After my quaint status update about the muffin top ad, Facebook got even more vicious, like a schoolyard bully provoked by my initial reaction. With the knowledge that I was engaged to be married, the site splashed an ad across the left side of the screen playing into a presumed vulnerability. Do you want to be a fat bride? You’d better go to such-and-such Web site to learn how to lose weight before the big day.
. . .
I assumed that the diet ads would subside after I changed my relationship status from “engaged” to “married” in May. They did. I now receive these:
“Trying to get pregnant? Visit our site now. We’re a national network of fertility specialists treating male and female infertility.”
Ouch. I am reminded of the time Facebook tried to hook me up with an alternate wife.
The success of distributed commenting systems such as Disqus, Intense Debate, and most famously, FriendFeed have generated a heated debate over if we should let discussions break out all over the place in small pockets or try to gather them all together in context with the source material so that everyone can benefit from a collective debate.
On the one hand, you have those that encourage everyone to “go with the flow” and let discussions take place inline, wherever convenient. Duncan Riley falls in this camp with his post last week about Blogging 2.0.
On the other, you have those that want to pull the discussion back into context. If it’s a blog post, they would like to see these distributed pools of discussion pulled back together under the original blog post. Fred Wilson falls into this camp with his post today, Leaving the Instigator Out.
Call me old school but I’m with Fred on this one. I think it’s possible to have both cookies – keep discussions distributed but at least tie them together so you’re not logging to sites across the web trying to chase down the latest discussion. The solution is to revive the long forgotten Trackback.
Trackback was developed by the blogging pioneer Six Apart back when blogs expanded beyond a close circle of friends and there was a need for blogs to notify each other when they were expanding on a conversation and moving it to a new venue. The standard practice was that if you wanted to take someone’s idea and expand on it a bit more than would fit comfortably into a comment box, you would post about it on your own blog and trackback to the original post. This would do two things:
send a ping to the original blogger so that he or she would know that you’re expanding on their idea,
add a link in the comments section so that people reading the original post could follow the discussion over to the new blog post
Trackback was a very simple technology but it provided a thread that linked the two posts and brought the readership of both posts together. If you were moving the conversation from one blog to another, sending a trackback ping was the right thing to do, it was common courtesy, an attribution. That link, that attribution, is what has gotten people up in arms. Without this link, both the original blogger and the reader of the original post are cut off from distributed discussions and that just doesn’t seem right or efficient.
Therefore, perhaps we can say that Techmeme aggregates what’s important about tech and Internet news and easily provides links to surrounding conversations. It’s really a new kind of online newspaper, and a pretty terrific one. And Friendfeed is an aggregator of lots of stuff, of what people are reading and writing and sharing and looking at and listening to.
Friendfeed is the modern version of a newswire while TechMeme is a constantly updated newspaper. If you have the time to scan through the real-time updates of everyone’s lifestream, FriendFeed is going to get you the news faster. If you’d rather let the editorial algorithms do the heavy lifting, TechMeme is the way to go.
Inside Facebook noticed that the thumbs up icon no longer on the Facebook mini-feed. All in the name of simplification says Facebook but to me it seems like they’ve removed a sense of control over the feed I once thought I had.
Back when Facebook announced it’s News Feed (then called the “mini-feed”) which aggregated all your friends activity onto a single, easy to scan page, there was a firestorm of controversy. What upset people the most was that this feed, which consisted of updates that, up until that time, had been scattered across each of your friends pages, now pulled everything together into a page which, at the time, seemed jarringly out of context. A single aggregation point was the right thing to do from a technical standpoint. Much like an RSS Reader made it easier to scan through the latest posts on your favorite blogs, the Facebook News Feed streamlined the process of keeping up with the latest activities of your friends.
What didn’t sit right with the Facebook users was that by making the process of keeping up with your friends easier and more efficient, it crossed an unwritten privacy boundary. It was like that first time you looked up a phone number or someone’s name on Google. It felt like you were looking at something you weren’t supposed to see. Seeing these events spread out over multiple profiles, in context with other activities was normal but to have it all pulled together was almost too powerful and it was a shock.
It’s only a few months later and now we think nothing of it. The fact that Facebook can pull this information together for us is nothing special and this kind of aggregation is now, as my colleague Todd Sampson likes to say, “the cost of admission” for any social network site. The one issue I’ve had with closed systems is that you’re limited with what you can do with data that you put in there. As soon as the News Feed was launched, I was poking around looking for the RSS output of the feed. The same when the Facebook API was launched. I was disappointed to find that Facebook did not allow you to pull the News Feed updates out of Facebook.
This is by design of course. The News Feed is much more than a simple aggregation of your friends activity. There’s an algorithm working behind the scenes that calculates the proximity of your friends and does some filtering to show you more events from friends that you may care about and less from friends that are only tangential to you. We now know that the Facebook News Feed is also a key venue for Facebook’s advertising where endorsements and call outs to products are services are beginning to appear inline along with your friends’ updates.
