Month: November 2010

I’m in Brussels today, for another EU Commission workshop. This time, the goal is to get the more successful European social networks and others in industry into one room to talk about innovation and research, and do some matchmaking.

Mind you, the commission facilities at 25 avenue Beaulieu aren’t the best dating site, and many here are making it unnecessarily difficult — folks, if you go to an event like this, make sure your e-mail address and twitter account is on every single slide you show, and make sure you pack lots of business cards!

Still, the event is useful, and some common themes are emerging from social network providers’ presentations:

• Regulation as a disproportionally heavy competitive disadvantage. Europeans will go to US social networking sites that don’t comply with European ideas and laws about privacy; social network providers in Europe struggle to comply, and struggle to develop competitive business models.
• Without going into the details of how that mixes with privacy, many of the social networks that presented this morning based their business models on targeted advertising, often with US-based advertising partners.
• Some (like XING) are trying to move away from the advertising model. In XING’s case, 80% of the revenue comes from subscribers and recruiters that use the service.
• Most of the networks that presented here were directly linked to a natural or cultural identity. They typically focused on few countries; several of the largest ones are invitation-only, i.e., you need to be asked by an existing friend to join.

The constant subtext is that not just are they unable to compete with Facebook: It’s unlikely that Europe’s regulatory culture would have permitted a social network of the same popularity to thrive.

Striking, then, the short presentation in the afternoon by Zed Group, a digital entertainment and social gaming company: Time to market and global reach mean that country and culture specific social networks don’t cut it for them as a delivery mechanism — they’re going with Facebook right away.

What does this mean for Europe’s social network providers?

They might be able to survive in a national niche, serving the business needs of a telecom operator or publishing house that provides the requisite financial backing. They might end up as a Facebook or Google application. But in the current environment it’s unlikely that they’ll benefit from the global network effects that the Googles and Facebooks can leverage when they sell advertising, or serve as identity provider, or mine data to build new services.

Mining data is one of the concerns that the commission’s Stefano Bertolo brought up early in the day: Large social networks and large numbers of interactions imply an incredible scale in the data that can be used to train advanced algorithms, and that can serve to build innovative services. As those data are collected in the US, Europe’s research landscape suffers what might become a serious competitive disadvantage.

How can we collectively solve the problem, then? The commission is certainly doing the right thing in trying to bring the social networks together, and in trying to bring them into the Framework Program, and getting them to collaborate with other players in Europe. Yet, the framework program’s culture doesn’t necessarily match the sort of environment a startup wants to play in.

Looking at the big picture, though, the small players in this space need to find their own way to enable and benefit from network effects; as an aside, even the Facebooks and Googles will have a long-term interest in having a healthy and diverse Social Web ecosystem that they compete within. Key elements of that ecosystem will be:

• A shared vision toward user privacy. Yes, many business models in this space are built on targeted advertising. Yes, some targeted advertising might be socially worrisome. But how meaningful is privacy (and child and youth protection) regulation when it will simply make US players dominant, even in the European market? This problem is hard.
• Web Identity. An interoperable identity layer for the Web will enable more services to occur as identity providers, and will enable a broader set of applications to be built on top of social networks.
• Advertising standards, perhaps. One of the interesting requests brought up by several speakers at the conference today was toward shared advertising standards — both to package ads, and to express user preferences and enable better ad targeting.
• Federation of social Web transactions. The W3C Social Web Incubator Group has spent the last year surveying the space. The group is now working on another incubator that looks specifically at the federation use cases. If you’re interested in participating in this work, take a look at the Federated Social Web draft charter.

The big picture here is to enable the plethora of small-ish social networks to be able to serve as a shared social layer for both users and applications (that includes advertising, I suppose), at scale, while continuing to differentiate based on culture and target group and language and country and whatever else they’re differentiating on today.

Some of the best fun while playing Scrabble are the strange word discussions: Does that word really exist? Can you find a book that it appears in? Can you find a dictionary that has it? (And can somebody please dust off that 19th century dictionary before we get it out?!) Is it a neologism or just plain antiquated? Or can you even convince your fellow scrabblers that a word exists…. that doesn’t?

