My Take On Social Media Tools For Influence

August 4th, 2010

Today I would like to offer my views on several social media tools. They are:

  • Peer Index
  • Klout
  • Quora
  • Yahoo! Answers
  • Facebook Questions

When I woke up this morning and got online, I went to Google Buzz! and found this Youtube video from the vernerable Robert Scoble, in which he interviewed the founder of a new Twitter social influence tool, Peer Index. Basically, Peer Index goes one level beyond what Klout does; instead of just ranking people as influencers, curators, pundits, etc., it goes one level beyond, and divides people into vertical groups, and the identifying the groups in which they are influential. Just to give you an idea of how it works, here is my profile on Peer Index.

Partway through the video, I got a little surprised and my ego puffed up a bit when the China economy and biz section was brought up and I was mentioned. Always thankful for nice little mentions!

This looks like quite an improvement over Klout because of the finer granularity than Klout. I have been disappointed in Klout lately because they don’t seem to have kept their index updated. Give you an example: Here is my profile on Klout; notice how my tagline hasn’t been updated compared to my Twitter page.

For this reason, I much prefer Peer Index to Klout.

Another area I have been interested in are online questions forums; these really started with Naver in Korea, which has the predominant search engine in Korea. At one time, Naver marketed itself as the leading human-powered search engine; it relied on human vertical sector experts to answer questions. Eventually, some of these people first became experts in their field and became well-known first on the Internet, then on TV and through society. A few even achieved fame and riches through Naver.

One of the interesting side effects of this was that when people become well-known for the right reasons, they want to use their real names. Naver enabled this to happen.

Yahoo! noticed the success of this, and created Yahoo! Answers , which was largely a copy of the Naver model. Since it did not have the rigorous enforcement, policing and feedback which Naver did though, the quality of the questions and answers quickly went down in quality, with the result that the audience which used it also went down.

A recent variation on this has been Quora. This is a well designed question and answer model, which has good design and a good clean interface, and is heavily policed by editors. I tried it out for most of July and generally like it, but I found the editors too intrusive in the way they tried to edit questions. The community which is there is heavily slanted to ex-Facebook people, and the venture capital community. For a while I found this amusing, but after two weeks I found it boring, since I found both communities to be navel-gazers. As a side-point, I found many of the editors to be either Taiwanese who were deep-green pro-independence folk, or Indian. (Not that I care, but it is interesting how sub-communities shown through.)

For me, the straw broke when I asked a question in Chinese: 能用中文发问吗？(Translation: Can I ask questions in Chinese?) My motivation in asking this question was to engage some lively discussions in Chinese, since there is a significant number of Chinese on Quora. This question was quickly deleted by one of the Quora editors, and I was told to send an email to feedback at quora dot com. This was too much, and told me that their rules were too inflexible to make it a truly global Q&A forum, and I had had enough of the ex-FB and VC community, so I left and haven’t been back.

Facebook Questions is now undergoing closed testing; I expect this to be much better than Quora because it will associate people using their real names with their FB identities. For advertisers, this will be a very powerful tool because it will identify who really knows their stuff, and it should quickly replace Quora because of Facebook’s huge user base. In my opinion, Quora is too little too late, and their community is too narrow, and their editors’ overzealousness will prevent it from growing significantly.

After seeing Peer Index and the Q&A portals, I have decided that the Peer Index approach is much better. When people go to portals, they want to strut their stuff and show off, or of that doesn’t work, they just leave. In my own case, I like it much better when people can build their crowds based on their tweets, and you can build and lose followers according to Twitter. This is why I like Twitter and Peer Index much better than any of the Q&A portals.

I hope that Peer Index represents the trend of the future so that we get better quality as well as quantitative research when looking for influencers and knowledge experts on Twitter and the Internet.

White God Syndrome Meets China’s Internet Sovereignty

July 8th, 2010

Virtually all westerners, and most western companies, embrace the belief that information should be free. This means that it should freely cross national borders and be accessible by anyone with a browser. In short, as long as it sits on a web server, it should be accessible from anywhere.

