But for Instagram and its users themselves? Things haven’t actually changed all that much — so far.

One year ago on April 9, 2012, Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook wall (where else?) that the not-yet-public Facebook would acquire Instagram. Founded in 2010 as a pivot from a location-based app called Burbn, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger’s Instagram turned into a scrappy mobile startup that seemed like the antithesis of Facebook’s ubiquitous web platform. It seemed like an odd match, and the even if the sale was a defensive move to keep Instagram out of Twitter’s hands, Zuckerberg explained why the duo still made sense:

“This is an important milestone for Facebook because it’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all. But providing the best photo sharing experience is one reason why so many people love Facebook and we knew it would be worth bringing these two companies together.”

The fears that came with the purchase

I wasn’t yet a tech reporter when I heard about the Facebook acquisition, but I remember having an instant sense of fear when I heard the news. Instagram was one of the first apps I eagerly downloaded when I got my first smartphone in August 2011. In the 20 months since then, I’ve shared more than 700 photos on the service, or on average, more than a photo a day. When I heard the news, my immediate worry was that Facebook would kill the app I’d grown to love, a tool that I have used to document my favorite memories over the past year.

And needless to say, I wasn’t alone in this fear. A quick Google search for “Will Facebook ruin Instagram” brings up at least five articles by that title on the first page of results. To say that people were aprehensive is putting it mildly.

What’s stayed the same

But now a year after the deal was announced, the essential core of Instagram — being able to quickly take and share mobile photos that look good, upload instantly, and generate positive social feedback from friends — hasn’t really changed. Sure, there have been signs that Instagram is under new ownership, such as the terms of service debacle in December. But the threats of quitting Instagram seemed overblown, and for now, my feelings about the app I first downloaded remain the same. Instagram still feels like a fast, efficient, and creative world within the app.

Mobilize 2012: Om Malik – Founder and Senior Writer, GigaOM Mike Krieger – Co-Founder, Instagram

Before the Facebook acquisition, Systrom said the company was aiming to hit 100 million users, and the app went ahead and met that benchmark in February of this year. The acquisition didn’t slow user growth, but it didn’t triple the predictions either — presumably once you start reaching large enough numbers, it’s hard to keep growing at earlier paces. But the app continued to do well, likely strongly influenced by the jump to Android just days before the acquisition that turbocharged usage and the increased support from Facebook’s servers to handle increased capacity.

So far, we haven’t seen a designated Instagram tab appear on Facebook profiles. And aside from larger photos on the revamped timeline (for all photos, not just those from Instagram), and integrated likes on photos, there hasn’t been much in the way of preferential treatment for the photo app, as Zuckerberg noted in March. Of course this could, and probably will, change over time. But for now, we haven’t seen anything too radical.

What’s changed

However, we have seen some changes to the platform over the past year. They might not be ones that casual users would notice, or changes that alter the core experience of Instagram. But they do hint where the company could be headed, and how the two companies are interacting so far:

1. It set off the battles among the web giants. Over the past year we’ve seen the launch of apps and products like Twitter’s photo filters, Twitter’s video service Vine, Flickr’s re-launched mobile app, and the rise of Snapchat. The Instagram acquisition came as Facebook realized it didn’t have a lock on how people shared photos, or as Om wrote, “Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects.” But the acquisition didn’t slow down Facebook’s competitors, and suddenly Instagram was pulled into the ongoing struggles between Twitter and Tumblr and Apple and Facebook. Instagram had previously been friendly in allowing users to cross-post content to a variety of sites like Tumblr and Twitter, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was an early investor in Instagram. But with reports that Twitter failed at acquiring Instagram just before Zuckerberg succeeded, relations between the companies deteriorated later in the year.
2. Instagram has to play by Facebook’s rules now. Until December, we hadn’t seen many consequences from Instagram’s new owners, but when Instagram updated its terms of service and people thought their Instagram photos of their kids could end up on billboards, they freaked out. Intentionally or not, Instagram had gone down Facebook’s “do it now, ask permission later” path, and as it has with Facebook, it got Instagram in trouble. While it seems people’s proclamations of swearing off Instagram didn’t really last, it served to remind causal users of the app that the acquisition had really taken place.
3. Say hello to the web. Prior to the deal, Instagram’s founders had said repeatedly that they had no interest in moving Instagram to the desktop, but the company did launch desktop profiles in November and photo-viewing and feeds in February. It’s hard to tell if those additions have changed the service much, but as we wrote before it’s the ability to upload photos via desktop that would change the alter the experience more dramatically — that so far, the founders have said they’re not interested in adding.

