Can We Get Everything We Want...for Free?

Fred Wilson wrote a great post about the need for two-way openness. He was referring to the features where you can receive things like Facebook friends’ status updates via RSS. Fred likes that this is available, however it’s not enough for him. He wants two-way openness. He wants to be able to update his status on Facebook via Twitter.

As an end user, I’m right there with Fred Wilson: let me use whatever I want, to do whatever I want! But if I were working at Facebook I’d be scratching my head and thinking, “How the hell are we going to make Fred happy AND generate lots of revenue?”

This, by the way is a problem, for even one-way openness. Especially as RSS usage increases – and I believe this is inevitable because you really can finally create “The Daily Me.”

I read Engadget religiously. But they send full feeds out via RSS, and I never (or hardly ever) actually go to Engadget’s web site. I don’t see ANY of the ads on their site.

I know sites are struggling with full-feed vs. partial feed for this very reason. I’d much rather see Dave Winer focusing on the issue of how to utilize RSS to the fullest and still make money than to worry about Jason Calacanis’ mid-life crisis or Mahalo. And that’s with ONE way communication.

Now enter two way communication. Let’s take Fred’s example. He wants a world where he can find out whatever is happening in his Facebook world via RSS, and he wants to be able to update things via services like Twitter. When will Fred ever actually log on to Facebook? How will Facebook make any money on him?

While Fred and many others (perhaps even me) might be willing to pay $10/mo. for such flexibility, I don’t think the masses would. And maybe that’s the model: Give Fred what he wants, but make him pay.

Will there be a company that rolls up a bunch of great content sites and packages “Full Feed RSS without ads!” for a fee? Will there be subscription models that allow us to use whatever tools we want without actually ever visiting a web site?

I think there will have to be.

Technology Evolves Rapidly, Human Nature Does Not

If I look at what’s happened just with blogging and RSS feeds alone since 1999, the technological improvements have been both very rapid and very beneficial.

But when it comes to human nature things haven’t changed since the dawn of recorded history. There are no conferences you can attend to speed to pace of evolving human nature. If there was such a conference I’d pay $1000 to attend. I worry that attendance would be sparse. A conference on how to make money via blogging, on the other hand, as you know,would be much more popular.

Please note there are no ads on this site and it is not currently my objective to make money off of this site. I do hope ultimately there is a revenue model for TVbythenumbers.com (don’t bother going to the site, it’s not live yet) which I co-founded.

There are many aspects to human nature, and one of them is that in bits and pieces we love some vicarious drama. We also, quite naturally sometimes love to get a laugh at the expense of other’s misfortune. The German word for this is Schadenfreude and while I didn’t get as much of the Schadenfruede genetics as my brother Steve, like anyone else, I’m not immune.

A couple of examples. Last Tuesday I walked from the Marina over to 24 Willie Mays Plaza to see Barry Bonds hit #756 (it was an exciting, emotional and exceptional 10 minutes or so). It’s over a 4 mile walk and I walked it through Fisherman’s Wharf and then around the Embarcadero. It’s not the shortest path, but it’s gorgeous and there are no traffic lights on the Embarcadero so other than the tourists in Fisherman’s Wharf, there’s nothing to slow you down.

As I walked through the Wharf I saw about 60 people congregated on Jefferson St. and looked over to see what the heck they were checking out. It was that staple of the Wharf, “The Bush Man”. He’s been there for years and his shtick is that he hides behind a few branches he carries around with him and then jumps out from behind them scaring the bejeezus out of unsuspecting passersby. The crowd of 60 or so that had amassed was enjoying it.

Schadenfreude.

Via my friend Mike Raneri’s real-life social engineering (it didn’t happen on Facebook if you can believe it) he’d actually wound up scoring the 2 tickets in front of our seats for the game where Bonds hit #756 so four of us got to enjoy it which was really nice. I sat in front of Raneri, who as it turned out had been dropping peanut shells on the top of my baseball cap for about 20 minutes. He was amused, as were the other two. As a younger man, this might have really irked me, but I am not a young man. I thought it was funny too and was OK with the others (including some of the other 42,000, I’m sure) having a laugh at my expense. C’mon, it’s not like he was putting the shells in my beer!

