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Facebook Is The New AOL

2010-10-25T00:00:00-04:00

Those CDs made handy compacts for the ladies.

Back in April, I wrote a little screed declaiming Facebook’s failures around privacy and why they had ultimately led me to delete my account. At the time, my blog was read mostly by friends and co-workers. I just wanted to convince as many of them as possible to follow suit, so that I wouldn’t miss out on any good parties. As it happened, one of them posted it to Hacker News, and, within a few days, it had been reposted on Gizmodo (where, ironically, it now has nearly 40,000 “likes”), and became one of the top stories on Digg and Reddit. The post was translated into several languages and, at one point, I was even interviewed for the French version of 60 Minutes. It’s safe to say that my little rant has now been read by well over a million people, and, based on the comments and tweets I received, I think a substantial number actually did delete their accounts. (More irony: I think most of my original target audience – my friends and co-workers – remain on Facebook. Which means I’m probably still missing the good parties.)

I certainly wasn’t the only one writing about this. Many other bloggers and journalists had been on top of this story for months already. (In fact, it was their coverage that made my blog post possible – check out the links in the post.) Shortly afterwards, the story broke into the mainstream media, with Time magazine featuring it as their cover story. Facebook felt compelled to hold a conference call explaining themselves and rolled out simplified privacy controls. This, in turn, suggests that the general frustration with Facebook’s attitude towards privacy had, indeed, begun to hit them where it counts – people had been leaving the site in droves. Although they were still growing, there was evidence that their growth had dropped off dramatically. More significantly, and very suddenly, all the cool kids were over Facebook. For a social media start-up, even one with ~~nearly~~ over a half-billion users, that is the death knell. Facebook knows this better than anyone, having come into vogue at the expense of MySpace, who, at the time, appeared equally invincible. (Remember when 100 million members seemed like a lot?)

But What’s The Alternative?

How much do people hate Facebook? They were willing to pay perfect strangers cash money to replace it.

The difference this time around is that no one seems certain what the “new Facebook” is supposed to be. This was one of the biggest questions people asked me after reading my post. “Sure, Facebook sucks. I get it. But what else can we use?” Facebook’s critics, including myself, were left scrambling for answers. An open-source project that had yet to release any code raised over $200,000 in a few days on Kickstarter. Others suggested up-and-comers like pip.io and Hibe. My own answer was that the Web itself is already a social network. There’s not much need, really, to have one place to store everything. In fact, it can be problematic, as Facebook has amply demonstrated. There are better solutions for sharing status updates, links, photos, videos, and much, much more. That said, I can understand the appeal of having a single, simplified interface to access things. Numerous startups (and not-so-startups) have tried providing such an interface to the “social Web,” but, at this point, it’s fair to say, none of them have really caught on yet. So while I can (and do) use Twitter for status updates, Flickr for photo sharing, YouTube for videos, and so on, I still had to learn to use all these separate services. That was fine for the early adopter crowd, and it’s fine for me, but none of these services have crossed over quite like Facebook.

In other words, the social Web exists, but it’s kind of a pain to use.

People Search: It Can’t Be That Hard

When you search for me, this guy comes up. Not really, but he might as well.

But there’s more. One of the most common responses I got from people to my anti-Facebook rant was that Facebook made it easy to keep in touch with people. Even I will admit that I did end up reconnecting with a few old friends, which was nice. (Of course, for every one of them, there were a dozen friend-requests from people I barely remembered, but, hey, nothing’s perfect.) People gave me the same answer several years ago when I’d ask them what they saw in MySpace. “People can find me,” was the most common answer. And it’s true. If I search for a person on Google or any other search engine, I usually get an indecipherable tangle of results, unless they happen to have a really uncommon name, are really well-known, or really good at SEO. Even then, it still takes work to piece together anything that looks like a profile. The search engines have left a giant hole in the search engine space, and, to this day, they don’t seem to even be aware of the problem. What Facebook provides is “people search” that works.

The Never Ending Quest To Be The Start Page For The Web

And Netscape … well, we won’t even talk about Netscape.

