wanderingstan

Every company would love to have customer lock-in; customers who can’t leave, and who continue to create revenue for you. The money just rolls in. Over the last decade, lock-in has evolved from shrinkwrap software to the online advertising world. Back then, customers were locked into Microsoft (and a few others) by file formats. Today we are instead locked into web services–especially social networks–by restrictive Terms of Service agreements. The battleground for customer freedom has changed from engineering to legal. Here’s my first-take assment of how things got started with file formats, and the strategy shift to the online world.

You could email your spreadsheet to a colleage in India, but they couldn’t read it without buying Excel. You were locked in to Microsoft by the engineering difficulty of reading their data format. Today you could authorize Facebook to scrape your friendlist and personal info from your MySpace profile, but they are legally disallowed from doing this. You are locked in to MySpace by the legal provisions of MySpace’s terms of service.

1990’s and Microsoft

I interviewed at Microsoft in Redmund the summer after graduating from college. They treated me like royalty, even giving me a rental car. I protested to the recruiter on the phone, “But I’m not yet 25!”  Bemusedly she explained, “Listen, we’re Microsoft. There won’t be a problem.”

I was offered a position on the Microsoft Money team. They had just cracked the file format of Quicken; the fruits of six months’ work by a team in India. That was an unusual position for Microsoft in the 90’s: they usually were the one’s setting the format standard. Back then it was said that 98% of the world’s documents were created with Microsoft products. And saved in Microsoft’s file formats.

File formats were the lock-in of the 90’s. You had to keep using Microsoft products because you had to work with everyone else, and they were using them too.

Today file lock-in remains an issue, but not nearly so important. Microsoft’s formats have been cracked wide open. My Mom reads attached Word documents in Gmail without realizing the format–she just clicks the “Read this” button.

Today and Social Networks

In today’s internet world, file formats don’t matter so much.  When was the last time you bought software because it was the only way to read or write some files? The online world has different frustrations. When I sign up for a new service, why can’t I point them to my MySpace page and say “Here’s my info, always look here for updates”?  Why can’t Outlook’s spam filter see who my friends are in Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn?  And what happens when today’s Facebookers are 70 and realize that all their life’s photos and thoughts and love letters are in one serivce, and there’s no way to hand these down to future generations?

This is my data. Why can’t I process it like files on my computer using whatever tool I choose? If I make a picture in Photoshop, Adobe can’t stop me from putting it in my Word document. If I put 2 years’ minutia of my life into MySpace, why can NewsCorp’s lawyers stop me from transferring it into Facebook, or downloading a backup copy for myself?

Unlike the file formats of yesteryear, there are no engineering challenges here. All the data is right there on the web pages. It doesn’t take a genius to program a server to download your Facebook page and scrape out your data: friends, interests, messages, photos, and the rest. Some have tried to build applications that do this. Robet Scoble was busted for testing one such attempt by Plaxo.

As a sometimes software engineer myself, the power of legal words are amazing. All of this innovation and user choice is eliminated by these short sentences:

MySpace Terms of Service

Prohibited activity includes, but is not limited to … (8) using the account, username, or password of another Member at any time or disclosing your password to any third party or permitting any third party to access your account [and your information];

Facebook Terms of Service

In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to: … use automated scripts to collect information [even your own] from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site;

Of course the picture isn’t nearly as cut and dried as I’ve made it out here. In a later post I want to work through the different mechanics–both financial and engineering–that run an ad-supported web service and push them to require these restrictions. But the takeaway here is that this problem will not be solved by engineering genius. There is no developer teams India working to crack the computer code that will give you freedom to switch social networks. Who will crack the legal codes of today, or how will they be forced open?

On the heels of Facebook’s API: The unofficial Facebook blog is reporting that LinkedIn may open their platform. Seth Goldstein is reporting rumors that MySpace may open theirs:

While I don’t have fresh data on hand to support this hunch, the well-sourced rumor I heard last week about MySpace scrambling feverishly to open their API’s reinforces what is becoming obvious: MySpace’s Kremlin-esque behavior towards 3rd party widget developers -”we buy them or we crush them!”- is on a crash course with the debauched dirty-dancing going on amidst the MySpace spring-breakers.

This is exciting news!

As a hacker, it is exciting to imagine the mash-up possibilities.

As an idealist, it is exciting to see that the silos may be cracking.

As a Lijit founder, it is exciting that more content from individuals can be rolled into their personal search engine.

Here’s hoping the rumors are true!

[Silo photo by Ixio]

What site will be the next MySpace or FaceBook? I think the answer is already here.

To justify my case, we’ll have to take a trip back in time.

In the late 80’s and 90’s being “online” meant getting stuff with your modem. So most people signed up with a service like CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL. They had email, news, shopping, forums, search, and more. Of course, the internet was there too, and it could do many of the same things, but only a few brave souls outside of academia could conquer the steep learning curve of Unix commands and arcane networking configuration needed to accomplish the most basic tasks. (Remember ‘talk’, ‘pine’, ‘nn’, and ‘gopher’?)