Alas, no such fun with the electronic version: While it’s on first sight fine if the game looks up things in the dictionary, it takes out the doubt (the machine becomes the referee), and quickly gets frustrating when the players’ vocabulary is larger than the machine’s (yup, got there pretty quickly). In a game that’s all about playing with words, give my fellow players a chance to accept that strange word even if it isn’t in the dictionary — or even better, memorize it and use it against me when I play against the machine!

But don’t force us all to stick to the limits of the computer dictionary’s linguistic imagination, please. Back to those wooden bricks again.

I’ve been having way too much fun with instagram lately. On its face, it’s an iPhone app that applies all sorts of filters to make bad photos look worse (including an imitation of the lomography look, and including several others that seem intended to negate any progress in camera construction since 1890), in square format, and at an embarrassingly low resolution. (Who needs that 5MP camera in the new iPhone any sort of color fidelity anyway…)

But under the surface, it’s a huge encouragement to really play with image composition, to try extreme colors and contrasts, and to try finding the beauty and interest in the bleak and underexposed. The ancient steel mill in Völklingen turns into a picture with few, if any hints, of being recent. The lights of the neighboring village, reflected in the Mosel river on an entirely too early and entirely too bleak evening, turn into something that almost looks like a painting.

If anything, I’ll keep playing, and I’ll probably start playing much more with some of the Lightroom options I haven’t yet started using, for the “real” photos.

If you’ve got an iPhone, give it a try!

Last Monday, the European Commission held an unlikely unconference in Brussels, about “My big Idea for the Digital Agenda.” (In Brussels-speak, it was a “stakeholder day.”)

The idea: In order to help implementing Commissioner Kroes’ grand strategy for the Internet’s and Web’s future in Europe, crowdsource ideas, and let those who submitted them (and a few others) do the bake-off. Anybody could get into the room for this invitation-only event by submitting an idea on the Web. Ideas were refined and triaged in several rounds of ever growing groups (with some professional facilitators doing a fairly good job) during the morning, then presented to the plenary (and the Commissioner) in the afternoon.

Among the surviving ones: Beyond Raw Data: Public Sector Information, Done Well (with kudos to Jeni Tennison‘s talk at the ICT 2010 conference a few weeks ago).

The gist of the idea: Innovation based on public sector information will require massive data integration across diverse silos. Integration works best when there’s interoperability. Interoperability demands standards work. What standards, then, should be used for public sector information? And how can we forge agreements on what these are?

At this point, it’s worthwhile thinking a bit about the larger context, and about the directions these discussions could take.

In Europe, the Digital Agenda is emphasizing the importance of public sector information as an economic driver. One of the actions under the agenda is the commission’s review of the 2003 Public Sector Information Directive; the commission is seeking input till 30 November in a public consultation. That public consultation is asking a lot of good questions, for example around the cost for public sector information. (Imagine there’s a 1 euro price tag per data set…) That’s important.

At the same time, we’re finally seeing a lot of government data get out in the open. Some of it might just be in Excel sheets, some of it might be in documents, and some of it might even get four or five stars on the scale of linked, open government data.

As pointed out in Tim Berners-Lee’s Putting Government Data Online Design Issues paper and the W3C eGov IG’s Publishing Open Government Data Note, putting out some data is the first, important step in getting public sector information available, and opening it up for innovation and use by outside parties (and by those inside the government, too!). It’s a step that shouldn’t be waiting for the data inventory, the standards roadmap, and the standards development, all of which can take a lot of time.

But that doesn’t mean that raw data is enough, or that, with the raw data out there, everything will fall in place: Governments need to go all the way to the five stars, and we need to collectively — geeks and governments! — figure out the path to getting there. In the puzzle that the commission’s policy review (in Europe), the raw data movement, and the call to go all the way to five star data form, Monday’s idea adds the missing piece: Agreements about formats, agreements about vocabularies, agreements about how to put data online, and do it right.

Let’s start the discussion W3C’s eGov IG mailing list!