Looking forward to the next year of Facebook + Instagram

So what will happen to Instagram over the upcoming year? Facebook has been through some serious changes since the acquisition – there was the botched IPO, the dramatic improvement of the speed and user experience on mobile, the launch of e-commerce products with the Karma acquisition and Gifts, the launch of Graph Search, the revamp of Newsfeed and tweaks to Timeline, and a new Home on Android.

Post-IPO, the company is building up its service as an advertising network, and doubling down on ways to make money. It seems like Instagram could be the next target for that. Emily White, Sheryl Sandberg’s protege at both Google and then Facebook where she worked on AdWords and then Facebook’s mobile partnerships, just announced last week that she’s joining Instagram’s team to be director of operations for the group. White’s joining Instagram could do for the group what Sandberg’s arrival did for Facebook: hello, monetization and advertising. We’ve already seen celebrities using their large followings on Instagram for brand endorsements.

But if users flipped out over terms of service (that a lot of people don’t even read anyway), it’s easy to imagine the outrage that would come if and when mobile ads started appearing in the Instagram feed. That could be the tipping point for many users who haven’t seen big changes over the past year. But it also could be the way for Facebook to start making up the billion dollars it spent on those photos of yours.

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In the wake of his suicide, Swartz’s case quickly became a cause celebre, and a group of legislators including Darrell Issa (R-Calif) — who was also instrumental in the fight against SOPA and PIPA — recently asked the Justice Department to look into the behavior of the U.S. attorney’s office in pressing for a severe penalty against the young hacker. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) has also proposed a number of changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that would prevent the state from going after others for what Swartz did.

Breaching terms of use shouldn’t qualify as hacking

Among other things, those changes — some of which were proposed by users of Reddit during a session with Lofgren last month — would prevent prosecutors from pressing charges for simple breaches of a website’s terms of service or user agreement, which is one of the clauses in the CFAA that was used against Swartz. Changing a computer’s hardware address (which Swartz did in order to avoid detection) would also not qualify as criminal hacking.

But while Aaron Swartz’s experience has drawn some much-needed attention to the problems with outdated laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — which was written in 1986, before the web was even invented — we shouldn’t forget that others have also been hit with this overly broad and vague piece of legislation, even though they haven’t become popular causes in the way that Swartz has.

As Marcia Hoffman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has pointed out, one of the most problematic parts of the CFAA is that the law makes it a crime to access a computer or website “without authorization” or in a way that “exceeds authorized access,” but those terms are never really defined. In a number of cases, prosecutors have defined them to mean that anyone accessing a web-based service in any way that isn’t explicitly approved by the terms of use is committing a crime under the act.

A broad and overly vague legal net

In 2008, for example, prosecutors used this aspect of the law to go after a woman who created a MySpace profile using an assumed name (although a judge declined to hear the case) — and as one security researcher has explained, the same principle could easily be used to charge anyone who simply goes to a website without the explicit permission of the owner.

Aaron Swartz

One of those who has been caught in this particular net is almost the polar opposite of Aaron Swartz, although both were clearly hackers: Andrew Auernheimer, who is known by the online handle Weev, has also been found guilty and is facing potential jail time for unauthorized access to a computer or web service. In his case, Weev and a fellow hacker collected a list of AT&T customer email addresses by generating random URLs at the AT&T website, and then gave them to Gawker in what they said was an attempt to draw attention to AT&T’s lax security measures.

