edgepolitics

Although Web leviathans like YouTube, MySpace and Facebook all clearly leverage aspects of the many-to-many/ peer-to-peer trend, they also usurp and plunder the power freely given by their users via constraining them inside the legacy client-server system of the web. The difficulty is, that in the web-context, the P2P meme’s pluralistic tendencies, as is obvious on sites like 'The P2P Foundation' (of which I am a member) tend to see the term 'P2P' applied in ever increasing ways, arguably diluting some of its power and potential, and its valid identity as a technical-system born of the Internet that actually predates 'The Web' by about 20 years.

A more objective Value-Axis of the Internet?

From where I stand there is a clear ‘value-axis’ existing on the Internet, and a rather peculiar ‘Cargo-Cult’ type adherence to a dominant cultural meme called “The Web” which as a term is used too often interchangeably with the term “Internet”. This simple semantic muddle must end, as it is the source of a lot of confused reasoning.

There are three primary components in a value-axis of the Internet, Connectivity, Communications and Transactions. Of these three, Connectivity is the most fundamental, with the next most fundamental factor being Communications and then Transactions with all other general applications, (information, entertainment, blogs, websites, web2.0 etc) sitting above these three. This simple taxonomy ranks factors in terms of which is more primary in its ability to ‘enable’ the others.

Websites, Portals (Facebook, MySpace, Saleforce, etc) are at the upper end of this scale of importance. (ie least fundamental) This does not mean to imply that consumer or business websites and ASP-based web-services are not important, but rather that as a rule these sites function atop a foundation of established connectivity, communications and transaction protocols, and are not in themselves ‘fundamental’ in the sense that they exclusively enable higher applications.

The Web itself sits on layer 2, ‘Communications’. After all, the Web, for all the hype associated with it, really just resembles a massive Amusement Park accessed by obtaining a ‘Browser’ ticket. In other words the Browser is your ticket, and you ride this communication platform which is actually built on the more fundamental Connectivity layer. Its no secret where the value truly resides in this mega-market duality. Browsers are free, Connectivity you pay for, and the ‘Attention Economy’ (acknowledgement to Umair Haque) sits like an ecosystem above all that, with Google currently at the top of the food-chain.

In his illuminating article ‘Content is Not King’ written in 2001, Andrew Odlyzko nailed it with prescient clarity, even though he, like so many, has used the term Internet, when he could well have been referring to the Web.

“The Internet is widely regarded as primarily a content delivery system. Yet historically, connectivity has mattered much more than content. Even on the Internet, content is not as important as is often claimed, since it is e-mail that is still the true "killer app."
- Andrew Odlyzko, First Monday: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/

Email (by the way) has the same status as the Web, it is a communication platform on layer two. Andrew Odlyzko does not distinguish between Communications and Connectivity. In his article referred to above, they are to all intents and purposes the same, yet his message is clear. Its the connectivity between people that is more fundamental (and valued) than the content exchanged.

The Web and the Internet are not interchangeable concepts

So we need to appreciate that the internet and the World Wide Web are quite different things. The internet is a network that is in fact a loose array of interconnected networks. The Web has been superimposed on this global network, and is the dominant overlay-system, but it is not the only possible system that can utilize that network. The web has allowed many hundreds of millions of people to download information from ‘servers’ via protocols like DNS, (domain name system) and communicate between each other via email by use of DNS and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol). However these protocols, serve to lock users into the ‘client’ paradigm where ‘clients’ have to accept the terms of the businesses that control the web servers. This system also helps to make the Web and email systems vulnerable to a wide array of security problems. Albert Benschop pulls back the curtains in this slightly ominous description.

“The exponential growth and far-reaching commercialization of the web have lead to an ever-stronger manifestation of the power structures of society in the virtual world. At present specialized computers channel the data traffic on the Internet and portals and search machines such as AOL, Google and Yahoo! dominate and exploit the market of the internet-dollars. Strongly concentrated hubs have arisen that play a crucial role in the Internet traffic. They are monster-servers, diverting their information to millions of regular web-users.”
- Albert Benschop, Peculiarities of CyberSpace- University of Amsterdam

The client/server paradigm of the World Wide Web, overlaid on the internet in the late 1980‘s, with its multiple layers of servers sitting on their underlying enabling protocols (DNS, SMTP, FTP etc) represented, at the time, a ground-breaking innovation and has gone on to become a global phenomenon. However, as the Web has grown, its hierarchical structure, identity and addressing protocols have also facilitated many of its almost intractable negative externalities.


For all the web’s vulnerabilities to attack and corruption, there is considerable ‘lock-in’ to WWW legacy systems, with the marketplace in general having built up a history of blind-acceptance trust and familiarity with it’s processes. This is a large part of the conundrum typified in the usual search for solutions to the web’s problems.

