Outside the Lines

The Web spirit of "build an audience and figure out the business model later" is a great filter. It allows products and services into the wild without barriers or the need to sell advertisers on an unproven concept.

Those who can build an audience, such as Twitter and FriendFeed, and before them Google, Facebook, and dozens of others who turned into giants, have the scale to develop monetization schemes that a loyal and fanatic user base won't summarily reject.

In the case of Twitter, the service is a hit, attracting millions of "tweeters," many of whom won't appreciate ads slipped into their Twitter stream.

Here's a solution. How about paying for what you like to use. Much of what gets sent via Twitter is a form of self-advertising. If you like Twitter so much, how about paying $5 a month for the privilege. Of course, the fee would have to include a quality of service guarantee and rebates for downtime. And, you would expect the owners of the Twitter or other services to be priced transparently and competitively, or at least reasonably if no serious competition exists.

In fact, why aren't people willing to pay for what they use? Public radio has the same problem, hence the tedious pledge drives.

A mere $5. Around here, that's less than a day's worth of coffee, a bacon cheeseburger with fries, a lowly beer, and maybe soon a gallon of gas. And you would get unlimited "tweets" ... Read more

The social Web is going through some birthing pains (see Techmeme). In the name of data portability, Facebook, MySpace.com, and Google made announcements last week about creating a more open social Web. For the most part, they are press releases and not yet fully released into the wild.

(Credit: www.travel-tuscany.net/)

On Thursday, Facebook suspended involvement with Google's Friend Connect, claiming that it redistributes user information from Facebook to developers without users' knowledge, violating the company's terms of service.

Google responded that Friend Connect is designed to keep users fully in control of their information at all times. "Users choose what social networks to link their Friend Connect account to. (They can just as easily unlink it.) 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," a Google representative said.

Full openness in the colonization of the social Web is counter to the instincts of companies funded by venture capitalists and with quarterly earnings to report. The companies are conflicted. On one hand, they want to maintain walled or semi-permeable gardens and find ways to keep users from defecting and the money from evaporating.

On the other hand, Facebook, Google, and MySpace are part of the Web generation, fueled by young people who value openness and advocate users having control of their data.

At this juncture, all the major social-networking players recognize that the walls ... Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Harvard Law and Berkman Center scholar Yochai Benkler and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales deconstructed Wikipedia and discussed peer production models at an event here Thursday.

Benkler, who is the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at the Harvard Law School and co-director of the Berkman Center, were participating in a program marking the Berkman Center's 10th anniversary at the Harvard Law School (see my earlier coverage of the conference). Wales is a Berkman Fellow and hopes to find ways for groups to come to better decisions in his research.

Jimmy Wales: Given enough time. humans will screw up Wikipedia just as they have screwed up everything else, but so far it's not too bad.

(Credit: Dan Farber)

During his remarks, Wales outlined what makes Wikipedia different in light of the perception that world's most-relied-upon information resource is counterintuitive. The following are notes from his remarks from the session (in his voice):

There were a lot of mistakes made in the early social design of the Internet. The unmoderated Usenet groups were difficult to control and exclude bad behavior. It gave the Internet a bad name in some circles, leading to spam, trolls and flamewars, and still exists today.

Given that background, and seeing the worst brought out in people, the community has no means to self-regulate. You end up with the top-down police state to manage it.

The idea that anyone could edit anything at any time made obvious that

Dark energy powers the Internet, at least according Jonathan Zittrain.

Zittrain is the Jack N. and Lillian Berkman visiting professor for entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard Law School, the chair in Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, and a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

With all those titles, he was the center of attention at a Berkman Center event on the occasion of its 10th anniversary at the Harvard Law School.

The author of the new book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Zittrain is being recruited to return from Oxford to Harvard as a tenured professor, but Stanford is also making a play for him.

The conference organizers had no problem using the venue to appeal to the audience of scholars and Internet wonks to cajole Zittrain into making Harvard his choice. It was like the Boston Red Sox crowd trying to convince Big Papi not to leave the team. Elena Kagan, dean of the Harvard Law School, and Charles Nesson, the William F. Weld professor of law at Harvard and a Berkman Center founder, stood up and offered a Harvard cheer for Zittrain.

"Jonathan is the Berkman Center, as well as his charisma and brilliance," Kagan said.

After several more preambles by Harvard law professors, Zittrain finally took the microphone to discuss his book. He outlined the beginnings of the Internet as built quietly, modestly, playfully, and whimsically, without the thought of making money, and yet capable of out-competing ... Read more

Update at 5 a.m. PDT Wed., May 14: Andreessen's analysis of Google Friend Connect has been added.

Marc Andreessen sees a number of companies suffering from the same disease.

"...I think a lot of companies have what I call 'strategitis.' Instead of launching a product, which would apparently make too much sense, they come up with a 'strategy,'" he says. "There's a strong temptation for companies that don't have strong social networking franchises to roll out social networking 'features' instead of products, and in reality, consumers like to have products."

