What Facebook is really up to (maybe)

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I’m not what you’d describe as a natural Facebooker. Sure I have a FB page and a bunch of ‘friends’ but I visit the site only rarely, and that’s mainly to find out what my kids or my friends’ kids are up to. Some Facebookers make the mistake of thinking that I’m an active user, but that’s because I’ve arranged for Twitter (of which I am an active user) to feed my tweets to FB where they appear as Updates.

All of which is by way of saying that my views on social networking are not based on deep personal experience and so should be taken with a pinch of salt. But, hey! this is a blog and blogs are places for unfinished thoughts, work-in-progress and the like. So here goes.

At the moment Facebook has two distinctive features. The first is a huge subscriber base — 900 million and counting. The second is a higher level of user engagement than any other service on the Web. Something like half of the users log in every day, and when logged in spend more time on the site than users of any other site. so the key question for anyone wanting to understand the Facebook phenomenon is: what’s driving them to do this?

I think I know the answer: it’s photographs — photographs that they or their friends have uploaded. Two reasons for thinking this: (1) the staggering statistics of how many photographs FB now hosts (100 billion according to some estimates), and the rate at which Facebookers upload them every day; and (2) personal observation of friends and family who are users of the site. Of course people also log into Facebook to read their friends’ status updates, newsfeeds/timelines, messages, wall-posts etc. But more than anything else they want to see who’s posted pics from last night, who’s been tagged in these images, and where (i.e. at which social event) the pictures were taken.

Hold that thought for a moment while we move to consider the speculation (now rampant) that Facebook is developing a smartphone. Henry Blodget thinks that this would be a crazy idea for seven different reasons, and I’m inclined to agree with him. (But then I would have said — probably did say — the same about Steve Jobs’s decision to enter the mobile phone market.)

Zuck & Co aren’t crazy — not in that way anyway — so let’s assume that they share Blodget’s view — that building a phone qua phone would be a daft idea. And yet everyone’s convinced that they are building something. So what is it?

Dave Winer, whom I revere, thinks it’s a camera. And not just any old camera, either, but what Dave calls a social camera. Here’s how he described it.

Here’s an idea that came to me while waiting for a train to Genova. I was standing on a platform, across a pair of tracks a man was taking a picture of something in my direction. I was in the picture, the camera seemed to be pointed at me.

I thought to yell my email address across the tracks asking him to send me a copy of the picture. (Assuming he spoke English and I could be heard over the din of the station.)

Then I thought my cell phone or camera could do that for me. It could be beaming my contact info. Then I had a better idea. What if his camera, as it was taking the picture, also broadcast the bits to every other camera in range. My camera, sitting in my napsack would detect a picture being broadcast, and would capture it. (Or my cell phone, or iPod.)

Wouldn’t this change tourism in a nice way? Now the pictures we bring home would include pictures of ourselves. Instead of bringing home just pictures that radiate from me, I’d bring home all pictures taken around me while I was traveling.

Of course if you don’t want to broadcast pictures you could turn the feature off. Same if you don’t want to receive them.

A standard is needed, but the first mover would set it, and there is an incentive to go first because it would be a viral feature. Once you had a Social Camera, you’d want other people to have one. And you’d tell them about it.

Dave wrote that in 2007, which is 35 Internet-years ago, and I remember thinking that it was a bit wacky when I first read it. But then I’m a serious (or at any rate an inveterate) photographer, and for me photographs are essentially private things — artefacts I create for my own satisfaction. Of course I am pleased if other people like them, but that’s just icing on the cake.

Over the years, though, my views changed. I bought an Eye-Fi card, which is basically just an SD card with onboard WiFi. Stick into your camera and it wirelessly transmits the images you take to a computer on the same Wi-Fi network. It’s fun (though a bit slow unless you keep the image size down) but can be useful at times — e.g. in event photography.

And then came the iPhone. The first two versions had crappy cameras, just like most other mobile phones. But from the 3S model onwards, the iPhone cameras improved to the point where they’re almost as good as the better point-and-shoot digital compacts. Given the First Law of Photography, which is that the best camera is the one you have with you, and given that most people always carry a phone whereas only hardcore snappers like me always carry a separate camera, it was only a matter of time before the market for compact cameras began to feel Christensen-type disruption. And so it has proved, to the point where the most popular ‘camera’ amongst Flickr users is now the iPhone 4.