Some individuals, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, and Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, have gone so far as to embrace the concept that people should have almost no secrets at all, and that if you do have secrets, you are either backward, or have something bad to hide. Basically, they put forward the view that if you want to hide something, you are old, out-of-date and out-of-fashion, and that you SHOULD embrace openness as the way of the future. Mark Zuckerberg has gone so far as to say that if he had the chance to re-architect Facebook all over again, he would make it completely open, with no privacy controls.

Many in the west, especially libertarians, have embraced this idea without even debating the merits of this argument. People in the IT sector especially are sympathetic to this POV, so much so that it has become a white god. The white god syndrome is the widespread belief is that those in the west have always known what is best for the rest of the world, and that it upholds the precious values of personal liberty and individualism. After all, hasn’t the west been the leader in the struggle for human liberty and progress, fighting two world wars and numerous small wars so that others could be free? Many in the west adhere to this point of view, forgetting to question why accountability in the west is often applied selectively, in spite of all the claims made by its proponents.

If you accept this historical narrative, then anyone, or any government, which dares to object are either ignorant or evil.

Throughout the argument for free flow of information, there is no room left for defining the role of what a government does. There is only 1) information and 2) the rights of the individual to access that information anytime and anywhere.

Because the argument is framed this way, the Chinese government’s claims for Internet sovereignty have been met with derision and even contempt by the western press. The Chinese government’s claim is simple enough: IT companies in China must adhere to PRC laws. Looking at it from the surface, there is nothing revolutionary or different about the PRC claim; other governments, including those in the west, require IT companies to follow the laws of the country they do business in. If there is a difference in China, it has to do with due process, and what the government needs to do in order to obtain data from the IT companies. This is where things get blurry.

The infrastructure for the Internet was built in a way which did not clearly follow national borders. A US IT company may have web servers in Iceland, which now has the most stringent laws protecting data privacy. The data may or may not sit on the company’s own web servers; it could just as easily sit in the cloud, on servers provided by Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Apple, adding yet another layer of abstraction. Just thinking about the legal aspect of this is likely to throw lawyers into a tizzy of billable hours.

In contrast to this, the Chinese government has been very protective of Chinese consumer data. In China, consumer market research is a restricted industry, meaning that non-Chinese market research companies are not allowed to enter the field. In order to enter the industry, most western market research firms need to form joint ventures or partner with multiple Chinese market research firms. While the western market research firms do the analysis, the data is usually kept in the hands of the Chinese market research firms. This way, the data about Chinese consumers is always kept in the hands of the Chinese market research firms, and never leaves China’s borders.

The only exception to this rule comes with regard to personnel files in western multinational corporations. Most US and European firms have centralized HR departments at company headquarters; these include detailed personnel files for all staff and management, regardless of country and location.

Throughout this discussion, it has become very clear that the Chinese government does not adhere to the currently dominant western notion that information should flow freely across borders. This position has been made crystal clear in the showdown between Google and the Chinese government over censorship. I see the Internet sovereignty assertion as the first step in a systematic pushback against the free flow of information argument.

How could the Chinese government push back further? The simplest and most logical argument would be to claim that all personnel and data files on PRC citizens must not leave the PRC’s borders, and giving the security services the right to go to western MNCs’ HR departments to perform data audits to make sure that they are in compliance. Such a move would throw their HR departments into chaos, as it would mean that headquarters would no longer have the personnel files of PRC employees.

If the PRC government were to make this claim, it would effectively claim that it has control over all data about its citizens.

To sum up:

  • There should be a healthy debate about the free flow of information across borders. For too long, this is a position which has been supported without question in the west, and those who have challenged it have been routinely tarred and feathered by the press. This lack of an open debate about this aspect of the white god is not a good thing.
  • The PRC government should clearly state its position on data, and express how far it intends to go. If the government stakes a claim to all PRC citizen’s personnel data, will they extend that to their medical information and later, genetic data, too? Will the individual have any control or recourse over their own data, or will the government always be the final arbiter and decision-maker? The Chinese government should makes its position clear, without resorting to slogans and nationalism.

