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Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends (and staffing it, of course, with that Mormon bartender).

We’re used to talking about how disturbing this in the context of privacy, but it’s worth pointing out how weirdly unsocial it is, too. How are you supposed to feel at home when you know a place is full of one-way mirrors?

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they’ve built to document your entire online life.

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Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90’s. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.

But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.

My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button. It’s just a matter of waiting things out, and leaving ourselves enough freedom to find some interesting, organic, and human ways to bring our social lives online.

- Maciej Ceglowski, The Social Graph is Neither

In a weirdly obsessive rant, Ceglowski glorously mixes up all sorts of things about social networks, social tools, terminology. FOAF, RDF, privacy, and the aspirations of the people behind Facebook and Google+.

It’s too long, and off base, but also amazingly prescient. Although he doesn’t say it explicitly, he suggests that the current implementations of social networking tools — Facebook, etc. — are analogous to AOL in the mid 90’s, and will soon be eclipsed by a truly social web, where socialiaty is built in, not grafted on as an afterthought.

How long can AOL stay committed to Patch? — Mathew Ingram

The answer is ‘as long as Tim Armstrong thinks his tenure is tied to the stupid investment he nmade in Patch’, or simply, until the board fires him and makes Huffington the CEO. Which is inevitable, I think.

The Yahoo comparison makes sense the way Elgan constructs it, but I think it’s more apt to say that Facebook’s goal has been to be the new AOL. “Walled garden” is a phrase that gets batted about a lot with regard to the Big Fruit, but Apple rarely builds services that you’re forced to use in lieu of interoperable standards. Facebook has little interest in building anything but.

Coyote Tracks: Why Facebook is the New Yahoo  

I don’t agree with Elgan, it seems like a very stretched and somewhat fallacious comparison right now but I love this gem from Watts Martin. It feels like Facebook is trying so hard to look ‘open’ with all their apps, API’s and login systems but I almost always end up at Facebook rather than departing it.

(via christopherdwhite)

(via christopherdwhite)

It's Official: Arrington Out at AOL; Schonfeld New TechCrunch Editor - Kara Swisher - Media - AllThingsD

So the Arrington era at Techcrunch is over. They killed the Witch of the West with a bucket of cold water. Personally, I thought Mike wanted out from the start, and had been goading them to fire him several times in the past. Schonfeld is a much more down-to-earth choice, and won’t even attempt to become a king-maker, like Arrington. And now, Ariana will be able to meld Techcrunch into HuffPo, somehow.

Mike Arrington And Linelessness

David Carr has done a good job outlining the specifics of the TechCrunch/CrunchFund mess, and raising the spectre of self-serving publicity:

As business reporters, we are often pressed up against the glass, watching as others take risks, make investments and build companies. We are observers, not players. But the froth and money sloshing around has reached a whole other level, and looks enticing no matter what side of the glass you are on.

Michael Arrington kicked a hole in the glass. A former lawyer and investor who founded TechCrunch in 2005, he told his bosses at AOL in April that he was going to continue to edit the site, but resume investing in some of the companies TechCrunch covered.

When criticism followed, he said he would fully disclose any conflicts, and besides, he never saw himself as a journalist anyway, even though he often broke news. AOL swallowed hard and said Mr. Arrington was free to do what he wanted. Thus emboldened, he spent the following months both investing and directing coverage.

TechCrunch is capable of tearing the limbs off a baby company, but it’s been a generally nurturing place for start-ups when Mr. Arrington has skin in the game. On April 1, he invested in Supyo, a video-chat start-up created by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the pair who changed the world with Napster.

Fourteen days later, M G Siegler, one of the TechCrunch’s highly regarded writers, wrote: “The new project is nothing if not interesting. Think Chatroulette done right.” Mr. Arrington’s involvement was duly noted.

On April 4 TechCrunch wrote a generally positive post about Milk, a mobile development lab created by Kevin Rose, one of the co-founders of Digg, the social news site. On April 26, a round of funding closed, which included Mr. Arrington’s investment, and his involvement was disclosed at that time in an article about the funding.

On June 30, Mr. Arrington invested in LikeALittle, a location-based flirtation site for young people. On Aug. 1, they got a favorable product announcement along with a video visit to their office in a home in Palo Alto where an employee talked about what an “awesome” workplace it was..

We know these things because Mr. Arrington was mostly transparent about the conflicts. But how many articles about equally interesting competitors did not get written?

All sorts of arguments can be made pro and con about the general and specific issues — Arrington is a good guy/bad guy, discloses all/conceals a great deal, everyone does it/no one should be able to do that — but something tectonic is being overlooked.

The subtext of this brouhaha is the incipient linelessness of new media. Arrington pushed the line, or jumped over the line, or erased the line. What line? Are there any lines left? Can there be lines?

