Last week’s announcement that Mark Zuckerberg is Time magazine’s “person of the year” for 2010 put the issue in perspective. Many were aghast at this perceived slight of Wikileaks’s Julian Assange, but I tend to agree with it.

Too many years ago, I did a customized undergraduate college degree in the Philosophy of Journalism, so I probably should have some deeper opinions about the issues Wikileaks raises. When I was thinking about journalism in the early ‘80s, I was mostly considering differences between the Soviet model of journalism and how it compared to Western ideas. Like so many projects studying anything having to do with the Soviet Union, all that work has since become utterly obsolete and almost completely irrelevant.

Now I spend more time thinking about how enterprises use social software, an endeavour which might remain relevant for a bit longer. The Wikileaks affair actually does not have much to do with social media, or at least it shouldn’t. Despite its name, Wikileaks does not have much to do with technologies like social networking, discussion boards, or even wikis. The organization uses fancy security and anonymization techniques to keep their web sites up and protect contributors, but there isn’t much social about what they do in the way that Wikipedia or Yelp are social.

The rise of internet-mediated social interactions has had a profound influence on how we work, play, and interact as humans. Without downplaying the effect that Wikileaks will have on politics, journalism, and potentially business (if Assange’s threat/promise to release controversial banking documents comes to pass), the influence of social software goes much further. While not the only driver, Facebook is the public face of this influence.

So for once, I agree with Time. It doesn’t happen often.

I fear that an unavoidable, but unfortunate result of the furor around the Wikileaks disclosures will be an increased desire to lock down conversations and restrict communication at both commercial and government organizations. It will be used as a reason to block access to social media sites, stop sharing information, and treat many who want to collaborate widely with suspicion. After a period where sharing and access were generally encouraged, I fear that the pendulum will swing too far back the other way. This inevitable reaction is unfortunate from a social media perspective because encouraging participation is one of the biggest challenges I find organizations facing. As social software gains in maturity, usage grows beyond the pioneers who are naturally attracted to the technologies and interacting that way. After the pioneers, the settlers need encouragement. Clamping down amid an atmosphere of fear is not conducive to encouraging participation.

This would not be the first time that a desire for one thing triggered the opposite. When deciding on steps to take post-Wikileaks, I really hope that the familiar relationship between babies and bath water does not get forgotten.

The Hyves announcement does not mention it, but Facebook is the elephant in the room for all of these locally-oriented sites. I have seen it with many of my Dutch friends, who started out on Hyves, but gradually moved over to Facebook as they developed more contacts with people beyond the Dutch borders. Bizarrely, when Google translates the original Dutch page from the Telegraaf into English, most of the references to Hyves get changed to Myspace. Just as many Myspace users have moved to Facebook, so goes it with Hyves.

Today’s acquisition by the Telegraaf reinforces the local character of Hyves. Terms were not disclosed, but I think it is fair to assume that there will be no movies made with Justin Timberlake about Hyves. The consumer social networking market is one where the big get bigger; the dominant site either loses touch with its audience which switches en masse to something else (e.g. Friendster to Myspace to Facebook) or gets more dominant, as Facebook has so far been able to do.

I believe that there is a future for local sites, but not a huge one, particularly in Europe. Certainly, there is an audience which wants local content and values the tight cultural connections that a locally-oriented site can offer. This audience will be most viable in markets which are reasonably isolated by culture or language. Local sites are emerging or even thriving in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, and Arabic-speaking countries. Friendster, one of the original social networking sites, was bought last year by a company in Malaysia.

Holland is definitely not isolated, neither culturally or linguistically. While few foreigners speak Dutch, language skills in Holland are so good that if you have any kind of an accent, it can be hard to find someone to speak Dutch with. The Dutch go everywhere on holiday, to live and to work. As cross-border interactions and relations become the norm, the same goes to some extent for most European countries.

Local  focus can be a way to differentiate a social networking site. It usually won’t be enough to compete with a behemoth like Facebook, however, especially in Europe.

While five cities in five days is a quick pace, it’s not out of the ordinary. I really enjoy these tours. As well as eating some great food, seeing (briefly) some nice places (the train trip from Zurich to Milan is stunning), I get a chance to talk to lots of people about what they are doing. It is always a great source of research, as I hear about the questions people are asking.

