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FCC Endorses Net Neutrality

FCC chair Julius Genachowski laid out the principles of Net Neutrality in a speech at the Brookings Institution yesterday.

As the Washington Post reported, this is just the beginning of the process. However, the net neutrality guidelines are being drafted in response to moves already made by ISPs to curtail service. “This is not about protecting the Internet against imaginary dangers,” Genachowski said. “We’re seeing the breaks and cracks emerge, and they threaten to change the Internet’s fundamental architecture of openness.”

The Wall Street Journal covered the reaction of telecom lobbyists, most of whom were not happy.

Brookings has the full transcript of the speech and video on their events page.

Facebook and the Fleeting Crowd

Trendmongers at the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have noticed a funny smell at Facebook lately — the unique odor given off by the death of an expired fad. Virginia Heffernan’s piece in the NYT Magazine, Facebook Exodus, put it most succinctly: “Is Facebook doomed to someday become an online ghost town, run by zombie users who never update their pages and packs of marketers picking at the corpses of social circles they once hoped to exploit?”

It wouldn’t be the first time a world-uniting social network was reduced to a footnote in the annals of internet history (remember Friendster or Dodgeball?). Creating something as ephemeral and fragile as a community can be a tricky thing. Putting a value on that social grouping is even more difficult.

Depending on who you talked to, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal of a $1 billion buyout offer from Yahoo in 2006 was either a stroke of genius, or an act of incredible hubris by a kid who didn’t know any better. A June 2009 article in Wired, The Great Wall of Facebook, made much of the potential revenues of the network with 200 million registered users, but also noted that Facebook burned through an estimated $75 million in 2008, not including the capital it took in from investors like Microsoft and Digital Sky Technologies. The actual worth of the privately held company has left many analysts guessing, as noted in Facebook is Worth … What, Exactly?

In the real world, community is usually defined as a group of people living in the same place or sharing common interests. Online, common interests typically supplant location.  Other characteristics of a sustainable online community are:

• It fulfills a need for information or support; it must sustain interest
• It fosters interaction and dialog
• It allows users to control their own self-representation, or identity, through profiles or other means
• It has some moderation or self-regulation
• Some would also add that a successful community must have a purpose; it must reward the time put into it.

Arguably, Facebook has all of the elements of a successful online community. In its first draft, Facebook was tied to the real-world community of the Harvard campus, a group with shared interests and extensive offline interactions. As it expanded off campus, Facebook added great functionality, making it really easy for anybody to set up a personal web page and share photos and stories with their friends. Giving users the ability to accept or deny friend requests also promoted a sense of control and self-management over one’s social sphere (even while forcing some awkward choices).

So what has gone wrong at Facebook? Maybe it’s a victim of its own popularity. Clay Shirky in Communities, Audience and Scale (2002) makes the point that when communities grow beyond a small group in which most members know each other, they become audiences. This would account for some of the creep-factor felt by Facebookers today: the most active members seem to be performing their lives instead of actually living them.

Or maybe Facebook no longer provides much useful information. Maybe your extended circle of friends isn’t interested in what you had for breakfast, the fact that you’re hungover, or that the Quentin Tarantino character you most resemble is Jules Winnfield from Pulp Fiction.

Perhaps Facebook fails on the point of purpose: it just doesn’t reward the time you put into it. Or it could be just the fickle nature of online attention: Facebook has lost its cachet and the digerati have moved on.

Google Earth Spurs Spy Hobbyists

Totalitarian states beware: Google is watching you. As reported in The Age of Melbourne today, amateur spies are puzzling over a large structure spotted in the Burmese jungle.

The structure, which looks like an Olympic swimming pool, is a big shed partly buried in the ground. Speculation is that the building may be a staging site for Burma’s nascent nuclear program.

Perhaps more startling is the discovery of an “open source military analysis community”, exemplified by the Arms Control Wonk blog. We’re not sure if this sort of volunteerism is a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly demonstrates how new tools can influence human behavior.

Social Media Defined

Couldn’t resist this concise commentary on recent social media developments by DespairWear. Naturally, the format for this missive is a T-shirt.

Anti-social media

Analog Television Ends and No One Notices

After much delay, America finally switched from analog to digital television June 12 — and hardly anyone noticed.

Most Americans already subscribe to satellite or cable TV, which is transmitted digitally. Fewer than 15 percent of viewers got their television broadcast over the air in an analog signal. Nevertheless, television stations staffed up phone banks, anticipating a flood of calls after the switch, but received barely a trickle, the New York Times reported.

According to the The Nielsen Company,  99 percent of American households own a television and the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day. Although, The Neilsen Company (formerly A.C. Neilsen Co.) still makes most of its money monitoring television and may have a slightly skewed vision of what Americans are doing with all those screens.

In 2004, a Pew Research study noted a shift away from television news toward the net.  Later an IBM study from 2007 found that internet usage was about equal to the time spent viewing TV.  Furthermore, Ofcom’s 2008 study of British media found that while most households had the telly on, few were paying attention (Ofcom is the British Office of Communications, similar to the American FCC). The Ofcom study found that two in five consumers use their mobile phones while watching television, and the same proportion watch the TV while surfing the web.

The cessation of analog transmission in the US marks the end of an era. It also delineates the beginning of a new chapter in communications — when “television” became just another node on the net.

TV is Over