Tag Archives: Facebook

Dark Value, a new book published today

Ember Library Mediator

Here’s the abstract for my new book:

Innovators like Airbnb, Uber and Netflix are creating dark value. They are creating features and benefits they didn’t  intend and don’t always grasp. And because this value is hard to see, it’s hard to monetize. I believe dark value is a chronic problem in the innovation and sharing economies. To observe one implication of the dark value argument: Airbnb, Uber and Netflix are charging too little.

We will examine dark value created by AirBnb, Uber, Netflix, Evernote, Fitbit, and Facebook. We will show how to make dark value visible in three steps: 1. discover, 2. determine, and 3. declare. Ethnographers, designers, VCs, creatives, planners, PR professionals, marketers, story tellers, curators, programmers, content creators, and social media experts all have a part to play. For all of them, Dark value represents a new professional opportunity and a new revenue stream.

You can buy Dark Value on Amazon here.

Why buy it? If you are a culture creative in design, marketing, planning, ethnography, advertising, curation, this is a treasure map. It will also help you find new revenue streams, as you find dark value for others.  (It now occurs to me that “A Treasure Map” should have been my subtitle.)

What will it cost you? The price is $2.99. It will take you about 30 minutes to read. If you buy a copy, please send me an email and I will put you on a mailing list for updates. I’m thinking about a Keynote deck, and you would get this for free.

 

Are photos a secret ingredient of the internet economy?

KodakBuildingI’ve been asking myself the big question: “Why did FB buy What’sApp for $19 billion?”

I know I am late to the party.  But surely this puzzle is still a puzzle even if the buzz(le) has moved on.

For me, there are four answers.

1) Facebook was trying to stay in touch with its early adopters, specifically young people who are now migrating away from Facebook at speed.  Early adopters are early warning.  Where they go, the world will follow.

2) Facebook was attempting to disrupt a disrupter.  Mark Zuckerberg has read his Clay Christensen.  He doesn’t want to suffer the fate of Friendster.  WhatsApp looked like the future.  So he bought it.

3)  The third answer has to do with the power of photos. Whatsapp users send 600 million photos every day.  (http://news.yahoo.com/whatsapp-19-billion-bet-facebook-053029423–finance.html)  And Facebook knows what this means. Chris Hughes, a FB founder, thought that photos could make FB “sticky” and discovered that they made it positively magnetic.  (Photos may be the biggest reason Facebook didn’t drop from view like Friendster.)

4)  The fourth answer turns on the mysterious properties of the photograph.  (This is a topic dear to my heart.  I did research for Kodak in the US, Europe and Asia.)

We tend to think that photos matter because they are a record of the world.  But this is only the necessary condition of their significance.  The reason they really matter is that they are the single, smallest, richest, cheapest, easiest token of value and meaning online.  We mint them.  We trade them.  We accumulate them.  We treasure them.

Individually, photos are content coursing through our personal “economies.”  They are the single most efficient way to build and sustain our social networks.  We gift people with photos.  They reciprocate.  Hey, presto, a social world emerges.

Collectively, photos create a currency exchange.  They are a secret machine for seeing, sharing, stapling, opening, sustaining and making relationships.  Want to know where networks are going?  See who is giving what to whom, in the photo department.  Photos are in constant flight.  They are a kind of complex adaptive system out of which some of our social order comes.

Why did Zuckerberg pay $19 billion for Whatsapp?  He was following the photos, that secret ingredient of the internet economy.

What are we looking for in those FB photos?

In an article called The Machine Zone in The Atlantic, these breathtaking stats about on-line photos are revealed:

“Facebook is the single largest photo sharing service in the world. In 2008, when the site had 10 billion photographs archived, users pulled up 15 billion images per day. The process was occurring 300,000 per second. Click. Photo. Click.

In 2010, Facebook had uploaded 65 billion images, and they were served up at a peak rate of 1 million per second. By 2012, Facebook users were uploading 300 million photos per day. And early this year, Facebook announced users had entrusted them with 240 billion photos.

