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User Controlled Pages (aka What I Need From Flickr)
Scott Karp doesn't like my use of the word "user" in my post about The End Of Page Views. Scott argues that when someone controls a page, they are not users, they are publishers and we should recognize that in our terminology. Well Scott is probably right about that. I've been thinking a lot lately about the things I want to do with my Flickr page, my LinkedIn page, my last.fm page, my Facebook page, etc, etc.
Scott is right that I want to act like a publisher with all of these pages. I've been using my Flickr page a lot lately as we travel around Italy. I am publishing some, but not nearly all, of the photos I am taking. I am blogging directly from Flickr to create the blog entries on our trip. And I am paying greater attention to the comments, favorites, and views I am getting on my photos.
One of the things about being an active blogger is you get used to a certain kind of behavior. I am used to being able to track visits and page views on a daily basis. I am used getting comments emailed to me. I am used to being able to see who is linking to me. I am used to adding functionality via widgets to my page, which include the ability to see who has visited it recently. The way I do most of this is by adding code to my page.
So here is my suggestion. If you want to allow users to truly control a page, if you want them to treat the page like it is their own page, you must let them put code onto their page. If you don't, eventually sophisticated leading edge users are going to move on. I know I will.
Comments (13) | Posted December 30, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
I am abandoning the straitjacket of Vox for this very reason.
And yet, it's a bit antithetical to the whole happy hippie/free/open/anonymous nature of the web, no? The idea of simply putting information and entertainment out there, without being able to harvest various back-patting forms of feedback in return, has lost its appeal. It's my information. I'll give only if you let me take.
Posted by: Kathleen | Dec 30, 2006 8:39:10 AM
I agree with you, through and through. The only thing is that you inherit security and usability issues when you allow the public to play with code.
Posted by: Jason Drohn | Dec 30, 2006 11:52:42 AM
Fred,
The ability to track and compile data and stats is a good thing, but sometimes this data can be misleading. I am new to blogging, although I have been reading blogs for some time. When I began to design my blog, I went to the ones I liked best (sometimes over and over), both to get design ideas, and to make sure that my blog did not end up too closely resembling someone else’s. I may also click on an interesting post several times a day, just to read the new comments, or to find and click through to another blog that I have read, liked, and failed to bookmark, and I may do this from more than one URL, which would give the impression of a unique visitor, so the data is going to be off a little bit.
In addition, in your post 2007: The Implicit Web, you write about user profiling, and I think that still has some people worried about privacy. There is a big difference between “Profiling with permission”, and spyware, but I’m not sure the average internet user truly understands this, so when they hear things like “tracking click streams” they tend to run the other way.
Posted by: Stephen L. McKay | Dec 30, 2006 1:38:32 PM
Fred,
I'm with you on this, though I think we need to have a new definition of "code." I own the e-commerce channel at work and I have this discussion with my IT team all the time. The line between content and code gets increasingly blurry everyday. Is a Google or MyBlogLog tracking tag code? Is a widget? I think of development on the web as a continuum, with content updates on one end and a full blown redesign at the other. Tags probably fall towards the content end, widgets somewhere further to the right, and so on. So many of the services and API's that continue to emerge as part of the Web 2.0 space move that continuum to the left. To your point, as this occurs, the folks who provide access to code as content most effectively will stand to benefit going forward.
Posted by: Tim Peter | Dec 30, 2006 2:03:44 PM
Very unlikely, if you're talking javascript embedding. Whoever embeds javascript has full access to the user's browser environment; this means hostile code can steal cookies and thus auth and so on.
Posted by: joshua schachter | Dec 30, 2006 3:21:58 PM
Is this the same reason why you feel compelled to put dozens of widgets all over your blog? Don't get me wrong I like your writing and I will continue to subscribe to your feed for that reason, but every time I visit your blog I must confess that I wonder whether you are displaying all these widgets as a way to express your interests, to highlight services you find interesting, to share what you think we might find interesting, or simply because you can.
Posted by: soxiam | Dec 30, 2006 3:23:26 PM
A PS to my earlier comment, I agree with Kathleen, unless I decide to share my usage stat’s and click streams, this is no ones business. I thought about a few hypothetical’s, and a few true scenarios, where people don’t want to be part of a major marketing experiment.
