Guillaume’s blog

Decentralized social networks seem to be the talk of the town these days (in tech circles at least). Blogger Robert Scoble has given attention and created a minor scandal of a Facebook policy that forbids the use of scripts to extract data from Facebook Web pages (Note: Facebook just recently allowed accounts to be closed). Around the same time project DiSo has started with the goal to build a decentralized version of Facebook based on the open source Wordpress personal publishing platform, and workgroup DataPortability.org has kicked off to define best practices to make personal data easily movable, reusable, remixable, etc. across Web services. Just two days ago at his Northern Voice 2008 keynote, Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, seemed to be almost hinting at what his company was up to with their recent $29.5M round of funding: a better, open-source alternative to closed social systems like Facebook that would use social filters to bring more relevant content.

As I mentioned in my previous post on business platforms of Web companies, one key aspect of these business platforms is that “they retain control over who gets to see the information and how”. Having a point of mediation is an essential part of online capitalism. Without it, there is no point of value extraction and no big business.

The natural question then is: if so many techies are excited about the inevitable advent of decentralized and portable social networks and related personal data, and if that means essentially that there is little point of control anymore for these Websites, how are businesses going to make big money out of this?

If we put aside the ad-based revenue model that Matt M. does not seem to keen on, as well as the “pro account” business model that would expand on some existing commercially available pro services, as well as the usual ways of making money with open source, here are two models that I think could work:

• Relevancy services: This is would be an expansion of services such as Akismet, Wordpress’ spam filtering service, which is currently free for personal use. Matt insisted strongly in his keynote how content relevancy (i.e. no spam) is really what users value, and how spam from bad users is what kills social systems. Perhaps a high-quality filtering system that would combine the Akismet filter and a social filter (a filter based on your social graph) is something people would be ready to pay for.
• The ring tone business model. This model consists in deriving transaction fees from digital goods sold on WordPress.com, such as themes and widgets. Because Wordpress.com knows which blogs use which themes and widgets, this would be easily done there. It may be a bit harder for users of the Wordpress open source software itself. This would be the equivalent of the ringtone business. Matt Mullenweg revealed himself that “People want their online presence to be an expression of themselves and in that regards, being able to customize the design is critical”. Matt even compared a blog as a locker, which are typically heavily personalized.

This list does not mean to be exhaustive, but seeks only to start a discussion on a subject that is getting more and more relevant. I would be curious to see what others think.

24C3 is the 24th Chaos Communication Congress, a 4-day conference I got to know reading this post at the always awesome We make money not art. All sessions were videotaped and are available to download.

I absolutely recommend the presentation given by Drew Endy on DNA programming. In a nutshell, Drew views DNA as an evolved program in some poorly documented machine language and shares his experience reverse-engineering this program, synthesizing DNA and uploading it to a cell i.e. “hacking biology”.

The session Paparazzi - The free autopilot is about how anyone can build a cheap version of the $1M UAV/drones monitoring everyone of us 24/7. Quite interesting for anyone with an interest in aviation. The cool thing is that the drone is literally remotely controlled via an open source software you can find here. You can assign a flight plan to the drone and it will follow it. The platform is packed with sensors that allow remote control and capture of data (videos, pictures). I hope these guys talk with the OpenStreetMap people: how could would it be to use this platform to capture views from the sky at a much higher resolution than satellites can provide.

I also watched the session Hacking ideologies, part 2: Open Source, a capitalist movement. There were a few shocking comments in there, but I was glad to get a refresher on the nature of capitalism from the very sharp Dmytri Kleiner:

“Capitalism is not so much about creating money or wealth. What creates wealth is work. Capitalism is about making money from other’s people work. It isn’t about money creation but about money extraction. […] The kind of information that capitalism is interested about is information that increased productive capacity. More productivity is more money to extract. The kind of information that capitalism is not interested about is information that is not about increased productivity or information that questions the system or information about the nature of capitalism. […] P2P offers no point of mediation where value can be captured, but at the same time p2p has to be financed by some wealth accumulation.”

This last point particularly resonated with me since I’m a big believer of decentralized social networks. I’m curious to see how a promising project like the DiSo project will resolve this chicken/egg problem: to finance a decentralized system, you need accumulated wealth, but to attract accumulated wealth you need a point of mediation where you can extract value, which you don’t have in a decentralized system.

One way may simply be some form of public funding. After all, if we didn’t have ARPA, we would probably all be surfing AOLNet or MSNNet these days.

Anyway, this conference is clearly politically incorrect in many ways but is awesome and I recommend everyone to watch some of these sessions!