TheFunded Respects Its Users

According to a blog post by Jason Kincaid at Techcrunch, the VC firm ratings site, TheFunded, is being sued by a VC firm that received a bad review by an anonymous reviewer. According to Jason

There are a lot of VCs who hate TheFunded for exposing character flaws, and posting term sheets.

Jason also quotes a response from TheFunded’s founder Adeo Ressi

When TheFunded was conceived, we understood that some investors might attempt to take legal action against the views of entrepreneurs. In order to prevent this form of censorship, TheFunded has been carefully designed and takes extensive measures to protect the anonymity all those who share their opinions on the fundraising experience. TheFunded does not store IP addresses, email addresses, or any other personal information associated with a Member account in any database or any file system operated by the company.

This is exactly what every company should be doing. If you must have a member directory, save an email address with permission. I have written about this previously when speaking about Google but this approach applies to all websites. TheFunded has respected its users and allowed them to truly stay anonymous even on the company servers. I commend you Mr. Ressi for your restraint when it comes to collecting your users’ information. We should all reward companies that choose this route to protect their users. I smell a trend. Which companies out there can claim that their users are “Truly Anonymous?”

User Privacy Isn’t About Information Protecting, it’s About Information Collecting

I used to work for a company that generated most of its revenue from lead generation. It was a web publication where users registered to see premium content. We would work with big companies like IBM and Microsoft to sponsor webcasts and we would give the contact information of the users who viewed these webcasts to the respective sponsors. The users agreed to this in the Terms and Conditions and all was done fair and legally. This is how many free sites make their money. They sell your contact information to the highest bidder. I always had a problem with this concept. I’m not giving companies my contact information so they could sell it to the highest bidder. But what choice do I have?

With the new slew of web 2.0 companies, we’ve seen a backlash of sorts regarding this issue. One of the many definitions of web 2.0 is user-centricity. It’s all about pleasing the user. That means you don’t give away your users’ contact information. Wonderful. Out contact information is safe. Right? Well, in a recent court case, Google is forced to provide Viacom the usernames, IP addresses and online activity of all of their YouTube users. Apparently our information isn’t safe.

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch makes a good point about who is to blame here. Everyone wants to blame Viacom and it’s understandable. It’s an organization that has decided to fight their customers rather than work with them. Viacom is in the group of other media companies who have pushed the legal limits to track down people who love their content and sue them.

As Arrington points out, the real company to blame here is Google. Google is the one collecting this information on us. Until now, they thought (as did we), that our information was safe. Apparently, we were both wrong. Google needs to change their policy on how they track their users. For one thing, Google needs to make sure that any information on their servers cannot track someone down. That means no IP address saving, no mailing address saving, no credit card saving, etc….Secondly, (this might just be a marketing ploy) but we want a user contract. We want to know what information you save, how you use it, and who has access to it.

Viacom is evil, but Google is now their tool. Google needs to eliminate the possibility that our information will be used to track us down. That doesn’t mean hiring better lawyers. It means stop saving our personal information.

Business Week and Michael Arrington are Wrong

Business Week and Michael Arrington have both predicted that any company competing in the smart phone market is in a lot of trouble this coming year. With the latest version of the iPhone coming out in July, both BW and Arrington think that Apple will dominate the space like they dominate the MP3 player industry with the iPod. I expect this from Business Week, whose analysis of the situation is based on Apple’s previous ability to come out with a revolutionary device and dominate the market. But I expect more foresight from Michael Arrington.

In the short term, yes, Apple will sell lots of iPhones. And yes, I will (eventually) be one of those buyers. But both BW and Arrington are missing the bigger picture. Apple’ s significant  achievement with the iPhone is the standards of services that users will expect from their smart phones. People want to organize their voicemail the way they see fit. People want to be able to install applications that others create for free. People want an easy way to see the web the way it was meant to be seen. These are all standards that other companies will adopt. With Google Android’s entrance into the marketplace, we’re going to see a lot of competitors to the iPhone in the next few years. All of which will provide those same high level of standards.

So let’s look 5 years down the line. Here are the potential options for businesses thinking about implementing a new smart phone service for all their employees:

Option A: Apple iPhone
Pros: It’s SO cool. The UI is gorgeous! I’ll be the cool one on the block. Web pages look great and the lack of keyboard is only annoying if I email a lot.

Cons: No QWERTY keyboard. It’s not focused solely on business.

Option B: RIM Blackberry
Pros: Device made just for business. Possibly cheaper than iPhone. Already have existing relationship with company. It’s got a QWERTY keyboard!

Cons: Not as cool as the iPhone. Web pages are viewed in mobile format.

Option C: Handset device with Google Android installed
Pros: Open system that allows companies to install company-related apps easily. Has many options for handsets depending on the user’s preference. Users can easily view web pages. Because of the many handset options, probably cheaper than the iPhone and Blackberry.

Cons: Handset and OS is coming from different companies. Not sure about others, but there will be a bunch.

