April 2nd, 2008
My Profile is my Cell
by Tony Haile | 
13 Comments
In the 1990s the cell phone number was the key component in our virtual identities. That number was the unique identifier that represented us, and was the main conduit of communications with our friends. We were asked to leave our name and number, as if both held equal claim to us. However, throughout the 90s and beyond, that number locked us in to a deal with a specific carrier. To change providers you had to jettison your old number, your old identity, and start again afresh. The price of this freedom was paid in lost friends and missed opportunities.
Much of the role of the cell phone number as the centre of our digital identity has been usurped by our social network profiles. Our unique identifier is now our URL, messages that once might have been SMS texts now find themselves on our Facebook walls or in status updates and the profile has become the main conduit of communications with our friends. Our digital identities have become much richer with the web of content and relationships our profiles display and yet the same problems remain. Our profiles lock us in to a specific provider and to change means jettisoning everything and beginning again with nothing.
The fight to make our cell phone numbers portable, to be able to change service providers without paying such a heavy price, seems remarkably similar to the fight to open up the social networks that we see today.
Throughout the 90s there was a rising tide calling for the right to take your phone number with you if you changed providers. The carriers saw number portability as a threat to their valuations and lobbied against it furiously; without it there would be few ways to compel subscribers to stay with their service. They knew one thing: lock in the number, lock in the value; export the number, export the value. They feared a commoditized, cut-throat world where the business of today could vanish by tomorrow.
Today, the social networks’ value is derived from the content (be it your words, photos or friends) with which it is populated. They also know one thing: lock in the content, lock in the value; export the content, export the value. There’s little chance that a $15bn valuation at such variance to performance could be sustained in an open interoperable world, and one might actually have to go back to calculating valuation in far more boring ways like as a multiple of revenue.
This is the crux of the problem that the large-scale social networks face, they know that calls for openness will only become more strident over time and that to survive in the long term they must open up. And yet if they lose the vendor lock-in and thus potentially have to recalculate their valuation, their investors will be out for blood. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, they suggest palliative measures such as widgets being available across multiple networks and mutual email exchange between oligarchs. None of which really gets us any closer to an open interoperable network where we can move our identities to whichever provider best satisfies our needs.
In 1996, the FCC mandated that all cell phone numbers should be portable, and then the fight began in earnest. The carriers claimed that of course they would like numbers to be portable, but there were huge technical barriers that would cost $1 billion to implement. Unsurprisingly, these technical barriers turned out to be less than insuperable and the $1 billion estimate turned out to include such costs as retraining sales representatives.
Next they claimed that there was no demand as large volumes of subscribers were already switching carriers despite the lack of a persistent portable number. This was something only a few people really cared about and thus there was no need to spend money on a demand that didn’t really exist.
We seem to be seeing very similar arguments coming from the major social networks today. Facebook representatives regularly claim that they want to move towards openness but technical barriers and privacy problems are slowing them down. Technical barriers and privacy problems that smaller more nimble systems without the access to Facebook’s funds and engineering talent seem to have dealt with without issue.
We are also told that people enjoy being able to cut free from their old identities and begin again afresh. Apparently, being able to move your friends and content around with you to whichever service you want them to be on is a non-problem only found within the geek community, and those who push for it need to step outside the bubble. The same viewpoint suggests that people ‘enjoyed’ the opportunity to dissolve old social connections with the change of a phone number and found that a benefit of switching carriers was the ability to start again with a blank slate. Just who is in the bubble here?
The same problem, the same arguments and the same intransigence. The carriers fought tooth and nail to appeal the FCC order and it took seven years for number portability to become possible. Even after that, the carriers went out of their way to make the process difficult for their subscribers: AT&T customers complained that taking their number from AT&T to another carrier was taking several days, instead of the two to three hours it was supposed to take and that AT&T’s customer service representatives were not being helpful, with hold times on phone calls often lasting hours. We’ve seen a similar philosophy behind the roadblocks put in place for those wishing to delete their Facebook account and there seems to be no rush on their part to improve this situation.
What made persistent portable identity possible in the cell phone sphere was overwhelming pressure from outside forces, in this case the FCC, and even then it took years. It seems that it will take a similar timeframe and measure of external force to compel the social networks to open up too. This time, though, that force is more likely to come from open networks invading market share, rather than from government intervention. However, the social networks can take a measure of comfort from the carrier experience too.
Since number portability was introduced, subscriber churn has not been as great as many feared. Customer service, price and network availability, strategies that facilitate rather than exploit their subscribers, have become the keys to retention. If the social networks were to open up, they might have to face more competition on quality of provision and innovation, but for the market, the users and their own long-term success that’s no bad thing.
Can you please enable a full feed. When I grab the feed and try to subscribe in Google Reader it shows me a snippet only. Also your site is extremely slow and unreachable for most of the morning for me.
My apologies on the site’s slowness, it has been equally frustrating for us! Our hosting provider has apparently been under attack from spammers and it has overloaded our server. We are looking to change servers as soon as we can. All posts from now on will be full feed.
I like to think of it as “You Are Your URL”.
I want someone to be able to type this into a device (any device) connected to the Internet:
@luigimontanez.com do you want grab lunch today?
And I want to receive that message based on how I prefer to receive messages at that time from that user. So that may be via Jabber IM, it may be via email, it may be via text message to my phone, it may be via a special web service that I set up to send me an IRC message in a certain room on a certain IRC server.
But the person on the other end shouldn’t worry about the method of delivery. He should only concern himself with the target (me) and the message (”lunch today?”).
Exactly! the only fixed points in communication should be the identities at either end, the identity signifier should not dictate the medium.
Mate, you are going to love Chi.mp!
