What is the Half Life of a Social Network? The Problems of Digital Baggage and a ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Philosophy

It is a little over a year since Facebook went public in a c.$90bn IPO, and I find myself amongst a growing group of people questioning what the future holds for ‘The Social Network’. Social media is a new industry and the rules of competition are being discovered as we go along. And the same things that caused Facebook’s meteoric rise may end up making it irrelevant.

Online technology companies (by which I mean social media as well as services such as search, email, blogging, etc…) face the unenviable situation of being violently pulled in two directions at once. On the one hand is the imperative for constant change: that constant struggle to capture the attention of the general public while hundreds of competitors are trying to do a similar thing. In this light we see firms as locked in an arms race, repeatedly adding features and revising designs in a bid to stay fresh. On the other hand, there is the need to provide consistency and reliability in the service being provided. Users become accustomed to the current set of features, so any changes will tend to cause discomfort and lead to inevitable outcries.

In a way this tension is faced, in some form, by all businesses. But in the online tech industry it is particularly acute, because there are such low barriers to entry, and thus there are so many entrants trying to displace whoever is leading at any point in time. There is also an implicit premium on mere ‘newness’ as trend-setting users like to explore new services in order to be ‘at the forefront.’

In most industries, the most common problem is resistance to change, an inability to adapt to changing user needs and changing social pressures. It’s my strong feeling that in social media, the opposite problem holds. Companies like Google and Facebook are pioneers at experimentation, trialing possible changes with randomized subsets of users, and implementing the ones that appear to work on a wider scale. This is epitomized in Mark Zuckerberg’s famous management philosophy: “Move Fast and Break Things.”

The problem is that while this philosophy may be suitable for a small or mid-sized start-up, it suddenly becomes a lot more dangerous for a large corporation. With every change that is pushed through, Facebook risks alienating some fraction of its users, and of those, some fraction is likely to disengage (see my comments on community pages in 2010). Take, for example, Facebook’s algorithm for deciding what gets put on your Newsfeed. This is one of its most important pieces of technology, as it determines both how users interact with each other, and how advertisers interact with users. When this algorithm is changed, it will always have the effect of giving some posts more attention and other posts less attention – and the people or businesses getting less attention will be irritated. I noticed this last year, when Facebook changed the algorithm at the same time as it introduced paid-for “promote this post” options, earning the moniker 'The Biggest ‘Bait N’ Switch’ in History'. I’ve also noticed another change in the last few months, which has led to my newsfeed being filled with less relevant posts (and more advertising than before) and my own posts getting less attention than they used to. I am already changing my Facebook engagement habits as a result, and using Twitter more as a source of interesting links.

This excess of change is far from the only risk. Two others are worth highlighting. An article in the Financial Times last week focused on investor disquiet over FB losing its ‘coolness’ as a result of people’s parents joining. Young people are the key audience for social network, and tend to direct posts to their friends, and the growing presence of older relatives is reducing the perceived freedom of the space. I’ve seen an example of this myself, when one of my friends posted about having a ‘too many drinks’ – and minutes later their father making a rather embarrassing comment on the post, along the lines of ‘I thought you were more sensible than that.’ This is all just rather off-putting, given that the original appeal of Facebook in its early years was based around it being restricted to peers at the same university. Private social networks, such as Microsoft’s Yammer, could begin to capture the attention of users looking for a more exclusive forum.

Then finally there is the issue of digital baggage. This is something I’ve realized recently: much of my activity on Facebook in the early years after I joined in 2005 has left a very large, quite personal digital trail. Furthermore, since I created the content, joined groups etc., the architecture of FB has changed, as has its privacy policies. This makes it rather difficult to see who has access to what. And even if I correctly manage my privacy settings today, there is no guarantee that privacy policies won’t be changed in the future. To give concrete examples, I discovered several photo albums which I thought were ‘friends only’ were actually reachable by the general public with a simple google search. Also there was a set of ‘groups’ that I set up for University colleagues (which are now years out-of-date) but were visible to the general public. These examples struck me as disconcerting, and I realize now that the only way to ‘leave that baggage behind’ would be a make a fresh start with a new social network – for example Google+. I’m not going to do that just yet, but I expect other people will. The Facebook timeline was famously glorified in this video as a way of having a record of your entire life in one place. But that idea is actually quite scary. I, personally, do not want that record in the (potentially) public domain, and I doubt that I’m the only one.

During its initial rise, the trend of Facebook’s subscriber figures was exponential growth. To look at the graph, if it referred to a share price it would definitely look like a bubble. Of course it is not a share price, and so I don't expect it to ‘pop.’ But I think user engagement with FB will decay. However much effort it puts in to try and stay relevant, it is nevertheless likely to be displaced by newer start-ups offering cool new services. The proportion of cognitive real-estate it can command will decline as other services manage to win more. My message to Facebook investors is therefore, get out while you can.

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Agree? Disagree? Please leave comments below

Updates on blog topics from 2010: 3D Cinema, Privacy and iPad adverts

Some recent news stories have added some new perspective to blog posts I wrote in the last year.

In May 2010 I wrote a post complaining about the terrible quality of the 3D visual effects in movies such as ‘Clash of the Titans’ where the decision to make it 3D film was taken at a late stage in the production process. Judging by this FT article on cinema revenues, it seems I was not the only one to be aware of poor 3D quality. My fears over 3D quality made me reticent to see several of the movies in the second half of the year. In my post, I wrote about the risk that studio execs would “kill 3D cinema” before it has been given time to find its place in the media landscape. This is a risk they still need to comprehend: the 3D fad in the 1950s faded into obscurity; it would be a shame to see history repeat itself.

