broadstuff

Doesn't it gladden your heart when trusted things come through? Yes, it would seem that Porn and e-readers were made for each other - Slate:

As I write this, the most downloaded item for Amazon's Kindle is a novel by Jenna Bayley-Burke called Compromising Positions. Here is part of the plot description: "David Strong knows how to do a lot of things—run an international fitness company, finesse stock portfolios and stay out of emotional entanglements. That is, until he gets tangled up with Sophie Delfino and her Sensational Sex workout....

......

You won't find Compromising Positions anywhere on the New York Times or USA Today best-seller list. So how did it become the No. 1 item on the Kindle, slightly outpacing Jonathan Franzen's Freedom? Price. To buy the paperback on Amazon costs $10.20, plus shipping and handling. The Kindle version? $0.00, which includes instant delivery. Christina Brashear, publisher of Samhain Books, explains that she usually makes one title in a series available as a freebie for two weeks, betting that some readers will pay for future titles. Based on the performance of August freebie Venus in Blue Jeans, it's reasonable to assume that some 35,000 people will download Compromising Positions during its freebie run. While few would dare try Samhain's giveaway tactic with a physical book, the tactic seems to be working digitally.

Many—including the publishing industry—would not label Compromising Positions pornography, and with good reason. For decades, romance and women's fiction novels have featured fairly explicit sexual passages, which readers apparently feel comfortable with as long as they are surrounded by what one Amazon commenter labeled "a tastefully written story of deep love and emotional commitment."

But you know the rest is coming (fnarr fnarr), don't you. It will be interesting to see what directions e-Readers (and by definition tablets like iPad) take as Porn starts to drive adoption of technologies in the delivery system.

A quick Flash, anyone?

I have tuned into the Royal Society's Web Science twitterstream today (#rswebsci) as I am at my workplace, and it was trotting along at a nice pace when (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee twts:

flotsam and jetsam, on the web - dotsam and netsam first time I'd heard it #rswebsci

Cue a retweet orgyspasm as everyone retwts said Tim-thing, totally drowning the #rswebsci column and then my "general" column as more people pick it up and RT. As one grumpy person (not me, oddly enough) then wrote:

{ give us a break } Why retweet someone who has 29k + followers? Ersatz spam #rswebsci

It is, indeed, ersatz spam (I retwt'd that comment though)

Did give me a thought for another function I want in my "Sin Bin" Webfilter though. Why can't Twitter or Tweetdeck or whatever have a function that culls all retweets after the first one into my stream?

(Update - an hour on an the #rswebsci column is still spammed to the gills by retweeters - I think a useul bit of netiquette is if you retweet something cancel the hashtags they've seen it already!!!)

(Update 2 - Article on RWW saying if you haven't seen RT in the hour its over - this was not happening here, it was still going strong 5 hours later. In fact it got worse when Bill Thompson published his blog post so then two RT articles jammed the #tag Twitterstream )

Mike Arrington on the "why".

The truth is I was tired. But I wasn’t tired of writing, or speaking at events. I was tired of our endless tech problems, our inability to find enough talented engineers who wanted to work, ultimately, on blog and CrunchBase software. And when we did find those engineers, as we so often did, how to keep them happy. Unlike most startups in Silicon Valley, the center of attention at TechCrunch is squarely on the writers. It’s certainly not an engineering driven company.

AOL of course fixes that problem perfectly. They run the largest blogging network in the world and if we sold to them we’d never have to worry about tech issues again. We could focus our engineering resources on higher end things and I, for one, could spend more of my day writing and a lot less time dealing with other stuff.

The (rumoured) $40m price of course never entered into it

That aside, Mr Arrington points to a very interesting problem that all startups will face at some point - it stops being about the technology (unless they are a pure technology startup) and starts to be about the product, and product managers etc etc rather than technology, and in The Valley that can be a tough transition.

And if the technology is not yet bedded down that is a huge risk to the business, and a major diversion of resource. I know of what he speaks from small companies I have run!

But what I can also tell them for free is that it is no picnic integrating into a large 24x7 infrastructure with huge heritage systems - never mind integrating a small, independent, "with attitude" culture into a large machine. We wish them luck - they will need it!

What is interesting is that they didn't opt for an Amazon or similar 3rd party infrastructure solution. But then those don't hand out $40m

(I think it works out to $25m to buy, $15m earnout, but it is, as I said, all rumours - as is the story that Mr Arringtom moved to Seattle some months ago to avoid California asset sale taxes)

Day Two of the Royal Society's Web Science Conference. Overall it was an excellent 2 days, probably the best conference I ahve been to for quite a while as it was by and large "real" web stuff rather than the hype that so many Web conferences are full of these days. Sara Fletcher has done a liveblog, so I have copied a pen picture from her blog plus my comments / takeaways on the morning sessions (Afternoon sessions will be in a following post - tempus fugit etc):

Nature of Collective Intelligence - Pierre Levy

The mind is not material in nature. It does contain ideas, and connections between ideas, networks of ideas, and as others have said the future of human sciences will involve the application of graph theory to this network of ideas. He defines "idea" as having concepts - abstract classes and categories, percepts, images - sense data, and emotional affects.

