The people's platform

Snippets and Summary:

Instead of the old start-up model, which tried to sell us things, the new one trades on our sociability – our likes and desires, our observations and curiosities, our relationships and networks – which is mined, analyzed, and monetized. To put it another way, Web 2.0 is not about users buying products, rather, users are the product. We are what companies like Google and facebook sell to advertisers. Of course, social media have made a new kind of engagement possible: they have also generated a handful of enormous companies that profit off the creations and interactions of others.

A great Web 2.0 site needs a mob of people who use it, love it and live by it – and convince their friends and family to do the same. Mobs will devote more time to a site they love than to their jobs. They'll frequently build the site for the founders for free. These sites exists because of unpaid labor, the millions of minions toiling to fill the coffers of a fortunate few. "Social networking, media and user generated content sites tap into – and exploit – core human emotions.

We are living in a world of “digital feudalism”, where sites like facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc., offer up land for content providers to work while platform owners expropriate value with impunity and, if you read the fine print, stake unprecedented claim over users creations.

When General Electric acquired NBC, for example, the CEO assured shareholders that the news, a commodity just like “toasters, light bulbs, or jet engines,” would be expected to make the same profit margin as any other division.

Understanding what sites people visit, what content they view, what products they buy and even their geographic coordinates will allow advertisers to better target individual customers. And more of that knowledge will reside with technology companies than with content providers. Google, for instance, will know much more about each user than will the proprietor of any one news site. It can track users online behavior through its Droid software on mobile phones, its Google Chrome Web browser, its search engine and its new tablet software. The ability to target users is why Apple wants to control the audience data that goes through iPad. And the company that may come to know the most about you is Facebook, with which users freely share what they like, where they go and who their friends are.