We have all been the subject of spam, and sometimes, very cleverly disguised spam. I clicked on an email that took me to a website I would never visit of my own choosing. It was porn, but not soft, this stuff was so raunchy, and cheap, it had to come out of some of these 3 ½ world emerging democracies, and the degradation to women was despicable! Yet such a click, from my URL may be tracked. This is not a good thing. Another example is someone who is doing research about a personal illness, maybe, of a private nature. These issues must be addresses before I could support any expansion of link tracking, or user profiling, or the ability to do so by anyone I visit on the web.
This may look to be in contradiction to my earlier post, but I think it must be addressed before we move forward with marketing at the price of privacy.
Posted by: Stephen L. McKay | Dec 30, 2006 7:33:55 PM
>Very unlikely, if you're talking javascript embedding. Whoever embeds javascript has full access to the user's browser environment; this means hostile code can steal cookies and thus auth and so on.
Wait, why is this unlikely if the biggest social network on the planet (myspace) already allows users to do it?
Posted by: chad | Dec 30, 2006 8:07:19 PM
Thomas Hawk does a very good job of maintaining his anonymity on the web. If people like me, and Fred don’t know who he really is, then I don’t think anyone is going to find out soon. This is Mr. Hawk’s prerogative, and I respect it. When people lose this respect for anonymity, we lose more than a bit of privacy. We lose ourselves, and our own identity, because our identity, although it shouldn’t be, is too often tied to what we buy, who we read, and what we look at, rather than who we are, and what we do in life.
I am against any piece of code that would allow the user of said code to track an individual beyond, or after they leave the respective web site
Posted by: Stephen L. McKay | Dec 30, 2006 9:44:15 PM
will we look back in 5 years and say.... delicious was a cool service, but... what was the value add.. I often wonder what is the party line for VC's. Cool web 2.0 + hype = scalable biz plan? Not a dig on Fred, his commentary is top notch. Just wonder if 11 West 10th would of been a better investment 5 years ago.
Posted by: Chad | Dec 31, 2006 2:51:37 AM
It's interesting that you brought up Thomas Hawk. Zooomr (the photo sharing site he's the CEO of) is the only photo site so far with trackbacks for photos, and according to a recent post it sounds like they want to roll out a stats package to go along with it: http://thomashawk.com/2007/01/yuvi-analyzes-scobles-links.html (2nd to last paragraph)
Posted by: Bill Erickson | Jan 2, 2007 1:56:02 AM
hmm.. thought I posted this before, but I can't find it... Anyway, I totally disagree with you on this one, Fred. If people start butchering Flickr to make it look and behave like Myspace, then I'm out of there. Flickr is a service that does a couple of things extremely well: store, share and browse photos. That's it. It also allows the user to use their photos in various ways (repurposing, chunking, whatever you want to call it) via APIs, feeds, blogging tools, etc. If I had to figure out where the "next" button was with each page view, it'd be like switching operating systems between each load. In short: suckage galore.
There are lots of services just like it that do things, and I don't want them to think they're Myspace, either. Delicious is one of them. I don't want inconsistant interface from page-to-page when I use these services.
Now, if people want to build their own version and do whatever they want with it, these services enable that. Have you seen Flickr leech? It's simply a different way to view Flickr because an enterprising guy wanted to do less clicking. Anyone with programming skills can do it. He rocks the API and "swizzles" the results. Another programmer could take what she wants from a del.icio.us feed and do whatever. A sip of Twitter here... whatever. You are already doing this with this page, as are thousands of others. But this is obviously just the beginning.
What I'm *really* looking forward to is the *next* phase: when anybody *without* programming skills can do it.
Here's a company idea for you. Please start it ;-) Think Ning (framework for social apps), but dead simply, push button easy like Apple's Automator, and with a focus on integrating social apps.
The concept is that content or functionality "chunks" can be brought into the service's interface, combined in useful ways, "actions" can be applied (behind-the-scenes transformations of formats, etc. via XSLT/API calls/whatever), and the output can be any other service or site (Myspace, your Typepad blog, my Wordpress blog, a .Mac web page, whatever). Make it open so that people can provide actions or chunks to the community, and figure out ways to monetize the flow of the mashups. I have already thought of a few simple ways.
I think it'd be neato!
Posted by: scott partee | Jan 2, 2007 5:10:20 AM
Very informative blog.
Posted by: Artorios | May 30, 2007 9:59:38 PM
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