Facebook’s über-communications platform

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Dan Gillmor takes a pretty sceptical view of Facebook’s new messaging system.

In a feature that Facebook thinks is great — and will thrill law enforcement and divorce lawyers — every conversation will be captured for posterity, unless users delete specific messages or entire conversations. Do you assume that the people with whom you communicate are saving every text message and IM? You’d better.

That’s only one of the things that makes me cautious about the service. Facebook’s privacy record is spotty enough already; trusting the company to archive and protect my communications? Not so likely.

Om Malik is much more complimentary:

Facebook has not only reinvented the idea of the inbox, but it has gone one better: it has done so by moving away from the traditional idea of email. One of the reasons why Yahoo and Google Mail have struggled to become entirely social is because it is hard to graft a social hierarchy on top of tools of communication. If you look at Gmail – it has most of the elements that are available in the new social inbox, but they are all discrete elements and give the appearance of many different silos, being cobbled together.

Facebook did the exact opposite – it imagined email only as a subset of what is in reality communication. SMS, Chat, Facebook messages, status updates and email is how Zuckerberg sees the world. With the address book under its control, Facebook is now looking to become the “interaction hub” of our post-broadband, always-on lives. Having trained nearly 350 million people to use its stream-based, simple inbox, Facebook has reinvented the “communication” experience.

The deadpan NYT report on the new initiative is here.

Forgetting the rest of the trick

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Bill Keegan, the Observer‘s economics commentator, tells a nice story about how the Labour Leader, Michael Foot, lampooned Sir Keith Joseph, Margaret Thatcher’s policy guru, in the early 1980s. Foot, says Keegan, gave

a virtuoso display in a speech which had both sides of the Commons in stitches. He was referring to Sir Keith Joseph, who had played the role of John the Baptist to Thatcher. Foot was speaking when, as now, the Conservatives were conducting a frontal assault on the fabric of British society. He had long tried to recall, said Foot, of whom the right honourable gentleman (Joseph) reminded him. It had suddenly come to him: in his youth, Foot had gone to the Palace Theatre in Plymouth on Saturday nights, where a “magician-conjuror” used to take a gold watch from a member of the audience, wrap it in a red handkerchief, and smash it “to smithereens”. Then, while the audience sat there in suspense, a puzzled look would come over his countenance, and he would say: “I’m very sorry – I’ve forgotten the rest of the trick.” Foot concluded: “That’s the situation of the government.”

Well, I suspect that is also the position of the present government. Thatcher at least had the excuse of fighting double-digit inflation. This government has invented an excuse – namely that the cuts are required to avoid the treatment that the bond markets have been meting out to Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

We’re all hamsters now

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Image used under Creative Commons licence from Flikr user: www.flickr.com/photos/cryztalvisions/2422753682/

Dave Winer has a lovely blog post in which he explains why Facebook (and Google and all those other ‘free’ services) are effectively hamster cages for humans.

They make a wide variety of colorful and fun cages for hamsters that are designed to keep the hamster, and their human owners, entertained for hours. When you get tired of one, you can buy another. It’s looks great until you realize one day, that you can’t get out! That’s the whole point of a cage.

Remember how they used to say: “If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is?” They still say it. :-)

Another one: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Exactly.

When they say you get to use their social network for free, look for the hidden price. It’s there. They’re listening and watching. It’s pretty and colorful and endlessly fun for you and your human owner.

Or, as one of the commenters on Dave’s post put it: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you are the product being sold.”

What’s the point of The Social Network?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Lessig’s point is that it’s the open internet that should be the real hero of the story. “What’s important here,” he writes, “is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without – and here is the critical bit – asking the permission of anyone.” That’s true, but I think Lessig is too harsh. The message he wants the film to communicate is there in the screenplay if you look hard enough. It lies in the film’s portrayal of the contrast between what happens to unauthorised innovation on a closed, tightly controlled system and what’s possible with the open, uncontrolled architecture of the internet.

A systems view of digital preservation

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The longer I’ve been around, the more concerned I become about long-term data loss — in the archival sense. What are the chances that the digital record of our current period will still be accessible in 300 years’ time? The honest answer is that we don’t know. And my guess is that it definitely won’t be available unless we take pretty rigorous steps to ensure it. Otherwise it’s posterity be damned.

