On Death

I’m usually late in sending out holiday greetings and this year is no exception. We had planned to make a physical version of our annual family photo but didn’t manage to do it in time for the holidays, so we wound up sending out virtual versions. At least there was snow. I sent out the photo to perhaps 150 friends and colleagues and received the usual 20 bounces. One bittersweet surprise was finding out that my friend Daniel Beunza has moved to the London School of Economics. I’m sure it’ll be a great place for him—and he’s closer to his home country of Spain—but I’ll miss discussions about finance with this remarkable colleague. Much sadder was receiving an automated e-mail from Anne Friedman, another friend with whom I co-wrote the Place chapter of Networked Publics saying that she was on indefinite medical leave. I had received this same message a while back and was concerned, but I didn’t get in touch. This time, I looked her up in Google news—just in case—and was saddened to hear that she died this October.

I remember Anne and I talking about how I had discovered that Derek Gross, a college friend who died on 1996 via his Web page. This was before the age of blogs, but Derek updated his Web page regularly and when I visited it to see when his band was next playing, I found he had died, together with a record of his experience. Certainly it’s something I had never wished to see again, but just as surely discovering Anne’s death via the net is not going to be the final time.   

Anne was a brilliant scholar, as evidenced by her books Window Shopping and the Virtual Window, as well as a great friend. She was crucial for not only my chapter, but also for the Networked Publics group and our book, articulating issues that were fundamental to the project, asking and giving me sage advice throughout. I could not have written the chapter of the book without her. Together we sat in our offices, she in her Lautner House, I in the AUDC studio on Wilshire Boulevard, and wrote the chapter simultaneously on Writely (now Google Docs). In so doing, we experienced the phenomenon of our voices becoming co-mingled, producing a third entity that was neither Anne nor myself. I am heartbroken that there will never be a sequel.

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A Modest Proposal for Social Networks or, How This Could be the Next Facebook

I’m still trying to catch up with my big blog post (maybe a white paper?) on the research we did on Networked Publics and the Infrastructural City, so bear with me. In the meantime, how about some pie-in-the-sky ideas about Web 3.0 (so sorry)?  

A couple of weeks ago, Traction Software’s Jordan Frank wrote an intelligently-written post titled "Wither Web 2.0 Social Networking? My 2 Cents." Jordan begins with a series of gloomy links on the failure of social networking technology to monetize. It’s pretty obvious to those of you on Twitter or on Facebook…we use these sites all the time. Some 150 million people subscribe to Facebook and half of them use it every day. It costs a lot of money to run Facebook’s servers (the photo below is of some of the over 10,000 servers Facebook uses) and back in 2007, Fishtrain calculated that the server cost alone was around $1.05 a user and of course there are employees, office space, and so on.

In other words, that’s crazy money and for social networks to stay afloat, they are going to have to make some real cash fast. Facebook could well be racing the New York Times for which one will shut its doors first.

facebook's server room

Advertising is the hitch here. Social networks, search engines, and of course newspapers and magazines have long relied on advertising to fund their businesses, but as advertisers are able to see results more directly than ever before, they find that perhaps ads—especially the sort of relatively unobtrusive ads that appear on social networks…but that users still hate—aren’t really generating the kind of results they want.

Remember "it’s all about eyeballs?" I remember doe-eyed business school graduates telling me that a decade ago and look how far that went…

User fees are certainly possible but extremely unlikely, in my opinion, to succeed.

Instead, here’s a thought experiment. With millions of blogs and content-management-driven Web sites out there (like this one, but also online user communities), what if social networks left the corporate-owned ghetto? What if a set of tools were developed—OpenId being only the first one—to allow all the goodies of social networking sites—meeting friends, posting profiles, tracking online actions, sending dumb gifts, unfriending people, posting kid photos, poking—to spread across the Web? How different would this be than losing America Online, Compuserve, and the various online services of the 1980s and early 1990s? What if all this social networking stuff just went into the cloud—not a cloud owned by Amazon or Google—but a cloud owned by everyone? A few new tools and Drupal 9.0 could certainly do this, I think. 

Surely some important technological breakthroughs would have to be made to make this a reality, but really, why not? 

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architecture gone wild

The New York Times carries an article on some projects (including some by former students of mine) that take transparency to a new degree. Actually, this is something that I should have addressed in my entry on transparency and government monitoring. It is not just that we don’t care, it’s increasingly that we would rather show. To some degree this is a question of trust and/or naiveté, but it is also part of a culture of exhibitionism (as this article shows…and something that is very different from the culture of voyeurism twenty years ago). It’s not that they don’t care: they want you to see…

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