My next thought — I believe there are some pretty substantial barriers that can be erected around a business like GroupOn, and I hope to release details on some of my concepts in the next few months.  We’ve been trying to crack the “local marketing” space since the advent of the internet and I believe we’re getting very close.  It’s pretty exciting.

I’ve told many of you who know me about my vision for social and professional life in ~5 years.  I believe that when we attend an event (e.g. a conference), we’ll pull up a list of attendees on our phone and that list will have photos, some career info about each attendee, some interest info, our closest connection to each attendee (do we know someone in common?), etc.   If background geolocation ever becomes a reality because of lower-power methods of doing geolocation (brief plug for my friend Steve Cheney’s writeup on the future of geolocation), then I believe we’ll even have augmented reality apps that point us to the people we want to meet and suggest ice breakers (“so you’re a Yankee fan, eh?”).    Much of this stuff already exists, I’ve just not seen it pulled together in the “right” way yet.

Anyway that’s professional networking in 5 years (probably sooner).  Most people are OK with that view of the future.  But what scares them is when I then say, “the same is going to be true when you walk into a bar, restaurant, club, etc.”  In other words, I fully believe when I walk into my local bar, I’m going to be able to pull up a list of all the people in it, see their photos, and find out some stuff about them, including, again, whether we know someone in common (which might be a nice icebreaker for that pretty girl in the corner!).   This view of the world is where people seem to get much more freaked out.  And I don’t blame them, I just think it’s inevitable barring draconian privacy regulation which I hope we’re smart enough not to put forth.

Back to the realization I just had recently — Foursquare is like the opt-in network for this kind of social sharing.  I’ve long thought of the whole check-in system as being a bad thing, only required because (a) iPhones can’t multi-task and (b) d geolocation is a huge power muncher so doing it in the background is energy prohibitive.    But the real power of the check-in system is that requiring a check-in is like saying “I’m ok with sharing that I’m here, including potentially to strangers here too.”  And what a convenient way to share information about ourselves that can only lead to better socialization.  I’d be happy if someone in a bar saw I was there too through Foursquare, clicked my Foursquare profile on their iPhone (or Android phone), found out a bit about me, and struck up a great conversation with me.  It would be awesome.

For me this is a perspective shift because I had always viewed manual check-in as a bad thing.  But it might be just what the privacy-doctors have ordered to get us to share more while still maintaining at least a feeling of control over what we share and whom we share it with.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/21/facebook/

You can also check out Robert Scoble’s Twitter favorite links which are basically a bunch of FB-related links:

http://twitter.com/scobleizer/favorites

I’ll tip my hand as well and do a very quick summary:

1. FB wants to be the “identity” system on the web.  This has been around for awhile — it was called Facebook Connect.  The difference now is that while Facebook Connect required that every time a website wanted to use your Facebook identity to “log you in”, you had to say “OK”.   Now you will say OK once and this permission will stick forever, for every website (to be fair it remains to be seen what level of granularity FB adds to the identity control — this will likely evolve).
2. FB has added a “like” feature and is trying to help developers integrate it into their websites.  See (3) for why this is important.
3. FB has substantially “opened up” its data to outside developers.  While I won’t go into the technical details here, a use case will suffice — when you go to nytimes.com to read some news, stuff your friends have read and “liked” might be visible to you in a bar on the right side.  Or when you go to the Pandora.com to listen to music, you might be able to create a channel out of “stuff my friends have liked.”
4. FB implemented some other more minor stuff like a virtual currency.  Virtual currencies are going to be huge, but we’re not quite there yet, so this is not as important as (1) – (3).

The Facebook announcement is definitely a big deal.  While FB has been telegraphing the company’s ultimate goal — to have most of our internet activity pass through Facebook in some way, shape, or form — for awhile, the ambition to announce this intention now in one fell swoop with simultaneous integration into some of the most popular web destinations is ballsy.  As Dave Winer blogs, “[Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] is like a young Bill Gates”, i.e. tremendously ambitious and one-step ahead of the rest of us (for awhile, anyhow).   In my opinion, however, this move — i.e. these new features —  is going to fail.  It’s not going to fail spectacularly, it’s just going to fizzle out.

The bottom line is that Facebook represents our digital “purely social” presence.  Facebook is where we all have pictures of us on vacation, hanging out, clubbing (that’s me), and partying.  Facebook is where we make sarcastic jokes on friends’ walls.  Our Facebook Persona is not the persona we want representing us everywhere.

Is it the side of me I want representing me when I’m listening to music?  Sure.  When I’m playing games?  Sure.