All the attention on Paris and Lindsay is of a similar nature. This weekend, the Web 2.0 crowd had its own little version of this with The Winer-Calacanis Slapfest involving Dave Winer and Jason Calacanis.

I wrote about this, and Jason posted some of that on his site and between that and a frenzy of people searching for “Calacanis Winer Gnomedex” I had about a 600% increase in traffic. Of course that’s easy because this site has no traffic, but typically Saturday’s are the slowest day and I had record traffic.

It’s no different than my friends being amused with the peanut shells on my cap or the crowd of people gathered to watch “The Bush Man” scare people by jumping out from behind is branches. I accept that’s the way it is, though this acceptance has been a long time coming. My preference would be that more people would want to read about whether capitalism is self-destructive and how to lose 80 pounds and keep it off. But the way human nature works, we’re more interested in Paris, Lindsay, Jason, Dave and The Bush Man.

Another part of human nature is that if you “attack”, people tend to fight back. I wasn’t at the Gnomedex conference and didn’t see the full context of how Dave heckled Jason. But I saw what Dave wrote on his blog and even if he’d not heckled Jason at the conference, Jason would certainly have responded similarly. For Dave to not realize that calling Jason a spammer would be viewed as an attack, at least by Jason is to have complete disregard for how human nature really works, and also completely ignores cause and effect. I’m sure Dave doesn’t view his write-ups on Friday and Saturday as any kind of attack on Jason. But, they were. The odds of Jason having a response were predictably 100%!

When Jason (somewhat surprisingly to me) received a lot of support via the blogs, Dave somehow felt victimized. Steven Hodson called Dave pissy in a post at winextra.com and Dave responded to him with a comment that Steven was being disrespectful and was somewhat aghast at the response. In this instance, Dave, like billions of others before him sometimes have been, is in denial. I’m not really sure that’s a bad thing either, though I think Dave would be a better friend to himself with a little self-examination on the matter.

The world will move on either way.

Calacanis vs. Winer: Part II

Ah, the drama of the blogsphere. I changed my mind and am switching over to picking Jason Calacanis without even needing to borrow his dog Toro (see part 1).


Dave Winer thinks he's giving good counsel to Jason, and being a good friend. He's full of crap and in this instance being a chucklehead. Not everything is a platform or needs to be. Mahalo isn't. It's a product/service. Dave's biggest complaints seem to be that he doesn't like that he can't make money off Mahalo (oh boo hoo!) and that he doesn't like Jason's style of promotion.

Guess what, it works, it may not work for me, and it may not work for you -- but it most certainly works for Jason! That's probably why Chris Pirillo invited him to Gnomedex!

If Dave has a problem with people promoting commercial stuff at Gnomedex that Dave has no way to capitalize on, he should take that up with Chris P.

Fortunately for Dave Winer, conferences are an open platform. He's certainly welcome to host his own conference where the only presenters of commerical products/services are ones Winer can capitalize on. He can't capitalize on Mahalo. BFD.

As for Mahalo, Jason stick with your plan of getting 25,000 human engineered topics. Mahalo is an open platform in that Dave could sign up to contribute human engineered topics and even get paid for them (sorry, I couldn't resist).

I don't know if Mahalo will work out or not. If it provides more useful search, people will use it. If it doesn't, they won't. That won't have a darn thing to do with whether it's a platform or whether Winer can make money off of it.

Weblogs Inc. wasn't a platform Winer could make money off of. I'm still glad that there's an Engadget.com (and it sends complete articles via RSS, God bless 'em!) and glad that Calacanis was able to make some money off of it.

Dave Winer vs. Jason Calacanis: Who ya Got?

