Category: Internet Big Five

Direct Mail Ain’t Dead, Says Facebook

I’m a bit behind on my snail mail, so to procrastinate from writing anything useful on the book, I went through a pile that’s accumulated over the past week. Perhaps the most interesting piece of mail came from a very familiar brand: Facebook.

The letter had all the trappings of direct mail – a presorted postage mark, impersonal address label, etc. I almost tossed it, but then I thought, why is Facebook using snail mail to message to me? I guess Facebook can’t grow using only its own platform to market its wares. After all, Google is now a major brand advertiser, and probably does direct mail as well. It’s kind of interesting that Facebook is now marketing in new ways….so open it I did.

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What Doesn’t the Valley Understand About Washington?

A few weeks ago I ventured to our nation’s capital to steep in its culture a bit, and get some first hand reporting done for the book. I met with about a dozen or so folks, including several scholars, the heads of the FCC and FTC, and senior folks in the Departments of Commerce and State. I also spoke to a lobbyist from the Internet industry, as well as people from various “think tanks” that populate the city. It was my first such trip, but it certainly won’t be my last.

Each of the conversations was specific to the person I was interviewing, but I did employ one device to tie them together – I asked each person the same set of questions toward the end of the conversation. And as I was on the plane home, I wrote myself a little reminder to post about the most interesting set of answers I got, which was to this simple question: What doesn’t the Valley understand about Washington?

It’s not a secret that the Valley, as a whole, has an ambivalent attitude toward DC. Until recently, the prevailing philosophy has trended libertarian – just stay out of the way, please, and let us do what we do best. Just about every startup CEO I’ve ever known – including myself – ignores Washington in the early years of a company’s lifecycle. Government is treated like plumbing – it’s dirty, it costs too much, it’s preferably someone else’s job, and it’s ignored until it stops working the way we want it to.

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On Larry Page’s Letter: Super Amazing Great Tremendous!

(I promised a bit more color commentary on Larry Page’s 3500-word missive posted last week, and after reading it over a few more times, it seems worth the time to keep that promise. I wrote this last weekend, but am on vacation, so just posting it now…)

It’s not often you get a document such as this to analyze – the last time I can recall is Google’s feisty 2004 letter to shareholders written on the eve of its IPO.

Well, eight years in, the feisty has taken a back seat to the practical, the explicative, and the … nice! The first thing I noticed were the exclamation points – Larry uses one in the second sentence, then keeps on exclaiming – 11 times, in fact. Now, I don’t know Larry Page very well, but he just doesn’t seem the type to use exclamation points. Seeing so many of them felt….off. Also, the letter had a very “softer side of Sears” feel to it, the language itself was rounded, not quite defensive (as it might have been given the news lately), but also not pointed.

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Facebook Buys Instagram, Checks Off A Swath of 2012 Predictions In One Move

Waaaay back in January, I rolled out my annual predictions. Thanks to our pals at Facebook, a few of them are now pretty much in the bag. I may have to start doing these things monthly, given the pace of our industry.

Prediction #5 was that it’d be a big year for Internet M&A. I further singled out Instagram as a company that would likely be bought, and figured there’d be a battle between Twitter, Apple, Facebook, and Google for the prize. Facebook won, with a billion dollar price tag. That checks box number seven, which predicted, among other things, that Facebook would make a billion dollar acquisition. FWIW, I also predicted Google would have a rough year (so far, seems that way) and that a heads up display would emerge (Google did that as well).

Facebook says it’s going to leave Instagram alone for the most part, but I don’t expect that to last that long. The most interesting part of the announcement for me was Zuckerberg’s promise to “learn” from Instagram’s integration with other social services. I wonder if that will hold. In any case, congrats to the team at Instagram, who presented just last month at our Signal SF event. Who might be next? Perhaps they’re presenting at our event next month in NYC…

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Larry Page Makes His Case

Given the headlines, questions, and legal actions Google has faced recently, many folks, including myself, have been wondering when Google’s CEO Larry Page would take a more public stance in outlining his vision for the company.

Well, today marks a shift of sorts, with the publication of a lenthy blog post from Larry titled, quite uninterestingly, 2012 Update from the CEO.

I’ve spent the past two days at Amazon and Microsoft, two Google competitors (and partners), and am just wrapping up a last meeting. I hope to read Page’s post closely and give you some analysis as soon as I can. Meanwhile, a few top line thoughts and points:

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Architectures of Control: Harvard, Facebook, and the Chicago School

Early in Lessig’s “Code v2,” which at some point this week I hope to review in full, Lessig compares the early campus networks of two famous educational institutions. Lessig knew them well – in the mid 1990s, he taught at both Harvard and the University of Chicago. Like most universities, Harvard and Chicago provided Internet access to their students. But they took quite different approaches to doing so. True to its philosophy of free and anonymous speech, Chicago simply offered an open connection to its students – plug in anywhere on campus, and start using the net.