This would be best for everyone, especially the Chinese people.

2010 Tudou Film Festival Award Delivers Tough Message

April 18th, 2010

The winner of the Tudou Film Festival Award was announced today, it went to the Machinima Film 网隐战争 or War of Internet Addiction. It is a remarkable production, made entirely in the world of World of Warcraft, and took three months and 100 Chinese volunteer gamers to make. It features excellent production values and is smart and clever.

Bill Bishop, publisher of the Digicha blog was the first English blogger to mention it in the non-Chinese blogger world, and afterwards it was picked up by leading English-language publications, including the Wall Street Journal.

For reasons I am not able to fathom, no one has really explained the context and significance of this production. Many who follow the issue of China, the Chinese economy, and modern Chinese social studies should endeavor to understand what the “War of Internet Addiction” really reveals about modern Chinese society. The whole story is much like the Japanese film classic Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa, which highlighted the Rashomon effect, or the view that viewers to an event only see what they want to see, and will deny the validity of alternative interpretations. This denying of alternative interpretations is not only valid in China, but as we will see, also in the west.

In order to underscore the difference of these interpretations, I will present their views in separate sections.

Chinese Government Official View
From the Chinese government’s point of view, many Chinese youth spend too much time at Internet cafes playing games. Among these games, World of Warcraft is the most addictive. This has given rise to a new illness “Internet addiction”, which the government officially believes to be an illness. A whole industry of treatment clinics has sprung up to treat this illness, using methods sometimes as severe as shock therapy.
Young people who spend their time playing WoW all the time should instead spend more of their time studying, or pursuing other more productive activities.
On the business side, World of Warcraft has become a major moneymaker for its China licensees, first The9, then NetEase. So important was regulation of the War of Warcraft franchise in China that a rare public turf war was fought between the Ministry of Culture and the General Administration of Press and Publication over regulation of NetEase, the China distributor. During this bureaucratic fight, the WoW servers’ service was partially suspended in China, causing much discomfort for WoW players in China.

China World of Warcraft Players
World of Warcraft has 73 different levels, and involves a wide variety of players with different roles and skills, working together to overcome obstacles. By working together and fighting together, these players bond and build strong trust, even though the players are playing in a virtual world. Unlike in the real world, where people are always competing against each other in a highly competitive education and social environment, and where there is little if any trust, the players build trust over time as they fight to higher levels. In this respect, World of Warcraft is a true meritocracy; one which does not exist in the real world of modern China. For this reason, most players look forward to meeting and playing with their fellow players on World of Warcraft on a regular basis.
“Why does the Chinese government want to interfere with what we are doing online by playing WoW? We are not advocating political change or violence. We just want to play WoW when we want to.”

The View of Many Western Observers
The fact that so many Chinese youth play WoW shows just how limited freedoms are for Chinese youth, and how intrusive government interference is in the lives of Chinese. This is yet another sign of how closed Chinese society is, even though on a material level, the Chinese government has provided well for the Chinese people.

My View
The Tudou award was actually a three-fingered salute from WoW players and the online community to the official Chinese government view which cannot understand the culture of World of Warcraft from the view of its players. China is run by one highly centralized organization which is not given to understanding alternative interpretations of society which do not conform to its view of reality.
The view of the majority of mainstream western observers, who only see China in terms of freedom and democracy issues are just as blinkered as the official Chinese view, as they are unable and unwilling to understand anything which does not conform to their worldview that while China has delivered a huge number of its population from poverty, continues to deny political freedoms to its own population.
In fact, western society, with the US in particular, has the same problems as modern China, except on an even larger scale. If the whole issue is all only about freedom and democracy, then why does the US have the largest number of illicit drug consumers in the world? Are they so happy that they need to escape into the world of drugs?
Western and Chinese consumer society have satisfied many material needs, but most intelligent people understand that this does not equate to happiness. In China and the west, adults with poor parenting skills seek to assuage their own guilt by showering their kids with all kinds of goodies, then wonder why their own kids don’t like them as people? Parents, the Chinese government and western consumer society are uncomfortable with the idea that many of their children and citizens prefer to spend their time online, in the communities of Facebook, Twitter, Stocktwits and WoW than in their own real world.
For many of us, the virtual world of online is preferable to the real world we live in, and this is why so many spend so much time online. And that is a message many parents, governments and politicians are increasingly going to have to deal with.

