The Point Of Social Leverage Is Mobile?

I see that my old friend, Keith Teare, has written a guest post at Techcrunch, making the case that Facebook and Google have inherent ‘structural’ problems in the way they manage information sharing which have become starkly apparent with Google’s new privacy policy and Facebook’s endless privacy issues.

Keith Teare, Google, Facebook, Privacy — And You

There is a big structural problem for both Google and Facebook as they contemplate the product consequences of consumer reactions to their product roadmap. In a centralized platform it is incredibly hard to create easy-to-understand controls that give each user the ability to control, at a granular level, what they share and who with. Grand policy shifts, like that which came out of F8 and which we are now seeing from Google, tend to assume all users are the same and will want the same thing.

In reality, users are more complex. I might want to save a private video to a personal storage space one moment, share something with a select group of friends another moment, and broadcast something to the world five minutes later. The web services infrastructure that both Facebook and Google are based on does not easily permit such fine grained control for users without also imposing serious effort. As we all know, that leads users to stick with the default settings most of the time.

So, despite good intent by the teams at both companies, one-size-fits-all decisions are the norm.

Mobile to the rescue?

Structural problems usually require structural solutions. What it seems consumers are asking for is a world in which we all know what we are sharing and who with — but where we don’t have to do a huge amount of work to achieve that. Google Circles seems to be a nod in this direction as are Facebook’s groups. But neither is really easy enough or sufficiently integrated into the flow of the products to really solve the problem. Both require a huge management overhead.

As I argued earlier this week in “Google, Look Out Behind You!“, the spread of smartphones may be part of the solution here. Hundreds of millions of consumers are now carrying around connected still and video cameras with lists of contacts in the address book, often already organized into meaningful groups. Decentralized decision-making is very easy when there are decentralized software clients under the unique control of each user. The ability to be private one moment, selectively share the next and then publicly broadcast a few minutes later is easy to achieve in this decentralized software architecture. And service providers can never become bad actors — simply because they do not own our information or the full social graph. The cloud becomes a means of delivering messages to the phones and the place where we store our media. But it’s not the place we need to trust to make decisions about what gets shared and who with.

So, Keith broadly paints a picture — users being forced into an oversimplified social architecture by Google and Facebook in which groups (or circles, which are a slightly different take on groups) are the mechanism of sharing — and hints that the problem is intractable for web-based social tools.

The answer is smartphones, he suggests: our personal devices, which we already use in myriad ways to connect with and share with others. He must believe — without saying so explicitly — that the solution lies in observing what we share and with who on our smartphones, and to refine that natural body of information into a bottom-up determination of who’s who in our world.

Imagine a Venn diagram of dozens — or hundreds — of sets of friends, where any friend could be in zero to all the sets, and all the sets are constantly in flux. And without us having to create all the scaffolding for it to work.

Obviously, Teare is not content to wave his hand at this: he’s started a company to actually build the solution:

Keith Teare, Seed and Series A Funding

just.me is a new architecture built on top of the mobile, and particularly the smartphone, ecosystem. It doesn’t take the web as its starting point, it takes the highly personal and ever-present mobile Internet as its starting point. As such it is focused on defining a new consumer software experience, not replacing an existing one. It is also focused on the freedom that comes from placing social tools on a device the consumer fully controls, and not building a big cloud service that owns or acts on the consumers data. We don’t know all of the questions this gives rise to yet, never mind all of the answers. But we are really excited about building on this new ecosystem and learning with users as we go.

I’ve been suggesting that the next wave for social networks is the social operating system — where exactly the problems that Teare is talking about are solved by building social primitives into the foundation of our online experience — but Teare is pushing at a transitional step, based on the mobile device as the logical point of leverage in the transition to the next generation of social tools.

edgeio Invitation Codes

I had the chance to catch up with Atherton polymath, Michael Arrington, earlier this week. It was my first glimpse of Edgeio, Michael’s new startup (where he is teaming up with RealNames founder, Keith Teare), which is nothing less than an assault on the traditional notion of classified ads’ listings.

[Exhaustively annoying disclosure: Michael is a friend, and I am in fact staying at his house tonight, and I am not reimbursing him for that. We are both members of the Web 2.0 Working Group, and we talk on a regular basis. I am not an advisor or consultant to the firm, and have no financial interest in its future, although I did offer various off the cuff recommendations during the interview. I am not providing independent or unbiased advice here. Beware. Take your vitamins, and wear sunblock when outside.]