Facebook has combined these two basic capabilities – a cohesive social media consumer experience and what amounts to a very effective on-line directory – and has essentially recreated AOL, except it’s 2010, and instead of CDs and DVDs, they have Facebook Connect and Like buttons. Like AOL, Facebook is clearly attempting create what amounts to a proprietary version of the Web. Their recent introduction of Facebook Places is a great example of this. Who needs FourSquare or Whrrl when you have Places? Rumor has it they are also planning to introduce their own version of Yahoo Answers. And they will continue to do this until you really have no need to ever actually leave Facebook. Of course, Web content will still exist outside of Facebook, but Facebook’s ultimate goal here is to get to the point where you get to it through their applications. (And I’d bet a lot of organizations already update their Facebook Group pages at least as much as they update their Web sites. I recently heard a Toyota ad that directed you to their Facebook page.) After all, Google became the de facto standard “start page” with search and now they basically print money. But Google has been almost comically unable to extend their lucrative beachhead into the realm of social media. I’m sure Skynet is by now somewhat alarmed by Facebook’s success at this point, given how chummy Facebook and Microsoft have been. How difficult would it be for Facebook to integrate the Bing search engine directly into the Facebook consumer experience? Not very.

The thing is, these attempts to “take over” the Web always fail. Even before the Web became the defacto way to share content, we had CompuServe and AOL. Both tried to ignore the Web. AOL embraced it in time to make a run at being the de facto start page. Microsoft tried for awhile to introduce a proprietary version of the Web (remember Blackbird?), so everyone would need Windows to use it. Then we had Yahoo, adding virtually every on-line service known to humanity in a similar quest. Next, of course, came Google, who succeeded with search, but failed with almost everything else. More recently, we had MySpace and now Facebook.

Guys, this never works.

You Can’t Out-Hustle An Entire, Highly Caffeinated Industry

Because a quadruple-expresso takes too long to make.

Yet companies can’t seem to resist trying. Eventually, they either fade into the background, old before their time (see MySpace, Yahoo), or they simply outgrow that phase (see Microsoft) and realize the Web is bigger than any one company and big enough for all of them.

The reason these attempts fail is simple. Collectively, innovation on the Web, given time, always outpaces that of any single company. It is the tortoise and hare fable, except with billions of dollars and massive data centers. Right now, as you read, thousands of entrepreneurs, many of them very talented, are eyeing those 500M Facebook members, not to mention a half-dozen billion-dollar companies who can, and are, throwing hundred and even thousands of engineers into social. And they will eventually come up with a consumer experience that is simply more compelling than any one-stop-shop approach.

And I think that is real lesson in the success of my little Facebook post. Facebook has already lost literally millions of us around the world. Millions more would leave except that, at the moment, Facebook provides features they can’t get anywhere else. As soon as there are decent alternatives, they will leave. Facebook, like MySpace and AOL and many others, will surely hang around for years after that point, but they’ll be irrelevant.

Moving On …

Of course, sometimes people do things they later regret.

Of course, perhaps they will change their stripes. A lot of talented people have joined their ranks over the past year or so, and I’m sure they didn’t do so with irrelevancy in mind. Otherwise, they would have joined Yahoo or MySpace. Facebook has made some noises about making account deletion more straightforward and they did simplify their privacy settings. But then they rolled out Places, which apparently defaults to opt-in again, an almost shockingly bad idea. So, for now, I’m going to say Facebook is ultimately doomed by their own hubris.

And that is the last thing I’m going to say about Facebook. I had never intended to be the anti-Facebook guy. I don’t like them, sure, and I am concerned about privacy in social media, but that hardly defines me. Going forward, I plan to talk more about how we can make the Web itself work better for consumers. After all, that’s actually my job.

The Death Ray And The Lean Startup

2010-07-28T00:00:00-04:00

Originally posted at borderstylo.com.

First, a word from our sponsor, Goliathon, maker of awesome weaponry.

When I was but a fledgling entrepreneur, like most fledgling entrepreneurs, I became frustrated with the process of trying to raise money for my fledgling venture. Now, this was during the “dot-bomb” era, and so raising money was supposed to be easy. We also had an increasingly vocal contingent of curmudgeons, wondering why we couldn’t just earn our money like everyone else, with hard work and everyday construction materials. We were pioneers, forging a new economy from bits and bytes and assembling entire companies by applying mass production to “value chains” where “capital formation” was no different than tightening bolts on a combustion engine!