Apple’s App Store Shows Early Financial Success for Devs

August 3rd, 2008

Several months ago I wrote about how Apple’s opening of the iPhone SDK and its App Store would create a whole new business ecosystem for application developers for that platform. Apple offers globally accessible hosting and payment clearance in return for a 30% cut of the app’s sales price.

Now, there are early signs that the strategy is paying off for some early application developers who have developed popular apps for the iPhone and iPod touch (which uses the same SDK as the iPhone) users. Eliza Block, who developed 2 Across, a word game for the iPhone platform, has reportedly cleared in the area of $2,000 a day according to this article.

The App Store is a new updated version of the shareware movement which took hold in the early 80s with the launch of the Apple Macintosh 128K. In those days, homebrew developers would develop games, apps and productivity tools which were distributed on floppy disks. (Remember those? If you do, you’re showing your age.) More often than not, these came with a message which went something like “If you liked this app, please show your appreciation by sending a contribution to this address.” More often than not, people just used the apps without sending money, although there were a few kind and generous souls who did.

Now, Apple has become the doorkeeper for these independent developers. There is no more reliance on the kindness of strangers; Apple takes care of global distribution and payment for new apps in return for 30% of the app’s sales price. For devs, the App Store is the perfect barometer for what’s hot and what’s not.

In contrast, Facebook and others have not been able to find the magic balance point between independent developers and their own corporate needs for revenue. When Facebook opened its platform to developers, it ended up enabling app developers to spam the FB audience, driving many away from Facebook. Now, with Facebook Connect, FB is trying to find that balance point.

Chinese social media companies are no better at finding the right balance between independent devs and their own need for revenue. While there has been talk about open systems in China, all of the competing business models in fact, are not open. Apple’s system is certainly not open. it’s just that Apple is willing to share in order to grow the pie.

Apple and Steve Jobs have successfully put themselves at the juncture of technology, business and hardware, and are willing to share a larger cut in order to drive up sales of a very attractive new hardware platform. With growing earnings from hardware sales, Apple can afford to be generous with devs, and is effectively subsidizing a new business ecosystem. By making some independent developers financially successful with App Store and getting that word out, they do something none of their competition have been able to do yet.

The question for Chinese companies such as Tencent is whether they are willing to use their high corporate earnings to subsidize their own independent developers’ business ecosystem as Apple has, and share some of the revenue in order to grow the pie for everyone? Or do they still think that they can own the whole pie? Tangos Chan says that they still believe that they can own the whole pie.

But Tangos believes that this will change in the future. In the meantime, more independent devs will gravitate to developing for the iPhone platform. It’s better to open up sooner while there is still interest in their platform because opening up later means that they will have to be that much more generous in order to attract developers away from Apple’s platform.

After all, that’s where the money is. And I’m sure that Steve loves how his competitors’ moves help his platform.

What more could he ask for?

What’s Wrong with C2C?

May 2nd, 2008

Yesterday, Twitterdom in China was on fire with the news, first published on TechCrunch, that Facebook clone Xiaonei had raised US$430M from Softbank, which is huge, even by current Web 2.0 bubble standards. Immediately on Twitter, there was almost an uproar, especially from users in Taiwan, who said that it was ridiculous that a Facebook clone would have such a high valuation. Does Oak Pacific Interactive and Softbank know something which we don’t? (My answer to that is a simple “Obviously yes”.)

