the Onda

In the context of recent blogposts about pageviews being a silly metric, Google trying to entice its users into doing work on their behalf, and social bookmarkers getting paid to do what they used to do for free, Doc Searls has an important post on the coming age of the individual-in-the-driver's-seat when it comes to various different spheres of computing. Specifically, he makes the case for all of the web service providers giving up on Roach Motel 2.0 (where Roach Motel 1.0 was about keeping your data hostage, 2.0 is about trapping your metadata) and even cites the Tabblo-Flickr ecosystem as an example of the way in which data/metadata sharing can benefit both the user and the companies building stuff.

I am definitely not smart enough to follow all of the intricacies of the Attention Trust model or the Gesture Bank (around how the user can keep control of his metadata) but I did want to add one observation to Doc's argument: the reason why metadata is so important to the "vendors" he describes is because they are all wed to an advertising model that implies monetizing eyeballs. Though this "media model" is often shrouded in all sorts of false complexities, the core levers behind it are very simple: you need increasing returns in the ability to get more eyeballs (which is why raising switching costs is so important) and a deeper understanding of those eyeballs than any of the competition who might also have access to them. With those two things you get more inventory and have the ability to charge more for it.

While this model continues to work, I find it pretty difficult to believe that anyone is going to make significant inroads putting the user in charge of anything that so core to it's continued success. In our case, our primary business is around two forms of value capture: converting bits to atoms (specialty print) and offering the user premium services (subscriptions). In both of these cases the value proposition gets made directly to the enduser and so it behooves us to make sure we make them as happy as we've made Doc with his creative investment of 11K photos on Flickr and his tabblos on Tabblo.

At the end of the day, companies, like people, are motivated by incentives and constrained by the rules of the game they choose to play and I don't think that even Doc would fault them for that. It's only when the advertising model starts to evolve to take account of this (and I mean more than just AdWords-like evolution though I am by no means a media expert) that things will really start to change for the user on a mass scale.

One other related note on lock-in: people (investors, partners, etc.) have been asking since day one of Tabblo: where is your lock-in? I used to have a lame answer about network effects and user-generated content that I would give, rattling off comparable efforts like eBay's and MySpace's. I don't do that anymore. And the reason is because I came to the conclusion that looking for this type of lock-in is similar to adopting a revenue model that has a high probability of putting you at odds with your users. Instead, we prefer to focus on execution, and specifically on locking product development to user demands. Better integration with Flickr? Full-res downloads? We're happy to oblige under the working hypothesis that the talented creative class on the Net responds well to companies that take care of their needs and that– to Doc's point– cycles spent there create a deeper relationship between company and users– which may be the only kind of lock-in we'll all be left with at the end of the day.

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