NBC Uses Facebook Connect As An Exclusive Login

I won’t be commenting on any NBC Olympics blog posts, or giving them a thumbs-up. That’s because the only option for commenting voting is Facebook Connect.

Unlike the federal government, which has also privileged Facebook Connect upon occasion, NBC is a corporation. It has no “taxpayer public interest” that should mandate the option of an open — non-proprietary, non-commercial — platform such as OpenID. But it should have advocates on its web dev staff who can convince their bosses that consumer choice in matters like this is in the corporation’s best interest. Read more…

Zynga Homepage

According to my Facebook News Feed, we are facing an agricultural crisis: I have more than 20 friends whose FarmVille crops need fertilizer. However, since FarmVille’s debut last June, the popular Facebook application has done more than flood my feed with farm-related requests. It has enabled its creator, Zynga, to reportedly rake in more than $200 million in 2009. But how can such revenues be possible if social gaming is supposed to be free? The answer lies in the sale of virtual goods and the games’ use of compulsion loops.

In social games, users are encouraged to enhance their farms or strengthen their mafias through the purchase of virtual goods. These can include fanciful structures (Ferris wheels), seasonal items (mistletoe-shooters) or tools (tractors) that enrich gameplay. Such goods allow users to customize their profiles, advance more quickly in the game or “keep up” with other players. In short, virtual goods are a graphic extension of common user behaviors such as self-expression or competitiveness.

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I came across Robert Darnton’s beautifully articulated essay collection, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future (2009), while looking for a book to review for class. Darnton’s book intrigued me from the first glance. Aside from the effective title, its warmly designed, aptly metaphorical cover drew me in, inviting me to flip through its pages. This is an experience that is unlikely to be matched by a digitized copy downloaded via the Internet, to be read on an electronic device.

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For years, I only knew of George Lucas’ 1977 cinematic sci-fi breakthrough as “Star Wars.”  Then I found out that it was part of a trilogy. But wait, Lucas had a plan all along; this tale of an oppressed rag-tag alliance looking to overturn a hierarchical, monopolistic political system (aka “The Empire”) was always meant to be “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.”

Of course, in a multi-part saga, if the good guys get their way initially, the Empire is always going to have to Strike Back to make it a good story. When I read Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff’s The Splinternet Means the End of the Web’s Golden Age, that’s what immediately came to mind.

We’ve been declaring an end to media monopolies for a while now, thanks to networked communities who no longer require institutional intermediaries to share, collaborate or take collective action.  This ability to produce and consume media for almost free threatened the very economic model that media moguls had taken to the bank for over a century. As I made my own transition from corporate media journalist to independent content creator, I took advantage of new, inexpensive tools that we saw as the great democratizer of production.

Apple was part of this rebellion, helping us to crash through the barriers to entry with the digital weaponry of firewire, USB, Final Cut Pro, iDVD — this filmmaker’s “secret plans to the Death Star,” so to speak.  As digital content proliferated, The Empire writhed in agony, from The New York Times to Conde Nast to NBC, desperately in search of new business models.  Now, with renewed focus on pay walls and walled gardens, Bernoff sees Apple’s new iPad as the turning point as we leave the Web’s hopeful first age of universality and openness:

…[M]ore and more of the interesting stuff on the Web is hidden behind a login and password. Take Facebook for example. Not only do its applications not work anywhere else, Google can’t see most of it. And News Corp. and the New York Times are talking about putting more and more content behind a login…Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines. Read more…

Friday, January 15, 2010 at 12:00 PM Pacific Time

In the third installment of our Emerging series, MCDM’s own Kathy Gill will talk with Scott Berkun about technology and public speaking, the challenges of Twitter for speakers, and how clear thinking and communication is at the heart of today’s economy.

Scott Berkun is the best selling author of The Myths of Innovation and Making Things Happen. He worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2003 in the early days of the web; his work as a full time writer and speaker have appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Fast Company, Forbes Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and other media. He taught a course in creative thinking for the MCDM and has been a regular commentator on CNBC, MSNBC and National Public Radio.

Scott’s popular essays and entertaining lectures can be found for free on his blog at http://scottberkun.com.

This discussion will be streamed on our  MCDM Livestream Channel.

Watch the video of my entire Seattle Town Hall talk on January 13, 2010 (we’ll post the high-res version later). Here is my slide deck with notes (cross-posted from The Storyteller Uprising blog).  Special thanks to MCDM’er Jay Al-Hashal who provided the design concept for the deck and advised me on structure.  We covered everything last night — Iran, the Haiti Earthquake, Google’s stunning Chinese censorship decision, and as always, the future of journalism and the danger of echo chambers:

At this time each year, college football fans excitedly watch the AT&T Cotton Bowl, the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, the Citi BCS National Championship game, as well as many other corporate sponsored Bowl events.  During games viewers are bombarded with corporate sponsored half times, game breaks, and players of the game.  With all the money being paid by big-name brands during college football games, it’s easy to forget that these players are amateurs.   The NCAA is able to treat these athletes as amateurs while collecting massive profits because of the tight control the organization has over its athletes.

Large organizations are trying to adapt to the disruptive force of social media, and the NCAA is no exception.  During autumn quarter, I took part in an independent study with the MCDM and the University of Washington football team.  The following is a brief summary of my final paper for the class.  The full paper can be viewed here.

The NCAA has enjoyed monopsony power over athletes for decades.  A monopsony is similar to a monopoly, except the company or organization has control over the price of inputs (like labor) rather than outputs (like telephone service). In this case, the NCAA has almost exclusive rights to college-aged athletes, largely due to the lack of competition and NFL and NBA rules that place limits on the age of athletes that enter their leagues. With this power, the NCAA successfully caps salaries for athletes (in this case salaries are called scholarships) and limits what athletes can do with their image (special permission is needed to use the likeness of an athlete’s image).  The NCAA claims these rules are in place to protect the “amateurism” of college athletes.

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It’s always fun to navigate around checking what the pundits decide to predict in the coming year. This requires being up on trends and having a bit of imagination of how the factors will collide to develop into the momentum needed for new technologies or trends to emerge. So taking a survey of my own favorites: ReadWriteWeb, IDC, Jeremiah Owyang, Mashable and Wired, here’s a summary of my picks for top 10 trends/predictions for 2010.

1. The Mobile Year: many agree the numbers are there. Smartphones have reached market share that justify more investment. Everything from GPS based services and new social networks (that capitalize on Facebook backlash on privacy and the advantages of Yelp). Google phone will become number 2 in the market, but new (and cheaper) smart phones will flood the market.

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