I would say that it should be “You Are Your Domain” though. It’s important for you to be able to switch providers according to who gives the best service and any URL other than a domain just locks you in too easily.
I have discovered the Yahoo does not allow users to cancel their accounts! I had attempted to find a link or means to do so a couple of years ago, and found out that there is nothing visible to do such a thing! Does anyone know why Yahoo does not allow this? I am not considering deleting my account, but changed my mind after I had realized that the process appears nearly impossible! Any comments on this? Thanks!
This “locking” of identities from ISP, TELCO, “IownYou.com”, domain registar or whatever social network site make me rethink about what is in fact an identity and to whom it belongs.
“[...] people ‘enjoyed’ the opportunity to dissolve old social connections with the change of a phone number and found that a benefit of switching carriers was the ability to start again with a blank slate.”
This quote is in a sense a perspective view from what, à newcomer to the NET TECH, may wish as a kind of « Digital Absolution » in this spirit of unforgiveness, where the sanctuaries are build from TeraBytes.
I guess I’m a little confused… can you elaborate on what parts of the social network experience you would like to see portable from one network to another?
@Cory I guess for me the minimum I would like to see is the freedom to move the things that I have created: the photos I have uploaded, the blogs etc I have written, the relationships I have created and nurtured. These should belong to me, not to the social network and I should be able to move them where I like.
To go even further, I would like to see the unique identifier (your URL) portable too, so that you people can connect with you through that identifier no matter who you choose to provide you with service, just as you keep your phone number if you decide to move from Verizon to Sprint.
Finally, and it’s not really portability so much as interoperability, i would like to see connections possible between different providers. To use a current world example, I would like to be able to communicate and interact with my Myspace friends from Facebook. Why when I can email you at gmail from my hotmail address can I not message you at Myspace from my Facebook address?
Luigi: What I think is especially interesting is that if you add a username in front of your example, what you get is email, a technology that’s tested and proven, and which has already seen many extensions to deliver messages to any device, such as cell phones or perhaps twitter accounts. Playing devil’s advocate for a minute, the only substantial differences are:
1) The notion of the domain itself being the address, rather than a username residing at that domain. Now that domains are widely available and inexpensive (or free with chi.mp), it’s no longer necessary to tack users onto some company’s domain. If email had a way of just sending a message to the domain itself, letting it handle figuring out a “default” recipient, that would serve just as well for this point.
2) The *expectation* that the endpoint will change. As I mentioned, it’s already possible to route emails to other devices or locations based on need, but there’s still an assumption that it will remain as email. In your example, it won’t be clear what mechanism will be used, and that’s okay. Email or not, that’s mostly a matter of education and evolving expectations. If email routing became easier to install/configure and thus more commonplace, people’s expectations would begin to change anyway. Rather than expecting my message to go your email inbox, I could just expect it to go to *you*, wherever you are. It’s just semantics.
Of course, extending the official email specification just isn’t gonna happen these days. That means that none of these routing techniques stand a decent chance of gaining widespread adoption, which means people won’t expect them to be present, and nothing will change.
Perhaps such simple syntactic change as dropping the username will be enough to spark a change in mindset in enough people as to make this all work. Or maybe chi.mp will offer email hosting with advance routing and forwarding services built-in, lowering the barrier to entry and helping change expectations. I don’t know, but I think it’s an interesting topic, anyway.
On the other hand, looking at it as email without a username brings up (as always) the topic of spam. Right now, most people are dealing with spam either by (a) not publishing their email address, or (b) relying on spam filters to help out. There are a few people trying to attack it with legislation, but we all know how well that’s gonna work. By removing the username portion of an email address, it becomes almost impossible to avoid publishing the address, especially if you plan to offer a Web site.
That leaves people with just one option: spam filters. Granted, they’re getting real good these days, to the point that I publish my email address freely, relying on GMail’s filter. But some spam does still get through. It’s easy enough to spend 10 seconds marking them as spam and moving on, but what happens when messages start routing to my (public!) twitter account? Or my personal cell phone?
It just starts to look like a very attractive spam platform: near-guaranteed access to a person’s eyeballs, without even having to wait for them to get back to a PC. All you have to do is a quick Google search on your products keyword to find blogs where people are talking about, and send a message to those domains designed to sneak by spam filters. That’s not all that different from today, sure, but remember, people today have ways of hiding their email address. Going forward, they might not.
Tony/Josh/anybody: Any thoughts on how domain-centric messaging would address the spam issue?
Hey Marty,
Awesome comment and sorry not to have got back to you earlier, we’ve been at the web 2.0 Expo and it’s all been fairly hectic.
The spam issue is an interesting one for us. If your central communications point is public then spam becomes a real issue. For me it is part of the wider issue that email seems to be fundamentally broken right now. For the moment I think one of the key advances would be to create better ways to turn whitelisting into a fine-grained filtering control, and combine that with a kickass spam blocker. We’re looking into this but it’ll be a bit of a way off.
how i can know my cell phone number profile
Tony: No problem on taking a while to get back. It’s difficult for me to keep checking these comments all the time anyway, so a week has now gone by since your comment, too. Such is life when having conversations on older threads.
@Jonathan Fritz
Sure they do. It’s not even that hard to find. If you click “Help” at the top right of any Yahoo page, then search for “close my account”, you’ll find it.
If you click “Help” on the Account Management page, which you can get to from clicking “Edit” next to your username when logged into any Yahoo page, it’s linked right there, in the “How do I…?” section.
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/acct/howto/acct_23.html
https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user
Compared to just about every other online profile provider, Yahoo really seems to do a very good job of giving users ownership of their profile information. Without the ability to destroy something, you don’t actually own it.