Aditya Mukherjee
One of my goals with this version of the website was to have a single place where I could store things — whether that be things high on importance and sentimental value like pictures, intellectual value like articles, or even low on value but still worth saving like tweets. Whether it be just a reference (i.e. saving a link to the content stored somewhere else) or the actual thing. The idea was to have a single point where I could point people to find anything and everything they wanted to about me. The latter half of this decade has allowed people to create content without having to worry about where or how it is being stored. If I may take a well-established context liberally, there’s a very app-ish feel to the Internet. All people see is their content; all they need to know is the name of the service they are using1. For users, the service is the data, just like on our iPhones the app is not only a window to the data, the app is the data. Flickr for our photographs, Tumblr for our writing, Twitter for those impulsive thoughts, Google Calendar for our events; we’ve truly and completely fragmented our online identity.
On the web, the norm is to borrow space that isn’t one’s own and use it to keep things, important or otherwise, for free. Free of costs, and free of worry. There is an inherent — and baseless, if I may add — trust in services to maintain the integrity of the data2, i.e. keep it safe and not misuse it. Plus the fact that there is no one place where someone can go to get all the things associated with a person; everything is scattered, and many of them abandoned and without ownership. If you don’t have the link to something, you can’t see it — discovery is again becoming a problem amidst spam and just the sheer volume of data. And with the advent of URL shorteners and users who don’t know how they really work, many links eventually lead to dead ends.
There are a lot of things wrong in that one little paragraph. In fact, it’s everything wrong with how we have approached our data in the last decade. It is such a mess that I think we will spend the next ten years un-doing the models of the last ten. That’s pretty much what all this “semantic web” talk is all about — making sense of the data, relating them to each other and to you. The most popular apps of the next decade will be the ones that let us bring all our data from all over the Internet and keep it together — literally or figuratively. Facebook does (or at least, did, when I was still using it) a good job of aggregating content from many places once you tell it to, similar to how Friendfeed works. But the trouble is that Facebook, yet again, is a second/third-party service (based on where you place it in the chain). Your data is locked in, and only people with Facebook accounts can see them3. Above that, if you ever want to get that data out, you’re dependent on Facebook to give it to you, of which they might or might not do a very good job4.
To bring some order to our content on the Internet, our possessions, there need to be some fundamental changes in how people think about it. And to make that happen, there need to be shifts in how we — the developers and designers of services which make up the consumer facing Internet — do things as well as how consumers perceive the value of said services.
Take control of your data. After all, it is yours; you have created it with your hard work and time. If a service lets you create content but doesn’t let you pull that content out to store on your computer or use with other services, don’t use it. Their attempt at locking you in should be obvious, but there’s always a chance that the service might not exist tomorrow5, and if it goes down, your data is going with it. This is even more important when the service is free. If something breaks down, all you will hear is that it’s a free service, so take it or leave it.
I believe that for the most part, users have been spoilt by us developers as to what to expect from the Internet. But while we can’t do anything about the past, users can pay attention to some things for the future. After all, developers eventually make what the users want.
Pay for services. Everybody likes free things. They reduce the barrier to entry down to zero. But everyone also knows that nothing comes for free. Anything that is any good, costs money. Anything worth using is worth paying for. Services, whether they be on the Internet or not, are not charity. People make and create these services to be used, sure, but they also want to be compensated for making something you find useful.
If paying for the effort is not your thing, then maybe you might want to pay to keep your data (and identity) under control. A punchline which has become something of an industry axiom over the past year is:
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
— User-driven Discontent, comment by Andrew Lewis.
I’ll admit that this is more of a personal bias talking, but free services are undoing all the good work we have done on the web these past few years. While they enable users to do a little more6, they take a lot more from the web by bringing its economy to a standstill. They have almost completely destroyed user expectations as far as paying for services go. Now, it’s harder than ever for a service to charge, because the competition from “free” services is almost impossible to answer when you’re charging a fee.
See also: Own Your Identity by Marco Arment.
Own your identity. That means investing in a hosting plan and/or a domain name. Start associating things around the web with your website or, at least, your domain name. Almost all services out there allow your profile page to be pointed to by your own domain name rather than being a subdomain on the service’s domain name. This is a good way to build up credibility and stand apart from the crowd. If you take your web presence seriously, this is almost a given.
