an early warning of news and second a way to find witness media – photos, videos, and accounts from the event. This is clearly more efficient than waiting for reporters and photographers to get to the scene after the news is over – though, of course, they will still go and do what journalists do: report, verify facts (which can be wrong from witnesses in the heat of news), package, and take their own pictures (which they then own).
These social services are also a source of witnesses for journalists to interview. After the Chinese quake, user “casperodj” reported his experience – “it did feel like the earth was going to split. literally everything was shaking” – and what followed – “CREEPY! while i’m typing, there’s an aftershock hitting!” – and the mood on the street – “the shitty concrete buildings around me are still ok though. people seem to be going back to work again” – and also told his readers when he’d gotten off the air with the BBC and Dutch broadcasters.
All this comes from a platform that does nothing more than enable anyone to tell anyone what they’re up to. But this is fundamentally new. We online citizens are living in public, revealing small details of our lives with our updates and our content. It’s in the smallness of this personal news that we can keep in touch with friends in ways we have not been able to since we lived in small towns, able to watch our neighbors’ every move. So perhaps this is not new at all but a return to the old ways: the electronic village, indeed.
London blogger Leisa Reichelt at disambiguity.com has a name for this: “Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.” We get to see what our friends had for lunch and with whom, hear about their trips, see their new haircuts. The mundanity of it is the message.
“Isn’t this all just annoying noise?” Reichelt asks and answers: “There are a lot of us, though, who find great value in this ongoing noise. It helps us get to know people who would otherwise be just acquaintances. It makes us feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. Knowing these details creates intimacy.”
I have speculated in this space that our new publicness and permanence online will change even friendship, as we no longer need to lose touch with old acquaintances. Just last week, I met up and caught up with my high-school sweetheart after (gulp) 33 years and that was made possible only because she Googled me.
Now it’s also become clear that this publicness and immediacy is yielding both a new relationships and new value: ways to find and report news for a start. Perhaps our chattering will also reveal our collective mood (for that, go to twistori.com and see all Twitter posts that include the words love, hate, think, and wish). Companies are now monitoring Twitter, as the smart ones have been watching blogs, to see what is said about their brands (the cable giant Comcast saw powerful blogger Michael Arrington of techcrunch.com complaining about an outage in Twitter and quickly dispatched a repairman).
When we start putting our lives online, it’s now possible to take our pulse in new ways. And that’s news. For what is news, after all, but what is happening to us?
There’s a quaint story in today’s Guardian revealing the futility of government attempts to control speech and assembly.
Police in Leeds are hoping to prevent an outbreak of internet-enabled mayhem after thousands were invited to a public pillow fight through Facebook. . . .
A police spokesman said yesterday: “We have contacted the alleged organiser regarding this event and advised him to cancel it. We will be monitoring the situation to ensure that it does not take place. Any such events, especially those potentially involving large numbers of people, must be given the proper licence by the council in advance.”
There’s the funny bit: a flashmob license.
I understand their desire. The story says that a flash water fight caused thousands of dollars worth of damage to a park in the city. And there’s no means for the organizers to organize a crowd once it is amassed.
Still, it’s a futile effort. Mobs can form instantly via Facebook and Twitter and there’s no telling who the organizer is because they won’t necessarily have an organizer. Welcome to the dispersed, distributed society. Mobs, by their definition, can’t be controlled.
I’ve been talking with folks lately about the need to develop distributed strategies for news, which includes:
* Widgets that enable people to embed your news (and links and brand) anywhere.
* A platform strategy enabling people to build on your content, data, and functionality.
* A network strategy that includes blog networks (a la Glam).
The objection always thrown up is that Comscore/Nielsen/ABC et al won’t count that. I say we need to count differently. Rather than counting page views from users on a destination, we need to count relationships with people wherever they are.
A few things to note in this context:
* Google (which, by the way, now has more traffic than Yahoo — even though its real traffic should be counted via its distributed strategy with ads and widgets everywhere) accounted for two-thirds of search traffic to U.S. newspapers, which increased a third from 2006 to 2007. I assume that universal search — that is, the inclusion of news headlines in standard searches — has and and will continue to have a huge impact on traffic to news sites. Google is the new newsstand. (This, by the way, makes Mark Cuban’s silliness look even sillier.)
* Reuters has opened its content up via an API. It’s thinking like a platform. This will distribute Reuters news anywhere and everywhere by enabling people to build value themselves atop it.
* Note again TripAdvisor’s use of Facebook as a platform to gather (free) content more than distribute it.
News cannot continue to think of itself as a destination. It has to think of itself as a feed that goes to where you are. Remember that momentous quote Brian Stelter got from a young person in the NY Times: “If the news is that important, it will find me.”
Poor Yahoo. It only goes from worse to worse. They might finally get rid of ineffectual Jerry Yang but then they might get Mark Cuban in the boardroom along with Carl Icahn’s slate. Cuban has an absolutely numbnutty plan to kill Google: Paying sites to drop out of the Google index.