But the internet was free and open, and it got better as the nerds kept creating. They made easy to use email clients that weren’t restricted to people on the same network. They made things with names like “Yahoo!” and “eBay”. They made ugly (but strangely compelling) home pages and fan pages. Publishers could set up shot on the internet without cutting expensive deals. Soon the Web had better features, more content, and fewer restrictions. The proprietary services started to cave: In 1994 Prodigy offered their members access to the web, CompuServe followed in 1995, AOL in 1996.

Fast forward 10 years.

Being “online” today means being generating content and being part of a social network. So most people sign up with a service like MySpace or Facebook or LinkedIn. They have friend lists, photo sharing, messaging, blogs, groups, music and more. Of course, there are independent blogs too, and they can do many of the same things, but only a few brave souls conquer the steep learning curve of setting up a blogging platform or configuring javascript widget code.

But the blogosphere is free and open, and it’s getting better as the nerds keep creating. They’ve created easier to use platforms like WordPress and Typepad, and widget platforms like WidgetBox. They’ve made photo sharing widgets (Flickr), video sharing widgets (Revver, YouTube), Blogroll widgets (Bloglines, Blogrolling), and more keep coming every day. The proprietary services have already been forced to let some widgets in, and the widget nerds are innovating faster than the them. (Including my own company, Lijit.)

I’m not a one prone to making new years predictions, but I predict that MySpace will be as influencial in 2017 as Prodigy is today in 2007. (And probably a lot sooner!)

A week ago I wrote about my idea for how MyBlogLog could work on MySpace.

As reported on TechCrunch today, they’ve done it! You can see it in action on my MySpace page.

I can’t wait to see how it will spread through the MySpace world. The only questions now are, “Why didn’t MySpace do it themselves?” and “How long till MySpace does it themselves?”

…

And the next idea for MyBlogLog: Their MySpace widget should also work in RSS description fields. So when you view the feed in BlogLines, this could also register as a recent reader.

UPDATE: Looks like MyBlogLog has implemented my idea. Horay!

I love MyBlogLog. It’s a simple elegant idea perfectly executed. You can see their widget on the side of my blog, listing the last 8 people who’ve been here.

The thing is, the “people-watching” aspect of it has a distinct MySpace flavor, but MySpace is the one place where their widget won’t work. (Because it’s in JavaScript.)

About a week ago I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea of how MBL could work on MySpace. I just got off the phone with founder Eric Marcoullier and he thought it should work too. Maybe we’ll see it in action someday? Would be awesome.

So excuse me while I geek out for a bit!

• On MySpace, you can’t use JavaScript and Flash movies can’t “phone home” to your server.
• You can however, have images that are pulled from off-site.
• The server which supplies the image can set a cookie on the viewer’s brower.
• So, your “widget” then becomes 5 (or whatever) images wrapped in link tags, numbered 1 to 5. This is the HTML you have folks copy onto their page.
• When a page is viewed and the images are displayed, the server performs the following when serving the first image:
• Looks for a cookie identifing the person viewing the page
• Looks in DB to find the last 5 viewers and get their avatars.
• Records this list of 5 in a newly set cookie. (Or alternatively stores it in a special table in DB) This is the important step–we’ll need this record when someone clicks.
• Serves up the avatar image along with the needed cookies
• Sometime later, the page viewer may click on one of the images.
• The server will only know that the viewer was on page X and that they clicked on (e.g.) user image #3. At this point we don’t know which avatar was in that #3 slot.
• It is possible that other people may have looked at the page since the images were served, so the avatar they clicked on may no longer be #3. E.g. maybe they’ve been bumped to #5. So we can’t look in the master DB.
• The solution is to look in the cookie we set (or in the special table). This will tell us which 5 avatars where served up to this particular viewer
• Do the cross reference and take them to user page of the avatar they clicked on.

You can see how it might look like on my MySpace page. So that’s my geek-out for the day. I’m really fascinated with widgets in general and think they are a good thing; a de-centralizing of the web. With any luck, walled gardens like MySpace will soon be forgotten. But until then…

Is it time for users to unionize?

I was talking with my friend Fabian shortly after the recent social revolt at FaceBook and we hit upon an amazing parallel. Consider this:

In the early days of the money economy, workers were horribly exploited. During the industrial revolution conditions got bad enough that users began to form unions and fight back for their rights.

Goldhaber now suggests that we are leaving the money economy and entering the attention economy. So are we, the content-creating workers, also being exploited? What else do you call it when web companies are built entirely on user-generated content, but we users are stripped of our rights to that content by onerous EULAs and forced to endure increasingly annoying advertisements? All the while trapped in walled gardens which we’ve been locked into, and the gardeners only listen when we scream.

Every MySpace user I know is absolutely sick of the advertising onslaught and would leave if they could. But they feel trapped because they have so much content invested there, not to mention all their friends.

Could the same techniques that brought down the robber barons also break down the walled gardens of  today’s social media sites? Is it time for unions of users?

In the last weeks I’ve run the idea by many folks from Boulder to San Francisco to New York to Frankfurt. Everyone gets it immediately. Several people are already moving forward with this idea and I look forward to seeing how things play out. I’ll keep you posted.