I personally subscribe to the notion that potential conflicts of interest should be exposed, but I don’t believe that ends favoritism. My disclosure that company X is a client in a story about compnay X doesn’t mean that over the course of a given year I will not have written more about client X than non-client Y. It’s only natural that I would know more about a company that is a client, and less about companies that I am not in touch with.

And how would such an ‘imbalance’ of coverage be tracked? All press releases aren’t objectively the same, and obviously some judgment has to be made, but they can’t even all be read: there are too many.

Even at a old school bastion of journalism like the NY Times, editors and authors have to pick what stories to follow, out of the infinity of potential stories in the universe. There is no infallible, objective mechanism to pick stories, one that is fair and unbiased in some truly general and provable sense.

The reality is that all organizations (and individuals) have to settle for extreme approximations of what a hypothetically unbiased approach to news coverage would produce, if such a thing actually existed.

Arrington’s heresy in all this is the simple fact of owning stock in the companies that he and others at Techcrunch are covering. This was old news years ago, when Mike was a small entrepreneurial blogger, and even later as the head of a go-go tech blogging company. But now that AOL has purchased TechCrunch, and then invests in CrunchFund, old school media takes another look and cries foul.

So, it comes down to this: Are there still lines that constrain ‘journalists’ from taking sides in the marketplace? Obviously, the NY Times has a rulebook that they require their employees to follow, as do many other organizations, that spells out their position: thou shalt not invest in companies in the industry you cover. The Times created that rule book in a time before blogs, social media, and the mess we live in today.

Mike has no such rulebook. And he says he’s not a journalist, either. He’s something new, living outside the lines. In fact, his existence suggests there are no lines. When anyone can write and reach millions without being anointed by an old school, ‘there are lines’ sort of organization like the NY Times, then there are no longer any lines. Someone like Arrington is, in this lineless universe, just a chameleon who used the trappings and style of publishing to achieve economic influence on the tech start-up market, and then has cashed out on that, exploiting a power vacuum. It’s an identity conflict, with his detractors saying he must act like a journalist, and Mike saying, ‘no thanks’.

But it wasn’t journalists that created Arrington, but the tech scene: a tight-knit, self-absorbed community of investors, entrepreneurs, and wannabes, all desperate for ink, share-of-mind, and a chance for the brass ring. So many hanging on every word printed in TechCrunch, trying to get written up, hoping for a leg up in the steeplechase that is the central animating goal of the tech scene.

Maybe the deep libertarianism of the West Coast tech scene is a factor here, also. The ideology that the elite should be allowed to do whatever, and that there is no need for regulation or lines.

One last thought: It’s strange to recall that Arrington was the guy to break the news in 2010 about Angelgate, a meeting of various angel investors who were engaged in cartel-like behavior, if the stories are to be believed. This was a case where he thought lines had been crossed, possibly into outright criminal behavior.

But in the current TechCrunchgate, the lines aren’t about illegality: this is a story about identities, and the communities that create them. An identity conflict, a culture conflict, and one that might end with a truly Shakespearean close, like Titus Andronicus, with nearly all the dramatis personae lying in a heap on the stage.

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Prediction: Tim Armstrong Will Be Sacked, Huffington Will Become AOL CEO

Just thought I’d do this before I go on vacation because, who knows.

The AOL hemorrhaging isn’t over, and a good housecleaning — shutting down Patch, selling off the web access business — could immediately follow his going.

It’s just a matter of time, since no one has figured out hyperlocal media — if there is such a thing to figure out — by Ariana certainly understands new media, and could scale that end up, I bet, especially with some other acquisitions.

The Decline and Fall of Facebook - Cringely on technology

Cringely heard a talk by Roger McNamee in which McNamee cites the now-conventional tech viewpoint: Facebook has won.

Again, I’m not saying he’s wrong, but what I took away from this speech was first an image of Microsoft as the Roman Colosseum being mined for marble after the barbarian invasion, and second a sense that while Facebook is certainly a huge social, cultural, and business phenomenon, I just don’t see it being around for very long.

Facebook is a huge success. You can’t argue with 750 million users and growing. And I don’t see Google+ making a big dent in that. What I see instead is more properly the fading of the entire social media category, the victim of an ever-shortening event horizon.

Each era of computing seems to run for about a decade of total dominance by a given platform. Mainframes (1960-1970), minicomputers (1970-1980), character-based PCs (1980-1990), graphical PCs (1990-2000), notebooks (2000-2010), smart phones and tablets (2010-2020?). We could look at this in different ways like how these devices are connected but I don’t think it would make a huge difference.

