You know that time you said, "What I'd like is a social network centered around the New York Times"

... remember that?

Maybe it was a long time ago?

Perhaps you'd drunk a lot of wine?

Or you might have been doing air quotes under the table when you said "like"?

No?

Well, someone must have said it because the Times announced TimesPeople this week.

So what, exactly, is a social network built around the New York Times--besides a colossally strange idea? Well...

It's not a social network like Facebook or MySpace — you won't have Times friends, and it won't get you Times dates.

Which is too bad, because the ability to accumulate friends and get dates is pretty much the entire driving force of most successful social networks.

But no! Instead:

Instead, you'll assemble a network of Times readers. Then you'll be able to share interesting things on NYTimes.com with others in the network.

Because, apparently, sharing via a social bookmarking site like Delicious, sharing straight links with your friends on Facebook, or doing social recommending on Digg didn't quite cut the mustard for the needs of New York Times audiences.

Look, I get it: technology is neat. It's technically a very cool idea that you can sift through a paper as dense as the Times in a social way. But is there really a need to do that?

It feels to me like a misunderstanding on how people are consuming news online: People read widely. They share links already, via e-mail, blogs, and the other sites I mentioned above (and another bakers dozen of sites I didn't mention). News is spreading virally more and more. And friends are trusted sources at a time that the media is becoming less trusted on a daily basis.

But nobody reads one source--even a "paper of record," like the Times. People, especially the kind of news junkies that TimesPeople would want to attract, read dozens of news and opinion sites, increasing their touch even further with aggregator sites tossed into the mix as well.

So why then would anyone take part in social news sharing that locks you into a single site both in terms of content, but also in terms of access?

If I want to share a Times story using TimesPeople, I can only do it with other TimesPeople users. That's a pretty limited scope. But beyond that, if I have a nice network of TimesPeople users and I want to share with them a related story from another site, I'm SOL on that as well.

It's such an outmoded way of thinking--the site-as-an-island mentality of the 90s--that I've literally combed the 41-point FAQ a few times over to make sure I'm not missing something. But as best I can tell, I'm not. That's it: a lockbox for your Times links, accessible from nowhere but the Times and sharable with nobody but other people on the Times site (though they do allow a feed out to Facebook, another walled garden. Have fun with that. I'll stick with Google Reader and Delicious.

MySpace Muckraking

Yesterday, when rumors began to swirl that all may not be as it seems with GOP VP pick Sarah Palin's family, I said the first thing I'd do if I was investigating the story was to find the MySpace and Facebook pages of daughter Bristol's friends. While you can scrub your family's past to a certain degree, the social graph is too deep to clean completely. If there were secrets to be found, they'd be lurking in teenage exhibitionism. All it would take is someone to look.

Well, someone(s) did.

If you expect it to help clear things up, it only makes things more confusing. But it does show the power of an individual blogger to do an end-run around much larger news organizations and discover some hidden truths about a family that gets more complicated by the day.

Four years ago, that wouldn't have been possible. Four years ago, it wouldn't have even been thinkable.

But today, it's clear that a run for higher office holds any number of web 2.0 pitfalls--including your kid's boyfriends sister's MySpace page. And that you're facing not just oppositional researchers and well-funded news organizations, but also anyone who wants to ask why.

dropping the bomb on social networking

That's a literal title folks: The department of defense has adopted social networking technologies in a field-tested system designed to allow for more networked information flow than normal in the armed forces, according to a report from Rough Type's Nicholas Carr.

By clicking on icons and lists, [patrol leaders] can see the locations of key buildings, like mosques, schools, and hospitals, and retrieve information such as location data on past attacks, geotagged photos of houses and other buildings (taken with cameras equipped with Global Positioning System technology), and photos of suspected insurgents and neighborhood leaders. They can even listen to civilian interviews and watch videos of past maneuvers. It is just the kind of information that soldiers need to learn about Iraq and its perils.

The above is actually a fantastic model for a web-based journalism site to adopt. Can you imagine the kind of robust networked reporting that could happen with something similar?

because who wouldn't walk away from $15 billion?

Mysteries abound in Palo Alto! It was quietly announced today that Facebook's Chief Revenue Officer, Owen Van Natta, is leaving the company to--say it with me now--"pursue other opportunities." Van Natta was the chief architect of the Microsoft investment, which gave the company it's $15 billion valuation. On the surface, it seems like an odd time to walk away, with every street lined with gold and every rose smelling like money. Even stranger that the position isn't going to be filled.

Though on the other hand, who needs a chief revenue officer when you don't have any revenue? And, well, with the news that the sites users in the UK dropped for the first time ever last month, maybe it's a sign that the rats are starting to escape a ship moving in the wrong direction.

(news via Fake Steve)

Google's old-media envy

“We need to find ways to target people of particular demographics that are comparable to the people you might find in The New York Times or a particular publication that you may be familiar with.”

That's a senior VP from Google interviewed in the Times (dug up by Rough Type's Nick Carr), talking about the search giant's shortcomings in selling ads on social networks. That's the trick about turning your ad sales over to an algorithm--there's no good way to target demographics and, as a result, for every spot-on ad that gets placed, there are plenty of total misses (like the ones in the sidebar on this page, which are currently advertising get-rich-quick schemes because a few posts on the front page deal with the challenges of making money with online publications). In the social networking space, where most pages aren't going to return easily computed subjects (how do you come up with an ad for a page filled with people commenting "thanks for the add"?) the challenges are even more daunting.

