Setting aside my bias (like I could actually do that), I think Alex rocked this talk – and the audience did too. Check out the Twitter stream.
Here are my notes on how Alex uses social media to cope (as opposed to coping with the stress of social media!):
Chris Messina, Google‘s new open web advocate, just wrapped Northern Voice’s second keynote with a call for the defence of the open web from the gatekeeper mentality. (Which is why I just hit “publish” on my last blog post – it covers some of the same terrain, and I’d like to contribute to that conversation.)
I’m liking this no-PowerPoint thing a lot. Here are my notes from Chris’s speech:
And yes, the iPad I drew this on is one example of that locked-down, gate-keeper, appliance model that Chris dubs “pop computing”. But as he points out, those can be great… provided they’re not your only device.
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Buy an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, and you get to choose from thousands and thousands of “apps”: software that ranges from full-blown business applications to games to novelty items. But before an app can make it to your iPhone, it has to make it onto the virtual shelves of the App Store… and that means convincing Apple that the app is worthy of inclusion.
Apps are rejected all the time for a wide range of reasons – some of them more opaque than others. And that often leads to controversy… and, sometimes, embarrassment for Apple, when its gatekeeping looks less like protecting the user experience and more like arbitrary capriciousness.
The latest glitch came when online cartoonist Mark Fiore won the Pulitzer Prize (a watershed moment for doodlers unaffiliated with newspapers, by the way). It emerged that just a few months earlier, Apple had rejected his NewsToons app for “ridiculing public figures” – a rule that covers much if not most of the world of satire, and a big swath of civic conversation. (And it’s not the only time arbitrary rulings on cartoons have caused consternation.)
The Association of American Editorial Cartoonists sent Steve Jobs an open letter raising free speech concerns. The App Store is “becoming one of the primary ways people publish news and information,” they said, and “with that innovation comes new responsibility.”
That one sentence hints at a much bigger issue, one we’re all going to have to deal with.
* * *
More and more of our online social activity is happening in “private” places – that is, sites and services that are owned and controlled by companies. The more happens, the more those private places begin to look like civic spaces. Yet those spaces are governed by corporate gatekeepers – accountable not to us, but to the owners of the sites, services and products mediating that experience.
Maybe in an ideal world, the market would pressure those owners to be more responsive to participant communities – or risk losing them to a more open and accountable competitor. But there’s a self-perpetuating cycle with large networks like, say, Facebook. Once they reach a certain size, their market share is a market differentiator; of course you’re going to participate on Facebook, warts and all, because that’s where everyone you know hangs out. And they all hang out on Facebook because that’s where all their friends – including you – hang out.
Besides, you have a ton of stuff locked in there: photos, videos, months or years of notes, updates and application data – not to mention your network of friends. It’s not like you can pull up stakes, leave Facebook and have all that stuff follow you.
Facebook has this huge market share because they’ve built something compelling. They’ve made a lot of things very, very easy – from maintaining a decent-looking social profile (compared to the god-awful mess over on MySpace) to keeping tabs on what your friends are up to. It’s not as though they haven’t earned a big chunk of market share.
Same with Apple. The iPhone is a glorious device, as is the iPad that followed it. There’s good reason for Apple’s reputation for making spectacularly well-conceived, well-designed products – and their large audience makes them an attractive platform for developers.
But here again, there’s a vicious (or, if you own Apple stock, virtuous) circle at work. Developers flock to the iPhone in part because there’s a large user base. Users flock to the iPhone in part because there’s a massive selection of apps, built by those developers. The more users, the more apps being developed; the more apps, the more users drawn to the iPhone.
In each case, a company has gained enough market share to make it far more difficult for a competitor to pose a threat. In each case, they’ve gained enough market share that their gate-keeping decisions have a significant impact on the flow of information and conversation. And in each case, those companies have at times treated that impact capriciously and arbitrarily – falling fall short of a reasonable standard of accountability.
What can we do at that? I’ll look at one alternative in part 2.
If you use Facebook, you’ve almost certainly noticed the ads on the right-hand side of most pages. And chances are you’ve also noticed the little “x” in the upper right-hand corner of each ad.
It’s the “I don’t like this” link (the opposite of that little thumbs-up icon under each ad), and I use it regularly. I let most Facebook ads slide, but some either offend me (usually with a gratuitously sexist photo, or a clearly misleading come-on) or are just so clearly not intended for me (thanks, but I’m not in the market for a condo) that I end up clicking – more to alert Facebook than for any other reason.
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Click it, and up pops a dialog box saying “Tell us what you think. Why didn’t you like this ad?” You can then choose from a range of reasons, such as “Irrelevant”, “Offensive”, “Misleading”, “Repetitive” or “I DON’T WANT TO PLAY #@$&ING FARMVILLE OR MAFIA WARS!” (Actually, that last one isn’t an option. It desperately, desperately should be.)
Click “Okay”, and then… what?
Truth is, we don’t know. Facebook says that “over time, this information helps us deliver more relevant ads to our users.” But they won’t tell you how… and it isn’t unusual to see the same ad you’ve just dissed pop up again in a minute or two – complete with the little “x” link.
Which is just so last century.
Asking people for their input, and then sucking their suggestions into a black box and never letting them know what happened to them – that isn’t going to fly much longer. Not for governments that conduct “consultations” around issues they’ve already decided, and not for businesses that want to get valuable targeting information from their audience and customers without giving them any value in return.
That goes for organizations large and small. If your web site invites input from the public, you want to be doing something more than just nodding politely while they talk; this is an opportunity for interaction that looks less like the old suggestion box and more like conversation.
What if your users could see the list 20, 50 or 100 items they’ve liked or disliked? What if they could meet people who’ve liked and disliked similar things? What if they could talk about what they like or dislike, make it part of their profile, and tell advertisers how they do and don’t like to be approached?
At the very least, what if they could click a button that means they would never see that particular ad again?
If you’re going to ask your users a question, you need to be able to show them you’ve actually heard their answer. It’s perhaps the most basic skill in conversation – and so far, Facebook hasn’t learned it. Has your site?
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