Now start joining up these dots — as Dave Winer did in this blog post — and you can see the glimmer of an intriguing possibility. Consider: if we accept that (i) the Facebook geeks are smart, (ii) social photography is Facebook’s addictive glue, (iii) cameras have morphed into cameraphones and (iv) Facebook recently paid an apparently insane amount of money for Instagram, then maybe the device that Zuck & Co are incubating is actually a camera which has photo-sharing built in. And if it also happens to make phone calls and send texts well, that would be a bonus.

Neat, eh?

Dave Winer: still programming after all those years

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Dave Winer (one of my heroes) has been programming for 37 years. He writes about that in reflective mood:

Some conclusions may be in order.

First, most people don’t program that long. The conventional wisdom is that you “move up” into management long before you’ve been coding for 37 years. Only thing is I don’t see programming as a job, I see it as a creative act. I drew a big circle shortly after I started, and said I was going to fill the circle. So until the circle is full, I still have more to do.

Beware what you “Like”…

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… it may come back to haunt you.

This from the New York Times.

SAN FRANCISCO — On Valentine’s Day, Nick Bergus came across a link to an odd product on Amazon.com: a 55-gallon barrel of … personal lubricant.

He found it irresistibly funny and, as one does in this age of instant sharing, he posted the link on Facebook, adding a comment: “For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.”

Within days, friends of Mr. Bergus started seeing his post among the ads on Facebook pages, with his name and smiling mug shot. Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon.

In Facebook parlance, it was a sponsored story, a potentially lucrative tool that turns a Facebook user’s affinity for something into an ad delivered to his friends.

Amazon is one of many companies that pay Facebook to generate these automated ads when a user clicks to “like” their brands or references them in some other way. Facebook users agree to participate in the ads halfway through the site’s 4,000-word terms of service, which they consent to when they sign up.

You have been warned.

Disrupting the HE market

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The Higher Education market is weird. For decades the costs of HE have been going up at rates that far exceed the rate of inflation. At the same time the “product” (whether as measured by the quality of the education ‘delivered’ or the student experience) has been, in overall terms, deteriorating. And throughout this period, computing and other relevant technologies have been developing at an astonishing pace. So if ever there was a market that was ripe for major disruption, HE is it. And yet, except at the fringes, nothing much changes. Elite US universities will soon be charging $60,000 a year just for tuition. Even gimcrack institutions — in the US and elsewhere — are still able to charge astonishing fees. How long more can this go on for?

At this week’s All Things D Conference, Walt Mossberg held an interesting and revealing conversation with John Hennessy, the President of Stanford, and Salman Khan, founder of the wonderful Khan Academy, which covered several of what seem to me to be key issues — in particular, credentialling and the real reason why we insist on gathering bright young people in one place at great expense, namely to enable them to learn from one another (and engage in oblivion drinking).

The Greek ‘election’

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Interesting piece by Slavoj Žižek in the LRB.

The next round of Greek elections will be held on 17 June. The European establishment warns us that these elections are crucial: not only the fate of Greece, but maybe the fate of the whole of Europe is in the balance. One outcome – the right one, they argue – would allow the painful but necessary process of recovery through austerity to continue. The alternative – if the ‘extreme leftist’ Syriza party wins – would be a vote for chaos, the end of the (European) world as we know it.

The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current democratic arrangements complain that elections don’t offer a true choice: what we get instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes are almost indistinguishable. On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment (New Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other. And, as is usually the case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in a panic: chaos, poverty and violence will follow, they say, if the wrong choice is made. The mere possibility of a Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of fear through global markets. Ideological prosopopoeia has its day: markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their ‘worry’ at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural reform. The citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these prospects: they have enough to worry about in their everyday lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades.

Such predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about the very eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels’s technocracy and anti-immigrant populism. This is why Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, made clear in a recent interview that his first priority, should Syriza win, will be to counteract panic: ‘People will conquer fear. They will not succumb; they will not be blackmailed.’ Syriza have an almost impossible task. Theirs is not the voice of extreme left ‘madness’, but of reason speaking out against the madness of market ideology. In their readiness to take over, they have banished the left’s fear of taking power; they have the courage to clear up the mess created by others. They will need to exercise a formidable combination of principle and pragmatism, of democratic commitment and a readiness to act quickly and decisively where needed. If they are to have even a minimal chance of success, they will need an all-European display of solidarity: not only decent treatment on the part of every other European country, but also more creative ideas, like the promotion of solidarity tourism this summer.

