Who is the product? Who is the customer? Do you even care?

Facebook, how big?

Facebook has obtained more than $500M from investors to grow facebook.com to the size it is today, and has not taken a single penny from any of its users. In order to pay back the investors for their extraordinary risky investment, the investors must be looking for something like 10x cash back.  That’s more than $5 billion! Of course it’s currently valued at over $50B. Just hold that thought for a second.

Now a second thought: billions of people can use email and not have to be part of one, single, organisation. How can that be?

Email is essentially a protocol. It’s called SMTP and is described by various RFCs. Any server that supports the SMTP protocol can advertise its MX record via DNS and receive email for that domain. Any client that ‘talks’ SMTP can send email to any SMTP server (it can reach). In fact, the SMTP client (or email client) can talk to its local SMTP server which will then forward on the email to its final destination.

This is, of course, a distributed system.  Due to an open protocol anybody can set up an email server and play in the big email ecosystem. Of course, the original inventors of the SMTP protocol didn’t envisage SPAM as we know it, and thus it was designed for a naive, friendly, co-operative world, where email users wouldn’t spam each other. i.e. academia.

Facebook is set up as a business. It has its customers’ interests to serve so that it can be a profitable company and return its investors money and provide a return for its financial stakeholders. The problem is, is that Facebook users are not the customer. They are the product that is sold to the actual customers who (I suspect) are advertisers. Thus, Facebook’s values aren’t necessarily aligned with their users, which means, almost inevitably, privacy is not Facebook’s key concern.

So if with Facebook, the users are the product, what are they actually selling? The social graphs its users create, along with the logged minutiae of the their lives, could just be the product that Facebook is, and will continue, to sell to advertisers. Your privacy is Facebook’s product. Your social graph (in theory) has value to advertisers. Do you want to exchange your privacy to multitudinous corporations for free access to, well, Facebook?

But the main problem with Facebook is that, in order to do Facebook with somebody else, you have to have an account at Facebook.com. It’s a closed system. Notice the difference to email? I don’t have to have an account at (the fictitious) email.com to send emails to other people. That would be absurd!

History has a habit of repeating itself. Remember CompuServe? AOL? MSN (pre-internet)? CIX? These were all silos. CompuServe had special pages only subscribers could see. Of course, they all went the way of the dinosaur, or were heavily modified, because the Internet was more useful. And Facebook is simply a better CompuServe or AOL.

Still, you may ask, “what’s wrong with a better AOL or CompuServe?”

Proprietary Silo vs Open Data and Open Protocols

Before answering that question, let’s consider what the alternative to Facebook or Twitter would be like. By way of analogy let’s look at Twitter vs status.net.

Twitter and status.net basically do the same thing: they are broadcast micro-blogging systems that let you send the equivalent of an SMS over the Internet to your followers. The best known example of status.net is identi.ca.

If you want to be part of the Twitter-verse you have to get an account at the sole provider of twitter-ness: twitter.com. Every tweet you send goes through twitter.com, is stored there, analysed and also provided to other (rich) organizations via the Twitter fire-hose. Not a great deal of privacy there, apart from the notional privacy that you can ‘protect’ your account. It’s still going through twitter.com.

status.net is like Twitter except that it is both an Open Source project and a Open set of Protocols. The difference is that status.net is like email; it’s a protocol that anybody can implement. You could subscribe to any status.net server and still be followed by any other status.net user in the world. Therefore, your tweets, or rather dents would only go through the distributed servers, the same as email today.

Another advantage of a distributed network is that it’s more resilient to failure. Twitter went down on Christmas day because every tweet goes through twitter. Email didn’t go down, except maybe a few distributed nodes did – but email didn’t fail en masse.

So back to Facebook and silos? I definitely want to put an activity stream (or lifestream) on the web. I currently use twitter for that because so many of my friends do. I also want to be able to put the odd photo up, publish a free/busy calendar, and enable old friends and new ones to find me and get in contact. But I don’t want Facebook to own that information. I want to own it. I want it under my own control, possibly in my own appliance running somewhere on the net. A distributed system that talks to other systems to exchange the data all under my control, with my privacy settings which won’t suddenly change because an over-arching corporation needs to sell more of my privacy.

