Facebook Buys Instagram

How to think about this : 

1) Facebook is in the face recognition business. (They run algorithms on all the photos posted to them)

2) Facebook (as all the big social network are) is in the "find where people are" business. ("locative services")

You don't even have to go conspiracy theorist (Facebook part owned by the CIA) to see that Instagram gives Facebook another massive injection of photo data about who is where with who and when. And that this can be mined for all sorts of valuable information and patterns.

FB can discover relationships between people and places that no-one has explicitly told them about. They can tell advertisers where you like to hang-out socially. And who with. You think they aren't trying "sentiment analysis" to try to figure out whether people in photos are happy or sad? What's it worth to FB to know which bars in London have the happiest customers? Or which companies have the most drunken
employees? Or that you like motorcycles?

Google are after this data too. That's why they just brought out  wearable "glasses" that can tell Google what you're looking at. Instagram might very well be Facebook's response in the "grab" for rich visual data streams.

Some people are noting the potential threat to FB from Pinterest too and saying this is a defensive move. Today is a great day for Pinterest. Someone will be trying to snap that up soon.

Dare Obasanjo on walled gardens and the social network os

It's the usual stuff ... (same as I was discussing with Umair some time ago)

Of course, Facebook and its ecosystem failed to find the value that I presumed that private networks could provide. And now looks to be in trouble. Does this mean I was wrong?

I don't know ... no one is doing what I thought they'd do ... but I still can't shake off the feeling that it's possible.

We'll see ...

ZDNet is calling this Browser Wars 2.0 ...

I've been saying that browsers are not (and shouldn't be thought of) as a site for strategic competition. But it looks as though I may be wrong on this one.

The reason I thought that there was no room for competition there, is that I saw (and still see) standards (HTML, Javascript, CSS) rather than differentiation as dominating. There's no mileage in a slightly different HTML or scripting language.

All web-applications want to be runable on all browsers ... anything else is just suicide. And all browsers want to be able to run all applications ... and so ...

But I underestimated the part about a better experience for the users which isn't related to the browser content. Browser features such as speed, privacy, off-line caching, new UIs such as Enso-like "ubiquity". All the browser makers have demonstrated that they can create some excitement in these areas.

Also, what's becoming clearer is that "privacy modes" can disrupt the kind of cookie tracking which allows, say Google, to serve relevant adverts, which makes browser innovation in this area a direct attack on Google's revenue. (And so also makes us realize how much of an interest Google have here.)

So, I think I was still right about standards in web content (at least for the moment). But as the browser really starts to replace the desktop operating system it takes over a whole lot of other responsibilities as well. And there's clearly some room for differentiation there.

Alexander van Elsas seems an intriguingly good blogger.

Read these three stories :

On Skype, iPhone, FriendFeed and suitability of technology to application

A new generation wants to return to privacy, and applications that require privacy? (Another example I'd identify with the coming netocracy).

Note criticism of Facebook's failure to protect privacy. This is far more damaging to Facebook's platform aspirations than criticisms of its lack of openness.

Joshua Allen responds to Marc Andreesen's types of platform.

He says the new platforms are about "data". That's rather like Tim OReilly's "Data Inside" aspect of his web 2.0 definition.

But a) it's not the whole story. And b) it leads to demands for "opening" the platform by making the data migratable.

It's not the whole story because, in addition to data the's user, her social connections and social conventions are the platform. When you think about it, this is true even with Windows, which is why UI consistency is such an important part of a platform.

On social platforms, the lock-in comes not from just having the data walled up in your silo. It also comes from your network being the place where people tend to do X. And if, on somebody else's platform, people don't tend to do X, then they won't shift the X-related applications over.

Because of his "open-data" perspective, Allen, I think, under-estimates the importance of the hosting issue, although he understands it perfectly well.

It's obvious what benefit a Ning or Salesforce.com would get from keeping your data and code on their servers; it's less obvious what the benefit to you is. There are only two real reasons such an arrangement would be a benefit for you :

If your data, aggregated with data from lots of other customers of the provider, can provide some additional intelligence.

If the provider gets dramatic economies of scale beyond what you could get on your own. In the case of a Ning or a Salesforce.com, this one is dubious. There are only a handful of companies who buy electricity and bandwidth in enough volume to offer hosting cheaper than Amazon. Companies like Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft.

This is the same debate that's had around Software-as-a-service. It's that "additional intelligence" which is the killer thing that social platforms can offer : doing stuff with social data that cuts across users and across applications. That's why Amazon's database is so much more valuable than everyone hosting their own "I bought and like this book". It can figure out the most popular or "readers who bought X also bought Y".

Yes, theoretically, "scutter" applications can run around a widely distributed microformats, but my bet is that the difference in efficiency and difference in privacy control is actually so great, quantitatively, that it can lead to qualitative differences of application.