Here are the top three questions that I heard on this trip:

• How do we introduce social software into a skeptical organization?
  Although social media is hot, it ain’t hot everywhere.Some organizations are more conservative, or have been around for a very long time and aren’t too eager to adopt new technologies. In these cases, people won’t use it because it is cool or because Gartner says they should.
• Should we start our own customer community or build onto one that already exists?
  After hearing all the reasons why customer communities are good for you, this issue comes from those who have not yet really started. They face the dilemma of going where their customers already are (like on Facebook or a more specialized site), or trying to draw them to a site associated directly with their own brand.
• How do we handle privacy? Our users and customers find this stuff creepy.
  This is a huge issue in Germany, where attitudes towards personal and professional privacy are very highly developed, but was a hot issue across Europe this tour. Importantly, the questions were not about legal restrictions and requirements on privacy, but about how social media makes people feel. Many are not comfortable with sharing too much in their professional lives, and social techniques make them uneasy.

I’ve got some ideas about how to answer these questions, and will work them out in formal research notes in the coming weeks. I also will be talking about some of these (especially the first one) at Gartner Symposium in Cannes. Carol Rozwell will cover this in Orlando. There are also sessions on privacy in Europe, and social CRM.

The theme for 2010 is “Think B4 U post!” (sic), with videos and posters aimed at reminding people of the potential consequences of posting embarrassing videos and pictures, or worse. Something that “seemed like a good idea at the time” often goes pretty wrong when populated across the Internet.

While the primary audience of Safer Internet Day is kids, the advice given also has relevance to enterprises. As so often happens, what is important to consumer users of social media, also apply to businesses:

Kids: Have you thought about what could happen if people you don’t know see what you are about to post?
Enterprises: Have you done an impact/risk assessment of what could happen if your social media sites are compromised?

Kids: Do you think about and use the privacy settings of the social networks you use?
Enterprises: Do you understand and effectively use the security and privacy protection capabilities of the collaboration products you use?

Kids: Do you know how much you can trust the people you “friend” into your network?
Enterprises: Do you understand the limits of trust with the partners you collaborate with?

Are you following the advice that you are giving your kids?

While the focus was supposed to be on the European tech scene, it often felt like a gathering transplanted tree and branch from San Francisco. The inside jokes, the focus on venture capital gossip, even the music felt very Californian. The smug, “we’re masters of the Tech universe” attitude was sometimes a bit hard to take.

Given Lemeur’s bi-continental focus (a Frenchman living in the Bay Area) and the influence that the US has on the tech industry worldwide that’s to be expected somewhat. However, I wasn’t sure why some of the companies presenting there, even in the startup competition were even there since they had no discernible European connection.

The main hall speakers were generally well chosen, even if some could probably develop a new story. I am not a habitué of these conferences, but I had heard several of these messages before. It was very clear that some of the speakers who had achieved great things had real ideas they were passionate about,which lead directly to their success. Others just seemed to have a reasonably good idea once, and were lucky enough to be where lightning hit, judging by what they had to say here.

Some speakers clearly understood what people were coming to the event for. Ryan Sarver from Twitter made several important announcements about new service offerings. Others, like Ethan Beard from Facebook  read from a prepared speech that told the audience basically what Facebook is and why it was so great, definitely not what anyone in the room needed to hear.

I tried to talk to or hear as many startups as I could, either on the show floor or in the competition. There seemed to be four main themes among the new companies’ products.

• Helping people organize their web experience and online resources (Mendeley, Symbaloo, Wikio, Allmyapps)
• Cloud support services (Superfeedr, Joilcloud, Cloudsplit
• Using the social grid in different ways (Kukunu, Friendbinder, Stribe the competition winner)
• Ecommerce (Shutl, Storific, Sokoz)

The star of the event was Queen Rania of Jordan, who gave an impassioned and clued in speech on how the Web can be used to improve how people live and calling on the entrepreneurs to support her main charity programme.

First Facebook changed its user interface to a adopt more Twitter-like activity streams. Although this style of user interface is arguably more like Friendfeed than Twitter, they all seem to be converging on a similar model built on real time feeds of what friends and contacts are doing right this very instant. Who cares what anyone was doing or thinking about an hour ago anyway, right?

The second move came this week when Facebook opened up their APIs to third parties. This is a far more welcome, meaningful and risky move for Facebook. One of the reasons Twitter has caught on is that it is easy to build applications on top of the Twitter service using rich interfaces. These applications range from the sublime to the ridiculous, providing mobile access, different styles of clients, monitoring tools, analysis and aggregation.

For most heavy Twitter users, these third party tools define their Twitter experience. Twitter doesn’t really seem to mind, since it has maintained a pretty utilitarian UI on www.twitter.com. it hasn’t changed much except for the addition of a (fairly well-hidden) search engine and a few tweaks seen recently like showing replies when the @symbol is anywhere in the tweet instead of only at the beginning; useful, but hardly revolutionary. There isn’t much need to go there except to change profile information, which doesn’t happen all that often.