Marc Andreessen

(Credit: Dan Farber)

Andreessen is referring to the launch of Google's Friend Connect, as reported by Betsy Schiffman of Wired.

Friend Connect glues together some emerging Web standards to make it easy for any Web site to add social features. Andreessen is co-founder and chairman of Ning, which allows people to easily and freely create their own social networks. Ning's platform currently hosts more than 260,000 social networks of varying sizes.

Andreessen is accurate in his categorization of Ning and Friend Connect. Ning is a finished product for end users, and Friend Connect is code that Web masters can apply to add a social dimension to their sites. It's also a way for Google to extend its reach into the social Web without having a leading social network.

They are complementary approaches, but Google's strategy appears to rankle Andreessen, even though he said that he would "support anything that ... Read more

Google's third Campfire One event Monday night featured the debut of Friend Connect. David Glazer, Google director of engineering, has described Friend Connect as a "salt shaker full of social to sprinkle social features on a site in a matter of hours."

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, at the Friend Connect Campfire event.

(Credit: TechCrunch)

At this juncture, the salt is in short supply, but Google plans to make it broadly available to developers over the next few months. More on Friend Connect here.

Web masters and developers can sign up to get on the Friend Connect waiting list here.

The Friend Connect administration site presents a catalog of social gadgets, such as member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing, provided by Google and other developers. Users copy gadget code snippets and paste them into their sites. The member gadget allows for sign-in with Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID accounts; invites and display of activities from existing friends on social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5 and Plaxo; browsing member profiles across social networks; and connecting with new friends on a site.

(Credit: Google)

Check out the Google video on Friend Connect below.

See also:

TechCrunch

Techmeme

This weekend I attended a book party in San Francisco for Jonathan Zittrain. His book, The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It, was recently published and received good reviews. I will be interviewing him at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society 10th anniversary conference on the future of the Internet this week.

At the party, I talked for a few minutes with Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison. The book party was hosted by Ellison's novelist wife, Melanie, and HuffPo's Arianna Huffington. It turns out that Zittrain and Melanie Ellison met in junior high school.

I asked Ellison about the growing market for on-demand software and about SAP's problems getting its on-demand enterprise application suite, Business ByDesign, to market. Ellison said that SAP's problems indicate how difficult it is to develop on-demand software.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison

(Credit: Dan Farber)

Ellison invested early on in two of the current on-demand software leaders, NetSuite and Salesforce.com. He is the majority stakeholder in NetSuite and owns a few percent of salesforce.com, both of which are public companies.

Ellison doesn't appear to be in a hurry to cash out or bring them into Oracle's orbit. It's been 10 years since NetSuite and Salesforce.com were founded, and there isn't a standalone billion-dollar on-demand software company, he told me. He noted that Oracle revenues are around $26 billion and said that Oracle has built the biggest on-demand software business.

The Oracle ... Read more

Updated 3:15 PST May 12

As expected, Google has unveiled a preview of Friend Connect, a way to add social features to a Web site without programming.

David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, described Friend Connect, whose site is inaccessible Monday morning, as plumbing for the rest of the Web.

"The Web is getting better by getting more social. We've baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site," Glazer said. "Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app."

I asked Glazer if Friend Connect is a response to Facebook Connect and MySpace.com's Data Availability. "People will speculate a lot in that direction. We didn't create this code in the three days (since Facebook and MySpace made their announcements)."

Unlike Facebook and MySpace, Google lacks a dominant, centralized social-networking hub. Friend Connect works the edges of the Internet, applying an open and distributed approach, and bringing a social dimension to the 99-plus percent of sites that aren't socially enabled.

Guacamole is a sample site created by Google for demonstrating Friend Connect features.

(Credit: Google)

"The distributed model has worked well for the Web. That is what the Web does--many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information," Glazer told me. "Now it is working to connect people to other people."

Friend Connect-compliant sites will be able to ... Read more

Amid speculation that Microsoft is looking to make an acquisition, Powerset launched a public beta of its Wikipedia search engine. It brings a new, rich semantic dimension via natural language query processing to Wikipedia that greatly improves the search and reading experience.

The company calls it a first step in changing the way users search and consume Web content. "It's a complete shift. You see this and you want to experience all content in this way," Barney Pell, co-founder and CTO of Powerset, told me. "And, as an introduction, it will drive huge investment in semantic and linguistic technology, just as investments were made in information retrieval and scalable databases in the past. People working in this space will be very marketable."

Users can enter keywords, phrases, or simple questions in Powerset's search box. Like many Web startups, Powerset is currently free of advertising.

Powerset's natural language search technology is based on patents licensed exclusively from PARC and its own proprietary indexing. Powerset's engine has read 2.5 million Wikipedia pages and extracted "meaning" from the sentences, creating a navigation and semantic layer on top of the popular Web encyclopedia. Following is a pictorial tour of Powerset features:

Powerset has also indexed Freebase, Metaweb's evolving, open database of structured information. The search result page presents Factz, a summary of key information extracted from Wikipedia pages.

Factz can be expanded to display more of the extracted verbs and their associated words and concepts.

Powerset creates a ... Read more