Projects like APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language), BCCF (the Buyer Centric Commerce Forum) and Project VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) are all well intentioned projects by switched-on people who want to do something about the inherent inequities and privacy problems of the web, and are arguably contained within this larger P2P pluralism. But… with the greatest respect, they all miss the point. Doing it actually ‘on the Web’, is self-defeating because its not a level playing field. There’s an orthodoxy present on the Web as dominant as the Catholic Church during the middle ages.

This is where an understanding of the pure definition of P2P, as it has developed on the Internet, may provide an instructive counter-weight, and clues to dealing with the over-hyped and over-rated orthodoxies of the web.

The term P2P already carries significant baggage in many people’s minds, as it is often associated with the illegal sharing of MP3 music files, software and movies on the Internet. However, the term in its usual Internet context in fact only means ‘peer-to-peer’ and the definition of a ‘peer’ is non-specific. In fact, P2P means many different things to different people.


Communication applications like email and ‘Instant Messaging’ (IM) are sometimes referred to as P2P or being closely related, because they are ‘user-to-user’ services. To make matters more confusing, the Banking and Finance industries use the term P2P to indicate ‘person-to-person’ financial transactions like those made through ‘Western Union’, and more recently, the internet payment service PayPal has been designated by the Banks as falling into this category. So when mainstream media or file-sharers and ‘geeks’ refer to P2P, they are talking about ‘network and device functionality’, but when Banks talk about ‘P2P’ they are talking about ‘people transferring money to each other, outside of the Banking system’.

All of the definitions indicate an increasing orientation toward a kind of ‘one-to-one’ connectivity rather than the one-to-many model of traditional media, ‘broadcast-television’ or the client/server paradigm of the WWW. The P2P meme also has a societal meaning in that it implies a cooperative approach to social-networking and commercial activity demonstrated in new forms of group-association and collective publishing on the internet. The ‘Wiki’ and the ‘Open-Source-Software’ movement being good examples of this broad trend. Michel Bauwens, in his work, ‘P2P and Human Evolution’ defines P2P as: “a form of human network-based organisation which rests upon the free participation of equipotent partners” This, could be called the ‘many-to-many’ movement, because it is one-to-one, on a mass scale.

The social phenomenon of P2P usage that is gaining strength on the internet, is a kind of pluralistic global super-community with a theoretically unlimited number of widely dispersed users. To join this community is to subscribe to a system of shared resources and distributed ownership, where all users contribute their own capital resource, their computer and processing power, to the open community. For internet users, being part of this new phenomenon is an innately communal and social process.

The thing that is often overlooked is that some of the biggest successes on the web, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook for instance, are facilitating aspects of the many-to-many/peer-to-peer movement, but doing so within the constraints of the client-server system of the web. This produces a weird kind of asymmetry. The users are creating the content, and the web vendors are trying to keep the genie in the bottle. Its all about control... When users are finally given the keys to the toy cupboard, I don't think they will want to give them back.

I have come to the conclusion that, far from liberating consumer's and businesses, the whole 'Software as a Service' movement, is inherently disempowering to users.



Firstly, some definitions. In referring to 'Software as a Service' (SaaS) I include Application Service Providers (ASP's) because, although the ASP model is seen as inferior in service to the more recent SaaS model, they both essentially do the same thing... they process data outside the client's PC as a service. This idea has steadily gained momentum and along the way has become associated with 'Web2.0-Think'. Tim O'Reilly et all, talk of 'Web as a Platform' and 'Software above the Level of a Single Device' and consequently, ideas like this have been jumped on by companies like Microsoft who have tried to co-opt the movement by coining new cool sounding terms like CloudOS which is really just another Microsoft euphemism for continued world domination... Visualize Steve Ballmer chanting:"developers, developers developers, developers!"



The anomaly that I see, is that the broad SaaS trend is fundamentally at odds with the massive investment consumers and businesses have made and continue to make in computer processing power, and Web2.0's 'Architecture of Participation' is built on that processing power. The extent to which the Web2.0 movement have actually embraced the SaaS model as serving some undeniable user benefit is unclear and therefore to assume so, could potentially be misreading the situation. However, the reason I am drawing the parallels here is that it is an issue that needs to be cleared up. 'Software as a Service' inherently serves the interests of vendors as much as, if not more than end-users by attempting to make users dependent on licensing technology and services rather than owning them and maintaining those competencies in-house. Chris Anderson and Tim O'Reily et al talk of the 'Long Tail'... Steve Ballmer talks of "selling to the Long Tail".