It’s inevitable that other social networks would catch on of course. Reservations about privacy melted away when publishing your profile activity became not only accepted but expected. The transformation was further solidified when Twitter changed the concept of friending into following. No longer did you need to declare someone a friend (which carries a social expectation) in order to follow their updates. It is now acceptable to follow someone’s updates because you trust their taste. You may not know them personally but you could still be a fan.
Now we see multiple versions of the News Feed appearing on the front page of other sites front and center as a key part of what they offer. Plaxo Pulse was the first out the gate and shortly after Friend Feed launched with their simple aggregation. Wink as well and most recently I noticed that even LinkedIn has joined into the game.
Vitality, as we call it at Yahoo, is nothing new. What is most exciting about the aggregation of events, particularly when it’s done across open systems as it is in Plaxo, Friend Feed, and Wink, is what you can do with that data. If we go back to the RSS Reader example earlier, it’s one thing just to pull together events for your users’ convenience. What is so much more interesting is when you can begin to infer things based on the collective activity that you pull together.
There’s been a lot of talk about the limitations of closed social networks. Jason Kottke kicked it off when he described Facebook as a more updated version of the AOL walled garden and others such as Jeremiah Owyang and Robert Scoble calling it a black hole because all your data goes in but there’s no RSS out.
I totally see where they’re coming from. Heck, I just spent the greater part of a day pulling all my data out of various blogging systems in order to bring them all together here on this new domain. I’m happy to say the text of the posts was not the issue, that’s portable. It’s the meta-data associated with the images that is causing me problems and I’ve resorted to a manual pull of everything in order to make sure things look just right.
The next step is resetting all my pointers. It seems that every web 2.0 beta that you sign up for has a place in its profile for your blog URL. What happens when you change to a new domain? You need to go back to each one and update it. Your blog URL is an updated version of your email address, an important part of your address card. Feedburner saw the writing on the wall and effectively serves as a .forward file for your RSS feed, maybe MyBlogLog can step in and solve the other part of the equation which is your static URL.
But step back a minute. As often happens in the Valley, we, the hyper-connected few are the vast minority. How many actually would use a Facebook RSS feed if it was available to them? How many people really need a service that points them to their latest blog URL? How many even know of services such as pobox.com that can forward your email address to your most recent address?
Sure it’s hard to get your images off of TypePad and it’s impossible to pull your mini-feed out of Facebook but do the vast majority of people really care? What’s more important is that the system they use works in an integrated way and they don’t have to fiddle with it to get results. iTunes/iPod, Microsoft Windows/Office, and Quicken/TurboTax pairings all work together in tightly bound ecosystems because to do so allows them to guarantee a level of stability for their customers. As much as they might want to be open, Facebook limits what you can do using proprietary subsets of HTML and SQL in order to lock things down and keep things neat. It doesn’t hurt that it results in user lock-in but their challenge is to provide maximum flexibility within the constraints that they lay down.
There are several noble attempts to build outside the box. People Aggregator,Ning, and Profile Builder come to mind. Yet the problem here is flow. The flow of readers across a profile out in the wild is so hard to build up. If you update something in Twitter or Facebook the closed network will channel that flow strong and fast so you’re bound to get a response. As anyone who has hosted their own blog can tell you, it takes a long time to gather an audience of regular subscribers – post something pithy in a closed network like Vox and you’re bound to get a reaction – their broadcast signals are much stronger.
So the challenge to anyone building an open social network, one that overlays the existing networks, is to locate and connect people of like interests and maintain a quality of decorum so it continues to be worthy of their attention. A fair bit of community editorial is required because anything totally open is going to be overrun by spammers if no one tends the garden. On top of that, it needs to be dead easy to understand, can’t break, and be immediately valuable to the casual browser just poking around. Think Soccer Mom. What’s going to compel her to create a universal profile? What’s she going to get out of it? What problem are you going to solve?
I don’t have all the answers, I’m still thinking them through. I think there’s a need for a service that connects you to the people and sites that are important to you in an interactive way. People search engines such as Spock only get us halfway there. They just crawl what’s out there but don’t really have a sense of the user doing the searching. The right answer for what you’re looking for depends entirely on who you are. I’m looking for a service that will take what I invest into it, not just the one -time editing of my profile but my ongoing interaction with it, either directly or via an API, and pay me back in spades when I turn around and ask the service for guidance, again, either directly or via my UI of choice.
It’s the basic trust proposition of the Internet. People will only trust a service that gives them complete freedom to come and go as they please. Further, they’ll want to come back if you send them to cool places. It’s why people like Facebook today, and why they’ll be tired of it tomorrow, if it only sends you to places within the Facebook silo.
What do you think? Would you find such a service useful? Would the Soccer Mom?
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