Democracy in Media

Facebook and the Illusion of Privacy

I was going to write this post a few weeks back, but time just got away from me. Facebook came out with a service (News Feeds) that essentially scraped data from all your relationships in order to give you a personalized daily briefing of your social network’s activities. This is a very cool solution to the issue of information overload, especially when you start managing so many friendships. But, the user community revolted and drove Facebook back to the drawing board.

The primary complaint revolved around the invasion of privacy (even though the data assembled was about people with which you already had relationships). I’m sure this was pretty surprising to Facebook and a clear demonstration of the need to consult with your community before doing such large scale updates. But on the central theme of privacy and people’s desire to maintain it, some interesting developments are occurring.

Whether people like it or not, personal privacy is evaporating. Between the digital trails we leave online to our increasingly videoed, photographed, and otherwise documented physical movements, the world is becoming a very public place for anyone that knows how to ask the right question. Facebook was just showing people the power of the technological tools that any good coder already has at his disposal (and frankly, it was just a hint).

This type of assemblage of data, across all your activities is already occurring at an astounding rate. As this technology gets into the hands of more people, the ability for the average individual to really maintain any level of privacy that has been traditionally expected will go the way of the teletype. Facebook’s failure to successfully launch this service notwithstanding, similar services are going to start proliferating in the very near future.  And they will frankly be much more powerful and pervasive in their scraping abilities.

Accepting this as a probable reality will start helping us deal with the outcomes of this trend and start demanding equal access to all information, especially from places like the US Government (thanks, Obama). We are already living in a very public world and it’s about to become virtually transparent whether we bitch about it or not.  And to be honest, I'm not sure that that's a bad thing...

UPDATE: I just went over to TechMeme and noticed that Wired has a pretty good roundup of the same issues.

Gotta Love Mark Zuckerberg’s Authenticity

This shit is classic…

From The Wall Street Journal…

During one series of talks with Microsoft, Facebook executives told their Microsoft peers they couldn't do an 8 a.m. conference call because the company's 22-year-old founder and chief executive, Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg, wouldn't be awake, says a person familiar with the talks. Microsoft executives were incredulous.

In an interview, Mr. Zuckerberg declines to comment on any talks. The young entrepreneur says he generally works late -- he recalls eating French fries recently in the parking lot of a local McDonald's restaurant at 3 a.m. -- and doesn't get to work early. "I'm in the office at 10:30 a.m. sometimes," he says.

Why Mark Cuban is Way Off Base with YouTube

Mark Cuban loves to beat up on YouTube. The main focus of his argument is that YouTube is a modern day Napster, steeped in the dark art of copyright infringement and ready to die a painful litigious death. But Mark has it very very wrong. Doubt about the extent of YouTube’s liabilities will certainly depress the price an acquirer is willing to pay, but it certainly isn’t the company’s death knell.

YouTube hosts and streams copyrighted content. No argument. But unlike the Napster days in which there was no evidence that this type of large scale ‘piracy’ actually helped distribution, today the signs are everywhere. Even the marketing departments of most major studios understand this when they upload their own copyrighted material to the site. But YouTube is, in its essence, a massive syndication platform for content. YouTube is not about monetizing this content directly; it’s about getting tons of people to watch a video clip at the lowest cost possible.

This type of massive low-cost syndication of low-quality streamed content is less than a year away from becoming the de facto launch strategy of professional and amateur content alike. While the lawyers may not understand this yet, the marketing guys certainly do. When content owners begin taking down copyrighted materials from YouTube, they become less culturally relevant. Has Jon Stewart’s relevance and consequent profitability to the studio declined as a result of his frequent free appearances on YouTube?

While I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the intelligence of the studio system, the positive impact YouTube is having on the distribution and relevance of quality television programming is soon going to become incontrovertible. Recent deals with Warner are the first indications of this effect. YouTube is quickly being woven into the fabric of a new video marketing and distribution model. The tearing of quilt is not in anyone’s interests, least of all the studios. This is simply about negotiating leverage in the fight over in-stream and localized ads (which I would argue will be minor compared to other revenue sources, but hey, they don’t know that yet.)

I didn’t write about YouTube’s compliance with DMCA rules (which it is almost certainly adhering to as rigorously as possible) because it’s almost irrelevant. This is all about money and value creation and who’s going to capture what kind of value when YouTube starts making real money (if ever). YouTube is where cultural memes are born and raised. And that, Mark, is a very valuable place to sit.

What the Apple iTV is Really All About

I’ve read a bunch of posts on the iTV announcement by Apple over the past couple of weeks. The posts have ranged from rhapsodic adoration of everything Apple to complete dismissal that anyone would pay such a price for a simple media extender. But I think it you look more deeply into what is going on here, the strategy of Jobs and company actually becomes quite clear and very compelling for the average consumer.

If you look at the iPod, it is essentially a portable mass storage device with an OS and display. You might only be able to display video at low resolutions on the device, but there is no reason why you cannot store high quality (or even HD) video on that hard drive. The iTV unit is Wi-fi (and likely USB) equipped such that it can stream video from a Mac to the TV. But really, all Steve has to do is add Wi-fi to the iPod and he can begin streaming high quality video from an iPod to the iTV (and even more reliably with wireless HDMI or similar technology).

In other words, the iPod becomes the remote by which you surf through your locally stored video content and then select for playback on the TV. Now, this solution doesn’t provide for playback of broadcast TV (which I think is a big problem), but nonetheless provides a very simple mechanism for replacing you universal remote with an iPod and your entire home theater set-up with an iTV. This is the type of simplicity everyone is looking for and that Apple is so good at delivering.

I think this type of set-up will occur within the next 12 months and will begin to put enormous pressure on cable, satellite and IPTV players. If they succeed, they become one of the first viable closed channel alternatives to studio distribution through existing MSO gatekeepers. I think Apple is going to eat their lunch very quickly. The response by the MSOs that want to survive will be to open their devices up in a way that Jobs seems pretty unwilling to do. It is their only strategy for continued relevance, but it is simply the lesser of two evils.

Apple is going to usher in the age of disaggregation between content owner, pipe and device in a way that is going to be very profound. Look for Microsoft to be a fast follower with the Zune (which will find limited success in the music market but fertile ground in the video market). The balance of power between open and closed distribution is being heavily distorted by a very talented dude. My hats off to Jobs for being able to bend the market in his favor, years after his strategy should have fallen apart. But it won’t last forever, Steve, it won’t last forever…

Blogging Again...

Blogging is Like Going to the Gym... It’s something I know I should do (and want to do); I just seem to have trouble finding the time to sit down and blog. Anyway, just like the gym, it’s great to be back and blogging again.