When I’m doing research?  Nope.  When I’m interacting professionally?  Nope.  When I’m even reading news, blogs, digital media?  Nope.

So in my opinion, we’re not going to want this “identity” logging into websites for us.  But there’s more to this play — Facebook wants to gather one-sided “interest” data from us (read: good advertiser targeting data).  This is an area where it’s been losing for awhile, mainly to Twitter, which is built around interests.  The problem with Facebook is that heretofore, its major relationship has been reciprocal.  If I’m “friends” with someone, they must be “friends” with me.  This is a good structure for doing some things like sharing vacation photos, but it’s a bad structure for other things like following interests.  Facebook’s new “Like” feature is an attempt to allow us to create more “one-sided” relationships with stuff out there (from articles to celebrities), but it’s too little too late for me. Take a look at the “sharing features” from the Tech Crunch summary article I linked above:  1071 tweets about it (Twitter), 243 “likes” (Facebook).  People are much more apt to tweet about stuff they’re interested in because they know anyone following them is (loosely) interested in the same stuff.

Now you may say “sure, I buy a lot of what you’re saying, but I still think Facebook has the leverage to pull this off’, and it’s hard for me to disagree.  But will Facebook execute?  Facebook has made a lot of mistakes (Beacon anyone?) on privacy and a mistake that damages us professionally or personally and is communicated outside FB’s walled garden could be the “last straw” for many people.  It remains to be seen how well Facebook will manage this risk while executing on all other cylinders and trying to pull off what amounts to an enormous coup.  I don’t want to write too much about this subject, but suffice it to say, as I said above, I think many people will end up turning off the “connect” features that allow everyone to use our FB identity as our main web identity, and I think the attempt to garner the “one-sided” interest knowledge that has been so sorely lacking for FB will fail as well because FB just doesn’t have the brand for it.  Fan pages have been a pretty spectacular failure — Like will be less so, but still a pretty big one.

Anyway, that’s my bet.

Unfortunately, I have to admit I’ve never been a big fan of either of these services.  I completely back the ultimate link between data about our actions and where we are, I just can’t get behind the whole manual check-in/game-based approach.   I’m an automator at heart and find it tough to get behind data collection technologies until they are invisible to users.  Obviously the major reason behind requiring manual check-in is the fact that you just can’t do background location grabbing on the iPhone (though this may change with OS 4.0), but it remains to be seen whether there will still be manual portions to the check-in processes if/when background location grabbing becomes possible.  (As a side note, GPS tracking is a big battery hog, so it also remains to be seen how big a dent background location tracking will put into battery life at least until lithium-sulfur technology is widely available).  Since I’m not a Foursquare or Gowalla user, I can’t really say how much of product’s social value is the “game” behind the check-in process vs. the ability to track where our friends are, although ultimately I believe the latter obviously becomes most important).This post is not about either Foursquare or Gowalla anyway.  This post is about taking a quick, albeit meandering, look at one of the amazing opportunities opened up once accurate background location tracking becomes a reality.

Let’s assume that our social media presence is built-out to include computer-readable data about where we are, what we do, and etc., and location-based background data gathering becomes a reality and is part of this presence.  I’m not sure if this is a part of Facebook, Twitter, Google profiles, or, perhaps most likely, some new service that doesn’t exist right now.   This presence data is readable by anyone, but perhaps not shared in a way that links the data to us personally (i.e. if I’m a company, I can see user 222′s data, and I can even contact user 222, but I don’t know his name or any other identifiable information — of course one problem here is that if I see where he lives via the location data I can probably figure who he is on my own, but let’s ignore that problem for now and assume there’s ultimately some solution).

Now let’s take a hypothetical situation in a future where everyone is hyper location-aware.  I’m looking for a home entertainment system, from speakers to furniture to the services required to set it up.  I walk into Best Buy and look around at speakers, TVs, cabinets, wires, etc.  I then walk down the street to West Elm and look at enclosure units and base units for TVs with accompanying closets/stands/whatever for other A/V equipment.  Meanwhile during all of this my phone has tracked my location and uploaded this location data to the “presence” referred to above.  Not only does this location data mention what stores I’ve been in, but also what areas of those stores and thereby what products I’ve looked at (because in his hyper location-aware scenario, retailers have published coordinate data on what products are where in their stores [or perhaps RFID transmitters/readers do this work for them).