One wonders if that's part of the driving force behind Google's new initiative to create a semantic social web: Once you can define relationships between users across sites, you're starting to create a machine-definable demographic.

Until then, though, Google will be looking back fondly at the ease of how a publication could define its readers and then sell them to high-value advertisers. Ironic then, that those very same publications now look to Google to bail them out of web advertising.

100 years ain't what it used to be

"Once every hundred years media changes" announced Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg last November at a press event for it's (now basically aborted) Beacon ad-spying program. It was, of course, a ridicule-worthy statement back then but now, with new numbers showing that the public interest in social networking is fading, it's becoming clear that they just don't make centuries like they used to.

While the news isn't all bad (Facebook's still up, just trending back down to earth), it certainly doesn't spell good news for the long-term viability of social networks.

The problem is that while social networks are fun and addictive, they're not actually all that useful most of the time. For most users of general-interest sites like Facebook and MySpace, it's a video game: collect as many friends as you can, add as many applications as you can, bite a few zombies, and... and... and... suddenly it becomes a bit boring. After all, after a few hundred friends it becomes apparent that you're reaching ("Sure, I guess I can add that friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend"). Eventually, you move on. After all, an infinite number of options are just a click away and I'm sure there's a zombie bite waiting for you somewhere out there. Or, as The Register puts it:

We're not suggesting that social networking sites are totally useless or are going to disappear anytime soon (Friends Reunited is still around? Who knew!) - they're a boon for prying journalists and recruiters for sure, and damn it, Scrabble is a good game. But today's shocking confirmation that their "phenomenal" growth isn't impervious to human nature does make the $15bn valuation Microsoft slapped on Facebook when it paid $240m for 1.6 per cent equity seem even more preposterous, if it were possible.

Add to that coverage of Facebook's announcement that they plan to have a cashflow of negative $150 million this year, and you begin to wonder how it is that the VC's of the world are still holding strong on tossing money down the monetization drain while continuing to insist that companies that are actually making things (*cough*newspapers*cough*) are doomed when they say things like the “perceived value of content is approaching zero" (dig for the quote here). Maybe when you strip away the due diligence and competitive analysis reports, the venture capitalists are really just as faddish as the Friendster users that fled to MySpace that fled to Facebook: the grass is always greener on the other side. Turns out, however, that the money may not be.

So here's to the end of Facebook's hundred years, 99 years premature. May the hundred years that came before last another thousand.

the tragic poetry of web 2.0

The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern.

(via Rough Type)

It's all zombie bites these days

So Facebook has finally admitted that spying on its users as they travel the web--and then reporting back to all their friends--was not perhaps the best move they could have made. Of course, it's not the first time Facebook has made a decision that flies in the face of what its users want. The last time however, the introduction of the site's now-popular news feed and mini-feed, at least it seemed the company was trying to introduce something useful to is users. With Beacon, their "you rented Ice Castles on DVD and I'm telling everyone" application, users only factored into the equation as something to exploit, not something to help.

That's the problem with the kind of fantasy money that's being bandied about with Facebook--when you're supposedly worth $15 billion, the pressure is on to prove you can earn the title (if not the money). As a result, you've got to try and wring every last cent out of your users. The problem is that on a social networking site like Facebook, your users are all you've got. If you start treating them as little more than grist for the money mill, are they really going to keep coming back?

It's something to remember as every publication and media company tries to incorporate some aspect of social networking into their websites: are you doing this for the users, or are you doing this for you?

Let's give the last word to Fake Steve Jobs:

Thing is, nobody ever doubted that Facebook can do better. What's scary is the fact that they won't do better until people start to scream at them. It's the fact that it doesn't really seem to be in their nature to do the right thing. Their instinct, in fact, seems to be to do the wrong thing, and to keep doing it until they get caught. Even after they get caught, their instinct is to spin and fudge and brazen it out. No wonder the Borg has partnered with them. It's a match made in heaven. These guys are like Google, only their slogan isn't "Don't be evil" -- it's "Don't get caught."

Either that or they truly are a bunch of spoiled and scarily fucking clueless kids who honestly have no idea why people are upset about this, because they truly have no moral compass and they view this whole thing as just another pain in the ass hurdle to get over on the way to becoming rich. In which case, yeah, I'm, like, rilly rilly super glad that they're, like, gathering information on me?

You got your good idea in my social network! You got your social network in my good idea!

So apparently someone at Google is reading Paul Davis' blog Is > Than because almost a month to a day after his post Social Media Needs Open Standards (which is a barn burner), does Google announce OpenSocial, a method for sharing social applications (and, as a result, content and data as well) across sites. This is the start of something much larger, the social web itself as a platform. Now if only someone could figure out how to make a living from it.

the social networks flameout dance

The always-sharp Paul Davis writes about the speed with which social networking sites are burning out, and diggs (pun intended) down to the core of what's needed if social networking is going to be anything more than a fad.

The only way I see these social networks as having any kind of lasting impact, the sort that could develop a legitimate social-networking media buffet with the credibility of a legitimized old-media powerhouse, is if the networks currently at the top (and the major ones to emerge) strive for some sort of shared standards of interoperability among platforms.

Yowza is right. Can you imagine?