Understand your audience; make something of value. Another personal advice. This doesn’t mean you strive to be the next John Gruber and if you can’t be one you give up. It does mean that you take your creation seriously. By creation and content, I mean anything that you create on the Internet — may that be a tweet, a blog post, or a photograph that you upload to a service — these are all created content of one kind or the other. More often than not people get into content creation to try it out and soon find themselves out of ideas on how to continue, which makes them stop. You wouldn’t start building a house without wanting to see it through to the end, would you? This also goes hand in hand with paying for services. When you’re paying, you’re bound to take it seriously. When you take it seriously, you automatically give it your best.
It’s not your data, it’s the user’s. As developers who enable content creation, we must realise that the content is not ours just because we hold it. Just because a company makes drawing pencils doesn’t mean they own every sketch that was made using them. APIs to allow users to pull their data out and use it anywhere and in any way they want should be the primary attribute of any service that holds content, not a “feature”. Of course, it doesn’t make sense that you hold all that data but also enable users to take it from you and leave any time they want while you get nothing for it.
I’m usually not assuming enough to outright tell people what to do. To each his own, and the market will shake itself right — that’s always been the belief. But that was the belief for an open web and market where competition is fair and healthy. Today’s web is not open, and the market is anything but healthy. These suggestions on this side are just my thoughts and ideas for a better environment for users to use the Internet in because at the end of the day, the consumers decide what succeeds and what doesn’t.
Stop giving out services for free. Seriously. Stop it. There is no harm in charging users for your service. The harm is when you start charging exorbitant rates. My personal billing plan would be (1/hosting cost to you)(100/{100-y}) = cost to customer where ‘y’ is your profit margin. Services like Flickr do this extremely well; they’re proof that a well thought out freemium model works7. In fact, I would argue that “free” is what makes users fickle. The low barrier to entry brings in everyone, but they won’t take it seriously because their investment in your service is zero. Make users make a tangible investment. Make the users feel that your service is worth it, so that they take the time to create content that is worth it. But no service is worth it if it doesn’t solve a problem.
Make something that people need, not necessarily something that’s hip. When Twitter started becoming big, the web was full of small apps/services that leveraged used its data to cook up more data to satisfy the nerd need for information porn. Things like mutual following, or a person’s Twitter “clout”, etc. When Facebook became big, games, quizzes and other useless “apps” began to take over their platform. The newest wave of completely inconsequential services seem to be location-based social networks — like Foursquare and Gowalla. Everybody is building a check-in system, but why? I don’t know; do you? Sure, if some things were done better, I could see why it would be fun. But I still don’t see its usefulness except satisfying the voyeur in us who wants to know what other people are doing all the time. We need apps and services that we need and that solve a definite problem. Becoming a “mayor” of Domino’s is not a problem. Discovering and meeting new and likeminded people at conventions and conferences is.
Stand on your own feet instead of leaning on others’ shoulders. Depending on others was never a good idea. In this age of APIs and platforms, it still isn’t. If your service depends on someone else’s platform, APIs and data to function, you will always be at their mercy. Third party services are meant to augment, not run, your service. Especially when they’re free and don’t have a clear business model; you don’t know if the model they come up with tomorrow will put you out of business or not.
There are many problems with the Internet, but a lack of ideas on how to fix it isn’t one of them; everybody has one opinion or the other. Ultimately we’re all trying to turn it into something more than a glorified telephone network. Even though I’m a pessimist, I believe this is one of those things that can be fixed and should be done. We just need someone to get the ball rolling. •
The Terms of Service have (unfortunately) only recently become a legitimate concern. ↩
And when there’s the slightest inkling that a service might be shutting down, there’s a massive scramble to get the data out to allow the user to switch to a different one. ↩
I do agree that this is a situational thing and differs from person to person. If most or all of the people you know are on Facebook, this isn’t a problem. ↩
In my case, when I quit back in January ’11, they didn’t. I didn’t some of my data for the last 2-3 years and got no data at all from before that. ↩
Look at what happened to tr.im. More recently, Flickr lost 4000 photographs of a user, while Google completely deleted a user’s 7 years worth of data. ↩
Look at what these “free” services actually let you do: Share photographs? Post on other people’s “walls”? These are some of the most inconsequential activites that you can do on the Internet today. Real services, that enable real activities, cost. Things like project management and online collaboration don’t come for free, with good reason. ↩
I do believe however that Flickr is too cheap, and I will not be surprised if they are just about breaking even or even if they’re making a loss. ↩