Unlike Swartz, who has been hailed by most of his friends and acquaintances — including luminaries such as Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig and even the creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee — as a force for good and a crusader for openness and other just causes, Weev is somewhat notorious for being an online troll who reportedly delights in causing mischief, aggravation and hurt feelings wherever he goes.

Being a troll shouldn’t qualify as hacking either

All of that may make him less than appealing as a public cause, but the flaws in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are just as obvious in his case: in fact, what Weev did barely even qualifies as hacking, since he simply generated random iPad ID numbers and then used those to get the AT&T email addresses. In other words, the addresses were freely available and not hidden behind technological locks or passwords of any kind (Weev also made no attempt to use them or sell them).

The bottom line is that the CFAA isn’t worth scrapping or rewriting just because it was used to go after Swartz, or even Weev — the biggest issue is that it is so broad and technologically ignorant that it can be used to criminalize behavior that should barely even register as a nuisance, let alone a crime. Swartz’s downloading of JSTOR documents wasn’t serious enough for the archive to press charges, and yet the prosecutor chose to threaten the young hacker with jail time.

At its best, hacking of the kind that both Swartz and Weev engaged in is no different than the kind that Microsoft founder Bill Gates employed when he let lose a worm that shut down a corporate computer network when he was 14. Within reason, testing the limits of computer systems and revealing security holes is something for which we should be thanking hackers — or possibly admonishing them — not sentencing them to prison terms.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / ER 09 and Fred Benenson

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Andreessen partner John O’Farrell, who will be joining the board of IFTTT, wrote in a blog post Thursday why the need for a service like IFTT exists:

“As the Web has evolved, more and more of that online time is spent in specialized venues such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Foursquare. While these are fantastic applications, they have a downside, in that they largely exist as parallel, unconnected containers for our personal data. Trapped in their respective silos, our posts, photos, tweets, pins and checkins are largely inaccessible to us from outside. Moreover, creating useful connections between one application and another is far beyond the average user. Sure, most of the most popular web applications now have APIs, but they’re written for the benefit of developers, not people.”

IFTTT, (which is pronounced like “gift” without the “g”), stands for “if this, then that,” and allows users to set actions to occur automatically on the web. For instance, you could set up an IFTTT connection that automatically posts an image to Tumblr when you take an Instagram photo. Or if a particular stock drops to a new level, IFTTT can send the user a text message. Users can create the connections, called “recipes,” with any of IFTTT’s enabled sites, which includes more than 50 companies such as Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram, and YouTube.

Users have created more than 2 million different recipes, and more than 3 million are executed every day, O’Farrell wrote. The company is looking to hire new talent to grow the service going forward with the new addition of funding.

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The Internet Society is an organization that tracks the use and influence of the web and releases policy recommendations associated with online access. For its annual survey it asked more than 10,000 people in 20 countries their thoughts on a series of questions. The results in some cases were surprising. For example, the U.S. had the highest percentage of people who never used audio/visual conferencing online, with 56 percent saying they never used services like Skype or WebEx. Globally, only 27 percent said they never used an IP-based web conferencing tool.

U.S. respondents also were the second most likely to avoid instant messaging, with 42 percent of Internet users saying they didn’t use an IM service compared to 16 percent globally. Only Germans were less likely to use IM — 47 percent said they don’t use instant messaging services. And while a majority of the respondents were concerned about their online privacy and took some steps to control access to their online profiles or turning off location tracking on occasion, a surprising large percentage did little else to safeguard their data or to preserve their legal rights.

For example, even when users know they are sharing personal data with a site or service, four out of five users do not always read privacy policies and 12 percent never read privacy policies. Only 47 percent of the respondents reported that they always use separate passwords for sensitive data, and only 13 percent said they never share permissions with family or friends.

