Lately there’s been a lot of privacy backlash over Facebook making a lot of information public by default. But one question that’s getting lost in the controversy deserves more attention. Why are they doing it?

I was lucky enough to be at a semantic web conference just after Facebook unleashed its new Graph API. What Facebook has done, for those who aren’t familiar, is changed Facebook interests and “likes” into links. So now, instead of having a list of movies and hobbies you like, your profile now links to pages for Cooking and The Godfather.

Cooking has more friends than you do

These pages are wrappers of the same information that was on Wikipedia, IMDB and elsewhere, but with likes and wall posts added. If you click on some of the Wikipedia links, you’ll get taken not to Wikipedia, but to another Facebook page that wraps it. Facebook may be using Wikipedia’s content, but the experience and the information is controlled by Facebook and stays on facebook.com.

Facebook isn’t interested in (just) becoming an encyclopedia of things, though. Facebook is interested in becoming an encyclopedia of you. All of your interests and likes are now linked, via FB, to wrapper pages that Facebook manages. Facebook is the centralized database that stores all that information.

This is how Facebook sees you. From F8 developer conference.

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Is having an open graph everywhere inevitable?

The four founders of Diaspora, in an appropriately indie band pose.

At the same time that Facebook was transforming their site into a database of everyone, a group of four NYU college students got a writeup from the New York Times. Their project, called Diaspora, was (is) to make your personal encyclopedia entry private, so you can control your information and how it gets accessed.

But while people donated nearly 200 thousand dollars to their project, and much ink was spilled over how much Facebook was now sharing about us, one might argue that the change to a public graph a la Facebook is inevitable. After all:

• Many, some at Facebook, some elsewhere, have argued that privacy is less important to members of Generation Y.
• Plus, having a shared social graph is clearly better than one where you can’t see any of the nodes, right? Once we see how useful it is to share the music we like and the news we’re interested in through the graph, we won’t want to turn back.

There are two forces that will decide this future: developers and you, the user.

Developers matter

You may have noticed recently that a huge number of sites – CNN, Pandora, the New York Times and others – have started spouting Facebook like buttons. Some other sites have included ways to login using Facebook itself, making you verify your identity by using your Facebook information.

Websites do this because it makes things easier. People are (arguably) more likely to login to CNN using Facebook than entering their email address, setting yet another password that could be forgotten, and checking their email for some confirmation link they have to click on. The added convenience makes it worth it to connect CNN to your real name and identity. For some people at least.

Web developers are the key to this, because we end up building the technology that decides if our sites are linked through Facebook or not. And, frankly: There are few good alternatives to Facebook.

For login, there are simply no sites that have the coverage of Facebook. We as developers could let you login to CNN through Google or Twitter, but allowing Facebook logins and using Facebook likes is a necessity. Or at least, a de facto standard.

Let’s say you wanted to make an alternative: You’d need to make sure that there’s an easy way for developers to incorporate it into their sites, because for a long time, you will be dealing with developers who have to put Facebook stuff on their website, and you’ll be their spare time project. If they can’t just drop it in, they won’t!

How will people react to Facebook in the long run?

As a Facebook user, the question that really matters is not privacy or the social graph. Instead: What’s in it for me? What do I get if I share all this information?

There isn’t that much value in sharing my movie preferences to a bunch of people, only some of whom are actually my friends. Twitter has proven that a market exists for conspicuous sharing – wide, out there, open sharing – but a lot of Facebook’s privacy woes come from incidental sharing – the “oops, I didn’t know that was public” type of sharing. One person came up with his own solution – all of his Facebook information is now public.

To borrow from the earlier 2000s: Some of us signed onto FB thinking it was LiveJournal, and it’s turned into MySpace. Those of us who thought that will move on.

Facebook’s main utility, for me and the one person I asked, is to see if my friends have updated their pages, and to upload and look at pictures. None of this has anything to do with the social graph, and until someone comes up with a killer app involving me sharing my links to fourteen different things, it’s not going to matter to me. I’ll just turn it off, and my Facebook page will be just another one of the many abandoned webpages I’ve made about myself.

I recently had the chance to compare an organization to an email.

The organization has had a number of meetings and made some useful decisions. They’ve put up a small site, but want to reorganize it and update the copy (it’s currently a shell with no visitors). This has been going on over approximately two months.

The email was from an email list about a startup competition:

On Friday night individuals pitch ideas for new ventures

Teams form around the best ideas and then work over the weekend to develop and launch a prototype on Sunday

——

Useful observations:

• In a startup, your limiting reagent is how fast you can build. If you have a fast engineering team, you can iterate quickly.
• Just because a product is minimal doesn’t mean it’s viable. The key criteria: Does the user have something to do?

Teams can basically function in one of two ways. Loosely speaking, let’s call them the light side and the dark side.

On the light side, everyone is communicating and everyone is focused on the success of the team. People are willing to make sacrifices, and everyone knows who’s making the sacrifices. There is openness and solidarity; the team shares one objective.

If this sounds a little bit doe-eyed and delusional, then I don’t need to introduce you to the dark side.