But before delving into that, let’s talk about the pluses and minuses of C2C, or “copy to China”, a term which I believe was first used by Tangos Chan, publisher of China Web 2.0 review. I believe that when an entrepreneur does not have a clear idea about what he is going to do, starting with a copy of a currently popular application is a good way to go. After all, if it got funded by VCs in the US, it is highly likely that given the team’s experience, they will also be able to get funded in China.

What is important is what happens after it gets initial funding. Where many startups lose direction is that they look too closely at their competitors, and don’t look at the challenges for many users whom they want to reach. Most ask the wrong questions: They are too focused on their platform and applications, and don’t study the problems their users have in their daily lives.

There are a few simple questions startup founders need to find answers to:

  • What are the most important tasks for a person in any given day? (These are always changing according to age, situation, etc.)
  • Where do they encounter the most frustration?
  • Can you offer a solution to this?

I have a simple way of looking at this: If the need is urgent, then you can charge a fee or subscription for it. If you can help people make more money, you can charge a fee or subscription for it. If it is a hardware solution which simplifies and clarifies life and makes the user more efficient, you can sell it (as is the case with the iPhone).

If it does not do any of the above things, but still offers some informative or entertainment value, then your most likely source of revenue is advertising.

Back to C2C. When OICQ was launched in early 1999, it was nothing except a Chinese-language clone of ICQ. It had an advantage in that there was tremendous need among Chinese for easy convenient communications across the computer and the then-new mobile phone platforms. The management saw this need, offered the services, collected fees all along the way, evolving into QQ along the way, and the company is now worth more than US$11B.

Tencent, the parent company for QQ, saw a social wave in China, copied something which worked overseas, fulfilled the need, and evolved it into something tremendously popular and successful in China. Instead of looking iinwards and worrying about their technology and UI, they looked out, and saw the opportunity in users’ needs and frustrations.

Now the company has more than 500M registered user accounts. It has achieved brand lock-in among most younger Chinese users.

That is why I say that when anyone only compares UI features, they are not thinking deep enough.

Now, the question is whether Xiaonei or any of the Chinese Facebook clones can evolve into something successful. The China of 2008 is vastly different from the China of 1999, and there are all kinds of communications solutions competing for users. The dynamics has changed to favor the user, who now has almost too may choices.

Add to that my feeling that SNS (social networking solutions) are a solution to a problem which is not that urgent for most people (hence the reliance on advertising as a revenue source instead of fee or subscription).

Of course, if depending on income was the only way to make money in this business, then I’m sure that Xiaonei would not have received such a high investment. An article in Plus8star talks about possible strategy scenarios in the move (h/t to Kaiser Kuo).

A Quick Look at 2008 and China

January 1st, 2008

Is there any way at all that 2008 will not be the year of the Chinese Olympics, and by extension, China? Will we be stuck between the rise of China narrative and the sourness to the point of completely puckering up of the US media and to a lesser extent European media re China?

I say yes.

The coverage of China by the major media has been completely unsatisfactory; it has not been informative and has instead driven their own editorial agenda. That old editorial agenda no longer works because it does not reflect the ground reality of China. It does make sense though to take a closer look at China’s development outside of just the tier one cities. Let’s hope that this begins to happen.

In the big picture though, the Chinese Olympics are not the biggest story. There are so many interesting things and opportunities happening on the Internet. I’m surprised that so many people miss them, such as the fall of Facebook even though their numbers continue to increase, and the failure of social networks to monetize their traffic because they have chosen to side with advertisers against their own user base.

Facebook is like a rocket which continues to coast upwards even though its engine has cut off; momentum is carrying it upward. But eventually gravity will win…

We are in the early stages of growth for the Internet, I believe that increasingly new Internet startups will be founded by business people, not technology people. On the PC platform, the technology is mature; it is the business models which aren’t working. Now, the smart technology people are switching their focus to the mobile Internet.

