Who owns our content? What are the exit costs?
GOOGLE now owns Blogger, Writely, Dodgeball, Feedburner, YouTube, and Picasa. EBay took over Stumbleupon and Skype. YAHOO snatched up Del.icio.us, WebJay, Jumpcut, Upcoming.org, Oddpost and perhaps Facebook soon.
Mr. Murdoch's NEWS CORP acquired MySpace, the video and photo-sharing site PhotoBucket and the media mash up site Flektor. It goes without saying that they already own Fox News and Fox TV, and a few good old publishing houses like Harper Collins, Daily Telgraph, The Times, New York Daily Post, The Sun, and The Australian.
Fox Interactive bought Photobucket, which is well-liked on MySpace. NewsCorp's effort is to make services on MySpace proprietary. This means that in the future, MySpacers, will not be able to plug in third party services. The goal is to create, popularize, and monetize in-house applications and then close the door to the wealth of the sociable web. Murdoch clearly does not get the sociable web as this direction will go at the expense of the teens on MySpace.
Ebay's acquisition of Stumbleupon, the web browser plug-in that allows its users to discover and rate web pages, is driven by a different impulse. Ownership of the company means access to the 2.5 million strong community using it and will help eBay to gain more exposure for their web pages, which will lead to more transactions. We are oversaturated with information and such referral sites, peer-to-peer recommendation, will only become more important.
Social software architectures (code) assert control. Code has agency, political implications, and it represents a worldview. Always. There is a chance, however, for agents in "social operating systems" to perform this code with critical awareness. Owning an environment such as MySpace means that you can subtly "adjust" the code in a way that draws people to your site and retains them there. Not offering people an easy way to export all the content that they contributed, makes it very hard for them leave. In addition, centrality (i.e. 85% of all American college students are active on Facebook) creates captive communities. Exiting such a community would isolate you from your friends and fellow students.
In the fall of 2006 almost 700,000 joined a "Students Against Facebook News Feed" group that protested the introduction of a new feature that’d allow parents, for example, to RSS feed the Facebook pages of their children. Not cool. Students threatened to delete their accounts or else. This Facebook mutiny shows two things. On the one hand it says: "Don’t mess with networked publics!!!" Students are linked up now and they care (seemingly more about their privacy than the war in Iraq). Facebook had to revoke the feature. But the other lesson is that net publics are captive audiences on these core sites of the sociable web and that the only chance that they have is to cause a ruckus as the exist costs would be too high.
Google buying Feedburner, a site that allows blog owners and podcasters to manage their RSS feeds, is also no surprise. Over 400,000 “publishers” use Feedburner. Community is the commodity.
What these media giants are actually buying is not service environments but the people who are using them: it's cold cash for hot communities. It's not even mainly about the content.
Walled gardens are the danger of central control that comes with this obvious development toward consolidation. The sociable web echoes capitalist society!! The wealth and diversity of what the corporate world calls Web 2.0, and what I call the sociable web, is at risk!
MySpace wants to become a proprietary platform-- just like Steve Job’s iPhone or Sony’s eBook reader-- and that is ultimately not even good for business; all the quirky, small applications that are coming out eachn week are fun for people to use. Closing the door to the wealth of the sociable web is a poor decision.
Should we call it quits; "Good bye, Feedburner?" (because it was just bought by Google). No. How much of a chance is there for essentialist alternatives in a post-autonomy world? Today's small startup (e.g. http://www.feedwhip.com/) will be in the pocket of one media giant or the other by next month. And of course, this is not a new development.
We can, however, diversify the tools that we are using and build non-profit or hybrid alternatives.
It is foolish to naturalize capitalism, as many do, by arguing that only greedy big business can support large-scale social life.
Fuhgetaboutit!!! Sure, Google’s server farms cost plenty. In spite of that you do not have to have a projected value/profit of $15 billion, like MySpace (bought for $583 million), in order to have sufficient incentives to create a useful context-providing platform.
Take Craigslist. Most of you will know this network for urban communities. It operates in 450 cities worldwide and supports 5 billion page views per month. It is number 34 of all sites on the web in terms of traffic. The site is serving up seven billion pageviews a month from 200 servers. In December 2006, Craigslist's CEO stunned Wall Street analysts by letting them know that
"Craigslist has little interest in maximizing profit from the website but instead prefers only to help users find cars, apartments, jobs and dates."
The non-profit Archive.org counts some 370.596 users and the number of posts in January 2007 was 7903. This is clearly insignificant if one compares it to Youtube's 60.000 daily video uploads but at the same time it is a good-sized community that uses Archive.org. Is it really impossible for a non-profit to support large-scale social life?
[Trebor]
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We could create an inter-owner contract patterned after the FSF's GNU GPL, but for assets in the physical realm.
Once written, small-time investors could choose to apply it to some of their physical property in the same way owners already choose to apply the GNU GPL to information.
Modeled after the GPL, this contract must insure the Freedom of every new User, but since we are talking about physical Sources that have real and recurring costs, we must also talk about real money.
A minimal description of this structure is easier to understand when we realize that traditional 'Profit' is a measure of User dependence on Owners.
Profit is the difference between User_Price and Owner_Costs (where Worker_Wages are an Owner_Cost by the way), and may be offset or balanced by causing any such revenue to become an investment for that User toward more physical Sources needed to insure future production.
Through such a contract, Ownership (and hence control) would flow to those willing to invest - as indicated by their willingness to pay more than cost for the resources they consume.
For instance, by applying such a contract to the hardware needed to host the kinds of software that make up the services you mention, the community of Users that grows around those physical Sources would be guaranteed to remain in control no matter how large the organization grew.
The collective User/Owners would decide how to run things through vote weights based directly on their percentage of holding and otherwise split according to realistic divisibility of the physical Sources.
Anyone interested in syndicating User Freedom can choose to grow such a corporation by purchasing some physical Sources of Production and then applying a private law as describe above that insures any amount paid above cost (what would usually be called 'profit') be an investment for that User - since paying profit is admitting they are vulnerable - and hence should be interpreted as a cry for investment toward more physical Sources.
On a more complicated note, it seems to me a community currency should be issued and backed by those same physical Sources, but this is still fuzzy to me...