Unlike Facebook and most other sites, Twitter doesn’t need to bring people to their site in order to make money by pushing advertising at them. For reasons discussed in an earlier post, I believe Twitter is concentrating on building volume and loyalty, with monetization to come later. Of course. “later” cannot become “never;” eventually they need to bring in some money. For the moment, that doesn’t seem to be a priority, however.

The threat to advertising revenue is why this is such a risky move for Facebook. When anyone can build a flashy AIR-based client to follow their friends activities, or gadgets that pull selected data from the Facebook stream, then there is less reason for users to actually visit www.Facebook.com, which is when the cash register jingles at Facebook HQ. So far, Facebook has done everything it could to keep users coming to its site rather than sending its data to someone else’s. I think that Facebook is counting on three factors in favour of opening up:

1. More activity means more visitors
   If the third party apps bring in more punters, than eventually they will visit Facebook.com with its full range of functionality. What they lose in visits they gain through more visitors.
2. Other revenue sources will open up
   Advertising is not the only source of money for social media. Expect to see more emphasis on sponsorship, partner fees, value-added services, and joint ventures.
3. If they don’t, Facebook could become irrelevant.
   Right now, they are at the top of the social media heap, recently having passed Myspace, which in turn replaced Friendster as the place to be. Losing some advertising revenue is better than being replaced.

I believe that last reason is the real clincher. The first two are throws of the dice; new money could replace or even surpass what they could miss. The risk of becoming the Last Big Thing in social media rather than staying the current big thing is more like flirting with disaster. A forward-leaning strategy encouraging more partnerships and activity certainly makes more sense in this space than building walls, so I think this is fundamentally a good move on Facebook’s part. It can be scary to put a painfully developed revenue stream at risk, but in the social media market, trying to protect it by erecting barriers will eventually prove disastrous.

By the way, I’m sure that the role of Twitter and Facebook will come up often at Gartner’s PCC conference in Orlando in June.

While walking the dog (when I do most of my thinking), I started to think about how it could go wrong and thought of this format as a way to illustrate it. I don’t think it was ever Facebook’s intention to make this possible. They have made several missteps, but I don’t think that they are evil. But over time, things change, and other people might not be so scrupulous.

The situation has also been mooted by Facebook’s climbdown after the kerfuffle caused by the change, but I like the idea so I wrote the blog anyway. The main message is something that we, and most social media observers have been saying for some time: Don’t post anything on a social media site that you wouldn’t want your mother, potential employer or a policeman to see.

Facebook II Mines IP as New Business Model

18 February, 2025

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook II, a company launched last month by IP Miners LLC, has announced the auction of photos and other content which originally belonged to Facebook, the once-popular social media site which closed its doors in February 2015 after its plan to sell marketing data based on its users’ Christmas buying intentions fell flat. Facebook II has contacted people who are depicted in photos from the old Facebook site with offers to sell them the rights to those digital photos. Several political candidates, high profile fundamentalist preachers, major league baseball players and prominent actors and models have reported being approached. The offer letter says that if they do not respond, the pictures will be auctioned to the highest bidder.

Facebook was extremely popular as a site where individuals could post pictures and share them with friends. In order to make it legally possible to do this sharing, Facebook retains the rights to all content posted on the site. Many people posted potentially embarrassing or incriminating photos without thinking of the consequences of them becoming widely available, even years later. While the original Facebook site did its best to fulfill the spirit of sharing and provide individual users with control over their content, Facebook II does not feel any obligation to respect those commitments. “What we are doing is perfectly legal,” said IP Miners CEO Nathaniel Moorveld. “People knowingly transferred rights when they used the system. We are providing a public service by offering to sell them their pictures back.”

IP Miners originally focused on buying obscure patents from defunct companies and pursuing technology companies who infringed on those patents. In their best-known case, they sued 400 software companies in 2019 for infringement of a 1953 patent covering “Method for Displaying of Textual information on Television Screens” arguing that it covered any situation where text was displayed on a screen. Litigation to invalidate that patent continues, but 120 companies have settled the suit for undisclosed amounts. IP Miners bought Facebook’s intellectual property from the bankruptcy administrator in 2020.

Moorveld expects this new source of revenue to be even more lucrative than the portfolio of patents the company has acquired. “This is a natural next step in the development of our company and its business model. Facebook I had millions of users, but couldn’t find a way to monetize all that activity,” Moorveld said.  “If there is one thing we know how to do, it’s monetizing.”