The Edgeio concept is a perfect example of the edge dissolving the center. In this case, publishing of classifieds is moved from newspapers, eBay, and Craig’s List sites out to the individual. armed with nothing more than a blogging tool. I could post a blog entry describing my out-of-date but still charming 2002 Dahon folding bicycle. All I have to do is a/ register with Edgeio, including pointing my feed their way, and b/ tag or categorize my post as a ‘listing’. Edgeio does the rest, aggregating my post along with thousands of others, and aggregating based on the other indicators latent or explicit in the post. If I tag the post with “Dahon”, “folding bike”, “$200 or best offer”, and so on, Edgeio tries to make sense of that, and uses it to help people find what they are looking for. The obvious terms are predefined tags (like “bicycle”) but users will be able to create user-defined tags, too.

Michael asked me not to share screen shots, since the application is likely to undergo various tweaks in coming weeks, but what I saw was cleanly designed, effortless to use, and intuitive.

The company plans to make its slice by offering eBay-style options to increase the likelihood of being found first by searchers, like top placement in lists, bolding, adding photos, and so on.

Michael donesn’t suggest it, specifically, but the opportunity exists for a full social architecture to underlie this system. By social architecture I mean that three tiers of social dynamics are supported:

1. the individual — who in this case wants the obvious tooling to help him/her in the listing process
   
   
2. the extended social networks — mediating the communication and negotiation necessary for these conversations and interactions, and supporting the social net with reputation and so on
   
   
3. the market — and here is the place where Edgeio — and others, in their own markets — could become really successful, but making liquid whatever is the barrier to market flow. Edgeio could become the central bank of a decentralized market for selling your junk.

   Of course, they have entrenched competitors — newspapers, eBay, and other upstarts. But Edgeio has the edge on its side: individuals become the publishers of their own classifieds, and the edge always dissolves the center.

Edgeio Write Up

So Mike Arrington’s startup (along with Keith Teare, formerly of RealName) has been leaked and reported on by Rob Hof. I had some inside dope on that, but was sworn to secrecy. It looks like we are going to see an insidious dribble campaign over the next few weeks, leading up to the planned end of Feb launch.

Here’s what Rob says:

[from Edgeio Edges Toward Launch—and a Clash with E-Commerce Giants? by Rob Hof]

Edgeio is doing just what its tagline says: gathering “listings from the edge”—classified-ad listings in blogs, and even online product content in newspapers and Web stores, and creating a new metasite that organizes those items for potential buyers.

The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word “listing” (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag and index them on Edgeio.com.

Also, Edgeio sends a trackback to the blog, providing a way for the blogger to go to Edgeio and modify the listing, adding other tags such as “autos” and other data that will further help the listing appeal to potential buyers.

Buyers get some interesting tools on Edgeio, too. You can search by geography, naturally. In fact, there’s a cool slider that lets you zero in on a particular city. If there aren’t enough listings, you can move the slider to a wider geographic area. Buyers also can filter listings by tag and see information on the blogger or publisher of the listing. Ultimately, buyers—if they choose to register as Edgeio members—can contact the seller directly by email.

Ad listing in blogs? Who does that? Today, almost nobody. And that’s why this idea could work at all: Teare said the tag “listing” is found only about 10 times a day on millions of blogs, so it’s an ideal, clean tag with which to create a unique index of “listings from the edge.”

Edgeio also plans a reputation system.

Wild. So this is the realization of the microformats/structured blogging idea: people can create posts, indicate — by a tag, or other microformat gesture — that the post includes a classified listing, and a service like Edgeio can scoop up that information and place it in a directory.

For example, I could tag a post with these markers — “Reston+VA+20194” “Edgeio” “Listing” “Leather+Couch” “$500+or+best+offer” — and an Edgeio-like system could do what you might expect with that metadata. [Note: I have not had a demo of Edgeio, specifically, yet, so this may not be the exact way that it works.]

Buyers could shop through these tags, and following the trackbacks to the original posts, although Edgeio obviously wants to control the sale, which is actually easier for all parties anyway.

So, a sweet idea, and one that should further erode the classified ads revenue stream for newspapers everywhere. The real competition is for Web 1.0 contraptions like eBay and Craig’s List. The newspapers have already lost, and just keep on doing the same old nonsense, like a chicken’s body running around the barnyard after the head has been cut off. Edgeio is just going to accelerate that death.