Steve Gillmor’s GestureLab

Conventional wisdom:

Social advertising doesn’t work because users are there for friends, not buying stuff.
Google reports weak results from MySpace deal, blaming missed numbers on bad estimates of social advertising yield.
Microsoft Yahoo takeover is about advertising.

Problems with that view for me, personally:

I don’t use search. Not externally, that is. I use Gmail search all the time, because my entire breadcrumb trail has been embedded there for 3 years now. So for me, search advertising doesn’t work, at all. My eyeballs are rarely focused on Adsense because they’re mostly focused on Twitter, gmail, and Google Reader shared items as triaged commonly via NewsGang. Mostly, I don’t search data, I search people’s searches of data.

So if search advertising doesn’t work with me (at least directly) what does that say about social advertising. For me, it works better than Google because it’s the affinity groups that I’m valuing, not the expression of my intent through keywords. Key to my information processing is understanding the context of the filter, not the descriptions of the containers or memes that surround the targets. That is the value proposition of Facebook and Twitter, which together conspire to route my attention dramatically more efficiently than previous methods.

Viewed in this lens, the Microsoft attack on Yahoo portends a dramatic shift in Redmond’s ability to capture, or nurture, its relationship with me. First of all, as far as I’m concerned, Facebook already is Microsoft. Its minimal investment may not appear to be golden handcuffs, but the one thing the FB cloud has been is stable. Of course, many folks see Twitter’s instability as a warning sign, but I see it as nicotine marketing and an object lesson for what $300 million can do when applied. I’m sure it’s not lost on Evan and Co. that getting that kind of money with no strings attached lets Facebook (and by definition them) thrive while keeping their options open while they garner market ownership.

So am I buying stuff via Microsoft-vended Facebook-housed social advertising? Probably not. How about Twitter social ads? Definitely. What are Twitter ads? Well, last night Dave Winer tweeted at The Dead’s reunion concert for Obama in San Francisco Monday night. Would I have bought the tickets if I had seen it soon enough? Maybe. Will I watch the streaming simulcast if it doesn’t crash? Probably? What’s the product? Obama. Did I buy it? You bet. I pay the next day with my vote. I pay right now by broadcasting my vote and this model of micro-community viral marketing.

The key here is that the information itself is the advertising. Through Facebook’s infrastructure and Twitter’s call-and-response follow handshake, I establish a gesture feed that attracts the kinds of signals I’m interested in mining. When the Microsoft/Yahoo deal broke, Twitter search brought me to the core British swarm that absorbed the announcement and analyst call before most of us on the West Coast were awake. Again, the people, not the data. Add them to my Twitter cloud, and I’m way ahead of the game. 9 hours for starters.

The monetization, if you will, is in the efficiency of information context. The ideas themselves are not particularly unique; when the sun rose over the east coast, and then out west, the general conversation largely repeated itself: will the Yahoo acquisitions be crushed, what will the VCs do with one less super-buyer, are there other offers, etc. But the history and resonance of the core players we value for their instincts and right (or wrong) guesses — another story completely. Arrington, Wilson, Blodgett, O’Reilly, Searls — you can match up their alliances and strategies with their reactions, and very quickly get a sense of what the Firesign Theatre called the 5th guy in the room, the synthesis of these people’s nuances, prejudices, business agendas, myopia, and humor — all of it combining into this ephemeral visitation known as What may very well happen.

Can Google control that? Not without the consent of those who control this new gestural bottom-up market. They can’t sacrifice a legitimate contract with users without undermining the very heart of their behavioral lead in data. If the person context is decoupled from the data, the quality of the lead crashes precipitously. If I felt that I had lost control of my Gmail data, or its representation in the form of identity profile, no matter how accurate in behavior but devoid of gestural intent, I would leave as quickly as I could. For if I am not represented according to my intentions, then the chances of those whose gestures I want to harvest being credible are similarly compromised. The 5th guy does not materialize.

It is precisely that calculation, and the possibility of a haven to bolt to, that drives the Microsoft Yahoo play. In this context, Microsoft’s belittled investment in Facebook can be seen as an investment not in last year’s advertising model but in the coming wave of user-vetted gestural partnership with information sources — with its much higher quality, yield, and translation to action. What Microsoft is buying is the people, not their accumulated data, and as we know from failed mergers of the past, an ongoing relationship with those people can only be maintained through a two-way contract that doesn’t violate user perception of transparency.