Of course, it is coming, and there’s even some competition in the space. onesocialweb and Diaspora are both trying to solve the Facebook problem. The Freedom Box project, inspired by Eben Moglen, is also trying to work in that space. These will be tools that work in a distributed fashion.

When will it displace Facebook and Twitter? I think the jury is definitely out on that one; AOL, MSN, Compuserve, MySpace: the Internet is littered with the corpses of previously all-mighty corporations that owned the space.

Personally, I want Facebook to fail. I want a future where people control their own information. I want the semantic web and the power of pull, not the push-web. I want my appliance with my data and my control and I’m prepared to pay for it. I guess I’m going to have to wait a bit!

Apparently, said buskers have to audition for a place in the city so that they can play! This is to ensure that they are up to scratch and fit with the city.

I’m frankly astonished that councils would have a busking policy, auditioning buskers, probably having an council officer administer the policy and then having various people checking that buskers have a license. What a waste of money. Let the market decide. Bad buskers will not get any money and move on. Good ones will earn money and stay. The public can decide.

Thankfully, Newcastle upon Tyne has a sensible attitude; apparently, it doesn’t believe that busking is something that should be licensed.

T5 Experience for Transit Passengers

My wife and I got off the plane at 6.45 am on Sunday morning.  After queuing and being checked for over an hour we finally made it into the Terminal ‘proper’ at around 8.00 am.  That’s an hour and a quarter to clear immigration.

There were four queues to negotiate when getting off the plane at T5. They all took place in a hot, airless, basement of the terminal.  Not very welcoming to foreign passengers.

• The first queue was to actually get into the hall where we had our boarding card checked. Essentially, we were transit passengers.  This queue split us into UK passports and everybody else. Luckily, our UK passport queue seemed shorter than everybody else – god knows how long they had to wait.
• The next (for us) fairly short queue was to get our passports checked. Everybody else seemed to have very long additional waits to get their passports checked.
• The third queue was to get our pictures taken.   This took a LONG time. I wonder how long they keep the pictures.  Knowing the previous Labour government, probably ‘forever’ is the retention time.
• The fourth, final, tedious, queue was to get our hand luggage scanned. Luckily we weren’t the lucky few who got a very, very personal pat down from the security staff.

And all this took over an hour.  It is was also staffed by grumpy, bored, unsmiling security staff who treated is like cattle to be processed.  And the joke is: we paid for this as part of our plane ticket price.  We were the customer.  You’d never know it.

We were finally ejected from the security circus into a shopping centre. Not a calm place where you can relax between flights or before setting off on your first one. Nope. An incredibly busy, over bright, shiny, steel and glass edifice with widely spaced shops and hardly any seats. A place where the restaurants are not grouped in one place, but are scattered to the four corners of the Terminal. Choosing a restaurant means walking the entire length of the terminal, passing the oh-so-important shops of course.

After waiting over an hour in the queues, we also needed to use the toilets. Considering the sheer quantity of people that were stuffed into T5 it was a surprise that there weren’t more toilets. There were long queues at both the ladies and gents toilets. This is the first time I have experienced that at an airport here or abroad. You’d think that, when designing a terminal, you would get something as basic as the number of toilets for the expected number of people in the terminal.

Leaving the terminal to get on to a plane was also tedious. We were checked twice at the gate and again stood in a slow moving queue. The main culprit this time was having our photo checked. Then we had our boarding cards checked before getting onto the plane.

Finally, because Heathrow was so busy, after pushing back from the terminal, the plane was still trundling around the airport 30 minutes later before finally taking off 20 minutes late. Normal day at Heathrow I suppose.

Design Goals for Terminal 5

It’s not entirely clear what the design goals for T5 were but the outcome for us was not a particularly pleasant customer experience. It feels less like an airport terminal and more like a shopping centre which happens to have air passengers in it. Maybe BAA were more concerned with maximising revenue per passenger and less concerned with comfort, relaxation or a calm, friendly, passenger experience?

I’m going to compare Schiphol Airport near Amsterdam with Heathrow because I have had experience with both. It’s like comparing apples and oranges. They are so different that the only thing they seem to have in common is that they are both called ‘terminals’. Being in transit at Schiphol goes roughly like this.