While I call it the dark side, the thinking that pulls someone over to this side is completely rational. “Why should I give up my time and my effort to get something done for someone who’s just going to claim it for themselves when I’m done, like he did last month when we finished the Spearmint project?” The big question a darksider asks is simple and practical: What’s in it for me.

The other thing about the dark side is that it’s contagious. Once one person starts doing it, everyone gets pulled in.

—

Now, I’m not going to claim that you should do anything for anyone if it’s only going to benefit them. But let’s consider what’s in it for you.

Did you ever think about what separates leaders from everyone else? Is it power? Money? The privilege of belonging to a special class, knowing special people? Education? Yes, all of those things matter. But what fills in the empty space when society no longer places them on a pedestal?

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t.

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t. Did you ever wonder, while you were sitting in the lecture hall, if you would ever stop being driven around by a system of authority beyond your ability to influence? Or why it didn’t seem to end when you left the high school classroom and found yourself in another set of forms and bureaucratic procedures driven by some unseen force?

There are two ways of coping in the workplace. The first way is the way of procedure, rule-taking, what’s in it for me. The rule followers are the dominant breed in high school and bureaucratic monoliths. You can’t change the rules, so you get what you can out of them. But the rest of the world doesn’t have to work that way.

The smaller the organization, and the simpler the bureaucracy, the more likely it is that part of the system and the rules is defined by you. When everyone else abdicates responsibility, that’s not an alarm warning you to rush to the doors while dodging all responsibility. That’s a vacuum, a power vacuum, and you’re going to fill it. If you choose to.

My version: Build every one to throw away.

Fred Brooks’ classic The Mythical Man-Month made this observation developing a new piece of software – inevitably, many of the problems that will need to be solved won’t be known until you try to solve them. The first try will incorporate many feelings of should-have and would-have that will be fixed on the second try.

This is much like a journeyman craftsman building his or her first bench, or planting their first garden. The first try is a learning experience. There is no way around this, nor should there be – learning is often best by doing. The valuable asset is the experience of the builder, not the product.

But we don’t live in the Middle Ages, the age of guilds. We live in the post-Industrial Age. Factory owners don’t consider hoarding all the toys or cars or electronics they produce as an asset. Henry Ford’s genius was to redesign not just the golden eggs, but the machine that lays them.

As programmers, we are not working on a code base. We are working on a machine that produces code. The machine is made up of us, our experiences, the tools we build to make code (which can be made out of code themselves!). This is where results come from, and we should spend our time tuning this machine by producing more, not protecting what we have.

Does this mean that we should throw out old code? By no means! Old code is one of the most efficient resources we have for producing new code. But every process of manufacture in the past has been made into a more automatic and refined process. How could we consider ourselves any different?

Does this mean that we should code like crap? By no means! As was once said, “If you write the first one to throw out, you will end up throwing out the second one as well.” The point is, write good code, but be willing to write new code – the point is to make not good code, but a good code factory.

This is how bureaucracy works. When you first see this, if you’ve had any experience with office bureaucracy, you may think “that’s true!” followed by “that’s crazy” followed by “that’s life,” and then you may run away because you want to watch scrubs or family guy or something.

I don’t have a TV though, so I will now try to figure out how to fix this problem. In the process, I will probably accidentally prove that it’s good not to watch TV. But that’s ok, because I’ll probably watch TV after that, disproving everything I just said.

Bureaucracy

is all about the disconnect between people and their incentives. At big corporations and gov’t organizations, you don’t earn the money you spend; you get a budget. If you want to spend more, you use up all the money you have and then try to talk the right person into giving you more next year.

When one person runs a business, they try to do what’s in their best interests. When two people work together, they will tend to hold each other accountable. When one thousand people work together, the interests of the group become disconnected from the interests of the individual.

The Myth of the Rational Voter describes this very well. It may be true that how well my company does affects my well being, but I make a very small difference to a big company, and this is outweighed by even a small incentive to act in a different way.

Transparency

Once a group gets big enough, we must find a way to realign the incentives of its members with the incentives of the group.

One of the things we mentioned earlier was holding people accountable (in the case of small groups). We also noted that people are disconnected from their incentives in large groups. If we can make the individual’s accomplishments public within the group, we can measure them.

There is a weakness to this approach:

1. The individual is rewarded on appearing to be helpful, not actually being helpful.
2. Even if people are honest, there is no way to say for sure what is helpful–if the organization is driven by thousands of people, it may be impossible to accurately measure individual contributions.

The Free Market Approach

The most well-known of getting people to act in the general interest is market economics, which argues that people who are free to act in their own best interests and have a way of exchanging value with others will maximize the public’s well being as a whole. It’s interesting that though the economy is largely free market, corporations internally are run more like dictatorships; this may imply that there is some reason for the free market organizing principle to break down within a corporate body.

Is it, hypothetically, possible to change an organization into a group where everyone buys and sells from each other? If so, how would we preserve the advantages of a corporate structure?

For example, say I have a software product and I need someone to develop features for the latest version. Insofar as the product is modular, I can pick a module and contract out bids to people within my company. So far, so free. However, systems within a company tend towards natural monopoly–it is unlikely that any company would throw out its working team to replace it with a new, less experienced one.