Live as Lifeboat:

What would it take to dump Gmail? Initially, nothing would make me even consider it. The longer I stay there, the more effective searches are for historical data - the random phone number, threads, do I know who this guy is already, clues for finally doing back expenses long after I’ve forgotten the details of the trip. I’ve only started using Google Calendar in earnest since the advent of the iPhone, so these mini-clues in Gmail go back much further.

The same is true for Google Docs — now starting to build up a backlog of documents — but I’ve used Gmail as a text repository with its spell-checking and auto-save since I abandoned Office 2 years ago. These features have migrated to Docs and Wordpress, but again only recently. So what would it take to migrate away from such a deep data store?

Wait, there’s more to tether me, namely IM. As Gtalk and iChat have converged in recent months, I’m piping most of my iChat/AIM chats into Gmail via Gtalk, where the Gmail integration persists the chat stream as part of the Gmail search store, adds threading, and blurs the distinction between IM and email by caching conversations when the other party goes offline. Invariably, the single search methodology encourages persisting phone numbers, links, project development, brainstorming, and note-taking in the chat window. The ability to pin the embedded window outside the Gmail window lets me aggregate all this data while navigating the other key parts of my UI.

Those other windows are increasingly dominated first by Facebook, and more recently, Twitter. More and more I’ve been using Twitter as an email gateway via direct messages, emulating the similar transition Facebook has gone through in inserting the body of an FB message into email. In both cases, it’s as simple as clicking on the direct message link to be inserted in the reply window of the incoming Twitterer or Facebook respondent. Although Twitter’s pipe into Gtalk has been down for the last few days, in general I have little reason to bolt and more and more reason to stay, as long as the various services maintain this piping flow in and out. So, again, why leave?

No reason. To leave, that is. But to migrate, every reason. And the Twitter virus suggests the method of transfer. Twitter’s follow/follow protocol establishes a contract between users that provides immediate benefit: you tweet something to the group of followers, I want to reply directly, I have established two-way identity credentials, I click on the @you link and then on the direct message link to reply. 2 clicks.

But wait, Twitter direct messages also leverage the hidden email address and present the same message in (for me) Gmail. I click on the link to the Tweeterer’s direct message page and respond. 1 click. This same methodology presents itself in Facebook email. In one fell swoop, the email client and social media clients are hidden behind an interoperability layer. The identity handshake is maintained while abstracting out the email client, the browser, the hardware, and certainly the so-called operating system. It’s platform relationship management, Doc.

What’s transcendent here is the relationship between senders, the social protocol, the contract between the individual and his or her affinity group of 1 or many. As long as the cloud service respects the privacy of my data in a consistent way across its offerings, I have no reason to switch. Of course, other clouds could offer the same service with additional incentives, but the baseline is user control of the social relationships. The data store is a commodity, albeit an expensive problem to maintain at enormous scale. The social relationships are the value that the user controls, the price the platforms must negotiate to access the efficiency of the next market.

Again, both Twitter and Facebook have identical interfaces to route the data via the social contract, thereby creating the beginnings of a new operating system. The user inexorably gravitates toward a single best practice; I’ve surprised myself at the speed with which I’ve migrated away from IM to this direct message model. The number of clicks dominates, as does the social context of the communication. Why gesture to the amorphous cloud when I can get much greater signal to noise by twittering or Walling to a group that has formed around gestures of interest in each other.

So the strategic investment is in mirroring the functionality of the service while abstracting out the best practices of the new uber-platform. If it’s easy and intuitive for me to pipe my TwitterGang cloud through Gtalk into the Google store, why not also pipe it into, say, the Live store. Of course, both platforms need to respect my transparency requirement, for what I want is data security as a given but identity and social security as an absolute requirement. That’s why Google’s refusal to cop to the egregious violation of my social contract by harvesting “friend” data assembled in Gmail via its Contact algorithm and using it to release my Google Reader shared items to people I may or may not want to view them retroactively is such a huge red flag.

You can’t have a 5th guy emerge until you have 4 guys already in the room. As long as Google continues to be the only player, I’ll put up with their stonewalling. But ever since WordPress adopted Gmail’s spell-check and autosave, I’ve migrated away to the container I’m typing in because it’s 3 less clicks for the copy and paste move I used to do. That’s 2 guys. Twitter, 3. Facebook, 4. The 5th guy starts to become clearer in the abstraction of the core services across 2 or more virtually identical containers. Can Microsoft play in this new sandbox? Just ask the 5th Guy.

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 1:57 pm.
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