1. Get off plane
2. Walk for 5 minutes or so to the centre of the terminal.
3. Make a choice in whether to eat, shop or relax.
4. Go to the appropriate zone
5. When ready to the gate
6. Be checked at the gate which includes the baggage check, passport check and boarding card.  This doesn’t seem to take very long at all.
7. Get on plane and depart.  From push back you are in the air within 10 minutes.

Each airports apparent attitude to security and their passengers results in very different passenger experiences. Whereas Heathrow is completely paranoid about security, Schiphol, to me, seems more pragmatic. Heathrow tries very, very hard to ensure everybody in the terminal has been checked before you get in.  At Schiphol they check you just before you get on the plane.

One of the problems with Heathrow seems to be the requirement to photograph everybody coming into the terminal and then check it on the way out. The results in delays and long queues aside from being an invasion of privacy. The overly paranoid security policy at the airport creates the rest of the delays. Besides, it’s theatre; Bruce Schneier has a lot to say on this.

T5 wants passengers to shop ’till they drop? Schiphol thinks it’s optional. T5 doesn’t want you sitting down? Schiphol provides relaxation couches around the airport. T5 makes you walk past shops whilst trying to choose where to eat. Schiphol puts them all in the same place. And Schiphol never seems to have queues in their toilets.

In summary

Heathrow T5 fails because it is designed with lots of security theatre and as a shopping centre. That’s the security processes that make us feel safe without actually doing anything about security. Long delays and miserable, bored and unfriendly security staff aren’t going to make passengers feel welcome. The apparent emphasis on extracting cash from travellers rather than giving them somewhere to relax isn’t going to help either.

I’m going to avoid Heathrow T5, which also sadly means British Airways, in future.

I had the ‘pleasure’ of travelling through Heathrow T5 twice during my holiday to Thonon les Bains on Lac Leman which is reached via Geneva.  On paper, the flights look fine; catch the BA plane to Heathrow, two hours at Heathrow and then catch your onward flight to Geneva.  On the return journey, three hours are offered at Heathrow – little did I know it was to clear security.

On the way out to Geneva, the plane was delayed by nearly an hour waiting at the gate.  However, desipte a 2 hour transfer time (not including the extra delay) our bags failed to make the connection from Newcastle and didn’t travel with us.  That’s everybody who flew from Newcastle to Geneva, six in total; not one of us was joined by our bags on the flight.  The bags did eventually turn up on the next flight and were delivered to us after a 5 hour delay. The baggage company at Geneva were not surprised; it seems that bags are far more frequently delayed from T5 than any other airport in the developed world.

However, it only got worse on the way back.  First we were delayed in Geneva because there was no slot available at Heathrow.  Then, even when we were given a slot at Heathrow, when the plane arrived at the airport’s airspace we were delayed again.

Then the plane was parked away from the terminal as there were no stands available.  Normally buses await to take the passengers to the terminal.  Except there weren’t any.  For 30 minutes.   None of the ground staff seemed to have any sense of urgency.  The bus driver even seemed to wait with the bus full despite several panicked American passengers on short transfers – they didn’t stand a chance with T5.  But when we were finally delivered to the terminal the fun really began.  We didn’t get to the T5 shopping centre for another 30 minutes.

Queues seem to be the norm at T5.  Firstly, there was a ludicrous queue after getting to T5.  It transpired that at the head of this queue was a small woman asking people whether they were transferring to local or international flights.  She was completely pointless because the hall immediately behind her was full of signs directing you where to go if you were transferring to a local or international flight.  She had no purpose whatsoever.  Utterly unbelievable and the first 10 minutes of waiting.

Next we queued to have our boarding passes checked.  After that another queue to have our passports checked.  Finally, both the local and international passengers were shepherded to yet another security check.  Together.  Why we were split up into different queues is anybodies guess as both the national and international passengers had boarding card and passport checks.  The final security check is the one where you take your belt off, take your laptop out, etc.  This took another 15 to 20 minutes.  Why?  Why?  Because the staff were just slow.  Inept too, probably, but generally very, very slow at staring at the computer monitor that displays the innards of cases, jackets, purses and other assorted bags. Incredibly slow.  In Newcastle this queue usually takes about 5 minutes.  The queue for our machine was on 10 or so people long yet took nearly 20 minutes …  I dispaired.

