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Alexander van Elsas's Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior

new media, social behavior, Internet, TV, mobile, social networks, human behavior, family, friends

Our need for interaction locks us upToday

MySpace has over 200 Mln registered users. Facebook follows fast with 140Mln registered users, and they are adding an astonishing 600.ooo new users every day. A rough estimate suggests that more than half a Billion people are registered in social networks worldwide. That is half of the entire Internet population. Clearly there is a need to be participating in social networks. The need is interaction.

While social networks undoubtedly have brought us many great things I find that the current setup is undesirable. Techies might consider Facebook and MySpace web 2.0, but their strategy is very much 1.0. They are silo’s. You are either in, or out. Or as Doc Searl puts it, Facebook is the Borg. Once in, it is hard to get out. You should realise that it isn’t Mark Zuckerberg or a talented developer providing you cool features that keeps you locked inside a social network. It is their choice of business model. MySpace and Facebook have only one mission, and that is to become the single silo everyone uses as their communication platform on the web. It allows them to execute their free, advertisement based business model. In this business model the network is more important than the user. In other words, the business model becomes more effective when the number of users increase. This is not to be mistaken from the network effect Tim O’Reilly often speaks about in referral to web

Interaction will drive the evolution of the webYesterday

I’ve often said it, and I’ll say it again. The real value of social media lies in the ability for anyone to interact over anything. It is the interaction that creates the value. Smart people like Tim O’Reilly will tell you that web 2.0 is about the web becoming a platform. That data is becoming more important than software. And that network effect determine value.

Clay Shirky is interviewed by the Guardian about his view of the next decade. Not a great in depth interview, but an ok read. In it he predicts newspapers will disappear (wow), and  that books will be printed on-demand. I do like his final statement:

What does the next decade hold? Mobile tools will certainly change the landscape, open spectrum will unleash the kind of creativity we’ve seen on the wired internet, and of course there will be many more YouTube/Facebook-class applications. But the underlying change was the basic tools of the internet. The job of the next decade is mostly going to be taking the raw revolutionary capability that’s now apparent and really seeing what we can do with it.

Kevin Kelley talks about the development of a new kind of mind:

It is hard to

The incredible power of Social TechnologyJanuary 6

My good friend Steven Hodson has written an excellent post called The impossible dream - Social Technology. Steven is, rightly, concerned about the fact that many people in society are not part of the freedom and conversation social media technology has brought us. Steven writes:

As enamoured as we are currently with Social Media we have become more entrapped by the services built on what Social Media is all about. Social Media is an idea – a platform of sorts – that because of its philosophy of openness and transparency gave us a new way to communicate. It was a two way communication where those that created the content could interact with those that were consuming that content.

In of itself Social Media has changed the landscape of our online lives by letting us be participants instead of just bystanders. Even though we have gotten caught up in the ways we use the new media it doesn’t change the fact that the Internet has evolved – if only ever so slightly. Even with that evolution though we are still living in a world where access to this new world is a haphazard affair.

Stephen points out that as long as basic access is seen as a revenue generator for companies there will always be people left out of this conversation.  He writes:

In effect when you have Social Technology borders of every

Facebook may become the next online ’smoking’ addictionDecember 23 2008

What if Facebook becomes the new web? This could become a reality for many users worldwide, given their unbelievable growth of 600.000 new users every day. Facebook already has 140Mln registered users. If they continue to grow at this rate they could easily get 50% of all the Internet users worldwide to the Facebook platform within a few years.

Smoking is dangerous for your health

I find that to be a scary thought. Not just because it’s never good for a user if there is only one choice. It scares me that Facebook has access to incredible amounts of private information and that most users do not seem to realize or care about that. Facebook quickly tries to monopolize our on-line relations and interactions. Which would be ok if their business model was to provide users with value. But it isn’t. Their business model is based upon advertisement. Basically it means that Facebook will exploit everything they know about you, about your friends, and the interactions you have with them in a commercial model.

If all of your interactions are happening thought Facebook, imagine what they know about you. Demographics, po

Facebook Connect a privacy tool? Yeah Right!December 2 2008

A good article by Brad Stone at the NY Times entitled “Facebook aimes to extend its reach across the web”. Brad talks about Facebook Connect:

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

This is beginning to sound like a development I have talked about many times, the user-centric web. In a User Centric Web, the user is in control of his data and interactions. Facebook’s attempt sounds like it, but it fails in one major perspective. And Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operation Officer of Facebook, together with Brad’s analysis indirectly explain where it fails.

Sheryl is quoted in the article:

“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “They can build their own social capa