Maybe we hope to mitigate some of our trusting nature by giving out false information — more than half of those surveyed give incorrect personal data when creating an account at least some of time. But, a staggering 44 percent say they always provide correct personal data. Apparently we are large and contain multitudes.

A good example of this can be found in the chart below, which compared the U.S. response on two questions with the global average and three other countries. When asked if the government should ensure people’s right to access the Internet, the U.S. was surprisingly reluctant to agree with that statement when compared to the rest of the surveyed countries. Yet, like most other people, the U.S. sees the Internet as a source of knowledge. Apparently we recognize that the internet is awesome, but aren’t willing to ensure everyone has access to it.

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Businesses have long tried to harness the web’s convenience and efficiency to move physical goods and services. Things like online ticketing, appointment booking and even shopping all let people take care of tasks when they want and where they want. But the newer crop of services are trying to close the gap between online action and real-world gratification.

As the New York Times covered on Friday evening, Google is testing a same-day delivery service. From the post:

Though the service propels Google into commerce, the company does not intend to operate warehouses or a shipping service but to team up with retailers and delivery companies. Several San Francisco retailers, including national chains, are participating in the program already.

For shoppers, the service means they can avoid the trouble of driving to the store and some of the wait for items ordered online.

The article notes that Google’s rationale for getting into this business is somewhat unclear, although it maybe be as simple as meeting rival Amazon on its own turf. It may also be Google’s attempt to understand what will become the next logical leap for the web in a way that doesn’t require it to build out a physical distribution network. In all walks of life, our physical world and online worlds are converging, so it makes sense to try to understand how that might happen, and where the limitations and points of friction are.

And as the article points out, once Google starts delivering products it can track the effectiveness of its ads from the initial click all the way into a user’s home — once again bridging the divide between the online and physical realms, and perhaps boosting the amount it could charge for ads. During the third quarter Google was walloped with a 20-percent drop in profits in part from declining ad costs.

However, I’m old enough to remember Kozmo, which allowed users in cities to order a movie or ice cream and get it an hour later as well as other experiments in same-day delivery. But Kozmo, like many others of the dot-com era, failed to make enough money to cover their costs. One hopes that Google’s efforts here have a real business model or rationale, or this next logical leap for the internet isn’t going to pan out.

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The docks, once crawling with shipbuilders constructing huge constructing vessels like The Titanic, are now an empty sprawl of wasteland dotted with lonely office buildings. And for anyone who remembers the Troubles, an activity as simple as crossing the road or staying at a hotel can carry chilling reminder of brutality that is not easily forgotten.

It’s no surprise that these difficulties have had an impact on the local startup scene too.

From what I heard, the attempt to build a new entrepreneurial culture is there, but it’s slow going. Northern Ireland’s turbulent existence means that the economy remains massively reliant on the British government (around a third of the population work for the public sector) and it is still working hard to attract investment from outside. Meanwhile, locals are still looking for a real champion, a real victory, beyond bluster and good ole boy networks.

Belfast’s problem is that things don’t get consigned to history: in fact, history stubbornly raises its head at every opportunity, bleeding mercilessly into the present and the future. Northern Ireland’s ambitions are too often scuttled like The Titanic, crushed by the pressure of the past.

But the truth is, Belfast is not alone in this. It may feel like an extreme example, but the whole of Europe suffers the same malaise in some shape or form.

Weighed down by the past

From Finland to Faliraki, from Portugal to St Petersburg, Europe is sitting on a vast and varied history that it struggles to move beyond. We’re stuck like flies in amber, our ideas freeze-framed at the moment our societies were at their most successful or most extreme. Britain can’t shake off the arrogance of empire, France clings to its l’exception culturelle,

In a way, this is especially resonant in technology companies — because, after all, they the ones meant to be inventing the future. And because our societies are failing to shake off the worst parts of their legacy and craft a successful vision of where we’re going, we are all left copying Silicon Valley’s idea of what tomorrow will look like.