For smart business people who want to disrupt the current business models, 2008 will be a banner year. For more predictions, take a close look at the predictions of Mark Anderson and Fred Wilson. Part of the reason new and viable business models have grown relatively slowly on the Internet is because the business side has been driven by technology people who don’t understand business and how to make deals, and the business people have been thinking too much in terms of the large corporate businesses which are now being disrupted by the Internet.

It is time for a new breed of entrepreneurs who understand technology, and are not behoven to traditional businesses. In China, this has already happened in gaming with Timothy Chen Tianqiao of Shanda and Shi Yuzhu of Giant Interactive. Ironically, it has not happened as quickly in the west.

It’s time to expand the base.

On the web application side, it is getting easier and easier to develop robust applications. Twitter, a very successful social application was developed with Ruby on Rails, a full stack web application framework which was released by 37 Signals, a Chicago-based design firm.

The significance of this is that web applications can now be designed by designers who are more focused on user experience than software engineers who are focused on features (many of which are of dubious value). One thing I have noticed among many Ruby on Rails deployments: narrower focus. Instead of trying to do everything, these applications focus on doing a few tasks very well. Good examples are the online project management tools put out by 37 Signals and which I use to manage my business.

Wouldn’t it be great if these web applications were made available to a Chinese audience?

As for myself, I’m sharing my feeds on Google Reader. You can find them through Google Talk and Gmail by contacting me. You can reach me at paul dot denlinger [at] gmail dot com.

I’d like to see yours too; let’s start sharing in 2008!

Facebook’s Beacon and Valuing Social Networks

December 5th, 2007

Social Networks

There has been a lot of talk lately about valuing social networks and Facebook's management knows that, which is why they try to track everyones' activities across the Internet with Facebook Beacon.

There has been a lot of discussion
if/how/when/who Facebook will acquire a social network company in China. As usual, I will jump out to offer my often contrarian views on social networking.

Let me put it this way, I don’t think that there is a way to value social networks, even though this is what advertisers would very much like to see happen. And the reason that social networks cannot be valued in a top-down/corporate/advertising way is because they are entirely subjective and dynamic according to each individual at any given moment in time.

That’s why it makes much more sense for each individual to assign a value for _access_ to his network, and anyone who wants to access it has to pay an access fee. If you don’t like the access fee, then don’t pay. If you like the fee, pay, and you will get access.

It’s that simple. Nobody owns the network except me. Not Facebook, LinkedIn, Google or anyone else. I own my relationships, just as you own your relationships. They only exist on Facebook insomuch as I’m active on Facebook now, but that is no guarantee that I will be there tomorrow.

That is why it doesn’t matter if Facebook owns all my data; if I no longer go there, it’s dead, out-of-date data. My data is only valuable as long as I’m active there.

I talked about the idea before, let me fill it out some more.

Here is my problem with Facebook’s Beacon:

  1. If Facebook wants to track my activities across the Internet, they should explicity ask me first, and give me an opt-out option.
  2. If I say “Yes”, they should ask me how much I want to be paid for access to my network activities on a 24-hour basis
  3. I go in and set my fee for 24 hour access beginning immediately and click submit.
  4. Facebook’s servers churn and return “yes” or “no”. If “yes”, they will be directed to my payment gateway. After confirmation, Facebook will say something like “Thank you for giving Facebook access to your network activities for 24 hours. After 24 hours, the cookie installed in your browser will automatically expire. (More blahblahblah from corporate and legal departments.)

In this model, each user has control over his/her activities, and is paid for access to their data by each social network.

Now wouldn’t this be a much better world than the current free-for-all where everybody is playing “Let’s screw the users and see how much we can get for free?” The current valuations on social networks are based on not paying users for access to their data.

How would you value social networks if they had to pay users for access to their data?

And since the Internet is all about pushing power to the edge, then why shouldn’t users have the power to earn money from having their activities and relationships tracked?