Now my online “presence” data indicates to anyone who’s paying attention that I am currently in the market for home entertainment products.  This could be a good thing or a bad thing.  It’s a bad thing if that just means I get spammed with offers.  It’s a good thing if I mostly see offers from people whose offers I will value — or maybe I even see offers for products and/or services I wasn’t explicitly looking for, but turn out to be great deals or tremendously useful.   The difference between the two is precisely the social layer we are so busy cultivating at the moment — the so-called “PageRank” for socially-driven interactions.  If a offer/service/provider is rated highly given my social network and interactions, I see offers from that provider.  Otherwise, I don’t.  Now we’ve got a really useful marketing tool that benefits both sides of the equation, consumers and sellers.

Some of this is already doable (though not really being done) using services like Blippy, but location-based information gathering offers so much more lucrative data.  I don’t know how quickly a setup like this will become reality, although I would guesstimate at least 4-5 years.  Nonetheless, I look forward to seeing how this data gathering and use evolves.  Privacy be damned!

Crystallized into its most succinct form, Goldhill’s argument has three major points:  1) there is no possible universe in which having routine healthcare paid for by “insurance” instead of out of our own pockets makes sense, 2) we don’t realize how significant the true cost of this perverse setup (where even routine checkups are paid for by “insurance”) is to our own pockets., 3) even worse, the misdirection that occurs by having us pay money to insurance companies who in turn pay for all our healthcare causes massive inefficiencies in the type of care (and how much of it) we actually get.  All of this paid for out of our own pockets just in an obfuscated way that makes it tough for us to get a real handle on it.    I highly recomend Goldhill’s entire article as his writing is brilliant and he has several other terrific arguments, but the scope of my post today just covers these major points.

Think about this issue at a high level.  You walk into a doctor’s office.  You walk out, having paid some pittance of a co-pay (say $30).  To you, it seems nearly free.   But how could it possibly be free?  Who would be subsidizing our care?  Furthermore, an insurance company, one that specializes in statistically understanding how to finance rare large outflows (e.g. massive surgeries) with common small inflows (premiums), pays for this.  How could it possibly be more efficient for an insurance company — which has to handle massive overhead, investigate claims, etc. — to pay for services only you and your doctor know the true value of?

The answer is it can’t, it isn’t, it never will be!  The entire American healthcare system is actually one giant misdirection caused by a single seemingly innocuous law which made employer contributions to employee health plans tax-deductible half a century ago.   This law meant that employer-funded health insurance became the most affordable option (after taxes) for all healthcare coverage and that completely skews our entire system.

How so?

Let’s take an example from my own life.  About four or five years ago, I had terrible pain on the outer half of my left knee every time I ran.  One routine visit to an orthopedist and I had a reasonable diagnosis of iliotibial band syndrome (ITBS), a common injury in which one has strained the band connecting our hips to our knees (along the sides of our legs).  The injury either gets better on its own or through physical therapy in more severe cases.  However, in addition to this diagnosis, I got a prescription for an MRI, “just to make sure.”  These works plague our healthcare system.

MRIs are something like $1200 (why they cost so much is another argument and to avoid circularity, I will avoid discussing that).   You should not have a $1200 procedure to diagnose an injury that has already been diagnosed(!) when the prognosis even if this diagnosis is not correct is still nothing serious (at worst without an MRI I would have to see the doctor again in a few months if the pain continued).   Is there any planet on which this can possibly be efficient?

And yet I of course had the MRI done because in our current system that’s the most efficient thing for me to do — hell, I’m already paying for it anyway.

First, we present the problem. The essential problem is that Health Care spending as a percentage of our total income is on the rise. The Congressional Budget Office predicts:

• Aggregate health care spending which amounted to 16% of our GDP in 2007 will rise to 25% in 2025, 37% in 2050 and 49% in 2082.
• Federal spending on Medicare (net of beneficiaries’ premiums) and Medicaid will from 4% of GDP in 2007 to 7% in 2025, 12% in 2050, and 19% in 2082.
• The growth in spending does not lead to a commensurate growth in actual health (as measured in complicated fashion)
• The “aging population effect” only accounted for roughly 20% of the overall “excess” cost growth in aggregate spending

Related to the second argument, but not quite the same — the New England Journal of Medicine claims that we are simply getting more care from more expensive procedures (which are “better”, i.e. either cause less discomfort or are more diagnostically accurate). If this were true, the most important outcome would be substantial improvements in our life expectancy.

Our health care standards are actually improving substantially, leading to longer lives. As we live longer we will need more health care (older people need more care). Thus improvements make sense — I state this as an argument, but it is effectively debunked in the CBO report above, in which the CBO shows that only 20% of increasing health care costs can be attributed to the “age” effect and this number decreases over time down to 10% in the CBO’s 2082 predictions.

