3 ms·

One thing I don't get, and I've started to feel really stupid for it, is this whole Social as Infrastructure meme that has started going around and that the aut

by marcusf 14y ago

One thing I don't get, and I've started to feel really stupid for it, is this whole Social as Infrastructure meme that has started going around and that the author touches on. I'd love for someone to explain to me exactly what it would entail, why any company would move to become a commodity, and where the user value would be? I'm not saying there aren't any really good answers to these questions, I'm just too thick to see it.

alttab 14y ago
Imagine a world where everyone used a protocol to communicate. Lets call that protocol "English". Now, imagine "English" is owned by one company, who changes "English" and compromises your conversations consistently, and then tries to monetize your conversations in increasingly subtle and annoying ways. Now in reality no one owns English. Its an open form of communication that anyone can use, anywhere. You can even create variants of it and use it with your friends as long as they understand your dialect. "Social Infrastructure" would require a common social protocol as a specification. This would open up an entire ecosystem of smaller players to contribute to it, providing delicious synergy and innovation along the way. Kind of like modding Minecraft, etc. Not every company wants to become a billion dollar start up. There are many IT service providers and MSPs that are perfectly comfortable servicing 30 clients and making a lifestyle business for everyone involved. If its a commodity, it opens up locality and niche markets easier than a monolithic implementation. Nothing but good would come from a true technological social protocol. Right now online social behavior is dictated through the mind of one man, which isn't really social at all. The user value is in that the users have all the power. If social service providers are a commodity, if they misbehave or provide a bad user experience they could simply take their social graph somewhere else. This empowers the user. This is also why Facebook does everything in its power to retain hegemony.
- snowwrestler 14y ago
  The users of Facebook are people, and as far as I know, Facebook does not change or compromise the conversations among people. I've never seen a status, comment, photo, friend request, etc. changed by Facebook. Businesses who build on the Facebook platform are not users. They are attempting to extract value from the users--just like Facebook itself is. It is not surprising that they sometimes find themselves competing with Facebook. The sort of open "infrastructure" Dalton advocates for would be great for platform businesses...of course they would love to have all the advantages of a platform (aggregated audience, aggregated data, well-defined API, etc.), without the downsides (changes to the API, competition from the platform owner). But it doesn't really matter that much to users. I can easily take my personal social graph with me...I know who my friends and family are, and I can find them again on whatever new service seems better than Facebook. After all, Facebook did it to MySpace--and without access to MySpace's social graph.
- fusiongyro 14y ago
  That's a great metaphor.
- marcusf 14y ago
  To counterpoint, haven't we been down that road before? XMPP, OpenSocial, etc. To be fair, it's market powers and network stickiness rather than abstract social or technical merit that have kept Facebook the incumbent. And for someone to dethrone FB, an interoperable social bus would probably be a good idea. Of course, that would not what would bring users to it (digital empowerment seems too much an abstract idea to explain to my mom, for example), but rather a killer app or a series of them -- like Instagram.
fusiongyro 14y ago
For one thing, the OP author is responsible for the whole meme, and is posturing his startup as the litmus test for the idea (which is probably fair). From a certain perspective, the whole idea of Google is to get users off the search engine faster, which doesn't sound like a great way to make money as compared to Yahoo! whose core idea was to keep them on the site as long as possible to serve more ads at them. In the end, the Google idea is more profitable because users prefer to use things that don't parasite them by a huge margin, especially if both are free. Caldwell's idea, as I understand it, is that there are a lot of interesting applications that could use Twitter's technology that aren't or can't be written because of their restrictions (or it would suck because of their ads), and that people would be willing to pay for a service like Twitter's if it enabled access to or the ability to author these applications. He thinks he can win at choosing to be the commodity by being first and doing the best job. The user value is hard to envision, because the apps that will be powered by this social infrastructure don't exist yet or are perverted by the presence of ads and Twitter's own self-interest.

by marcusf 14y ago

alttab 14y ago

Imagine a world where everyone used a protocol to communicate. Lets call that protocol "English". Now, imagine "English" is owned by one company, who changes "English" and compromises your conversations consistently, and then tries to monetize your conversations in increasingly subtle and annoying ways. Now in reality no one owns English. Its an open form of communication that anyone can use, anywhere. You can even create variants of it and use it with your friends as long as they understand your dialect. "Social Infrastructure" would require a common social protocol as a specification. This would open up an entire ecosystem of smaller players to contribute to it, providing delicious synergy and innovation along the way. Kind of like modding Minecraft, etc. Not every company wants to become a billion dollar start up. There are many IT service providers and MSPs that are perfectly comfortable servicing 30 clients and making a lifestyle business for everyone involved. If its a commodity, it opens up locality and niche markets easier than a monolithic implementation. Nothing but good would come from a true technological social protocol. Right now online social behavior is dictated through the mind of one man, which isn't really social at all. The user value is in that the users have all the power. If social service providers are a commodity, if they misbehave or provide a bad user experience they could simply take their social graph somewhere else. This empowers the user. This is also why Facebook does everything in its power to retain hegemony.

snowwrestler 14y ago
The users of Facebook are people, and as far as I know, Facebook does not change or compromise the conversations among people. I've never seen a status, comment, photo, friend request, etc. changed by Facebook. Businesses who build on the Facebook platform are not users. They are attempting to extract value from the users--just like Facebook itself is. It is not surprising that they sometimes find themselves competing with Facebook. The sort of open "infrastructure" Dalton advocates for would be great for platform businesses...of course they would love to have all the advantages of a platform (aggregated audience, aggregated data, well-defined API, etc.), without the downsides (changes to the API, competition from the platform owner). But it doesn't really matter that much to users. I can easily take my personal social graph with me...I know who my friends and family are, and I can find them again on whatever new service seems better than Facebook. After all, Facebook did it to MySpace--and without access to MySpace's social graph.
fusiongyro 14y ago
That's a great metaphor.
marcusf 14y ago
To counterpoint, haven't we been down that road before? XMPP, OpenSocial, etc. To be fair, it's market powers and network stickiness rather than abstract social or technical merit that have kept Facebook the incumbent. And for someone to dethrone FB, an interoperable social bus would probably be a good idea. Of course, that would not what would bring users to it (digital empowerment seems too much an abstract idea to explain to my mom, for example), but rather a killer app or a series of them -- like Instagram.

fusiongyro 14y ago

For one thing, the OP author is responsible for the whole meme, and is posturing his startup as the litmus test for the idea (which is probably fair). From a certain perspective, the whole idea of Google is to get users off the search engine faster, which doesn't sound like a great way to make money as compared to Yahoo! whose core idea was to keep them on the site as long as possible to serve more ads at them. In the end, the Google idea is more profitable because users prefer to use things that don't parasite them by a huge margin, especially if both are free. Caldwell's idea, as I understand it, is that there are a lot of interesting applications that could use Twitter's technology that aren't or can't be written because of their restrictions (or it would suck because of their ads), and that people would be willing to pay for a service like Twitter's if it enabled access to or the ability to author these applications. He thinks he can win at choosing to be the commodity by being first and doing the best job. The user value is hard to envision, because the apps that will be powered by this social infrastructure don't exist yet or are perverted by the presence of ads and Twitter's own self-interest.