It would be great to hear what Seth Godin, Dare Obasanjo, Dave Winer and Robert Scoble have to say about the idea.

UPDATE: It’s been three hours since I posted this article, and I wanted to see if Facebook had imported this article into Facebook Notes so that I could tell my Facebook friends about it. (I have set Facebook to automatically import my posts here.)

Guess what? Facebook has not imported this article. Now what have I done to get that kind of treatment? I seem to have some recollection about “empowering users” and all that stuff.

Charming. Did their PR and marketing people go to the “Khmer Rouge Charm School of How to Win Friends and Influence People”. I guess I should be so grateful to Facebook and their management where they can watch all our moves and try to monetize it without passing anything down to us dumb users who haven’t figured out the shill yet.

I’m a great believer that if you fail, you should fail fast. In this respect, Mark Zuckerberg and his flaks have done a great job in record time. Mark, what are your chances now that you will hit that 15B valuation?

Scott Karp has written a great piece “Facebook’s Crisis Demonstrates That People Matter More Than Technology”. Be sure to read it.

How Facebook Screwed Up, and How The User Can Control Advertising

December 2nd, 2007

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook

Scott Karp had an excellent article about how Facebook’s Beacon messed up and created such a reaction from Facebook users.

My explanation for Facebook’s policy re Beacon is that all the press, plus a 15B valuation on a company which does not have significant cash flow will get management to adopt all kinds of dumb user-privacy violating tactics to justify the valuation in the hope that the company can garner significant ad revenue.

In short, Facebook’s Beacon policy of spying on users’ activity across the Internet was a panic move…

Some hokey marketers get so wrapped up in the data that they can garner that they forget a lof the information is, frankly, useless.

“Look! We can target albino 16-year old Chinese boys who play more than 20 hours on the PS3 in Nome, Alaska during the winter and who had the Nintendo Wii recommended to them on Overstock by a friend in Wichita, Kansas!”

Now, many have put forward basically a Bill of Rights for users, and user control of their own data. Dave Winer has said that the user should be able to control how his/her data is used, right down to being able to to keep a copy for him/herself.

Giving the user control over his data? What a revolutionary idea! (There I go again…)

I think that there is a simple and elegant solution which will take some hard work and years to perfect.

Here it is: Why do consumers have to give their data for free to advertisers and be only consumers? Why can’t consumers be advertisers too? And why can’t they be credited or paid for advertising products/services they like? In return for being paid/tracked, they would give up their anonymity. Should they want to become anonymous again, they can do so, and they would not be tracked. But they would not be paid. If they wanted to become tracked/paid again, they could do so. Anytime. Anywhere.

In this scenario, the user would control what ads he wanted to receive in his user profile in real-time; this could be done with a system of checks or tags or something else. To opt out of “auto ads”, just to use an example, all he would have to do is uncheck it.

Basically, the user is selling his attention information to the advertisers. I look at it another way; the user is selling his time to advertisers to get data; relevant advertising data will be deemed useful and passed on, while irrelevant data will not be used and will not be passed on, and will be treated by the user as spam. In return for passing meaningful data to another prospect or customer, the first consumer should be reimbursed with money for exposing his data, and making a meaningful referral which eventually results in a sale.

And so on and so forth. Here is the trade: Give us your name, identity and user info, and let us follow your activities, and we will pay you. You can opt out anytime, and you will not be paid.

Simple.

I have always wondered why consumers are always treated by advertisers as consumers, when in real life, people have multiple roles such as father, husband, son and manager, or mother, wife, daughter and VP, just to use a few examples. So why should people only be consumers? Ask people for their data, then pay them for it.

That’s what I call a fair trade.

Now, if Facebook did that, that would be really something. And if Facebook doesn’t, then I hope that someone else does.

If they do, they’ll have my business.

Whatever Facebook does, let’s cut the spyware bullshit. That’s a real business killer. Those guys just dug themselves a big one with Beacon, and I’m wondering how they’ll get out.