Not a Fan of Ad Blockers

One of my friends was surprised when I told him that I don’t like ad blockers. For those who don’t know, ad blockers are little programs that block ads on web pages as you browse the web. These programs eliminate those annoying flash ads, pop-up ads, and general display ads that you find on almost every website nowadays. And the question I always get is why don’t I use one of these programs.

It’s a valid question. Considering I consider myself to be a consumer advocate, and these ads annoy the consumer, I should be fine with removing these ads. Well, I’m OK if others do it but I don’t want to do it for my own browsing. Here are my reasons.

1. I don’t want the filtered web

While I use Google News as my homepage, I check CNN many times during the day to get my news. I know I could create a personalized news page that caters to my interests, but I don’t want that. I don’t want my internet filtered. I want the news that is relevant to everyone. I don’t want them to tell me about the tech news and world news and not the entertainment news. Regardless of whether I care or not, if it’s important to make the front page of CNN, I want to hear about it.

This applies to more than news. I don’t like it how when I go to Amazon, my page is filled up with products similar to my previous purchases. Just because I recently bought a Malcolm Gladwell book doesn’t mean I want to buy his other books. I know this customization increases sales, but I don’t like it. I don’t want the customized filtered web. I want the best of the web. Not the best of the web that sites think is right for me.

2. Ads make the web better

Yes. I did just say that ads make the web better. They do so by allowing the free market to dictate what sites have good advertising (and by good I mean advertising that isn’t annoying to the consumer) and what don’t. If I go to a site and it has annoying bright flash ads I’m going to stop going. If enough people feel the same way, that site will fail. If I go to a site that has good ads (like reputable sites like the New York Times) then I’ll go more often (if the content is good) and thereby giving that site good traffic.

3. It’s my job

As a current/future web entrepreneur, I need to see what’s happening on the web and figure out the best business model for my business and my customers. If I block out the current system that is used by most websites, I won’t be able to see what is working and what isn’t. If you work for a web-based business, you shouldn’t be using ad blockers. You’re missing out on important research.

That’s it really. Ad blockers are great for some but I prefer the web unfiltered and choose to be a part of the free market that helps internet businesses succeed.

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.

This Website Looks Worried

People are wired/trained to recognize the the slightest emotion in the human face. The slightest curve of the lip, raise of the eyebrow, or furrowing of the brow implies a different mood. There isn’t one other part of the body that we can analyze as well as the human face. Why is that?

According to the Face Perception Wikipedia entry:

The face is an important site for the identification of others and conveys significant social information. Probably because of the importance of its role in social interaction, psychological processes involved in face perception are known to be present from birth, to be complex, and to involve large and widely distributed areas in the brain.

So we know we’re wired to be able to interpret the face with more complexity. Does that mean that we can explain those complex processes? I don’t think so. I can very easily tell when someone is worried but might have a hard time defining what aspects of their appearance makes me think they are worried. It’s our developed brains that can analyze faces but cannot always verbalize those analyses.

Let’s take this analogy to the evolution of web users. I personally could never stand MySpace. I didn’t know why. It just bothered me. I signed up once and after a week or so and then closed my account. I knew I couldn’t stand the design, but so many people loved it (they won’t admit it now). It was more than the design, however. There was something in my subconscious that was telling me that I don’t like this site. It was something that I wasn’t able to explain in words. I figured social networking just didn’t appeal to me. Then Facebook comes along, and after pushing off signing up for as long as possible, I signed up and I love it.

I still wonder why I have such an affinity for Facebook but still can’t stand MySpace. I think it goes beyond design. It’s a mixture of design, usability, accessibility, and overall usefulness. All these things, combined with some undefinable qualities, create a conscious and subconscious decision on whether I like a website. And while I’d like to think I was ahead of the curve disliking MySpace, I think any new website has to deal with the refined tastes of web users. We analyze websites like we analyze faces. It’s hard for us to tell why in particular we don’t like or use a specific site. It’s just a feeling that we get. Some sites just make us want to use them. This is what developers should be working towards. They should be looking to find those key elements that unlock the “favorable” opinion in our minds. A lot has to do with design. A lot has to do with usability, accessibility, and usefulness. But there is more there that a developer needs to capture in the user’s mind. I know what it is but can’t put it into words. If it was definable, then everyone’s site would be successful.