All told from the moment of touching down to getting into T5 took over an hour; it would have been 30-40 minutes at best even if we had got to a stand.  What a disgraceful way of treating people arriving at supposedly the most advanced passenger terminal in the world.  I imagine the American passengers on short transfers missed their flights.  There bags almost certainly will have done.

However, once in T5 proper you understand that it isn’t for passengers to relax waiting for their flight.  No, it’s only purpose is to extract money; it’s simply a glorified shopping mall.  All we wanted to do was get some lunch and then find somewhere comfortable for our next flight.  Instead, there are precious few places to eat and virtually no where to actually sit.  Unless you have an executive lounge pass that is.  T5, which because of its size, should feel spacious, yet feels claustrophobic, cluttered, noisy and generally unpleasant.

Even when we boarded our flight to Newcastle the madness of Heathrow didn’t end.  We ended up staying a further hour at the stand and taxiing before we finally took off.  Because they are operating at full capacity.

That seems to be the problem.  There are simply too many passengers.  They don’t need another runway; they need less passengers.  The current ‘systems’ at T5 don’t seem to be able to cope.  Most of the staff have a ‘learned helplessness’ air around them.

Heathrow needs proper competition.  Maybe BAA needs to be broken up so that Gatwick and Stansted can offer real competition to Heathrow to force it to buck its ideas up and provide a proper service to its passengers.  The security theatre is a joke; I don’t feel more secure, just that I’m having my time wasted.  We are paying customers; yet we pay to be treated like cattle.  I’m not sure why we put up with it.  Yet another reason for competition, but perhaps in a different way.  If there was an airport that didn’t treat you like cattle and actually treated you like paying customers then I would definitely fly through there, even if it was a bit more expensive.

BAA is bad for Heathrow and bad for British Airways.  The sooner it is broken up the better.

After all, you don’t need a passport to take the train to Bristol. Or a coach, for that matter. And I’ve never needed a passport to drive my car to Bristol. This is inside this country. These are internal flights. Next time you travel inside the country and have to show your passport, ask yourself why?

PS I know people are going to say “Because they mix International and Internal passengers.” I don’t care about that; they also check your boarding card and passport at the gate before you get on the plane.

I took the train to Wolverhampton, as it seemed the easiest way to get there. Cross Country Trains is now the operator as Virgin seemed to have lost it. I went 1st Class down; I wish I’d managed to on the way back. I’m not sure which was worse; the chatty woman for half the journey, the fat man with huge elbows on the other half, or just that the seats were too narrow and like pieces of wood. I’ll not travel standard class again on National Cross Country Rail. Also their website doesn’t appear to work very well in Firefox 2.0 on Linux.

Incidentally, the trains must be a pretty good implementations of a Faraday cage because neither my O2 data card, nor the Neo FreeRunner, nor the Nokia 6310i was getting much of a signal at all. And there is no WiFi available on the train which limits connectivity somewhat. Maybe this is a quiet train?

The venue was the Lighthouse Media Centre which occupies the old Chubb factory in Wolverhampton. I never knew Chubb (the lock people) were based there. It’s a large Victorian venue, red brick, with a slightly leaky roof. Bytemark, the people who actually run the machine this site lives in, were there with a big multi-player gaming rig. Matthew (of Bytemark) told me that a light mist had headed for the gaming rig earlier in the day when it had rained! There is a cinema, which was the main stage, an atrium, which is really the covered courtyard of the factory, and a small, expensive, place to eat conference food. Nothing for vegies or anybody who wants green things in their food. Eat out is my advice.