With all these options, I think most businesses will go with B or C. The iPhone will be huge with consumers but Apple is going to have A LOT of competition in the business sector.

The Latest King

For all those who haven’t heard yet, Yahoo entered into a partnership with Google that will effectively make Google the ultimate king of search advertising (just in case it wasn’t before). Google can monetize search much better than any company on the planet. So even with Yahoo giving up a portion of their revenues to Google, they should still make more money than if they were doing it themselves.

So the obvious question here, is this a good thing? The obvious answer is NO! This deal eliminates any potential competition for Google in search marketing. A monopoly in any market is always bad.  On the other hand, this might not turn out badly for consumers or businesses. Dominance in technology is extremely hard to hold onto. Former incredibly dominant companies include Microsoft, Palm, AOL, Yahoo, Sony…do I need to go on? The bigger a company gets, the more of a target they become.

The majority of people started their experience with the web through AOL. People didn’t understand how the web worked. They just knew that they sign onto AOL and can email, chat, and do whatever else we all used to do on AOL. At some point, the majority gained a better understanding of the web and learned that they don’t need AOL to do what they want to do online. They can access the web through any ISP and get the same information. AOL, as a gateway, became pointless. Through Internet Explorer’s dominance/monopoly, users developed a similar relationship with IE. They felt that they can use any ISP but IE was their connection to the web. Users learned more, and now understand that any browser can get them there.

Google holds that place in the many user’s minds at this point in time. It’s a gateway to the information they want. Google, however, doesn’t hold that information. The information is out there for anyone to organize and spit back to us. Google’s algorithm is good when compared to it’s competitors, but it’s not SO much better. There is a very good chance that a competitor will come along in the next decade and show us how Google is a gateway, and we don’t need them to get the information we need. Check back for an update in 10 years. We’ll see if I was right.

Let My Data Go

The current disagreement between Facebook and Google brings to light the the bigger issue of data portability which was summed up quite well by Steve GIllmor over at Techcrunch. This is a HUGE issue which needs to start being talked about outside of the tech world. I’ll try to sum up the situation in simple terms for those who don’t know about it (or as my wife would put it, not as nerdy as me).

Your personal information is spread out all over the web. Your email provider has it, as well as other sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, WSJ, NYTimes, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc…). You might not be signed up to many sites where you have a username and password but you definitely have a few. What these sites did with your information could sometimes be ethically questionable. Some sites sold the ability to market to you (you might know it as junk mail or spam). Others were more responsible and kept the data private but might have kept your personal information on low security servers which made your information ripe for the hackers taking.

The problem here is that YOU did not control your data and how it was treated. And because every place that would need our information is now becoming digital, this lack of responsibility of managing our information is quite the cause for concern. Because of these issues, the idea of you having control over who has your personal information and what they do with it has become a popular concept called Data Portability. Here, watch a video.

This Data Portability issue is becoming a hot topic lately because of the Google-Facebook controversy. Google and Facebook both understand that users are going to start demanding their data be portable. So both companies create programs that allow you to take your information outside of their walled gardens. Regardless of whether you think it is within Facebook’s right to bar Google from using Facebook’s API, there is one thing we have to acknowledge. Neither company is providing true data portability. They’re just changing their walled gardens into walled tunnels that allow us to traffic what they feel we can share, not what we think we should share.

For too long, companies have made money off of our personal information. It’s about time companies are forced to provide good quality services to get our eyeballs/business. Feel free to support Google and Facebook’s new approach to letting data outside of their sites. But understand that this has to be just one step towards true data portability. Otherwise, our data is still held hostage by a corporation that is only interested in its own bottom line.

Google Launches Friends Connect

Yesterday Google announced a new initiative to bring our social connections outside of the stronghold of social networks. A video of how it works is embedded below

While we can see that concept of having one ID across the whole web is in its initial stages, I believe it can have significant impacts on businesses in the near future. I’ll discuss those in future posts.

Subway Search Car

The subway door opens and I step in the car with a swarm of other passengers. We all consciously and subconsciously adjust our body position to maximize our personal comfort as well as allow as much room as possible for other passengers. Like a can of sardines, the packed car rides to the next stop where some people get off, some people get on, and the process of reestablishment for personal space starts again.

This subway dance that I perform every morning (along with other NYers) reminds me of the current search market. We’re in between stops riding the packed train. We’ve got a huge fat man named Google who takes up most of the car, somewhat smaller men named Yahoo and Microsoft, and then a few skinny people on the side with the biggest being Ask.com.

We’re coming up to the next stop and something will change. Microsoft might still eat Yahoo (wait a couple months and they might rebid after the stock drops from shareholder lawsuits) and we’re all waiting for that new innovation in search. Whether Yahoo gets eaten, attaches itself to Google (they start dating and can stand closer to each other), or just withers away, there will some reorganization of space in this subway car in the near future. What we need is some new people to come in. We need innovation in this space. We need the next Google to compete with Google. I’m looking forward to the next stop.