In August I wrote a post discussing the decline of privacy in a socially networked world. Although this controversial issue is far from settled, the News of the World phone-hacking scandal has drawn a clear line in the sand. Celebrities are the leaders and trend-setters of society when it comes to balancing self-promotion with retaining some level of privacy. Through regular interviews, TV programs and paparazzi shoots we get to know the intimate details of many celebrities’ lives and for the most part they put up with it. But the press, in the form of NoTW reporters, have overstepped the boundary and are facing serious consequences, in the form of law suits, job losses, and jail terms. The upshot of this: it is reassuring to know that at some level, our privacy is still sacrosanct.

Finally in June I wrote a post praising the simplicity and sophistication of iPad adverts, which use screen shots of cultural content (e.g. Facebook, The Guardian) to convey the personality of their target consumers (e.g. young tech-savvy trend-setters). In 2011, a new set of iPad adverts can be found around London, with the same concept but different screen-shots. Most notable among this new crop of images is a shot from the website TED. Much like this blog, TED is dedicated to the propagation of interesting ideas. It is a non-profit organisation which videos lectures and performances by some of the world’s top thinkers and talents in a variety of fields. TED talks from the likes of Steve Jobs, Al Gore and Malcolm Gladwell (to name but a few) are free to view online. Historically these kinds of talks would only have been by conference attendees or MBA classes; now they are available to the world. With this advert, Apple have done it again, and given TED Talks a useful leg-up in the process.

What does 'Reputation' mean in a world of instant knowledge?

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has made the headlines this week for suggesting people will need to change their names to hide embarrassing material from their past. Indeed, for each cautious person who monitors carefully what they post about themselves online, there are several more who put little thought into it. And we cannot control what other people post about ourselves.

However I believe that in liberal-minded societies (such as the majority of Europe and parts of America), it is more likely that people’s standards will adjust. Having a spotless record in your past will not be a requirement for a responsible job, because enough people will recognise that a few wild years is actually the norm. This has already become the case, to an extent, with the public’s acceptance of politicians who have smoked cannabis. I expect that in future generations, people will be judged on their merits and not on their social faux-pas, recorded forever in the social media archives.

There may be a rather more serious problem in societies which are less accepting of the rebellious behaviours of the young. Super-conservative religious communities come to mind, such as the Christians of ‘Bible-Belt’ America, or Muslims living under Sharia law. Standards of acceptable behaviour are much more restrictive and the consequences of straying from the straight and narrow can be serious. And while these societies are just as exposed to new technologies as the rest of the world, their cultural norms may adapt more slowly.

In this sense, the ease of accessing information, that Eric Schmidt’s comments have highlighted, may have a polarising effect on culture. In liberal cultures, behaviour will become more open; in conservative cultures a paranoia about tainting one’s record could reinforce the restrictions. It’ll be interesting to see how it plays out...

Digital Voyeurism

This weekend I went to the newly opened exhibition “Exposed” at the Tate Modern. The collection of images explores the invasion of privacy through photography – at what point does artistic licence decay into dangerous voyeurism? Is the viewer of a photograph implicated in the act of taking it?

Most of the exhibition looks at the invasion of privacy in a historical context, but it prompted me to think more deeply about the present (and the very imminent) technological advances that could take voyeurism to a whole new level.

For example, online photo sharing means that most of us are already leaving publicly available records of our movements through time. It is easy to imagine a scenario in which an organisation trawls the web for photographs, downloading them to an archive and running them through face-recognition software. With the time, date and location stored with each photograph they could create a searchable database that could re-produce the historical location, through time, of just about anybody, based on the photos that they appear in. It would not surprise me if national intelligence services already have such a system. Nor would it surprise me if a privately-run commercial system is available soon.

On the subject of digital voyeurism, Google managed to open up a new frontier when they recorded masses of data being passed over unsecured wi-fi networks. I, like millions of others, already entrust Google with my personal data (emails and search histories and such). As such, I think it is probably a good thing they were behind the data collection and not a company that might be tempted to exploit what they found.

But overall the pace of technological advancement seems to be outstripping the pace at which we adjust our behaviour, our laws and our cultural norms. The Tate Modern’s exhibition focuses on the extreme, but in doing so it acts as a useful prompt for us to re-think our concept of privacy for a digitally-connected world.

Facebook: the Big New Story that was overlooked?

May has been a busy month for news what with volcanic ash, the election, and the oil leak. But for me, one of the biggest stories has been overlooked by the mainstream media. For me, Facebook’s decision to link any Interests or Favourite things that we mention on our profile pages directly to “Community Pages” is a watershed moment. Not only is privacy being eroded - nothing new there – but this major change was undertaken without any consultation, without any choice to opt out and without any regard for the widespread criticism that has followed. In my opinion it could signal the beginning of the end for the Facebook phenomenon.

What’s so bad about the changes? For me, my profile feels like my personal space. What people see on my profile will shape their image of me, so I want to control what goes on there. In a similar way to clothes, hair styles and body language, our online presence is something that people see and make judgements about. This extends, in my opinion, to the things that we link to on our profile, in our status updates, and in wall posts. By forcing us to link our profiles to these bland and invasive ‘Community Pages,’ Facebook has put me off listing any Interests or Favourites*. Which removes one of the more interesting aspects of the social networking medium.

Why the dramatic talk of the ‘beginning of the end’ for Facebook? Because in order to sustain its dominance in social networking in the long term, Facebook will have to consistently make itself better. Judging by the outcry every time Facebook makes a change, a lot of people find that it is consistently getting worse. Facebook started out by being adopted by small but influential communities then spreading out more widely; there is no reason this success couldn’t be emulated if someone came out with a social networking platform that is a step change better.

* This also means the adverts now displayed to me are less relevant, which means I click on them less and Facebook loses advertising revenue