Stop Complaining and Starting Building

Doc, as usual, hits the nail on the head in explaining how to solve the privacy-problem-de-juer: Facebook’s advertising platform. To wit:

If we want our reach to truly exceed Facebook’s grasp, we can’t just tell Facebook to stop grasping. We have do deals on our terms and not just theirs. We have to have real relationships and not just systems on the sell side built only to “manage” us, mostly by minimizing human contact.

Perhaps most of all, we need to come up with systems that help demand find supply, rather than just ones that help supply find (or “create”) demand. That means we need alternatives to the outmoded and inefficient system of guesswork we call advertising.

That doesn’t mean we make advertising go away. But it does mean that we find new paths between demand and supply. and it does mean that find ways to get unwanted advertising out of our face.

From Doc Searls Weblog · Making Rules, II
Referenced Mon Nov 26 2007 08:33:20 GMT-0700 (MST)

As I say in my piece at Between the Lines, I think there’s more money and greater customer satisfaction in recommendations, but Facebook didn’t go there.

Doc isn’t, I’d guess, eschewing a commercial venture that would build these tools. Probably multiple commercial ventures. This doesn’t have to be an open source project—although that’s a possibility as well. People have made money—lots of it—connecting demand and supply for thousands of years. We don’t have to imagine the alternative to demand generation as a revolution. Indeed, as Doc points out, it’s a return to the long time order of things.

Posted by windley on November 26, 2007 8:40 AM