[…]

Here is the paradox that sustains the ‘free vote’ in democratic societies: one is free to choose on condition that one makes the right choice. This is why, when the wrong choice is made (as it was when Ireland rejected the EU constitution), the choice is treated as a mistake, and the establishment immediately demands that the ‘democratic’ process be repeated in order that the mistake may be corrected. When George Papandreou, then Greek prime minister, proposed a referendum on the eurozone bailout deal at the end of last year, the referendum itself was rejected as a false choice.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. I agree with that last para, because what’s been clear for decades is that the European ‘Project’ is, at its heart, a profoundly undemocratic one in the sense that a large proportion of the citizens of European democracies don’t feel represented within the Euro machine and probably have never voted for it. An academic colleague of mine who has spent many months in EU committees discussing science and technology policy once told me that there was one infallible way of getting Eurocrats riled, and that was to ask whether a particular venture would be a defensible use of “taxpayers’ money”. My friend intuited that it was the idea that taxpayers might be in any way relevant to these questions that really irritated the Eurocrats.

Likewise, the fact that my fellow-countrymen in Ireland rejected the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum was famously regarded by Brussels as the ‘wrong’ result. The Irish was told to go back to the ballot box and vote differently (and they did). This is a bit like Brecht’s famous dictum that if the people reject the government then it is time to dissolve the people and get a better crowd.

On the other hand, it’s really difficult to work up too much sympathy for a society in which tax-evasion and a bloated public sector are as pervasive as they have been in Greece. Consider, for example, Micheal Lewis’s celebrated report on the country which contained passages such as this (about the Greek public sector):

As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it. In just the past decade the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled, in real terms—and that number doesn’t take into account the bribes collected by public officials. The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greece’s rail passengers into taxicabs: it’s still true. “We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,” Manos put it to me. “And yet there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.” The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finland’s. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as “arduous” is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.

Or this, about tax evasion:

A handful of the tax collectors, however, were outraged by the systematic corruption of their business; it further emerged that two of them were willing to meet with me. The problem was that, for reasons neither wished to discuss, they couldn’t stand the sight of each other. This, I’d be told many times by other Greeks, was very Greek.

The evening after I met with the minister of finance, I had coffee with one tax collector at one hotel, then walked down the street and had a beer with another tax collector at another hotel. Both had already suffered demotions, after their attempts to blow the whistle on colleagues who had accepted big bribes to sign off on fraudulent tax returns. Both had been removed from high-status fieldwork to low-status work in the back office, where they could no longer witness tax crimes. Each was a tiny bit uncomfortable; neither wanted anyone to know he had talked to me, as they feared losing their jobs in the tax agency. And so let’s call them Tax Collector No. 1 and Tax Collector No. 2.

Tax Collector No. 1—early 60s, business suit, tightly wound but not obviously nervous—arrived with a notebook filled with ideas for fixing the Greek tax-collection agency. He just took it for granted that I knew that the only Greeks who paid their taxes were the ones who could not avoid doing so—the salaried employees of corporations, who had their taxes withheld from their paychecks. The vast economy of self-employed workers—everyone from doctors to the guys who ran the kiosks that sold the International Herald Tribune—cheated (one big reason why Greece has the highest percentage of self-employed workers of any European country). “It’s become a cultural trait,” he said. “The Greek people never learned to pay their taxes. And they never did because no one is punished. No one has ever been punished. It’s a cavalier offense—like a gentleman not opening a door for a lady.”

The scale of Greek tax cheating was at least as incredible as its scope: an estimated two-thirds of Greek doctors reported incomes under 12,000 euros a year—which meant, because incomes below that amount weren’t taxable, that even plastic surgeons making millions a year paid no tax at all. The problem wasn’t the law—there was a law on the books that made it a jailable offense to cheat the government out of more than 150,000 euros—but its enforcement. “If the law was enforced,” the tax collector said, “every doctor in Greece would be in jail.” I laughed, and he gave me a stare. “I am completely serious.” One reason no one is ever prosecuted—apart from the fact that prosecution would seem arbitrary, as everyone is doing it—is that the Greek courts take up to 15 years to resolve tax cases. “The one who does not want to pay, and who gets caught, just goes to court,” he says. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the activity in the Greek economy that might be subject to the income tax goes officially unrecorded, he says, compared with an average of about 18 percent in the rest of Europe.

Žižek is right that our enslavement to a particular manifestation of neo-liberal capitalism threatens to undermine democracy. The problem for his case is that the Greeks are not a great argument for it. A better example might be Ireland, a country in which every man, woman and child is now in debt to the tune of €17,000 because of their government’s insane decision to indemnify banks for their crazed borrowing and lending. In the last General Election, my countrymen threw out the crooks (Fianna Fail) who had got the country into this mess, but elected a crew who — at least in one respect — were just “Fianna Fail Lite”, and who have insisted in sticking to the ludicrous commitment entered into by their predecessors. The result: an austerity programme on steroids, and a predictable recession.