In my view, this goes all the way back to Hotmail. In the early days people used a hotmail account only when traveling or for non important or 'anonymous' email. Of course many students and ordinary folk used hotmail as their primary email account and that fed its stunning growth. However, it was also a curse, as I noted in an earlier post (Putting P2P in Perspective - April 22 2006) even Bill Gates freely admitted that:

"...over half of what goes through (the hotmail servers) is actually mail that's spam that people are not interested in receiving.” - Bill Gates

The trouble is now, as I found out the other day when helping a friend with her new Mac, that webmail is the only kind of email that some people know about. My friend simply had no idea that there was any other kind of email! She has never used a proper email program, has never had a proper email address and had no idea what I was talking about when I said:

"With a real email program, you download your email and it stays on your computer, including the files you receive, like pictures, PDFs etc. So, you don't have to go online to review all the emails you have received"

She had no idea... To her, when you check email, you have to go online and log onto Hotmail and that is the only way to get email or to review old emails. She is clearly not an early adopter, obviously. She in fact is what marketers call "a lagard", but if you look at the product adoption curves for market growth on the web you will know that she is far from alone. This is where the disparity becomes evident. She is able to afford the latest iMac, (easily) but the little 'Mail' icon in the tool bar is a foreign area for her. She's got an abundance of processing power and storage space, she only ever checks email from that PC, but the market has trained her to depend on a third party for a service as basic as email... I think she has been disadvantaged.

Now, consider Salesforce.com and such sites. They want everyone to throw away their in-house software and migrate on mass to the quasi 'thin-client' approach and use their software instead of yours. This trend is pushed heavily by web2.0 entrepreneurs and the venture capital industry because its a business model that keeps 'control' with the vendor and keeps the client having to come back time and time again to that vendor for a service that in earlier models may have meant sporadic or once-only purchases. It also provides the 'multiplier' to shore-up the business model. So, where does the benefit really lie, and who's really driving this model, consumers or vendors?

The 'Software as Service' doctrine is that it is a: "low-cost way for businesses to obtain the same benefits of commercially licensed, internally operated software without the associated complexity and high initial cost." (wikipedia) However, in many ways its a model that is also at odds with the service enabled by P2P applications like Skype, where users individually and collectively power the software that underwrites the service. This undeniable trend (eDonkey, Limewire, Bittorent) is pointing in the opposite direction, as it utilizes each consumer's capital outlay in PC processing power and bandwidth. So... What is so 'web2.0' about Software as Service? This is web2.0 vendors in service of themselves, arguably.

There's a kind of brand-dilution that occurs when previously user-centric sites like StumbleUpon and YouTube get swallowed up by the likes of EBuy and Gobble. The valuations, and prices paid for these sites are so high, that the new bean counters inevitably force the introduction of advertising that essentially breaks the site's unwritten contract with users. - Its been creeping in over at YouTube since the purchase, but everyone expected that. However, EBuy is making a mess of it over at StumbleVideo, because the whole proposition is more delicate... Users expect relevance.

Gambling ads??? Gee I don't remember clicking 'gambling' when I set my Stumble preferences... and of course I did not; and those 4 and 4.5 star recommendations for "as she did not wear anything" and "beautiful women"... seem a bit weird. Is this the same StumbleUpon that received such rave reviews and quadrupled its user base in 2006? Well, yes and no... Same company, but after a US$75M purchase by Ebay, it has a new style and agenda. Their wikipedia entry which sounds a lot like it was written in-house, may need some updating:

"StumbleUpon uses knowledge of user preferences to deliver targeted advertising. A small proportion of the 'stumbles' users come across (typically less than 2%) are sponsored pages matching their topics of interest. For example, those signed up for photography will occasionally see an ad related to photography. Such content is vetted by humans for "quality and relevance" prior to its delivery."

Just like the sudden emphasis on aggressively building the user-base, the company is stretching the truth and the friendship with their users.


"The more friends you have using StumbleUpon, the more new websites you'll discover"... Well, actually, Ebuy... that's not quite true. Bringing friends to StumbleUpon has no direct correlation with one's chance of discovering new sites, but it will help Ebay sell more advertising on the site. However, Ebay has already started soiling their own nest by allowing cheap and crass ads to break with the sites established collaborative filtering promise that user's have become accustomed to, and which is alluded to on the wikipedia page "StumbleUpon uses knowledge of user preferences to deliver targeted advertising"

This is a sell-out, and a dangerous one. It risks alienating the existing user-base, and it dilutes the brand. The same phenomenon is of course occurring over at YouTube. In trying to achieve ROI, Ebuy and Gobble, leave themselves open for inevitable disruption.

Clayten Christensen is fond of quoting ice skating legend Wayne Gretzky, who apparently attributed his luck with the puck to "Skating to where the puck is going, not where it is". In other words Gretzky watched the pattern of the game being played and felt confident to predict the probability of the puck's movement, spilling out from a pack of skaters.

Christensen uses this as a metaphor for spotting opportunities for innovation in business, and of course specifically to explain why some people see an opportunity for a (potentially) disruptive innovation where other people presumably see... zip.

This metaphor has stuck in my mind ever since hearing Christensen explain it a few years ago. When you truly start to focus on the challenge of implementing a 'disruptive strategy', all sorts of strange things start to happen. Firstly, you instinctively begin to disassociate yourself from the status quo, because the herd can not by definition be following the same scent as you, can they? No.. they are skating to where the puck is... and there they are, as plain as day, reveling in it.

But you don't want to go where these guys are going, because the laugh you want is the last one... and you know that it is like a science. Its a discipline. It's achievable.