Harvard’s approach was the polar opposite, as Lessig explains:

At Harvard, the rules are different….You cannot plug your machine to the Net at Harvard unless the machine is registered – licensed, approved, verified. Only members of the university community can register their machines. Once registered, all interactions with the network are monitored and identified to a particular machine. To join the network, users have to “sign” a user agreement. The agreement acknowledges this pervasive practice of monitoring. Anonymous speech on this network is not permitted – it is against the rules. Acceess can be controlled based on who you are, and interactions can be traced based on what you did.

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Will Transparency Trump Secrecy In The Digital Age?

Next week I travel to Washington DC.  While I am meeting with a wide swath of policymakers, thinkers, and lobbyists, I don’t have a well-defined goal – I’m not trying to convince anyone of my opinion on any particular issue (though certainly I’m sure I’ll have some robust debates), nor am I trying to pull pungent quotes from political figures for my book. Rather I am hoping to steep in the culture of the place, make a number of new connections, and perhaps discover a bit more about how this unique institution called “the Federal Government” really works.

To prepare, I’ve been reading a fair number of books, including Larry Lessig’s Republic Lost, which I reviewed last month, and The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain, which I reviewed last year.

Wikileaks And the Age of Transparency by Micah Sifry is the latest policy-related book to light up my Kindle. I finished it four weeks ago, but travel and conferences have gotten in the way of my writing it up here. But given I’ve already moved on to Lessig’s updated Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 (highly recommended), and am about to dive into McKinnon’s new book Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, I figured I better get something up, and quick. I’m way behind on my writing about my reading, so to speak.

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The Yin and Yang of Audience

(image) The Signal San Francisco conference is less than a week away, so I thought I’d take the time to explain my reasoning for the theme, and offer a curtain raiser of sorts on the day-long program. (PS, I have ten, and only ten, half price tickets available. Hit this link, and use the code “luckyday.”)

The theme, a portion of which is the title of this post, is “The Yin and Yang of Audience, Platforms and the Independent Web.” I do get a few eyes a-rollin’ when I frame conference themes, but hey, I can only do what I know how to do. I actually think pretty hard about this stuff, and like to take the time to outline the ideas behind the program.

So here goes. As readers know, I’ve been thinking out loud a lot about the future of the Internet, and whether the rise of “walled gardens” like Facebook and Apple’s iOS (what I call AppWorld) are ultimately the future the web. My short answer is yes….and. By that I mean that the Internet, which began as an open, gatekeeper-free platform where anyone could hang a shingle, will ultimately interconnect with these walled gardens – there’s just too much value in what I call the “ecosystem approach” for the opposite to occur. I framed two major forces driving the Internet today: The independent web (sites unaffiliated with major platforms like Google or Facebook), and the dependent web (major platforms which create a valuable “logged in” experience that changes “depending” on who you are.).

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Who Controls Our Data? A Puzzle.

(image) Facebook claims the data we create inside Facebook is ours – that we own it. In fact, I confirmed this last week in an interview with Facebook VP David Fischer on stage at FM’s Signal P&G conference in Cincinnati. In the conversation, I asked Fischer if we owned our own data. He said yes.

Perhaps unfairly  (I’m pretty sure Fischer is not in charge of data policy), I followed up my question with another: If we own our own data, can we therefore take it out of Facebook and give it to, say, Google, so Google can use it to personalize our search results?

Fischer pondered that question, realized its implications, and backtracked. He wasn’t sure about that, and it turns out, it’s more complicated to answer that question – as recent stories about European data requests have revealed.*

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Why Hath Google Forsaken Us? A Meditation.

(image) Here’s a short overview of Google’s past few months: It’s angered policymakers and pundits with a sweeping change to its privacy settings. It’s taken a beating for favoring its own properties in its core search results. It’s been caught with its hands in Apple’s cookie jar, and despite the fact Facebook and others previously condoned the practice, it was savaged for doing so. It’s continuing to fight an expensive and uncertain patent war. And its blinkered focus on beating Facebook – a company which, at its core, couldn’t be more different philosophically – has caused many to wonder….What on earth has happened to the Google we once knew?

Has it abandoned its principles of supporting the open web, data liberation, and doing no evil? Is Google turning into … another walled garden?

Well, those are questions I’ve been pondering for a while now, and I think I have an answer, or at least, some reasonable speculation as to an answer.

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