It’s a big mistake to think about this as a technical problem — to regard it as a matter of bit-rot, digital media and formats. If anything, the technical aspects are the trivial aspects of the problem. The really hard questions are institutional: how can we ensure that there are organisations in place in 300 years that will be capable of taking responsibility for keeping the archive intact, safe and accessible?

Aaron Schwartz has written a really thoughtful blog post about this in which he addresses both the technical and institutional aspects. About the latter, he has this to say:

Recall that we have at least three sites in three political jurisdictions. Each site should be operated by an independent organization in that political jurisdiction. Each board should be governed by respected community members with an interest in preservation. Each board should have at least five seats and move quickly to fill any vacancies. An engineer would supervise the systems, an executive director would supervise the engineer, the board would supervise the executive director, and the public would supervise the board.

There are some basic fixed costs for operating such a system. One should calculate the high-end estimate for such costs along with high-end estimates of their growth rate and low-end estimates of the riskless interest rate and set up an endowment in that amount. The endowment would be distributed evenly to each board who would invest it in riskless securities (probably in banks whose deposits are ensured by their political systems).

Whenever someone wants to add something to the collection, you use the same procedure to figure out what to charge them, calculating the high-end cost of maintaining that much more data, and add that fee to the endowments (split evenly as before).

What would the rough cost of such a system be? Perhaps the board and other basic administrative functions would cost $100,000 a year, and the same for an executive director and an engineer. That would be $300,000 a year. Assuming a riskless real interest rate of 1%, a perpetuity for that amount would cost $30 million. Thus the cost for three such institutions would be around $100 million. Expensive, but not unmanageable. (For comparison, the Internet Archive has an annual budget of $10-15M, so this whole project could be funded until the end of time for about what 6-10 years of the Archive costs.)

Storage costs are trickier because the cost of storage and so on falls so rapidly, but a very conservative estimate would be around $2000 a gigabyte. Again, expensive but not unmanageable. For the price of a laptop, you could have a gigabyte of data preserved for perpetuity.

These are both very high-end estimates. I imagine that were someone to try operating such a system it would quickly become apparent that it could be done for much less. Indeed, I suspect a Mad Archivist could set up such a system using only hobbyist levels of money. You can recruit board members in your free time, setting up the paperwork would be a little annoying but not too expensive, and to get started you’d just need three servers. (I’ll volunteer to write the Python code.) You could then build up the endowment through the interest money left over after your lower-than-expected annual costs. (If annual interest payments ever got truly excessive, the money could go to reducing the accession costs for new material.)

Any Mad Archivists around?

Worth reading in full.

LATER: Dan Gillmor has been attending a symposium at the Library of Congress about preserving user-generated content, and has written a thoughtful piece on Salon.com about it.

The reason for libraries and archives like the Library of Congress is simple: We need a record of who we are and what we’ve said in the public sphere. We build on what we’ve learned; without understanding the past we can’t help but screw up our future.

It was easier for these archiving institutions when media consisted of a relatively small number of publications and, more recently, broadcasts. They’ve always had to make choices, but the volume of digital material is now so enormous, and expanding at a staggering rate, that it won’t be feasible, if it ever really was, for institutions like this to find, much less, collect all the relevant data.

Meanwhile, those of us creating our own media are wondering what will happen to it. We already know we can’t fully rely on technology companies to preserve our data when we create it on their sites. Just keeping backups of what we create can be difficult enough. Ensuring that it’ll remain in the public sphere — assuming we want it to remain there — is practically impossible.

Dan links to another thoughtful piece, this time by Dave Winer. Like Aaron Schwartz, Dave is concerned not just with the technological aspects of the problem, but also with the institutional side. Here are his bullet-points:

1. I want my content to be just like most of the rest of the content on the net. That way any tools create to preserve other people’s stuff will apply to mine.

2. We need long-lived organizations to take part in a system we create to allow people to future-safe their content. Examples include major universities, the US government, insurance companies. The last place we should turn is the tech industry, where entities are decidedly not long-lived. This is probably not a domain for entrepreneurship.

3. If you can afford to pay to future-safe your content, you should. An endowment is the result, which generates annuities, that keeps the archive running.

4. Rather than converting content, it would be better if it was initially created in future-safe form. That way the professor’s archive would already be preserved, from the moment he or she presses Save.

5. The format must be factored for simplicity. Our descendents are going to have to understand it. Let’s not embarass ourselves, or cause them to give up.

6. The format should probably be static HTML.

7. ??