We can try to represent ideas in computational form. The mind can be viewed as a consistent universe of operations on ideas in a structured semantic space. We can gather data, images etc electronically and categorise these. We cannot however represent the concept electronically, the meaning. We can represent truth in binary form but not much more. We cannot "see" the concept, it is always represented by signifiers (images, audio etc), and concepts are always networked, always linked to other concepts, like a giant grid of concepts, so a concept itself is a network. He outlines a semantric machine which takes signifiers, manipulation mechanisms, mechanisms to manipulate the signified and semantic circuits.

I'm starting to find this a bit confusing and desperately trying to recall discussions of signifiers and semantics from my philosophy of science course but it's all a bit hazy now!

I will be honest - I didn't have a bloody clue about what he was on about - he used a heck of a lot of very long words, many of them interchangeably it seemed. At the end he put up some diagrams and it turns out what what he was saying (as I far as I could tell) was that in essence we will need more metadata than data in semantic webs, there are different layers and levels required, and a number of mathematical transforms are required to move from on level to another, and he has re-invented the earlier Semantic Web's stuff.


Social Networks in the Internet - what Social Research knows about it - Manuel Castells

The web is providing tools for individual autonomy - creative, political and social. Internet use empowered people though security influence and led to increased happiness, and this is true for groups that need empowering, for example women (?) who are at the heart of the family and social networks, according to a study by Michael Wilmott. This is circular - the more people use the web, the more autonomous they become, the more they use the web.

The deepest social transformation from the internet has come in the last decade with social networks. Social networks passed email use in June 2009 in both time and number of users. Interestingly when people find their needs are not being met by existing platforms they create a new one. The new social platforms are not just about conversation, but about actually doing things, taking action, creating content. There is a connection between the development of social networks and social life, but individuals are taking control of how these develop, not controlled by governments or corporations. The big sites cannot control how people interact - if they do someone will create a new site that does what they want and everyone will migrate there. If facebook tried to go nasty it will disappear, as AOL did, as seen when Facebook tried to charge and retracted this three days later as people went away.

Engaging speaker, but blotted his copybook (in my view) because:

(i) he got some of his facts wrong ( For example he said first social network was in 2002 and was Friendster. No it wasnt - what about 6degrees, FriendFinder etc said the Twittersphere!)

(ii) this may be part of the issue with web science coming in from so many diferent angles, but much of his "what social research knows about it" stuff was fairly old hat if you have been reading the field. To be fair, talking with Jemima Knight over tea break she felt he had pitched correctly for the audience which were all at very different levels of undersyanding.

(iii) he was very much a Panglossianist, ie it's all for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and I think the fact that nearly all the questions were challenging him on this spoke for itself.


New Models of Government via the Web - Helen Margetts

The Big Society concept does allow for social media tools to come to the fore, single citizen accounts, citizen surveillance to replace audit systems, social web services within government. Digitization allows for quasi-voluntary compliance with DIY forms, government supers-sites, open data projects freeing public information are all good for governments looking at austerity measures. Delivery of all government information online can reduce costs elsewhere.

Mainly discussed their Digital Area Governance (DEG) as a solution to the "old" model of governance, which is fairly standard stuff among the Government 2.0 crowd, but she injected a dose of realism that is often missing among this crowd as:

(i) The current climate has a cash shortage, and that reduces the options - the cheap stuff will be done, the expensive stuff will be left alone

(ii) These organisms won't change fast - as she noted, of c 240 million transactions at the Dept of Work and Pensions in 2008, about 0.6% was online

I asked a question about what to do about the 1/3rd of people who won't use the 'Net (ie there are no savings as you still have to use the old services for them). Her view is that you move the effort to intermediaries between those people and the web, but as far as I can see that just transfers the cost (at best - at worst you then have to police the intermediaries)


Augmented Intelligence - Luis von Ahn
This is the guy who invented the Capcha - he tooks us through the current 2 word capcha (did you know its being used to digitise all the world's books? They are using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) but its not perfect so the words that OCR cannot recognise are now being used in 2-word Captchas (one is a control word). Now 750 million people have solved a word through captcha - 10% of the global population.

He asks, "If we can use 100,000 people to get to the moon and build the pyramids, what can we do with 100 million?" He has a project to translate the most important pages on the web into the world's major languages. A project called Duolingo uses people who are learning foreign languages to act as translators. This can act not only on text but also subtitling videos and training speech recognisers, simultaneously helping the user in listening and speaking languages. This could enable, for example, wikipedia could be translated from English to Spanish in 80 hours with 1 million users.

