John Battelle's Search Blog Internet Big Five

The PRISMner’s Dilemma

Sometimes when you aren’t sure what you have to say about something, you should just start talking about it. That’s how I feel about the evolving PRISM story – it’s so damn big, I don’t feel like I’ve quite gotten my head around it. Then again, I realize I’ve been thinking about this stuff for more than two decades – I assigned and edited a story about massive government data overreach in the first issue of Wired, for God’s sake, and we’re having our 20th anniversary party this Saturday. Shit howdy, back then I felt like I was pissing into the wind – was I just a 27-year-old conspiracy theorist?

Um, no. We were just a bit ahead of ourselves at Wired back in the day. Now, it feels like we’re in the middle of a hurricane. Just today I spoke to a senior executive at a Very Large Internet Company who complained about spending way too much time dealing with PRISM. Microsoft just posted a missive which said, in essence, “We think this sucks and we sure wish the US government would get its shit together.” I can only imagine the war rooms at Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and other major Internet companies – PRISM is putting them directly at odds with the very currency of their business: Consumer trust.

And I’m fucking thrilled about this all. Because finally, the core issue of data rights is coming to the fore of societal conversation. Here’s what I wrote about the issue back in 2005, in The Search:

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The Facebook Ad Network Is Here

It’s been a pretty good year for my annual predictions, I must say. A few months ago I did my “how’ve I done so far this year” post, and found myself batting about .500. Yesterday Facebook pushed up my average with the announcement that it’s begun testing a mobile ad network. And this isn’t just an on-domain network (where you can buy ads across Facebook’s domain), but rather, it’s a true cross-domain network – just like AdMob on mobile, or Adsense on the web.

From Ad Age:

The company is working with an undisclosed number of ad exchanges to deliver the ads on iOS and Android devices for its advertisers, who can still target using Facebook’s array of options such as age, location, education and interests.

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A Show Of Hands Please…

…from those of you in the marketing business out there. How many of you would love to promote your product on the home page of Google, in this fashion?

It’s arguably the web’s most valuable ad placement, it’s not for sale, and no one knows how much traffic or conversion it drives save Google itself.

Just one more sign that the Internet Big Five are girding for a massive fight to be the platform for your life. And if you’re shocked, don’t be. Remember when Amazon launched Kindle? The first thing you saw when you went to amazon.com was….what again? But then again, the Kindle was just another product Amazon was selling, right? At least, it seemed that way.

Now, when Facebook does a home page takeover with its own hardware device, then the battle will truly be engaged. Though I’m not convinced the young company has that move in it….Regardless, here we go….

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Facebook’s Real Question: What’s the “Native Model”?

The headlines about Facebook’s IPO – along with questions about its business model – are now officially cringeworthy. It’s an ongoing, rolling study in how society digests important news about our industry, and it’s far from played out. But we seem at an interesting tipping point in perception, and now seemed a good time to weigh in with a few words on the subject.

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The Internet Big Five: Up $272 Billion in Six Months

Last December I posted on “The Internet Big Five,” noting their relative strengths and the market cap of each. Since that time, the Five have only gotten stronger, adding a cumulative $272 billion in market cap (much of that is Apple, but Amazon and Facebook – assuming the offering does as expected on Friday – have also increased quite a bit). All in all, nearly 30% increase in value for these five companies – sort of makes me wish I was an investor, rather than a writer and entrepreneur.

I’ll also check the number of engaged users for each platform, to see if there are any significant shifts, though I don’t recall seeing any in the news recently (save Facebook crossing 900 million users). It is interesting to note that Facebook, should it hold its supposed valuation, will be more highly valued than Amazon.

A reminder as to why I’ve made a point of watching the Big Five, from my original and secondary posts:

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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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A Sad State of Internet Affairs: The Journal on Google, Apple, and “Privacy”

The news alert from the Wall St. Journal hit my phone about an hour ago, pulling me away from tasting “Texas Bourbon” in San Antonio to sit down and grok this headline: Google’s iPhone Tracking.

Now, the headline certainly is attention-grabbing, but the news alert email had a more sinister headline: “Google Circumvented Web-Privacy Safeguards.”

Wow! What’s going on here?

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Larry Page’s “Tidal Wave Moment”?

Who remembers the moment, back in 1995, when Bill Gates wrote his famous Internet Tidal Wave Memo? In it he rallied his entire organization to the cause of the Internet, calling the new platform an existential threat/opportunity for Microsoft’s entire business. In the memo Gates wrote:

“I assign the Internet the highest level of importance. In this memo I want to make clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to every part of our business. The Internet is the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981.”

The memo runs more than 5300 words and includes highly detailed product plans across all of Microsoft. In retrospect, it probably wasn’t a genius move to be so transparent – the memo became public during the US Dept. of Justice action against Microsoft in the late 1990s.

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It’s Not Whether Google’s Threatened. It’s Asking Ourselves: What Commons Do We Wish For?

If Facebook’s IPO filing does anything besides mint a lot of millionaires, it will be to shine a rather unsettling light on a fact most of us would rather not acknowledge: The web as we know it is rather like our polar ice caps: under severe, long-term attack by forces of our own creation.

And if we lose the web, well, we lose more than funny cat videos and occasionally brilliant blog posts. We lose a commons, an ecosystem, a “tangled bank” where serendipity, dirt, and iterative trial and error drive open innovation. Google’s been the focus of most of this analysis (hell, I called Facebook an “existential threat” to Google on Bloomberg yesterday), but I’d like to pull back for a second.

This post has been brewing in me for a while, but I was moved to start writing after reading this piece in Time:

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Tag: Internet Big Five

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The Facebook Ad Network Is Here

A Show Of Hands Please…

Facebook’s Real Question: What’s the “Native Model”?

The Internet Big Five: Up $272 Billion in Six Months

A Sad State of Internet Affairs: The Journal on Google, Apple, and “Privacy”