Seth Goldstein

Google died on May 24, 2007.

Not Google the company, nor the stock, but the idea of Google as this unstoppable juggernaut of world internet domination.

Facebook opened up its platform to 3rd party developers- it moved from Facebook 1.0 to Facebook 2.0- and nothing has been quite the same since.
I am not sure if it’s the applications themselves, or just the fact that we have something new to share with eachother, but without a doubt we (the blogosphere?) have all adopted a new interface which is capturing more and more of our attention.

I like the way Pulver put it when he said that:

In LinkedIn, everything centers around establishing a connection. In Facebook, connecting is just the beginning. Facebook is all about community. And this can been seen by doing things like leaving messages on users’ walls, joining groups and having discussions, as well as some of the more social applications built for Facebook.

I tend to agree with this. While page views persist, and connections are being made in MySpace and LinkedIn and other networks, the only place where people are actually engaging socially in virtual real-time is within their Facebook feeds and profiles.

My friend Ted here in Mill Valley confided in me that “yeah, well I think I am now spending two hours a day on Facebook after having never used before a couple of months ago.”

I no longer Twitter.

Or Flickr so much.

Or del.icio.us anymore.

It gets harder and harder to maintain the heavy responsibility of a Wordpress blog when I can communicate so quickly to specific social groups within Facebook.

My friend Pierre told he how much he enjoyed tracking my progress across the East Coast the past few weeks on Facebook, with status updates and pictures and video, even while I was feeling guilty about not properly blogging.

I still search with Google, and use it for email and docs and calendaring.

I wish that my Facebook inbox would talk with my buddy list and keep a record in my Gmail search, but I am willing to suffer through this lack of interoperability because the Facebook communication kit has become so vital to me (and so quickly for that matter).

A number of people have commented about how Facebook has enabled them to connect with long lost friends, who they are suddenly back in touch with in strangely, suddenly intimate ways.
It’s like StumbleUpon for people.

What if Web 3.0 is not about the “semantic web” or about any major revolution in natural language search?

What if, instead, Web 3.0 is really about moving from pagerank to peoplerank?

And what if the Facebook Newsfeed, opened up as it was in May to third party applications, marked the dawn of this next phase?

Netscape browsed the Web. Yahoo! organized it. Google searched it. And now Facebook has made it social.

What we actually want to do within this social platform is the big new question in Silicon Valley, where everybody is scurrying to figure out what are the Social OS equivalents of Word Processing and Spreadsheets.

Walls and pokes?

You can look at the fact that millions of people are turning their friends into zombies, spraying grafiti on others’ walls, getting super-poked, and sending “poop” at eachother as simply so much chatter.

Or you can look at these gestures as new forms of language, crude in their pronunciation but rich in meaning and intentionality.

I turned the page on Attention and the back of it reads: “Engagement.”

Focusing on banner CPMs and click-thru rates in this new medium is like focusing on the Television set as opposed to the shows.

Facebook users are more engaged with their media, in a truly social way, than anybody else. This is why my friend Rich Greenfield of Pali Research who is a *media* analyst on Wall Street is so f-ing excited about what is going on.

This is different than Google which is an accidental media company. Nancy Peretsman of Allen & Company told me how Google kept thinking they were a technology company until she (and no doubt others) revealed to them that they were in fact a media company.

I doubt Facebook needs this clarification.

The bear case on Facebook has become somewhat clear in recent weeks:

• Advertising does not work
• Few of the Applications that people are installing and spamming their friends with have any staying power
• Facebook is throttling back the viral coefficiency of applications and offers no clear path to monetization
• There are no barriers to exit for Facebook users, who will inevitably move to the next “cool” social network

Against this critique, the only legitimate responses are usage, engagement and responsiveness.

• How many people are using Facebook applications?
• How engaged are they in these activities?
• How responsive are they to interact with 3rd parties (friends, friends of friends, marketers, etc)

Some of these metrics are available (for example usage of apps via our Appsaholic service) but the critical metrics on engagement and responsiveness are still to be determined. The early indications across a few million users in our Social Media network, however, suggest that users are interacting far more often with applications and are more than willing to interact with marketers, than the Facebook bears would lead you to believe.

More on this in the days to come.

Tom Glocer,  CEO of Reuters, stands in front of  Media Futures at the Open Data Conference in NY

And so, what does exhibitionism have to do with Wall Street?

How does the voyueristic behavior of 20-somethings relate to the commission decisions of hedge fund masters of the universe?

Traditionally, very little.

Or at least we weren’t aware of these connections.  Now, however, the advent of personal surveillance technologies has begun to popularize processes that up until now have been unavailable to individuals.

This resonates with a comment that Reuters CEO Tom Glocer made at the Open Data Conference.  It was the night before the conference, over dinner, that Glocer gave his perspective on the evolution of "open data" in the context of financial services. 

He told a story about the transformation of individual data points into market data.  Surprisingly, he didn’t start with a traditional financial services firm, like Reuters, but rather with an individual Schwab customer.

