Like a lot of people today, I’m completely delighted by Maciej’s post “The Social Graph Is Neither” over on the Pinboard blog. (Pinboard, by the way, is one of Stikki’s big influences; if we’re the Arcade Fire, they’re that really crappy period in late 80s music when Jeff Lynne was overproducing post-relevance albums by Boomer icons. Okay, maybe that’s not the best analogy, but you get my meaning. Or maybe you don’t.)
For someone who’s building a nominally social web app, it may surprise you to learn that I actually deeply mistrust social networks, mostly for the reasons Maciej lays out: the lack of human ambiguity in defining relationships, the irritation of having to go and sort out all of your friend lists and such every time a new network pops up; but primarily, for me, it’s the deep knowledge I feel in my bones, every time I’m on Facebook, that I am not the customer; I am the product being sold.
There are two measures of any and every social network’s value: the value to you, the user, and the value to whoever is actually writing checks. Rarely, in this age of “free” services and content, is this the same person.
You and I find Facebook valuable because we can do…well, because we can do all the stuff we think Facebook is for, like inviting people to parties and posting pictures of our cats and engaging in gleeful schadenfreude as we see how fat our exes have become. But that’s not what Facebook is really for, of course. Facebook is a honeypot that offers you something tasty (parties, cats, the vicarious enjoyment of an old flame’s struggle with morbid obesity) in return for the opportunity to sell all of your data to someone else: what bands you like, what shows you watch, what clothes you excitedly post about buying (OMG I just got the hawtest Manolos!!!!).
There’s a lot of talk about privacy and the lack thereof on social networks, but I don’t think “privacy” is precisely what we mean, at least in the traditional sense. Nobody who posts every detail of their life on Facebook is particularly concerned with privacy as it’s commonly understood; what we’re really worried about is not that our personal information is out there in the world, but who’s seeing it and who’s using it. We want everybody to see our party pictures, but we don’t want anybody to run a pattern recognition algorithm that figures out who’s in the pictures, what brands they’re wearing, and files it away for future reference. We want to talk on Twitter about our new toys, but we don’t want to get fifty spam tweets on how to win a free iPad just because, y’know, I just happened to use the word “iPad” in a goddamn tweet when I was sitting at Starbucks last Thursday morning. For example.
I also deeply mistrust anyone and everyone who tells you that this is fine, it’s just the way things are now and if you don’t buy into it you’re a dinosaur and Old Media and yadda yadda yadda. Never, ever forget that most of these people benefit somehow, directly or indirectly, from the social networks. Their reassurances are as meaningless as those of 1950s TV network executives telling their audience that no, of course it’s fine that Johnny watches TV from the time he gets home from school until the time the test pattern pops up and the national anthem begins to play! That’s just how kids are these days! What are you, a Communist?
As someone who is developing a social app, this is something I actually devote a lot of consideration to. I tend to take the long, wide view on things, and one of the questions I ask myself whenever I try to do something new is: is this a good thing to do? Not just for me, but for everybody? Am I making something that’s useful, or am I just adding to the bullshit in the world? I don’t always follow this precept, but I always at least ask myself the question. Call it self-important or naive if you like, but that’s the way I think.
Stikki is a commercial venture, which means it ought to make money. In order to do that, I have two options: 1) charge people for it, or 2) let people use it for free and figure out another way to make money from it. I have, so far, chosen the latter path, for all the obvious reasons — people don’t pay for stuff on the Internet, yadda yadda yadda.
However, this puts me in a quandary: how do I make money off Stikki without selling out my users? And I have devoted more mental CPU cycles to this than almost anything else as part of creating Stikki.
My first and most important decision was this, and this will stand as long as I am in charge of Stikki: I do not give my sponsors any personally identifiable information about my users. Ever. If a sponsor wants to know what you’re stikki-ing, they can look at your public profile just like everyone else. I do provide sponsors with a lot of usage metrics (mostly geolocational, like where their ads are actually physically being viewed from), but none of them can be directly traced back to you. I plan to do a good deal of data-mining and things like keyword matching (i.e. the sponsor ads you see are based on the content of your stikkis), but it’s all automated and anonymous and leaves no breadcrumbs for unscrupulous marketers to follow.
If Facebook had done this, it never would have left Zuckerberg’s dorm room, because — quite frankly — Facebook’s entire business model is based on selling its users out. But I’m not Facebook, and for Stikki sponsors, the value of a consumer is not who they are but where they are. My model is not competitive with Facebook’s, it’s totally orthogonal, with a totally different sponsor/advertiser target audience. There’s a lot to this, and I’m not quite ready to share it all yet, but I think I’ve managed to side-step a lot of the privacy and personal marketing issues entirely while still providing immense value for my sponsors.
I’m gambling that sponsors will understand that, when they see the way Stikki’s sponsorship model works. These are new ideas, and people have to get used to them. But I’m confident that they will. And if I do succeed, I hope that other people will start trying to find ways to benefit both sides of the equation — the people who use the networks, and the people who pay for them — without selling either side down the river.
