Alexander van Elsas

As many have noted before: history repeats itself. There have been bad times before and we don't seem to be able to pass on those lessons between generations or even between groups in the same generation. Governments and the body of laws in some way encode learned wisdom, but they change as lessons are forgot and greed regains. How can web x.0 change human nature? - todd

@ashraf comments:"I dont see any problem in that. Privacy is overrated actually. It would not be a problem for FB to show your friends what you are looking for, unless you are searching for porno :D" - Alexander van Elsas

@kirill. Wht if Facebook knows what religion or political views you have. What if your own government forces Facebook to provide them profile data on users. What if Facebook knows things about a relationship between you and a friend, between you and family member. I can think of tons of things I don't want anyone to know about me. Not because I'm hiding things that are illegal. But because they are MY business. I want to be in control of my own privacy. - Alexander van Elsas

@Kirill. Make this physical for a moment. Would you mind that some company installs web cams in your house, monitors your phone calls, e-mail, conversations you have in the house or at a bar with friends, so that they can provide you better service? I bet you would mind it there? So why is it different on-line? - Alexander van Elsas

Svetlana:"Alexander, actually in my post on online ads I was thinking more about media companies (websites of newspapers, news sites, blogs, etc.), not the ad-supported startups. The problem with ad-supported model is often that startups need to raise money to operate and with investment banks breaking chances of getting an investment will be lowering. Of course for startups it will be wiser to develop a solid business model based on real value people are ready to pay for instead of supporting themselves with ads. What I was talking about myself is that advertisers will still continue to pay money for the ads we display - and it will be the matter of efficiency where they spend their money." - Alexander van Elsas

my answer:"Hi Svetlane, I understand what you are saying. I’m touching the same subject from a slightly different perspective. I also believe that media companies will remain spending advertisement money on-line. But because they will be forced to do this more efficiently we will see that it will have great effect on advertisement based startups. They will get hit hard has both investors and media companies will be less likely to invest based upon an advertisement based business model only. And that is a good thing. - Alexander van Elsas

Nice comment from Fred Wilson: "first use is critical. getting that right makes everything else possible" - Alexander van Elsas

My reply:"Fred, I fully agree (but you know that already ;-) ). I also think that advertisement models often lure us away from answering First Use questions.These models are mostly growth or network oriented, not user-value oriented. Growth is something that will occur naturally because you create user value. It shouldn’t be the other way around. Freemium is the best way to do that. It builds a fanatic customer base that will help you to improve your service and it allows revenue stream that directly monetize user value. The simplest and best business model there is. - Alexander van Elsas

I wrote about how the attention economy creates the sound bytes economy. Here 's the best example I could find. Not sure what she actually tried to tell us... ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

@Tom Beardshaw responded: "Hey Alexander - good point. I think your description of the attention economy is spot on, but perhaps we should also think about the contexts and purposes of communication. I don’t think that substance will die… in fact it may become more important than ever, depending on how people’s values shift (and it seems that within the US election, the electorate is shifting towards placing more value on substance - let’s see how they vote, anyway)." - Alexander van Elsas

I answered: @Tom I hope you are right. I’m not so optimistic. Media is trained to think in terms of sound bytes. It’s a process that is hard to fix, unless we fix it ourselves. If all we do is go for the one-liners then nothing will change. If we are willing to explore, to get our hands on substance, which means investing time, then things will change eventually. - Alexander van Elsas

@Freecloud responds: "right - and that is what will make "whuffie" unusable as well - the game theory is obvious! Hmmm...I feel a blog post coming on :D" -> can't wait to see what e as to say about Whuffie ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

Nice snippet from a comment by Nicolas "“This conclusion is very much in line with findings of Introna & Nissenbaum (34), who argue that search engines raise not merely technical issues but also political ones. Their study of search engines suggest that search engines systematically exclude (in some cases by design and in some cases accidentally) certain sites, and certain types of sites, in favor of others, systematically giving prominence to some at the expense of others. They argue that such biases, which would lead to a narrowing of the Web’s functioning in society, run counter to the basic architecture of the Web as well as the values and ideals that have fueled widespread support for its growth and development. - Alexander van Elsas

The article by Introna & Nissenbaum is available at http://tinyurl.com/3zz3a5 . - Nicolas Caitan

Can't believe I managed to write Hutch's name wrong yet again, sorry Hutch (old habits are hard to change) ;-) - Alexander van Elsas

Nicolas Caitan wrote a nice comment on the blog in which he says that user-centric thinking and privacy are important, I agree in full of course ;-) http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/... - Alexander van Elsas

Alexander thanks for your kind words :) - Nicolas Caitan

Another quote from Tim which is great "That goes back to a major theme of web 2.0 that people haven't yet tweaked to. It's really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data." -> my question is always, why is no one concerned enough to give the user control over his own data. - Alexander van Elsas