Look at Nokia — not long ago the world’s biggest force in the world’s fastest growing technology industry, now apparently an also-ran. Although some of its leaders have a bright vision, too many insiders stubbornly cling to a history of greatness that no longer chimes with the rest of us.

Or look at Germany’s attempts to enforce rigid and steadfast privacy rules. These ideas have a totally understandable historical context, but outside of that unique bubble, it would be polite to call them overzealous. Clinging to that history has left German web companies hamstrung while the buccaneering robber barons of the Wild West clean up everywhere else.

The result is that the conversation about our future has become a one-sided dictation from a group of companies who essentially grew out of the same Valley culture. Our tomorrow is their tomorrow.

I was reminded of this failed future when London’s Tech City announced that it had poached top Facebook executive Joanna Shields to run the organization.

Bringing in Shields, an American, is definitely a win for the group paid to cheer on London as a startup and technology capital: she’s got more experience at the top of 21st century web companies than almost anyone else, which gives her a stratospheric level of credibility with the investors that Tech City is desperate to court. She’s smart, savvy and sharp: a great hire.

Shields’ record is not as spotless as Downing Street would have everyone believe — for example, masterminding the $650 million sale of Bebo to AOL was a genius move for company insiders but disastrous for everyone else. And then there’s the little fact that she has presided over companies that avoid millions of pounds of taxes from the country she now represents. But there is a rightful sense of pride at being able to prize somebody away from Mark Zuckerberg’s clutches.

However, bringing her in is also an admission that Britain — and Europe — has no other visions of the future to offer. It’s a tacit acceptance that technology, that innovation, can only be built the way they see it in Palo Alto.

Follow your own path

Perhaps you don’t mind. That’s fine. But I think if we want to find some alternatives — or at least explore them — we need to move on from our history, and our obsession with creating “the next Silicon Valley”.

Earlier this year I gave a talk in Portugal aimed at helping people there understand that they cannot win by chasing the Bay Area’s dreams. Every startup hub across the continent talks endlessly about being “the new Silicon Valley”, every PR flack has pitched the and every journalist (including me) has worked on those stories. But that’s just playing somebody else’s game. You can’t be the next Silicon Valley by doing what Silicon Valley does. It will win every time, because the game is stacked in its favor.

The same thing happens elsewhere. I talked about the reporting I did a couple of years ago from Shenzhen, China, where most of the world’s electronics are now built. Those skills, that expertise, are all in one place — and in just 30 years. Now their advantage is so huge, why would you try to beat them?

The problem with “the next Silicon Valley”, I argued, was that we took it too literally. Focus on “the next”: What will the next huge technology-led industry be? What will the next center of innovation that touches everyone be? What will change the world? Find that, get there early, build now around a vision of the future that you really believe in, and reinvention could work. Use the strengths you have locally — things like engineering talent, design culture, customer service, research expertise — but don’t let them dominate you. Don’t let history weigh you down.

Now, I don’t know what that thing is — biotech, next generation manufacturing and data are all contenders that Europe could focus on. But whatever “the next” ends up being, every entrepreneur across the continent, whether they’re in Belfast or Berlin — must stop looking over their shoulder, shrug off the past and stop buying into somebody else’s dream of tomorrow.

Photograph of Bobbie Johnson and Belfast mural used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr users Luca Sartoni and Infomatique respectively.

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This is something that’s worth thinking about as we see the social web becoming a mainstream phenomenon, with all that implies. The choices we make when it comes to the platforms we use, and the choices those platforms make about how they choose to monetize their networks, will have far-reaching implications.