Now look at the dominant players in each succession – IBM (1960-1985), DEC (1965-1980), Microsoft (1987-2003), Google (2000-2010), Facebook (2007-?). That’s 25 years, 15 years, 15 years, 10 years, and how long will Facebook reign supreme? Not 15 years and I don’t think even 10. I give Facebook seven years or until 2014 to peak.

Does this feel wrong to you?  Listen to your gut and I think you’ll agree with me even if we don’t exactly know why.

Roger may not care since he will have already made his Facebook fortune and then some. But I think this foreshortening is important because it makes Facebook the winner, yes, but the winner of what? Super-IPO of the decade? Yes. Dow-30 company of 2025? No.

My interest is in what follows Facebook, which I think must be its disintermediation by all of us reclaiming our personal data, possibly through our embracing the very HTML5 that Roger loves so much. The trend is clear from “the computer is the computer” through “the network is the computer” to what’s next, which I believe is “the data is the computer.”

You’ll notice I didn’t mention Apple. Black swan.

Facebook is the new AOL.

Cringley doesn’t get into my argument about the rise of social operating systems, but he points to Apple, where we just might see it first.

Local Media Isn’t What People Want: They Want Liquid Media

The truth is that the numbers for AOL’s Patch efforts look bad, based on the southern California numbers leaked to Business Insider. It’s especially bad when you contrast them with traffic generated by Huffington Post, with is topical, not local.

The reality is people don’t want ‘reportage’ on a local level: they may want better search, and the ability to complain about potholes, but they aren’t super excited about the PTA board meeting, or even the local high school sports. Yawn.

People are signing up in the millions for experiences online like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, where traditional news has been reduced to a stream of social objects, and these find their way to us in social streams. Patch is the effort to build thousands of destination sites in a world where people are spending less time on sites, and more time inside social apps.

The saddest thing of all is that Greg Narain and I sketched out a project for AOL years ago called Nerdvana, which would have been a breakthrough in that area, building on the very considerable headstart that AOL had with AIM.

That’s what people still want, though. So AOL could divert a few million of that Patch money to a startup taking a hard look at what’s going on in Twitter and Tumblr, and do something interesting, instead of building a massive and unsustainable flop.

We Don’t Want Hyperlocal News, We Want Social News

AOL is diving into a shot glass from 100 feet up, betting huge amounts of cash on local media, a sucker’s bet. The list of failures in this area boggle the mind: Backfence, Bayosphere, Outside In, TBD, Loudon Extra, Everyblock, and now AOL’s Patch, which might be the biggest dodo of all:

Mathew Ingram,  Can Patch Become the Huffington Post of Local News?

The bigger issue for AOL is that even if it manages to hit the Patch ball out of the park, and creates thriving communities in hundreds of locations across the U.S., it’s not clear whether that’s going to be a good business or not. Building online communities is all well and good, but generating revenue and profits is what AOL really needs to do. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post shut down their local ventures in part because they didn’t generate enough revenue to make them worthwhile. So far, Armstrong hasn’t made a strong case for why Patch should be any different.

AOL says it expects to generate local advertising revenue from its Patch sites, but admits this isn’t even close to happening yet. Meanwhile, it plans to continue pouring millions into this unproven hyperlocal strategy. Tim Armstrong just keeps piling his chips higher and higher on his Patch bet, but the odds of winning continue to be extremely slim.

The message of the web is being missed here, again, by folks like Armstrong. People are breaking free of mass media, so we don’t watch the Evening News together like folks did in the ’50s and ’60s, or reading the Daily Blatz on the train every morning.

But we aren’t replacing that 20th century behavior with watching the Hyperlocal Evening News or reading the Hyperlocal Daily Blatz, either. We haven’t shifted our allegiance from the nation or metropolis to a zipcode, which is after all just a smaller mass.

No, we are defecting from mass identity — which is the real message of mass media — to social identity. And social identity is not based on zipcodes, it is based on connections.

We are building intentional communities: by picking who to follow, not by moving into some utopian neighborhood.

And we want our media to follow those intentions, to support the communities we are crafting through connection.

So Armstrong and Huffington will have to give up on Patch. It is trying to do the wrong things for the wrong motivations. There is no constituency for Patch, because there is no single public that cares in the same way about geographic locales, any more.

(This turns out to be a similar problem for geography-based politics, too, by the way.)

Patch attempts to solve a problem people don’t know they have. They feel informed — if anything, they feel like they have too much information.

AOL would be better off look at solutions like News.me, Percolate, and Flipboard. These are based on the social news flowing in the streams of tools like Twitter.

News is better when it is delivered through people I trust, and then it is ‘near’ me in my social net: that’s the only sort of local that works. It will overlap with hyperlocal, in part, but incidentally.