An increasingly litigious society means more, expensive malpractice lawsuits. Malpractice insurance premiums go up, thus so do doctors fees, and doctors practice “defensive” medicine in which they order unnecessary tests to save their skin.

I’m not going to respond with my own too-wordy polemic on the flaws of the past 50 years of American realpolitik.  Let me simply say that I am not a Kissengerian and I think the Manichean worldview is wrong not in the moral sense, but in the “how can we get it right” sense — i.e. what will produce the best outcome.  In a perverse way, I and other liberals are actually more Machiavellian than our conservative counterparts like Krauthammer!  While he believes it is our fundamental duty to stand up against repression and for democracy, even if it means a worse outcome in the long run (because it makes America an easy stooge), I believe the ends justify the means — we should do whatever we consider necessary to end up where we want to be … with a freer and more Western friendly Iran.

Peggy Noonan has a great piece on this topic and I agree with her 100%.

Today’s post will be tech-centric, so those uninterested can navigate away now.

I want to talk a little bit about my vision for “devices” as we begin to move towards the next generation of computing.  To me there are three major factors which define the “next generation” of consumer computing/tech:

- significantly faster, ubiquitous broadband (wireless)

- unlimited computational power and relatively cheap access to any software via cloud

- open specifications for devices which enable device categorization and communication between multiple manufacturers

You can probably tell from my use of bold and my blog title that I want to discuss the last of these three in this post.  

What is an open specification?  To begin, let me posit a scenario.  Let’s say Apple comes out with a much anticipated tablet PC on Monday at their Worldwide Developer’s Conference.  What would this tablet look like?  Well, it would probably look like a big version of an iPhone to some extent — it would be mostly for web browsing and watching media, not for doing document editing which is clearly a pain with no keyboard (although certainly one could attach a wired or wireless keyboard).

But what if instead of just being a standalone device, Apple envisioned the tablet as a device capable of multiple functions.  Let’s call each of these “classes”:

- display

- internet access/wireless router/network creator

-  computation/CPU

… among other, more specific categories.  Now imagine that you have 2 people with iPhones, which would be have all of the capabilities above, plus the ability to act as a “controller” because of its small size.

Now imagine you could play a game of air hockey, using the tablet as the screen (it would also handle the computation of the game and set up an ad-hoc wireless network over which the game would occur), and your iPhones as paddles/controllers.  How cool would that be?  How cool would it be if you could just as easily use a Google (Android-based) phone as one controller and an iPhone as the other?

The concept here is abstraction.  If device makers start to create abstract “classes” which restrict a device’s sphere of activity, it enables much superior interplay between devices even among different manufacturers.  For the above example to work, there simply needs to be a controller “class” that hands off control data to a “computation” class over a network created by a “network” class, with the ultimate output displayed by the “display” class.  These can all be the same device, each different devices, or 3 classes in 1, 1 class in another, as in the air hockey example (tablet is computation, network, and display, iPhones are controllers).  In other words, rather than deal with specific devices having different capabilities, we have an open specification that says “ok, if you’re going to claim to be a network class, here’s what you have to support and in this language that every other device understands.”  And all of the sudden myriad devices can interoperate and open up new use possibilities that simply weren’t possible before.

This is not a new concept.  Abstraction and object-oriented (hierarchical class structure) are ideas that have defined software development for decades.  Nor are these ideas limited to software development.  Your computer itself is built on similar principles — you have a motherboard which can be made by one company, a CPU which can made by another, a graphics card made by a third, a hard disk made by a fourth, and etc.  None of this would work if these pieces of hardware were not written with defined roles and interoperability in mind.   But for years since the advent of the personal computer, we have thought of these distinct types of device — a desktop, a laptop, a mobile phone, a music player [ipod], a personal organizer — rather than about the roles they actually fill.  Nowadays it is common for the mobile phone to encompass multiple roles and even subsume portions of the laptop/desktop role, but we’re still hamstrung by lack of interoperability between them even though all of the technology exists to make amazing interoperability work seamlessly.

In other words, I advocate a different type of thinking.  I would do away with the device-centric viewpoint which says “I want one device to do everything.”  Or more accurately, I have no problem with devices that do everything as long as they also implement a restricted set of behaviors according to well-defined, open specifications that enable complex interactions with other devices.  I embrace a different model where devices can do everything or do very specific things(!) and thus interact seamlessly.   In a world where increasingly every piece of electronic equipment out there, including washers, dryers, energy meters, audio equipment, etc., is gaining computing power and versatility, we need abstraction and role restrictions to make the most of our device potentials.

Oh, and by the way – this already exists.  See Bluetooth.