Of course — as with the Greeks — my countrymen are not exactly blameless either. Apart from tolerating the pervasive corruption of their politicians and of the planning system, they also enthusiastically mounted the ‘Celtic Tiger’ and goaded it energetically into a gallop in the belief that the laws of economics had been suspended, that property bubbles go on forever, and so on. So I’m left with the thought that while we get the governments (or at least the politicians) that we deserve, we also got a banking system and an economic ideology that none of us voted for and even fewer of us understood.

Mighty Meg and HP

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This morning’s Observer column.

‘Hewlett-Packard to lay off 27,000 employees,” said the headline, prompting a grimace from this columnist. For while it’s great fun to observe a smart-ass startup such as Facebook screw up (as it appears it did with its IPO), it’s quite another to see one of the world’s great technology companies apparently entering a death spiral. What you need to understand is that for geeks of my generation, HP was a synonym for engineering excellence in the same way that Rolls-Royce is for aero-engine designers. And what makes it worse is that most of HP’s wounds were self-inflicted.

So it was with a sinking heart that I dug out the transcript of the internal video that HP’s newish CEO, Meg Whitman, sent to her 350,000 staff, announcing the job cuts and other measures she is taking. Having read it, I came away thinking that not only does Meg get it, but that she might even turn this supertanker round…

“Legacy”: the use and abuse of a term

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The word “legacy” crops up a lot in discussions about innovation in cyberspace, so it was good to find thoughtful essay about it by Stephen Page, current CEO of Faber & Faber, the eminent publishing house of which TS Eliot was famously a Director.

In any revolution, language matters. One powerful word in the digital revolution is “legacy”. There is a conscious attempt to employ the word pejoratively, to suggest that existing media businesses – publishers, in the case of books – are going to fail to make the leap to a new world.In common usage, the first meaning of legacy is an inheritance, or something handed down from the past. A second meaning, more specific and recent, denotes technological obsolescence, or dramatic business-model shift. These two meanings have been fused to imply inevitable irrelevance for those with history, especially in media. This is a sleight of hand that would be sloppy if it wasn’t so considered.

Let’s deal with technological obsolescence. Media businesses are not technology businesses, but they can be particularly affected by technology shifts. I run a so-called legacy publishing house, Faber & Faber. Most of our business is based on licensing copyrights from writers and pursuing every avenue to find readers and create value for those writers. We are agnostic about how we do this. For our first 80 years, we could only do it through print formats (books); now we can do it through books, ebooks, online learning (through our Academy courses), digital publishing (such as the Waste Land app) and the web. Technology shifts have tended to result in greater opportunity, not less.

Implicit, I suppose, in the pejorative use of the term legacy is that we at Faber, like other publishers, don’t get it – “it” being the new economy, the new rules. There is something in this, of course. It’s harder to transform an existing business into one with a new culture and cost structure than to start afresh. Any existing business, no matter what old-world strength it has, will fail if it is not bold enough to attack its own DNA where necessary. The ailing photography firm Eastman Kodak is widely cited as a recent example of this phenomenon. But this is business failure due to cultural stasis. There is nothing inevitable in failure for existing businesses, but they have particular issues to figure out: simply adhering to old business practices will lead to failure. Failure will not be because of technology, but through failure to react to technology. In fact, it could be regarded as squandering the opportunity of a beneficial legacy.

He’s right about the two meanings. A legacy can be a source of mindless complacency — the kind of mindset one finds in the trust-fund Sloanes who hang out in Belgravia and Chelsea. But it can also be a source of strength — as in the case of Faber, who seem to me to be approaching the challenges of digital technology with imagination and vision. For example, the wonderful Waste Land App produced by my friend Max Whitby and his colleagues at TouchPress required access to the Eliot papers and rights held by Faber. So they used their ‘legacy’ to add value to a digital product in a distinctive and valuable way.

But others legatees in the publishing (and other content industries) have viewed their inheritances in different and less imaginative ways. Think, for example, of the way Stephen Joyce has relentlessly used his control of the Joyce estate to prevent imaginative uses of his grandfather’s works. (Mercifully, Ulysses is now finally out of copyright and therefore beyond Stephen’s baleful reach, which is what has enabled TouchPress to embark on an imaginative App based around a new translation that will come out later this year.). Or of the way some legatees have viewed their inheritances as guarantees that the digital revolution will never threaten their hold on a market.

Still, Mr Page is right: “legacy” is too often used as a term of patronising abuse by tech evangelists who think that they have “the future in their bones” (as C.P. Snow put it in his famous Rede Lecture all those years ago.)