Later, we discovered this was all part of a collective neurosis, much like the one that gripped the mortgage industry a few years later. And like most such Jungian fantasies, it ended tragically for most of us, although a few people cashed out in time to become very, very rich. (Still later, we would discover that we’d actually been right the entire time, when Web 2.0 would sweep most of us back into this brave new world again, but that’s another story, or blog post.)

Backlash

A certain percentage of these newly disillusioned entrepreneurs decided that the curmudgeons had been at least half-right. Surely we didn’t need investors to start companies! We could just save our pennies and take out a second mortgage on the house and perhaps teach our kids HTML and CSS and voila!, one day we could strike out on our own!

No more spending all our time raising money and worrying about having to give up a controlling stake to some evil venture capitalist hell-bent on turning our beautiful start-up into a “enterprise” software company, so that we’d wake up one day and find ourselves in a cube, wearing a white shirt and khakis, working for IBM, and using Microsoft Windows. (It’s a recurring nightmare of mine.) The backlash reached a peak – the lean startup was the beginning of a new utopia, where we were all our own bosses, and where VCs would have to come begging to entrepreneurs to convince them to take their money. And guess what? We wouldn’t take it! Not ever! Because we’d be happy with our cozy little companies just as they were. We were happy creating neighborhood coffee shops, we didn’t need to be Starbucks!

That was what had gone wrong with Web 1.0 to begin with – everyone got too greedy. This version of the new economy said that everyone was an entrepreneur and, instead of the assembly-line, we had crafts- uh, people – and apprentices, just like in the pre-industrial revolution days. There was a beautiful symmetry to it: everything old was new again. Yay!

A Frustrated Comedian

As I said, I had become frustrated trying to raise money, even back when it was supposed to have been easy. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but it was a measure of exactly how easy it was that I had actually been able to raise any money at all. Although I had been a part of several startups by that time, and even founded a couple of companies myself, I didn’t have any runaway success stories that suggested I was the guy you wanted to entrust with a few million bucks and say, “Go make me some real money, son!”

Not only that, my only real experience was with programming. I knew next to nothing about business plans, marketing, or finance. But it was easy back then to get awfully confused about these things, since, almost from the moment I announced I was starting my own company, everyone seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion that I was soon going to be very, very rich. (Sigh. Those were the days.)

Not only that, but I was, in fact, actually able to raise a few million bucks. Still, it was an arduous process, and I was constantly being asked about pesky details like the size of my “target market” and what “pain points” we were addressing for our customers. These details seemed to me to be beside the point entirely, serving no purpose other than obscuring my “vision.” And so I concocted a spoof to demonstrate my point, which, if I was given enough to drink, I would happily perform in the best one-man-show tradition.

The Death Ray Skit

VC: So, tell me about your proposed venture?

Entrepreneur (pleased with himself): Well … I’ve invented a death ray!

VC: A death ray?

E: Yes! A death ray.

VC: Very nice! Can you tell me, who is your target market?

E (taken aback): Uh, I don’t know. I mean … it’s a death ray.

VC: Right, but what is your value proposition?

E: That it’s a death ray?

VC (forcing a smile): I see. What price point are you going to sell it at?

E: I have no idea. A lot?

VC: Let me get this straight. You don’t know the size of the market. You don’t know how much you can sell this for. How can you ensure that we will see a return on our investment?

E (exasperated): Because it’s a $@#!% death ray!

VC (bored, escorting E to the door): You said that already. Listen, don’t call us, we’ll call you. Have a wonderful day.

Enter Nicholas Effing Tesla

What I didn’t realize was that this actually happened. And to no less than Nicholas Effing Tesla, one of the honorary demigods of Geekdom, and the namesake of Telsa Motors. Tesla actually claimed to have invented a death ray, and that it would cost him only $2M to build it. He apparently pitched it to JP Morgan, among others. In fact, there is a fascinating letter from Tesla to Westinghouse that sounds like a follow-up to a failed investment pitch. You know it’s rough out there when Nicholas Effing Tesla, the guy who basically harnessed electricity for everyday use, can’t raise a buck for a death ray. And the best part? This was in the years leading up to World War II!

You know you’re awesome when they name stuff after you just because it’s awesome.

