Should we demand to pay for Social Media?

This week, GrrlScientist wrote an open letter to Google after her account was deactivated without warning:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jul/28/google-open-letter-google

While she argues that she did not contravene their terms and conditions (as they were claiming), I believe that they are legally within their rights to deactivate it anyway.  And it raises an interesting point.  We all rely so much on free services provided by companies like Google and Facebook that we (or certainly I) would be lost without them.  If Google one day decided to deactivate my  gmail account then I would lose all my emails from the last few years.  And since I have a tendency to forget passwords for websites, I would be permanently logged out of most of my other accounts, because the websites have no other contact address for me.

And even worse, what if Google decided tomorrow that they had been successful enough and were going to stop trading immediately, deactivating all gmail accounts.  There would be complete chaos!

Because we are getting these services for free, the companies legally owe us very little.  The obvious solution would be for us to pay for the services and got more rights and guarantees in return.  I wouldn't dream of getting all my post sent to an address manned for free by someone who I had never met, so why do I do so with my emails?

Saying that, people have got too used to receiving all these services for free so it would be a very hard sell to get them to pay for it.

What do you think?  Is there another solution?

Hollywood vs. The Internet

Yesterday the UK's high court forced BT to block access for its customers to Newzbin2 - a file sharing site which has become a favourite for people who want to share films illegally.

I can imagine the scene in Hollywood at the moment.  Everyone jumping and cheering.  Banners everywhere.  Steven Spielberg declaring a new public holiday to rival the 4th July.  All the big names in the film industry already coming together to make a new blockbuster about it - they could call it "Saving Private Film Makers" or "Titanic Profits".

But of course that isn't happening.  And not just because of the size of the UK film market.

Hollywood is taking on an enemy who is much more agile than it can ever be.  It takes months of legal wrangling to get a site blocked.  But the site's owners can create a new one almost instantaneously. It might take a while the new site to get a following as big as the original - it could even take a whole 2 hours - but it won't get rid of file sharing forever.

Hollywood need a new tactic and they should look towards the music industry.  Illegally downloading music was a big problem 10 years ago.  But then companies like Apple came along and made itsimple to download music for a reasonable price.  If film companies could do the same, maybe setting the charge at £0.99, they could open up a new revenue stream and maybe come to embrace the internet.   Of course people could still download films for free but those with a chronic addiction to free media are never going to be cured, and the film studios shouldn't think that making them go cold turkey will chage anything.  But enough people will switch over to legal downloading to give the film studios a tidy profit.

Unfortunately I get the feeling that it will be a while yet before they can see past the epic storyline they are creating for themselves... *sigh*

Onavo - Too little, too late?

Today an app caught my eye. That app was Onavo.

Onavo is a data compression app and its developers claim that by using it you can
(i) double or triple your data plan, and
(ii) save up to 80% on your data bill. 

So far, so good.  The mobile internet is booming and in some countries (such as India) it could grow to be far more popular than the conventional internet, since it is much cheaper to buy a phone handset than to buy a fully blown computer.

But...

At the moment there are other forces at work in the mobile internet space.  The EU is currently looking to significantly reduce roaming charges when users move between EU countries, and it is not inconceivable that other countries will follow suit.  This removes one of the app's key selling points: reducing the cost of data abroad.

In addition, the rise of smart phones means that mobile users are also starting to use a lot more data.  Since they won't want to spend all of their disposable income on using their phone the way it was intended, either mobile contracts with free inclusive data will become a lot more common or data on a PAYG basis will become a lot cheaper.  So you won't even need to use this app at home either.

Despite all this I can still see Onavo becoming a winner.  And not for any of the reasons it claims.  I think Onavo might be able to solve an issue with mobile internet that isn't going to go away any time soon: speed. 

Using the internet on my mobile is a bit like going back 10 years to the days of dial up internet.  The days when you had to be very careful when browsing because one wrong click and you could be stuck for hours waiting for a page to load. 

If Onavo's compression means that I can access web pages faster (as there is less data travelling around) then this could be a real winner.  And I sincerely hope it is!

Mission (Impossible) Statement

The world of telecommunications and social media has changed so much in the last few years that it is inconceivable that anyone 10, or even 5, years ago could have predicted what it would look like today. 

But I like challenges (especially impossible ones!) and through this blog I will record my vision of the future.  Maybe in 10 years time I will be able to look back on what I have written here and see that I got everything spot on.  I'll be able to boast about my predictive powers and might even get a Mystic Meg-style slot on a lottery program.

Or, more likely, I will look back and see that I got almost all of my predictions wrong.  I will then point out any vaguely realised predictions to friends and family in the hope that the internet will have reduced their attention span to such an extent that they will get distracted before they read the rest.

So here it goes...