The story of how Berners-Lee created the web is pretty well-known: how we was working as a researcher at the CERN Institute in Switzerland and decided to try to put the theories of earlier thinkers such as Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush into practice and developed a series of programs and standards that would allow a scientist in one lab to connect his thoughts or research to information that was located on a computer somewhere else. The result was hypertext markup language, or HTML, as well as the hypertext transport protocol, or HTTP — concepts that most of us barely even think about anymore, as they have become such an integral part of our lives.

A critical feature: No centralized control

It’s interesting to note that the initial response to Berners-Lee’s idea was skepticism, primarily because others in the field wanted all hyperlinks to be approved by a central authority, so that no one would click on a link and find nothing (or something unexpected) at the other end. As a Time magazine feature on Berners-Lee from 2001 described it:

“When Berners-Lee attended hypertext exhibits and asked designers whether they could make their systems worldwide, they often said no, citing this need for a clearinghouse. Finally [he said], ‘I realized that this dangling-link thing may be a problem, but you have to accept it.’”

That willingness to give up some form of centralized control may not seem like a big deal, but I think it was a crucial aspect of what Berners-Lee and CERN did in throwing the development of the web open to anyone, provided they abided by certain minimal standards. And it’s directly related to his other decision, which was not to try to commercialize what he had invented — something he left to people like Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, who turned the graphical browser he developed at the University of Illinois into a corporation and launched the initial wave of commercial web companies in the mid-1990s.

As Robert Wright (who did the interview with Berners-Lee for Time magazine in 2001) notes in a recent post at The Atlantic about the anniversary of the web, it would have been fairly easy for Berners-Lee to build on what he had developed and create some kind of commercial entity. In fact, he had a graphical browser/editor before Mosaic or Netscape came along (and the two-way or social web was very much part of Berners-Lee’s initial vision). But he didn’t, and one of the main reasons was that he didn’t want the web to become balkanized, with multiple versions of the browser that wouldn’t be truly interoperable with each other or the open web. As Wright described it in 2001:

“Berners-Lee envisioned competitors springing up, creating incompatible browsers and balkanizing the Web. He thought it better to stay above the fray and try to bring technical harmony.”

What kind of web do we really want?

Reading about Berners-Lee and thinking about the development of the web — and all the ways in which it could have become something very different — made me think about the recent furor over the evolution of Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, and how the nature of those networks is changing as commercial pressures come to the forefront. Twitter in particular is no longer just an open platform for real-time information, with an API that anyone can use to add value to the network. Now it is a commercial media entity with corporate partnerships and advertising relationships that will determine much of its future behavior.

As Hunter Walk of YouTube has pointed out, a big part of the impetus for this change is the massive amount of venture financing Twitter has taken on over the years and its attempts to justify an implied market value of $8 billion or so. Facebook is in a similar situation, since it has gotten billions in venture funding and is now a public company with shareholders and investment bankers to satisfy. Thanks to Berners-Lee, the web has never been a commercial entity, or it probably would have turned into something like AOL or CompuServe.

Even potential competitors to Twitter like App.net, which entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell is trying to develop, are driven by their funding models: Caldwell argues his service would be better because users and developers would pay for it, but others — including blogger-turned-venture-capitalist MG Siegler — maintain that in order to become successful App.net would eventually have to do many of the same things Twitter is doing and that the only real alternative would be a truly open platform (something blogging pioneer and developer Dave Winer has been talking about for some time).

Berners-Lee has also raised a warning flag before about “walled gardens,” such as the Apple ecosystem and Facebook, which he says threaten the open nature of the web. In the end, the debate about what Twitter and others are doing is about more than just competitive concerns or even capitalism vs. nonprofit models. It’s about what kind of internet we want and what we are prepared to do in order to get it.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Fabio Venni and Faramarz Hashemi

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Every so often, a controversy erupts over something that seems relatively simple: Namely, the concept of linking to (and thereby giving credit to) the source of a news report. In one of the most recent examples, Instapaper founder Marco Arment — who broke the news about a wave of corrupted apps in the Apple store — kept track of both media outlets that repeated the news and whether they gave credit to him or not. Some did but others didn’t, and some hid their links or otherwise tried to make it look like they broke the news themselves. There are a number of reasons why this kind of behavior is still so common a decade after digital media became mainstream, but none of them justify it. Simply put, linking is a core value of the web, and if we lose that then we have lost something incredibly important.

