Real Sharing vs. Fake Sharing

In a recent brainstorming session about Web 2.0, I made the observation that "harnessing collective intelligence" is the pattern that opened the Web 2.0 era, but that "Data is the Intel Inside" is the pattern that will bring it to a close. (See What is Web 2.0? for a definition of these patterns.)

It is in this context that I want to bring to your attention a thoughtful blog posting by the ever-insightful Larry Lessig, entitled The Ethics of Web 2.0:

"There’s an important distinction developing among “user generated content” sites — the distinction between sites that permit “true sharing” and those that permit only what I’ll call “fake sharing.”

A “true sharing” site doesn’t try to exercise ultimate control over the content it serves. It permits, in other words, content to move as users choose.

A “fake sharing” site, by contrast, gives you tools to make seem as if there’s sharing, but in fact, all the tools drive traffic and control back to a single site.

YouTube comes in for a bit of a tongue-lashing from Larry, being singled out as a "fake sharing" site. Larry notes that "YouTube gives users very cool code to either “embed” content on other sites, or to effectively send links of content to other sites. But never does the system give users an easy way to actually get the content someone else has uploaded."

I'm not sure that Larry's entirely right about YouTube, but I believe that he's entirely right about the importance of the "true sharing" principle.

YouTube actually did a better job of sharing video than anyone else in the video space -- that's why they are so successful. They are masters of virality. Their embedding tools are the key to their success, not just that they were "cooler." Even "fake sharing" is better than no sharing, which is what we had before. (After all, a lot of the problem of "getting the content" isn't YouTube's. We don't have the same free tools for managing and editing video that we have for photos. If Adobe had a lightweight Flash authoring environment that could be deployed as easily as YouTube's Flash sharing tool, that could bring video on the web to a whole new level... )

But Larry's on to something. I've been seeing the distinction that he makes coming more and more into focus as a defining issue for Web 2.0. Google has been a key enabler of the decentralized nature of the net -- they make other sites more visible, distributing attention, rather than concentrating it. But some of the newer sites, and the newer applications from Google and the other big guys, are increasingly aimed at centralizing user activity and user data.

This is true of GMail, of Orkut, and of Google Calendar. Google Maps could have been such a centralization play, but because of the brilliant hackers who built the first mashups, it's instead been liberated as a "real sharing" service.

I've been concerned about this switchboard vs. repository issue very specifically with Google Book Search. While I've come to the defense of Google over their library project, and overall, I believe that GBS is a very good thing for the publishing industry, it's essential that Google remember their heritage, as a distributor of attention, rather than trying to make their sites sticky (Web 1.0). Because publishers have been slow to put their books online, there's been nothing to search. Now that Google has gone to the expense of creating an online book repository, will they have the courage to set that content loose, either licensing it back to publishers for use in other contexts, or in the case of public domain content, releasing not just the scanned images but also the text? Will they create an integrated search that includes other online book repositories (Amazon's, or publisher sites like Safari), or will they insist that book search means only "Google book search"?

These are unresolved issues, and I do worry that the YouTube acquisition moves Google's model from switchboard to repository, and I'm not sure that's good for the company's DNA. So I'm hoping that Google will remember Eric Schmidt's dictum, "Don't fight the internet," and will work to make both YouTube and services like Google Book Search progressively more open, not progressively more closed.

Evidence is strong, though, that top management at Google understands this distinction, and wants to open up all their services. What folks like Larry remind us, though, is that even people of good will need to be reminded from time to time about the choices they face. Web 2.0 is still a work in progress. We can get it right, or we can screw it up.