The Road that Requires Less Travel

I started my summer internship this morning. My commute has gone from an hour trip on a comfortable coach bus to an hour trip on crowded trains and buses. It’s amazing what a difference that has on my level of energy at the end of the day. An uncomfortable commute can add unnecessary stress and anxiety to an already busy day. I’ll survive. Just like every other New Yorker does. But I do think this situation can be applied to the web.

Sometimes, what makes a web service or website successful is not how great the marketing was or how many glowing reviews it got. Many times, it comes down to the travel the user has to take. How intuitive and quickly can the user do what they want to do on your site? If sites can offer their services as quickly and as easily as possible to their users, they’ll be ahead of most of the sites and services that we see on the web. We want simplicity and ease-of-use and reward those who give it to us.

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.

The Web 2.0 Civil War

I’ve been noticing a lot of battles amongst Web 2.0 giants lately. Let’s just take a look at a few of them:

• Microsoft’s battle to buy Yahoo (now it’s more like Yahoo’s battle to be bought by Microsoft)
• eBay’s battle with Craigslist
• Michael Arrington’s battle with Wired
• and more recently, Google’s battle with Facebook

What I find most interesting about these battles is that, only recently, are we seeing the dark side of business with some Web 2.0 darlings. eBay and Craigslist! They’re such good companies that have helped consumers communicate and get better prices for their goods. Why are they fighting? Well, it’s because eBay bought 25% of Craigslist and then launched a competing service. What about Michael Arrington and Wired? Well, Techcrunch is going to be syndicated at the Wall Street Journal website and Wired is pissed about it.

What is comes down to is that none of these companies (even Craigslist) is about anything other than money. Each company has its own agenda and it all comes down to dollars and cents. Find me one successful web 2.0 company that seems to be altruistic in its ways and I’ll show you how all they’re doing is focusing on the $$$. You have to love capitalism.

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.

Information Overload

I saw Iron Man this weekend. I definitely recommend the movie, but this is not a review. The part of the movie that got me thinking the most was the previews. The good previews are the ones that give us a brief explanation of the story without giving away any plot twists or the ending. The bad movie preview is the one where they give us a recap of the entire movie so you know the basic beginning, middle, and end, without having to see the movie. In other words, there is a formula and this movie follows it. Now while I like to see good movies, I like to see bad movie previews. The reason being, is that usually bad movie previews are for bad movies. And now I know the whole movie plot, so I don’t need to see it to know what happens.

I think the average person is expected to absorb more information now than ever in history. Because of the ease of finding information, we’re exposed to more information, and thereby required to know more to be accepted. Whether it is in a social setting or business setting, you’ve got to have mental access to lots of info.

So how do we deal with this information requirement? Blogs have helped. They’ve consolidated important news into niche chunks that we can absorb in small segments and get overall knowledge of an industry or topic. RSS feed readers have helped consolidate the blogs into one central location but it’s still a challenge to absorb all this information. I think the answer lies in the formula. Movies have formulas. Why can’t other types of mental input have formulas as well. I think to some degree they do, and it’s important that bloggers, or other information-deliverers, use the bad movie preview approach when delivering this information. By providing us with our the overall gist of a concept that we can fit into a standard mental formula, then we can extrapolate information from the post without reading it. That would save time and provide a mechanism to improve memory retention.

I think I’ve developed a mental formula for the majority of Techcrunch posts which talk about Web 2.0 companies. That allows me to skim them and still retain the information (most of the time). I’m not sure if this mental formula can be created for any type of medium after repeated use. What I do know is that this formula creation is extremely important for my own personal knowledge absorption.