Monica Lam argues that centralized social networks like Facebook trap users in restrictive systems that control their data, while decentralized alternatives like email and phone networks let people own their information and switch services freely. She contrasts social intranets with social internets, examining how platform monopolies limit choice.
Chapters
So what is social as we know it? Hmm, how many people are on Facebook? Maybe I should ask how many people are not on Facebook. All right, so you now— so you all know social as we know it, okay, you know what that means. So let me put on the computer science hat, And I would say that from a computer science perspective, the way we build these social networks these days is a little bit sad and embarrassing because what we have today are these centralized cloud services. In order for you to share, you sign up and you say, here is my data, Facebook or any other social network, please take my data and share it for me, okay. So this is— these are centralized services. The computer science researchers have spent lots of time distributed computing so people can own their different data and then they can share from different sources, but somehow that's not the kind of systems we have today. So we have all these centralized services and these are what we call social intranets as opposed to social internets. What are social intranets? You know when you say if you sign up to work for a company, you fill out a form and then you say, look, all my intellectual property belongs to the company and that's called the intranet in a sense, all the materials available if you are an employee inside the company. But to some extent, the social networks that we have today are intranets because there is a long EULA. How many people read the EULA? Oh my, you know what the EULA says, right? I mean, they own the data, they can do whatever they wish with it, and by the way, it doesn't really matter if you read it or not because they can, they reserve the right to change the EULA anytime, so. But anyway, there is such a thing as social internet. Have you seen any social internets before? What do you think? Anybody? Could there be such a thing? Actually, you've been using both two very famous social internets. One is email, all right, because with email you can pick the provider of the email service and you can interoperate with each other. There are 3 giants for the consumer email services. There's Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. I mean these are the huge giants. They may, you know, they provide you a free service, they may monetize the data, but you have a choice. And at the same time universities can pick up and can put up their own, companies can put up their own, individuals can even put up their own, and you have a choice between paid and free services and they all interoperate and that's called social internet. Another example of a social internet is a telephone system, because I may be on Verizon and you may be on AT&T, we can still talk to each other. We don't have to say you have to join the same network before I can call you, okay. So these are social internets, but with these centralized services we have, we have these proprietary systems, we have these proprietary social networks today. From this proprietary social networks we have these proprietary app platforms. How many people have heard of FarmVille. All right. FarmVille is very, very successful. It's a game from Zynga and by using the Facebook network they grew really, really quickly. And so when a social network like Facebook puts out these app platforms it is very, very attractive to a lot of companies, you know. So for that they do have to pay and some, you know, before they IPO, Facebook turned to them and they say, oh, for the service you have to give us 30% of your revenues, okay. What is 30% of your revenues? It turns out for that quarter, I don't know if you can see it, they reported like a drop of 95% of their profits. Okay, that is pretty steep because these are revenues and not just profits. Is that a fair number? Possibly, all right? I mean they really owed it to Facebook in a sense to get that big really quickly, so that may be a fair number. What is the right number anyway? Well, it really depends on the market usually, the market determines the number. What if a social network turns around and says I really want 60%? Is that fair? Well, it really depends on whether there is a market or whether there is a choice. If Zynga doesn't want to go with Facebook, do they have a choice to go to? And whether there is a choice determines the money, determines the price if there is an open market. But if you don't have an open market, if we, for example, have a monopoly, then it will be controlled by a single company, okay? So it's a little bit concerning for some of us.