This retail trader, by virtue of her decision as to what to buy or sell and at what price, is the most granular actor in the price discovery machine.  As Glocer told the story, the online retail investor was the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in Hawaii causing hurricanes in China.  Her only action was to trade a stock in her 401K account online; but unbeknownst to her, Schwab took this trading data, along with that of all of the other individual retail investors, and established a higher level trend.  This process reverberated up through larger institutional brokers like Goldman Sachs and ultimately exchanges like the NYSE.   At each step up in aggregation and abstraction, significant economic value was extracted.  Although this individual’s behavior is too volatile in and of itself to offer much in the way of trend analysis, this does not mean that her behavior is worthless.

This is the foundation of Wall Street 2.0:  the individual data producer is beginning to wake up to the economic value she is creating.

This economic value had in the past been appropriated by those aggregating up the data from above.   Our electronic behavior, whether it be querying a search engine, clicking on an ad, checking out a stock, or trading a share, is generating value for other people that are in a position to aggregate and sell this information to institutions, who in turn transform it into some other form that ends up getting sold back to individuals.   Alchemy… to… Arbitrage.  This is nothing new.  What is new, however, is the extent to which our behavioral trails are no longer hidden, but are instead now available to us via various modes of personal Attention services, also known as myware.   This is the window that Open Data flows through:

Open data is to media what open source is to technology. Open data is an approach to content creation that explicitly recognizes the value of implicit user data. The internet is the first medium to give a voice to the attention that people pay to it. Successful open data companies listen for and amplify the rich data that their audiences produce.

Web Alchemy

Exactly two years ago, in April 2005, I wrote the first chapter on Alchemy in the Media Futures series.  Over the course of history, Alchemy always promised more than it could deliver.  But it was this promise that captured the imagination of people and drew their Attention to the very impossibility of turning “base metal into gold.”

As it relates to the contemporary Web landscape, Alchemy represents the promise of automatic personalized media creation.  It is the nuclear fission of intersecting Web 2.0 services.  "Maybe, just maybe, if I go to Web 2.0 Expo I will find that one service that that connects me most fully?"  This is the process of extreme triangulation that we- maybe without even knowing- are trying to achieve every moment that we use the Internet to express ourselves.

The process is not new.  But its reception is.

When Josh Harris broadcast his life in real-time on weliveinpublic.org in 2000, it was received as strange exhibitionism in SoHo.  He and his girlfriend Tanya Corin went online in a Warhol art-house kind of way.  It wasn’t clear what exactly Josh was trying to prove, but like many I was fascinated by the embedded cameras he installed in the Turkish-style bath.

On Day 93, long after Tanya walked out and Josh had left it to brokers to sell the 4000 sf+ loft on lower Broadway, a recently arrived journalist who needed a place to crash ended up minding after the apt while it was being shown to potential buyers.  All the surveillance gear was very much in place and there was a working live control room where all the cameras flowed into, as well as the external chatter from those across the community grabbing these streams.  This writer describes what it was like to be there during these last days:

I am doing laundry all the next day, sitting alone, and I learn how to take advantage of the chatters. After all, I am a visitor in the house of a man I do not know. But they, they’ve lived here for a while… I ask them if Harris allows people to smoke in the loft. I ask if they know where an iron is. In one particularly surreal moment, I realize I have lost my keys. I enter the chat room and ask if anybody happens to see where I might have left them. One guy tells me to check my pockets. And there they were.
From The Cyber House Rules By Will Leitch, Jan  1, 1999

Eight years ago when he wrote this, we had a different attitude towards pervasive surveillance than we have today.   Now, as American Idol, YouTube, Twitter and countless other social media phenomena would attest, the quickest road to celebrity is via one’s willingness to become-  physically or behaviorally- naked.

And so, how then to describe the performance of Justin.TV?  His omnipresent camera cylinder to the left of his perspective is like the pen-above-the-ear of a great investigative journalist- Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein in All the Presidents Men.

Despite his camera, Justin doesn’t care about coming off as a disinterested reporter.  There is no longer even a pretense that the subject drives the interview.  Maybe it’s wrong to think of it as an interview at all.  The  recording instruments are so integrated and obvious that everybody Justin comes into contact with gets their own live studio audience.  This shifts the lens of narcissism from Justin to his audience, making him seem almost, well, selfless.

Michael Goldhaber recently defined a "star" as:

(When an attent typically has many audients, thus taking in more net attention than paying out, that person is of course a STAR.  )

On the Internet, this is based in large part on one’s ability to express oneself openly, across multiple networks.  For example, in addition to the live video feed and community chat, Justin makes it easy for us to connect to him via shared social networks:

Justin wants people to pay close Attention to his stream and comment on his blog. This is exactly how stars enrapture their fans:  engaging them in production of the very stardom they wish to worship.  There is a significant difference between celebrity in the first Internet cycle and now.  It is not the tools that matter, since many of them have not changed dramatically, but a growing responsibility that more and more of us feel to express our unique, authentic selves online.

Justin.TV, like Tia Tequila of MySpace, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, Mark Zukerberg of Facebook and Fred Wilson of Typepad, inspire us to be all that we can be online- to open up our API and let the data flow.   

This is the Summer of Love, 40 years later transposed onto the Web.