Arment initially reported on Wednesday that corrupted apps downloaded from the Apple store were crashing repeatedly, something he noticed with his own Instapaper app first and then confirmed was a problem for close to 100 other apps. The news spread quickly throughout the tech blogosphere, but Arment noticed that many outlets were not giving him credit for breaking the news, so he started what he called “Rewrite Bingo” by cataloging the blogs that were duplicating his report.

Time for rewrite bingo! CNET's rewrite, not too bad: news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-5… The Verge's post, better: theverge.com/2012/7/4/31380…

—
Marco Arment (@marcoarment) July 05, 2012

In some cases, blogs such as CNET gave credit to Arment for the initial report and linked to him prominently, while others linked to one of the first outlets that repeated his news, such as The Verge. Some linked to subsequent reports at other sites without any mention of Arment. And several reports that didn’t initially give credit to him were updated to add a link after the Instapaper founder started tweeting about the lack of credit. Both John Gruber of the Apple blog Daring Fireball and Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar pulled together Storify collections of his Twitter stream.

Virtually every blog or media outlet has probably seen similar kinds of behavior, and that includes GigaOM: Our legal expert Jeff Roberts broke a story on Thursday about a patent troll going after the popular travel site Hipmunk, and several outlets covered the same news without providing a link to our post on it. With other stories, including one recent one from Ki Mae Heussner about an Amazon acquisition, outlets such as the Wall Street Journal mentioned her report but failed to link. Although a link was added later after we complained, it shouldn’t take a complaint to get a media outlet to give credit to the original source of the news it is reporting.

Linking is a critical part of web culture

As I argued after a similar incident last year, this kind of linking isn’t just polite: It is also a crucial part of what makes the web function. Whether or not you believe in the value of the so-called “link economy,” giving credit to the sources of the information you used to develop a post or story is a principle that distinguishes ethical outlets from unethical ones. And as David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has pointed out in the past, the ability to link to sources is also a critical element of transparency and something that separates online media from print. As Om has said:

Links were and are the currency of the collaborative web, that started with blogs and since then has spread to everything from Twitter to Facebook to Tumblr. Links are the essence of the new remix culture. It is how you show that you respect someone’s work and efforts. It is also indicative that you are part of a community.

In the days when newspapers ruled the world of information, giving credit to other outlets was (and often still is) discouraged. Rewriting or “matching” a story that someone else broke — or taking wire-service reports and rewriting them a little — was standard practice, and code words such as “one report” were often used so a newspaper wouldn’t have to mention a competitor’s news story. This kind of behavior has spilled over onto the web as more mainstream media outlets have moved online.

One reason people often give for the failure to link (or the “hiding” of links at the bottom of an article, for which some have criticized outlets like The Verge) is that the financial model for digital media — that is, advertising — relies on page views, and one of the ways to juice those numbers is to pretend you broke a story. But regardless of whether this inflates reader numbers in the short term, it ultimately depreciates the value of the blog that does it, and that leads to a loss of trust. And trust is far more important than pretending you have a scoop, the half-life of which is now measured in minutes.