If we assume the ratio of photos uploaded to photos viewed has not declined precipitously, users are probably pulling up billions of Facebook photos per day at a rate of millions per second. Click. Photo. Click.Facebook is the single largest photo sharing service in the world. In 2008, when the site had 10 billion photographs archived, users pulled up 15 billion images per day. The process was occurring 300,000 per second. Click. Photo. Click.

In 2010, Facebook had uploaded 65 billion images, and they were served up at a peak rate of 1 million per second. By 2012, Facebook users were uploading 300 million photos per day. And early this year, Facebook announced users had entrusted them with 240 billion photos.

If we assume the ratio of photos uploaded to photos viewed has not declined precipitously, users are probably pulling up billions of Facebook photos per day at a rate of millions per second. Click. Photo. Click.”

Predictably, The Atlantic and author Alexis Madrigal harbor dark suspicions about what drives our interest in these photos.  

What if the 400 minutes a month people spend on Facebook is mostly (or even partly) spent in the machine zone, hypnotized, accumulating ad impressions for the company?

Here’s my contention: Thinking about the machine zone and the coercive loops that initiate it has great explanatory power. It explains the “lost time” feeling I’ve had on various social networks, and that I’ve heard other people talk about. It explains how the more Facebook has tuned its services, the more people seem to dislike the experiences they have, even as they don’t abandon them. It helps explain why people keep going back to services that suck them in, even when they say they don’t want to.

This seems to me, as a piece of criticism, almost entirely habitual.  The only thing more certain than each new wave of technology is the generation of intellectuals who exert themselves to show how this technology puts our agency, autonomy and liberty at risk. Note especially the term “hypnotized.”  Any time a deep thinker can find evidence that we are hypnotized, well, mission accomplished.  Put down your pen and walk away from the table!  

I don’t doubt that there is a darker side to our consumption of all these photos, but let us cast the net a little wider.  I think we are looking at all those photos in search of something. Actually, in search of many things.  Let’s have a wonder what.  

Reference

“The Machine Zone: This Is Where You Go When You Just Can’t Stop Looking at Pictures on Facebook.” 2013. The Atlantic.  (August 4, 2013).  For the full article, click here.  

Acknowledgments

To Steve Crandall for pointing out the article.  To Martin Silverman and his book Disconcerting Issue which opens with his respondents reading the newspaper looking for stories that make their lives make sense.  

Silverman, Martin G. 1971. Disconcerting Issue; Meaning and Struggle in a Resettled Pacific Community. University of Chicago Press.

 

Google + and the late-adopter advantage

Ooph.  To be standing in the intersection, when the new comes roaring through.  My hat, pipe and papers all went flying.  

I finally, belatedly, got my invitation to Google + and I have been fiddling with it.  

On first glance, it feels like an elegant restatement of the social media proposition.  

Indeed, it so simplifies and clarifies that it may actually claim a “late adopter” advantage, forcing on Facebook and Twitter what Veblen once called “the penalty of taking the lead.” 

The fun of being on Google+ as the moment is that it is filled with people doing “edge finding,” trying to figure it what it is, how it works, what you can make it do.  

Please come find me there.  And if you need an invitation, send me an email at grant27@gmail.com.  (But I think by this name the gates may be open, no invitation required.)

Fee-based Facebook and Google

It’s clear, isn’t it, that we pay for Facebook and Google one way or the other.

One way: We pay by fee. 

The other: We pay in privacy. 

I get why Facebook and Google are prepared to play loose and fast with our privacy.  That’s the business model.  This is the way they make money.  They "have to."

Actually, there’s an alternative.  It is to give us the option of paying for Facebook and Google in something less precious than our privacy.

I’m not saying millions would sign up for this option.  But it would clarify the debate nicely.  It would allow Google’s Eric Schmidt to say, "Oh, privacy is important to you?  Here’s the alternative.  Pay us."

(And wouldn’t it be interesting to see someone run these numbers.  What would Facebook have to charge us in the currency was, um, currency?)  

But I think this wouldn’t just be useful for Facebook and Google.  I think it might be obligatory.  I think a fee option is something they’re obliged to make available.  It would be mean they no longer "have to" invade our privacy.