Day 1

I arrived around 12.00, just in time for the afternoon session:

• Jeremy Allison – an update on where Samba’s been, is and is going. This was an interesting and amusing talk delivered with Mr Allison’s typical blend of wit, verve and sarcasm.
• Gong-a-Thong – a series of lightening talks compered by a man in a thong. Really. Actually, a man dressed in a thong, racoon feet and gloves who arrived complete with comedy racoon head. A mixed bag of excellent, dull, incomprehensible and, frankly, bizarre talks that can last no longer than 5 minutes. The bizarre one left me speechless.
• Conduit – what’s happening with desktop sync in the Gnome world. Quite a lot it turns out. The chap was very knowledgeable, but a tad on the dull side.
• LUGRadio Live and Unleashed – the Podcast done live. This was typically excellent, with a few dull moments. And it turned out, this isn’t the last LUG Radio Live. No more podcasts though, but another Live event next year in … Wolverhampton

And off to the hotel we go. I stayed at the Quality Inn in Wolverhampton which was the official hotel and was a bargain at £32 for b&b. The only major problem was that the room was hotter than hell. The shower was also scalding hot and took about 10 minutes of wrangling to get something that could actually be stood under. Breakfast, on the other hand was good with the usual array of hot and cold food. Nothing like a fry-up to battle a hangover.

The evening saw the LugRadio party at the same venue. This had the joy of Karaoke. You either like Karaoke or you don’t. I don’t. Everybody seemed to have fun and drink lots which meant day 2 had a quieter start:

Day 2

After a brief introduction by the LugRadio team, straight into the talks:

• Demoscene – some amazing animations/films generated by the people who crack(ed) games. Essentially, computer generated graphics and music in real-time; no videos allowed. These are unconferences that allow people to demonstrate just how good they are at visual and musical feasts delivered in real time on a variety of computing platforms ranging from 8-bit Atmels to quad-core Intel monsters. Good, but very loud.
• The great debate – Jeremy Allison, Mathew Garret, Tony (the LugRadio community guy), Max Spevack (Fedora Project) with Jono Bacon as the compere. It was generally amusing as they debated GPL3, Distro release synchronisation, OOXML as well as whether computing is fun enough for new blood to enter it.
• Telepathy – which should have been interesting, but wasn’t as the delivery was very dry – some people actually fell asleep. But we did get to see the XO (OLPC) which uses Telepathy as part of it’s networking stack to do collaboration between XOs.

People

I met some really interesting people during the event. It ranged from business owners/consultants to network administrators, to programmers, community managers, etc. The social side, particularly the chats during the part on the Saturday night were great, and I now know a lot more faces than names. Which is partly my problem – I remember faces much better than names. Hopefully, I’ll run into them again.

If you didn’t go this year, it looks like you could next year!

Europeans and other potential enemies of the US are to be forced to deposit their personal details on the Department of Homeland Security’s computer system 72 hours before they get anywhere near the place.

The new rules will apply to citizens of the UK, and other countries whose citizens can travel to the US under the “visa waiver program”, from January next year. The prime motivation for the scheme is increased concern in Washington that European grown terrorists can exploit the visa waiver program to get into the US and wreak havoc.

Such a beautiful, interesting country populated by really great people; sadly governed by (apparent) idiots.

On their web site, they go to great lengths to say how safe the data will be; that the DNA and other information will be held anonymously and that they definitely won’t give the information to anyone (except if told to by the legal authorities). Except, the data isn’t held anonymously.

To quote from their web site in the confidentiality section:

• Your DNA samples and information are stored anonymously – that means any information which can identify you, such as your name and address, date of birth or NHS number is taken off your data and samples and stored separately.
• Information is encrypted. We do need to be able to identify your samples and information so that we can track your medical records, contact you again or destroy your samples if you withdraw. We do this by using a code. Only those UK Biobank staff with access to the code will be able to connect you with your information and samples.

Note that the emphasis is mine. Therefore, they can identify your DNA samples. They just keep the key in a separate database. Thus, they can equally reconstruct a database with your DNA records and name, address, and any other details that are held quite easily. They just say they won’t.

Tinfoil hat time. I can foresee a near-future event where the Government decides that 500,000 DNA records are just too interesting to be kept away from their ID database and decide to pass legislation to gather all DNA databases into the (future) ID database. It would just be too tempting for them. I just can’t take the risk. As much as I would like to help science, I really don’t want my DNA ending up on yet another poorly secured database where just about any Government employee can access it. Better yet, in the process of transferring the data, they will burn it to a CD unencrypted and leave it in a briefcase in a taxi or something similar. Sorry, don’t want to be a part of that.