But this isn’t just about the media. Despite skeptics like Nicholas Carr, who has argued links interrupt the flow of reading and confuse readers, linking of all kinds is one of the crucial underpinnings of the internet and the web. That’s why the attempt to criminalize links via lawsuits like the one the U.S. government has launched against website operator Richard O’Dwyer (who linked to copyright-infringing video streams), is such a dangerous phenomenon. Links are the lifeblood of the internet, and it is up to all of us to see that we keep them — and the collaborative nature of the web itself — alive.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Skedonk and Robert Brook

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Regardless of whether some investors thought it was a damp squib instead of a moon-shot, the Facebook IPO was a landmark event in Silicon Valley terms — a multibillion-dollar share issue by a company that has become a global behemoth virtually overnight. While that may have given thousands of entrepreneurs and investors big ideas about the future, there are those who argue Facebook’s success has also done something else: namely, changed Silicon Valley culture for the worse. One of the most recent critics to advance this theory is Bill Davidow, a venture-capital veteran who says the social network has altered the values that tech entrepreneurs used to hold dear.

Davidow, who was trained as an electrical engineer, is a partner emeritus at Mohr Davidow Ventures, one of the oldest VC firms in the Valley with about $2-billion in investment funds under management. The author of several books such as Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet, he also has a long history in the technology sector — including early roles at Hewlett-Packard, General Electric and Intel Corp. Mohr Davidow, which focuses on IT, life sciences and clean energy, has invested in companies such as Brocade Networks, 23andme and Rocket Fuel.

A business based on the exploitation of users?

In a piece he wrote for The Atlantic magazine, Davidow talks about how Silicon Valley culture has changed as result of companies such as Facebook and Google, and in particular how he sees the focus of many companies changing when it comes to the consumer. In the past, he says, large companies like Intel and HP had large customers, and they had to serve them well or risk losing them. Newer Silicon Valley companies are different, he says:

[T]he valley is no longer as concerned about serving the customer, and even sees great opportunity in exploitation. We are beginning to act like the bankers who sold subprime mortgages to naïve consumers.

As giants like Google and Apple and Amazon and Facebook battle for supremacy, Davidow says, their main weapon is the ability to lock web users into their ecosystems and then exploit the data provided by consumers, along with the other elements of this unbalanced relationship. He doesn’t mention it, but a great example of what I think Davidow means is the way that Facebook routinely seems to change the terms of its offerings primarily for its own benefit — including the way it recently made facebook.com email addresses the default for all users without telling anyone.

Would older Silicon Valley companies have treated their customers this way? It’s hard to imagine how — but then, their businesses were very different, in a time before social media took over the world. Davidow argues that this kind of behavior is almost required in today’s environment, since everyone is after the same goal: accumulating as large a user base as possible, so that it can be monetized in some way. If Google can’t generate what it needs with Google+, then Facebook wins — and if Facebook can’t make inroads into mobile, then Apple wins. As Davidow puts it:

When corporate leaders pursue wealth in the winner-take-all Internet environment, companies dance on the edge of acceptable behavior. If they don’t take it to the limit, a competitor will… and when you engage in these activities you get a different set of Valley values: the values of customer exploitation.

If you are not paying then you are the product

The fundamental shift behind what Davidow is describing is that consumers are not really Facebook’s customers — as more than one person has pointed out, they are actually the product that is being sold. Since users don’t actually pay cash for the services they get, they have to pay for them in some other way, and in most cases it’s with the information they provide by using the network. So Facebook devotes huge amounts of its time and resources to figuring out how to get users to share more, and that’s what Davidow sees as exploitation.

Facebook isn’t the only company the veteran VC accuses of doing this: he also mentions how Zynga founder Mark Pincus has confessed to doing “every horrible thing in the book” to get revenues, and bragged about designing “compulsion loops” into products to keep customers engaged. And he slams Apple for building a walled-garden ecosystem that gives it the power to deprive customers of choice — a power he says it exercises aggressively — and Google for having a culture that “condones shamelessly violating consumer privacy.”

Are Davidow’s criticisms just a lament from the old guard about the rise of new firms with different values, or does he have a point about the world that Facebook and Google and Apple have created? Probably a bit of both. But it’s worth considering whether the benefits we get from free services are worth the trade-offs we make in order to get them, and what kinds of incentives the success of Facebook and others are creating for the companies that follow them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Mark Strozier

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