Delusions Of Grandeur

So the backlash against raising money is understandable. But it also turns out that some of our new new economy assumptions were also flawed. It turned out, for example, that, no, not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur. And it’s not always a good idea to risk your life savings or, worse, go into heavy debt, to finance a startup yourself, particularly with little regard to what kind of return you’re going to get. And not every child wants to learn HTML and CSS – strangely, some children prefer to ride their bikes or VC with their friends (to them, “VC” means video chat, not venture capital or Viet Cong). I don’t know why.

A startup is still, no matter how you slice it, a highly speculative venture. If you’re extremely wealthy, this is perfect, because, according to your basic portfolio theory, you want some part of your investments in high-risk/high-yield investments. These sorts of folks will not be telling their children that college is out of their price range if those investments don’t pan out.

Which reminds me of a story. (Ed: Groan.) A friend of mine was making serious money for the first time in his career and so he went out and bought an expensive sports car. He also bought a nice house and a boat. He started day trading. I sort of envied him, because I was busy sinking all my money into my new startup – the same one that would later crash and burn horribly, along with the NASDAQ – so I was constantly broke and couldn’t afford things like fancy new cars or day trading.

For awhile, we both looked like we were doing alright. He was making a killing on tech stocks and I had raised enough cash to have a real startup in the hottest IPO market in history. When the market crashed, I, of course, was wiped out. But, much to my surprise, so was my friend. You see, we were both playing a game meant for the rich.

In his case, after the car, the boat, the house, and the day trading, it turned out he was flat broke. He’d seen people with real money do those things, and he emulated them. Only he didn’t have that kind of money. For him, that car, that boat, that house, his stock portfolio, these things stretched him to the limit. And beyond. He ended up selling all but the car to pay down the debt he’d incurred.

But the real point is, I had been doing the same thing. I didn’t have the money to start a company! What was I thinking?

I Hate You, Red Herring

Of course, I did it again later, even after spending years advising every budding entrepreneur I met, “never invest your own money!” But the thing is, it’s gotten to the point that you’re almost supposed to feel embarrassed if you actually go out and spend other people’s money to build your company. The Horatio Alger startup story probably inspires dozens of entrepreneurs to do stupid things every year, and yet we never seem to learn better, because there’s always another generation of PR-driven success stories to keep the myth alive.

The truth is none of us succeeds alone and very little of merit is ever truly accomplished by just one person by themselves. The truth is that it is difficult to create a viable business, even when you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to pay your bills. Some folks have trust funds, some live in their parents basement, some have husbands or wives who support them, some have invested wisely – and some have angel investors. It’s going to be a lot of hard work and long hours, either way. Anyone who says otherwise is either lucky or lying.

Growing Up

And maybe, just maybe, the investors have a real and valuable role to play in the startup world. There’s no question investors and entrepreneurs often come at the problem of starting companies from completely different places. But I’ll address that in a future post. For now, suffice to say that one of the things I love about Border Stylo is that, not only do we have founders who are the salt of the earth, and the talent base to accomplish whatever we set our minds to, but we have a strong financial foundation, backed by investors who are committed to our vision.

This isn’t a bad thing, and I find it sort of amazing that I would actually have to defend it. But I know I do. Because I know there are some people who are going to read this and say, ah, but you won’t be as hungry, you won’t be as lean, you won’t listen closely enough to your customers, yada, yada, yada. Well, hooey. You can run lean and still have money in the bank. It’s okay. In fact, I’d argue it’s awesome.

I can go through the “lean startup” checklist and we would qualify easily. (We do use Microsoft Office, for some reason, but I’m working on that.) But we also have awesome customer support and a real, honest-to-goodness community manager – and thus a burgeoning community that is the foundation of our brand – and we can actually tackle significant technical hurdles that cash-starved companies can’t take on.

And I’ll bet every successful start either had these things, too, or there was some reason why they didn’t need them, some indirect substitute for them. (That’s kind of an involved topic all by itself. Perhaps I’ll go through some examples of this sort of thing in a future post as well.) There’s a reason the vast majority of really successful startups raised lots of money. And even if you’re just trying to create a “lifestyle” startup to replace a regular salary, the reality is that the cause of most business failures is inadequate cash flow.

So, while raising money can be frustrating, there’s also nothing wrong in being able to defend your business model and take criticism and learn from other perspectives. I think what is often really lacking is simply humility. Letting go. Learning from mistakes. Accepting that your way isn’t the only way, and there might be lots of people with the same “vision” that you have. And that you’re probably going to need all the help you can get if you want to be successful in the long run.

