I drew this little diagram just now…
It seems Facebook tweaked their newsfeed again. The New Yorker wrote a nice piece about it.
It got me thinking…
When I first encountered the ‘Net (as we called it back then) back in the early ‘nineties, the Net was this big vast whatsit, growing out 360 in all directions, like a never-ending Rhododendron. Some branches were mighty, some were mere twigs, but you get the idea.
In order to make sense of this unending, 360-degree vastness, we develped tools to corral everything into a more manageble dimention. We changed the angle from 360-Everywhere, to the far more manageble single up-down axis, i.e., The Stream.
So suddenly the ‘Net only had two dimensions- up and down, just like the scroll bar on our computers. First this happened on our own single blogs, then we started bundling everybody else’s blogs into RSS readers… Google Reader most famously. So we now had this macro-stream, as it were. Lots of blogs as tributaries, all flowing into the mighty Google Reader equivalent of the Amazon river.
I worked pretty well, but it was still big and clunkly. It took forever. Writing blogs is hard work. Bundling together in RSS readers is a pain in the butt.
So eventually some clever dickies managed to create a single stream service that bundled everything together in a single web address- without anyone having to create their own blog.
One stream to rule them all. Call it the Uberstream. Highly networked and efficient, it worked well, it was fast and easy. The trouble is, they wanted to own everything. The content, the photos, the URL address, everything.
This Uberstream was otherwise known as Facebook.
Sure, there are other big streams in the mix, doing the same thing- Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Myspace, Tumblr etc.
But Facebook is the grandaddy of them all. One billion people on it. It is vast. It is the Goliath. It is THE Uber.
It’s business model is obvious to even somebody who doesn’t care: By coralling the social part of the Net into their private Uberstream, it’s hoping to turn us all into digital sharecroppers, somehow. And sell our sharecroppery goodness to whoever wants to pay for it. Goverments, big business, entrepreneurs and nosey people. I actually don’t know the whole story, they’re kinda opaque about it.
And they have to reamin opaque. Now that Facebook a public company, it has no choice. All those people who paid their billions in order to get their piece of the Facebook IPO action, are expecting a BIG return.
The other folks I mentioned- Twitter & Co, will try to do the same thing, the minute they can. They also have investors and shareholders. Their snouts are already in the trough as well. It’s much of a muchness.
Conclusion? In less than a decade, The Stream went from mostly communal property to mostly monopoly. Somebody else owns it, and it ain’t us. Unless we change our minds, get off our butts and do something. Which seems unlikely for most people.
So now you’re thinking, Oh Heck! We should be worried!
Don’t be.
The thing is, Facebook actually doesn’t matter. You, your freinds and the things that you share with each matter, the matter. And that’s the way it’s always been. facebook cannot change that.
Facebook is just an easily replaced moddleman, same as the other Ubers. The Stream is a nice metaphor, a nice way to electronically curate and organize our lives and all the vastness around us. But nobody actually has to own it. Not really.
Which is why Facebook and its Uber cousins now spend so much time trying to re-jig their newsfeeds, their terms of service, their designs, their list of products, or their whatever.
Becasue the reality is, they can’t own it. The Internet will always (successfully) try to build around that which (unsuccesfully) tries to own it. But the Ubers of the world also can’t let anybody else know, that they know, that they can’t own it.
Because the aforementioned snouts in the trough will be angry. And all those amazing fortunes amassed recently will become less amazing, both quantitively and qualitively. And then heads will roll.
Yes, tt’s a messy business. The only question is what do YOU want to do about it.