Need that be absolute? Perhaps part of owning a process is having the ability to transfer knowledge about that process. If you can force the team working for you to make that process transferable, it changes from their asset to yours (and lest this seem unfair, you would likely pay for the privilege). The same goes for software as it does for factories or stores – if you don’t have the information to operate it with a different team, then you don’t own all of it.

Final Comments

But this is just one objection – an example amid many. The U.S. Army, certainly, could not operate along those principles. The power of choice is necessarily limited when it comes to a professional army.

Transparency can get people to operate in a way that appears good, though it wouldn’t actually make them act in the way best for the organization overall. There won’t always be two or more actors to compete for the same work and push the best one to the top.

Individuals can generally be counted on to act in a way that benefits them; the free market is largely based on this principal. Bureaucracy is typically about getting large groups to act in a way that benefits them as a whole; even when this is parallel to the individual example (large numbers of bureaucracies competing with each other) there is a necessary weakness–individuals are still individuals, and try as we might to get their interests to all point the same way, they will inevitably shift in their own direction.*

This may in fact be a good thing. Do we want the Mafia’s cronies to act with single minded purpose towards advancing the Mafia, or would we rather they skimmed and subverted?

That individuals can be counted on to act in their own interest more reliably than a group interest** may act as a bulwark against the power that a group has against an individual. Plenty of groups have turned against each other in history, but it is likely that there are injustices that have never occurred, simply because the unjust lacked the ability to act with sufficient unity.

* If you want to reduce this subversion, forcing people to act in the open is highly useful. Mobilizing the forces of conformity is likely to encourage people to act more subtly in their interests, however.

**(at least, when the group is not pitted directly against another group)

(originally started January 20, 2006 @ 00:22)

Ever since the RIAA crackdown on illegal downloading, there’s been quite a drop in CD sales. And iTunes sales have gone up substantially. But the reason isn’t that users feel that DRM is bad, just that illegal downloading and iTunes are both cheaper. The Kindle not selling enough? Maybe because it’s $400. [no citation available, just see for yourself] At least the books are cheap.

Perhaps, it’s not about restricting rights all the way to the point of controlling everything we see and do. Maybe it’s just about the money.

Bill Gates is my personal hero, which should come as no surprise to those who know me as a Kool-Aid drinking fanboy. However, the reason I admire Bill Gates has little to do with Microsoft itself. He exemplifies personal qualities that I admire, including technical breadth, ambition, and commitment to effective philanthropy. I’m sure Bill has made some mistakes over the years, as many would like to point out, but the way I see it, the best way to judge character is to see if a person really puts his money where his mouth is. Bill delivers, though I suppose that makes his mouth pretty big.

Adios, billg! So long, and thanks for all the fish/DOS/qbasic/etc.

-Tim

Me: I hate windows mobile.
Tim: Why?
Me: In what universe do you get a smart phone that’s too smart to make calls with?
Tim: Yours must be defective, i’ve never had a problem with that.
Me: No, it’s not. I’ll explain.
Me: My mom got a palm treo 750.
Me: This should have incited my “ruh roh” response.
Me: somehow it didn’t.
Me: That was fine, even though she never uses mobile web
Me: but then, she got this plantronics headset
Tim: ruh roh
Me: and she was telling me how she couldn’t get the regular phone speaker to work anymore
Me: she disabled bluetooth
Me: but she could still only make calls with the headset
Tim: hmm
Me: soo, I removed the device from the partnership. Now, it still doesn’t work, bluetooth’s off, and when i call i don’t hear anything.
Tim: Did you check the volume?
Me: Furthermore, it requires some ridiculous YES I CHECKED THE VOLUMEFDSFDSF
Tim: and does speakerphone work
Me: –anyways, ridiculous passkey (no speakerphone doesn’t work)
Me: and without the pass key you couldn’t reattach the headset
Me: So now i couldn’t talk on the phone,
and couldn’t talk on the headset.
Me: ==with a palm treo and winmobile, you can do everything but make voice calls
Me: We called tech support
Me: They had us do a hard reset
Me: The lady’s basic explanation was “you have to think of the phone as a little computer. and just like your computer builds up cookies and stuff and slows down, your phone can also get cookies and slow down as well, so you need to turn it off regularly”
Me: (I congratulated myself on keeping a straight face through that one)
Me: but it seems to have worked
Tim: treos suck

Tim: the phone is clearly better than my old one
Tim: but the cpu sucks, and the screen configuration is retarded

Me: it’s totally unacceptable to have to whip out a stylus just to turn off the headset
Tim: there’s not a button on the headset?
Me: there is….it doesn’t work
Tim: my friend josh has a blackjack and bluetooth headset and has zero problems with it
Tim: it’s clearly the treo that sucks
Me: menu->cancel bluetooth
Me: so….go to the MENU menu
Tim: whaaa
Me: i want to find the idiot who dreamed that one up
Me: and give them their phone back
Me: with my fist
Me: the button on the headset hangs up
Tim: funny
Me: not when mom’s on a 2 year contract
Me: there are three buttons on the headset
Me: volume up, volume down
Me: and the “multifunction button”
Me: which i believe is mainly for hanging up