On the other hand, if you happen to have invented a death ray …

Why You Should Still Quit Facebook

2010-05-05T00:00:00-04:00

It’s no exaggeration to say I’ve been overwhelmed by the response to my post on why you should quit Facebook.

To those of you who shared your stories about leaving, or took the time to clarify some of the reasons for doing so, thank you. Apparently, I was hardly alone in making the decision to quit, or at least seriously considering it. It has been nothing short of inspiring to read your comments and realize how many of you cared enough to take action, whether it was actually deleting your account or simply taking the time to share your thoughts.

I thought I’d try to respond to some of the more common objections:

What’s the big deal? I don’t care if someone has access to my photos or status updates.

Tens of millions of people provided personal information to Facebook with the understanding that this information was being shared only within their social network. Then Facebook changed the rules and this information was unexpectedly shared with perfect strangers. That is, simply stated, a profound invasion of privacy. In the United States, the Fourth and Ninth Amendments to the Constitution, along with numerous landmark Supreme Court cases, have established privacy as a fundamental right.

Consider the example of the government tapping your phones. You conduct phone conversations thinking that they’re just between you and the person you’re speaking with. The government can’t tap your phone and listen in on the conversation without a warrant. This is because your privacy is a right protected by law.

Now take this example a step further, and suppose your cell phone provider one day sends you an updated privacy policy that states that they can tap your phone any time they want. Would you still use their service? Of course not! And, in fact, they won’t do this because it’s actually against the law for them to do so. In other words, it’s such a big deal, we passed laws to prevent it from happening.

Social networks involve not only voice conversations, but images, video, links, and text. Not only that, but there are frequently many recipients of this data. According to Facebook’s original privacy policy, these rich “conversations” were supposed to be private. Later, they changed their minds. This certainly breaks the spirit, if not the letter, of privacy laws, not only in the U.S., but all over the world.

I haven’t even touched on the various reasons people might want to keep these conversations private. They range from the profound, like avoiding workplace discrimination or protecting political dissidents, to the banal, like cheating on your wife or avoiding an abusive husband. But it really doesn’t matter. It is not for any of us to decide on behalf of someone else what information should be considered private.

Most people just want control over what they’re sharing and with whom. They have a right to make that choice. And many Facebook members did make that choice, only to find that, after the fact, Facebook made a different choice on their behalf. In the telecom industry, that’s illegal. Yet in the social networking space, where far more information is being shared, it’s not a big deal?

Just don’t share your personal information. Or, if you do, don’t use any applications and learn to use the privacy settings.

Maybe that works for you, you fabulous geek, you. But are all of your family and friends as clever as you are? What are the odds that the majority of Facebook members will do these things?

I don’t trust Facebook, either, so I just use fake data.

Uh, okay. Somewhere between not sharing personal information and actually using fake data, we cross a line into “what’s the point?”

Facebook works just fine for marketing purposes.

That’s true. Of course, that’s true for any social network with a critical mass of people on it. But it’s a circular justification. Once people switch to another network, it’s useless for marketing.

I’d leave except that I have too many family and friends still on there.

This is a tough one. I wrote my original post for exactly this reason – to try and convince them to leave. I felt that by continuing to use Facebook, I was passively endorsing it.

I’d leave except that there aren’t any real alternatives.

I am not aware of any good solutions for privacy in social media. Facebook has expressly moved away from providing one. But there are plenty of good opt-out solutions. Twitter works fine for status updates. For photos, we’ve had Flickr for years. For video, YouTube. For link sharing, Digg. I’ve picked these because they are all independent companies, but there are dozens of solutions for sharing social media.

The nice thing about decentralizing control over your data is that you aren’t at the mercy of any one company. In fact, you could make a pretty good argument that the Web itself is the real social network.

If the allegations against Zuckerberg are “dated and unproven,” they’re irrelevant.

I’m not trying Mr.Zuckerberg in court, I’m selecting a service provider. The burden of proof is on Facebook here. If the head of a major bank is accused of embezzling or a teacher is accused of molesting a student, they’re usually summarily fired. They may have been entirely innocent, but the standard for holding a position of responsibility is much higher than that for simply not going to jail. Mr.Zuckerberg has been accused of reading people’s private emails, and he runs a social networking company. Also, keep in mind, Facebook also settled out of court in a related case for a significant sum of money, lending some weight to the allegations. If Facebook and Mr.Zuckerberg wanted to clearly establish their innocence, they could have chosen not to settle out of court.

Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook

2010-04-26T00:00:00-04:00

Let’s all ban Facebook!

Update: Due to the surprising popularity of this post, I feel I should be absolutely clear about my role as VP of Engineering for a Hollywood-based social media startup, BorderStylo. The opinions expressed here are purely my own and are not in any way endorsed by my employer. While I do not see our applications as directly competitive to Facebook, nor have I presented them as such, it would be disingenuous not to mention this.

After some reflection, I’ve decided to delete my account on Facebook. I’d like to encourage you to do the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I’d like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I’m not missing anything. In any event, here’s my “Top Ten” reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your account.

10. Facebook’s Terms Of Service are completely one-sided. Let’s start with the basics. Facebook’s Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don’t keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook’s interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their other activities, this defense is pretty weak. As you’ll see, there’s no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data.

9. Facebook’s CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior. From the very beginning of Facebook’s existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg’s ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO of the world’s largest social network. They’re particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.

8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy. Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook’s privacy changes last January: “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.” More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: “… the default is now social.” Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that …

7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch. At the same time that they’re telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It’s also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning).

Update: Check out this excellent timeline from the EFF documenting the changes to Facebook’s privacy policy.

6. Facebook is a bully. When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook’s privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the “default is now social.” So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you’re actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don’t want their membership to know how much data is really available. It’s one thing to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into MatLab.

5. Even your private data is shared with applications. At this point, all your data is shared with applications that you install. Which means now you’re not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your data – all of it – must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.

4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted. Even if we weren’t talking about ethical issues here, I can’t trust Facebook’s technical competence to make sure my data isn’t hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their “Like” button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users’ profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don’t care too much about your privacy or don’t really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.

Update: Yet another very recent example of Facebook struggling with very basic security and privacy bugs.

3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account. It’s one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you’ve had enough, it’s pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you’ve used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you’re given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you’re deleting your account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you’re back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it’s really not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by “buried” I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they’ve “deleted” their account.

2. Facebook doesn’t (really) support the Open Web. The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It’s bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It’s bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It’s bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it “open,” when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can’t use this feature unless you’re on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks. Between the farms and the mafia wars and the “top news” (which always guesses wrong – is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I’m single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don’t bother. (And, yet, somehow, I can’t even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized.) Let’s not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.

Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn’t the most usable thing in the world, at least they’ve tried to stay focused and aren’t trying to be everything to everyone.

I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren’t. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn’t mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed – have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook’s revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies.

While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn’t the only game in town. I don’t like their application nor how they do business and so I’ve made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

Update: I’ve responded broadly to the comments posted here and on Gizmodo in a follow-up post.

Thanks to David Harthcock for creating the great “Ban Facebook” graphic.

Geek Chic: Art Meets Technology At TEDx

2009-03-29T00:00:00-04:00

I’ve been meaning all week to blog about TEDx at USC because my mind was really buzzing afterwards. But, instead, I let the grind of the week get in the way. And it was an ugly grind, the kind that makes you wonder, what am I doing with my life? And looking all the worse for following on the heels of all the hope and possibility celebrated by TED. So now I can’t quite recall what it was that I was so excited about in the first place. But I’ll try anyway and hopefully it’ll be cathartic.

Cynicism is so easy.

It is easy to be a cynic. It is easy to say, the hell with it, and give up. But nothing really interesting ever gets done that way. And certainly part of what I love about TED — and Mindshare and other events like it — is that it celebrates perseverance. Some people don’t get that. Was it cheesy as hell when Melissa Etheridge joined Muslim rock star Salman Ahmad, singing ring the bells of change, and everone was literally ringing these little bells? Hell, yeah it was. But when you back it up with an organizational behavior case study on building the Large Hadron Collider or a talk by a guy restoring sight to the blind, well, you know what?

I’ll take the cheese all day long. Because, really, it’s a celebration.

Flower: Video Games As Art?