Disclosure: I have met Jason, he recently bought me brunch and maybe as much as 10 years ago he ranked me in the Silicon Alley Reporter as one of the 100 most influential new media people in NY. All of his antics are not my cup of tea, but generally speaking I find him to be very engaging as well as entertaining. I did join the Facebook group “People who can’t help but love Jason Calacanis!”

I have never met Dave Winer, but since I already "pushed" in one "who ya got?" today, I got Dave Winer. RSS baby. Way more important than a free brunch, or being ranked as influential – and even more important than interesting and engaging conversation. I love, love RSS. I might even change my middle name so that my initials can be RSS. Really Simple Syndication is good, good stuff.

I probably agree with Dave that Jason is hypocritical for whining about spam and then shamelessly self promoting constantly. But one of my favorite quotes is Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. I’m not immune from that myself, neither is Jason, and neither probably is Dave “if I can’t profit from it why should I care?” Winer.

I understand the thinking, and I’m all for self-interest, but that seems over the top. Dave doesn’t care about Mahalo because he can’t develop for it, and that’s fine, but other than that they utilize RSS, the New York Times web site isn’t an “open platform”, but it’s still something that millions of people love to use.

Bottom line on Mahalo is if it can become very useful – more useful than other generic search then people will use it and not give a rat’s behind whether it’s a platform or not.

Still, I have to pick Dave even if he complains about the iPhone for the same reason he complains about Calacanis’ Mahalo. The iPhone isn’t a platform so Dave can’t figure out how to develop something that will make money on it. Oh freaking well. I say that because no “platform” came out of the blue to give us an iPhone. Could Apple have made the iPhone more of an open platform? I’m not really so sure.

I’m OK if Jason and his investors are the only ones who will make money off Mahalo if the service it provides is useful to the people who use it. As for the iPhone, it might be more useful if it were an open platform, but I am finding the first generation of the phone very, very useful, even with its flaws. If the mobile phone industry here in the USA itself was an open platform, I’d probably be more prone to siding with Dave. That the mobile phones here aren’t built around some open platform that allows you to switch your phone to another carrier, etc., is a big deal to me. That Dave can’t make money off the iPhone or Mahalo is not. But it was fun to think about for 10 minutes.

There’s lots of stuff I use every day that’s not a platform. It doesn’t matter if it’s technology or not. Comcast or Starbucks. I still give them my money. Am I supposed to boycott Comcast because Dave Winer and Fred Wilson haven’t figured out how to develop an application for Comcast they can make money off of?

The ironic thing to me here is this: the non-platform iPhone + i.bloglines.com (Bloglines feed reader for the iPhone) is the best RSS feed reading mechanism EVER (so far). I am able to absorb much, much more information more quickly than I ever have before. Hell, it’s SO easy and so fast, I want to get everything via RSS, even my freaking e-mail.

Still, I’m a massive hypocrite myself here, because when the Flash upgrade for the iPhone is released, if it blocks streaming in the same way that Sony’s PSP did, I will send Dave some flowers and ask him how I can assist in the quest to turn the iPhone into a platform. But hands down, it’s already the best portable media device I’ve ever used, plus the best feed reader I've ever used. That's pretty good for a generation 1 product.

I personally don’t care whether Mahalo is a platform or not and I’m sure I’ll never change my mind about that. As for the iPhone, I’ll let you know after the update that supports Flash finally comes out (I’m guessing in October).

Dave Winer’s contributions to the Internet are many, and significant though and not just RSS. It’s just that RSS significantly changed the way I access information. So even though I think “if I can’t make money off it, I just don’t care” seems a bit over-the-top to me, I got Dave Winer.

P.S. the conference where the Jason vs. Dave smack talk occured, Gnomedex was not a "software developers" conference, if it was, Dave's comments would've been completely reasonable. Since it wasn't, his comments seemed over-the-top to me.

P.P.S. Jason's English Bulldog, Toro is an amazing chick magnet -- if Jason let me borrow him for a few hours the next time he is in SF, I might swing over to Jason's side in this contest...