Technology is transformative. It changes what it means to be human. The emergence of agriculture changed our social structures. More recently, cell phones and social networks are changing the way we communicate. Kelly Santiago talked about an emerging art form: video games. Then she showed us Flowers and proved her point. We also got to see Natasha Tsakos (via TED vid, not yet posted on the TED site), passionately sharing — and demonstrating — how technology is transforming art and providing us with new ways to reach our kids and thus shape our future. And we’re only just getting started. This stuff changes the world and I think having a dialog about that, and, when appropriate, celebrating it, is good.

LA, as the mecca of the film industry, just a short hop from Silicon Valley, is uniquely positioned to emerge as the hub of this convergence between art and technology. I think that is at the heart of the success of Mindshare and the TEDx event at USC. Already, Electronic Arts and MySpace are headquartered here, and Google and Yahoo! both have significant LA offices. AT&T Interactive, of course, is here as well. The fact that USC is here and hosted the first (I could have sworn that’s what Z said, but it appears as though there are others) TEDx conference, along with numerous other universities, provides a rich pool of talent to go with the emerging tech industry and the existing vast entertainment ecosystem. Tech is no longer about operating systems or search algorithms: it is crossing over into the every day, becoming a part of our collective experience.

Hollywood: convergence epicenter?

My Bay Area friends looking down their noses at LA would laugh at this. LA, with it’s smog and traffic and plastic surgeons and velvet ropes, could never be taken seriously in the tech world. Which, perhaps, is exactly the point: tech is leaving the tech world behind. Like art has done for centuries, now technology is also doing. It is transforming us, becoming a part of who we are. LA has it’s good and bad, it’s ups and downs. Everything does. But greatness is what shines through, over time, always persevering in the end. And it is not so rare as we might think. In fact, we are surrounded by it. That is the gift of TED and gatherings like it, a celebration of that reality: we are changing the world.

That is why I remind myself when the grind wears me out. It is never easy. Not for Aimee Mullins or the people behind the LHC or Dr.Humayun. They all have had setbacks and days when hope was nearly extinguished, I’m sure. That’s life. But, as they say …

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

The Ethics Of Innovation

2009-03-21T00:00:00-04:00

I grew up in Detroit, but I’ve got no love for American automakers. I think bailing them out is a waste of money. I want them to die and for Detroit to move on and find an industry who treats them better. Like Eminem, for example.

Why do I hate them? Because they don’t innovate.

What’s wrong with that? Well, when your products spew megatons of pollutants into the air and you not only don’t try to solve the problem, you actively sabotage potential solutions, you’re, um, evil. You’re selling planetary cigarettes.

Then we get into the usual debates about the nature of evil, yada, yada, yada, and the next thing you know, we’re talking about the RIAA. Evil. Why? Like the automakers, they block innovation to maintain the status quo, even when it is obviously profitable to purse another course. (And, no, it’s not stealing, for God’s sake.)

And, no, there’s no difference really. True, automakers may be driving us off a global-warming cliff in our SUVs, while the RIAA just keeps suing broke college kids, but it’s just a question of degree. So to speak. Either way, you’re getting in the way of people trying to make the world a better and cooler place. So to speak. (Sorry, I can’t seem to stop.)

Civilization itself is based on the premise of innovation and progress. Was there a hunter-gatherer coalition burning down crops at the dawn of agriculture? Probably. Later, they would form the basis of our present day NRA and sell homemade deer jerky at farmers’ markets.

Life itself is about innovation. Darwin knew this, but carefully kept his theory of evolution a secret for two decades to keep the Bible thumpers from freaking out. To this day, they haven’t stopped freaking out or trying to block innovation.

Is progress always good? Well, sort of by definition, yeah. And even when it appears to be bad, the truth is, “progress” is no better or worse than we, the people, are. Cynics will always view progress as bad for this reason. But that’s not an ethical issue, that’s just a question of taking the right meds. Yes, you. Stop yelling at your TV. They can’t hear you.

Cynics also hate capitalism and believe money is the root of all evil. But the saying is actually that the love of money is the root of all evil. Technology is a powerful thing. Pursued without any sense of responsibility for what we create, innovation can obviously become dangerous. But that is a choice we make. Just like whether to take our meds.

What is certain is the world is still a troubled place. Maybe a college kid jamming out to their favorite band in their dorm instead of staring longingly at the CD rack at the mall is the butterfly, and the hurricane is that the polar ice caps stop melting.