In conclusion: we should stop being parasites on computers and allow them to use our brains for processing. Excellent talk from very charismatic speaker!

Engaging speaker doing good stuff - what's not to like with all of us being little angels in the Web Architecture? Questioners quickly homed in on the issue that while his stuff is For The Common Good, other organisations - especially those driving the Walled Wide Web - may not be so benign.

From GigaOm:

AOL, the New York-based online media company, is on the verge of acquiring TechCrunch, the online blogging network started by former attorney, Michael Arrington. The deal is at a sensitive stage and might fall apart yet, but I don’t think so. Sources familiar with both entities says that the announcement is likely to come onstage at Disrupt, TechCrunch’s flagship conference currently underway in San Francisco.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is likely to make an appearance at the conference, and perhaps that’s when the announcement is likely to be made. Michael Arrington was unreachable for comment, and AOL has not returned my calls. I still don’t know the terms of the deal, and will update the post accordingly.

Hmmm...the last Social Media purchase AOL made was Bebo, where it overpaid massively for an asset about to be hollowed out by Facebook. Good exit for Techcrunch's owners (not so sure it will be so much fun for the staff), but for AOL's long sufffering shareholders, let's hope they do better in the negotiations this time!

Still, big picture - if you are looking for validation of blogging as a medium, this is it in spades.

(Update - @kosso points out "that Engadget/WebLogsInc wasn't too bad. It only really boiled down to more resources and an Aol logo at the bottom of the pages")

Attended the first two lectures at the Royal Society's Science of Networks conference today, from Albert Laslo-Barabasi and (Lord) Bob May. It was very refershing to hear Social Networking discussed with things like facts, rather than the more usual hype amd half-truths.

Barabasi in my opinion (literally) wrote the book on the subject, pulling together a lot of disparate strands in 2001, so it was interesting to hear what he had to say 10 years on about what was different or unexpected. My big takeaways were that:

(i) You have to differentiate between human and physical data networks. A lot of the initial theoretical work assumed humans would behave more like physical networks like the Web, and that there was less of a spread between richest and poorest nodes on the networks. (Physical networks have more randomness - but humans ones are far from random). It is becoming clear that Human networks are massively skewed towards a small group of very powerful nodes and a very long tail, that the differences (in followers etc) are huge, and that the "rich get richer" due to the preferential attachment principle (Most people tend to follow the most popular nodes)

(ii) This makes human networks more "scale free" than predicted, with far stronger power laws. They are driven by the dynamics of these power laws so reinforce early winners. They are also more "small world" than theory would have it (ie number of jumps from person A to B is low - "6 apart" for very large populations.

(iii) However, latecomers can make it big , but they have to have a higher "fitness" in the ecosystem. Think of the evolution social networks - Facebook is "fitter" than MySpace, which was "fitter" than Friendster. A later speaker showed how relatively small differences in user experience created huge changes in adoption, and that gives an indication of what "fitness" means.

(iv) Robustness is a real problem with scale free networks as the main nodes are so large. They degrade similarly to random networks if the main nodes are not taken out, but if they are the degradation is very much faster and worse.

I have ignored stuff that he covered 10 years ago, these are the big differences he highlighted. sadly there wasn't time for him to get into social networks proper.

Next up was (Lord) Bob May whosew ork I've also followed for 10 yers or so, his main area is stability in natural communities, but he used a lot of network maths to do it. He also applied these tools to the study of disease and to the study of biodiversity. His talk was on networks, ecosystems and a foray into how they can be applief to the financial system. takeaways:

(i) He pointed to a paper that seemed to use Game theory as well as network analysis for predator/prey network stability (Dunne and Gerwin 2008) which I haven't read (yet).

(ii) A interesting point about Sex Epidemic theory in Sub Sahran Africa - shouldn't happen on averag. However epidemiological network theory didn't take avccount of the small number of very active sex workers (shades of Barabasi and the Scale Free surprise) The key is then clearly to focus on these superspreaders and innoculate then, so gives a lower cost way to solve.

(ii) He made an interesting aside, to the effect that the worst thing you can have in these networks is to give the "superspreaders" carthe blanche to prey on the little people, and by the tone used (he has a marvellously dry wit) it was clear he was concerned that the major social networks today are going down these routes.

His next topic was one that has interested me this year, to teh extent that we have dine some work on it - namely using network theory a(and other tools like game theory) to understand Systemic Risk in banking. Big takeaway when they looked at teh banking network was that all the ingenuity that is going into ever more esoteric trading systems with higher and higher returns, but the overall banking ecosystem was being neglected as the big players got richer (shades of Scale Free big nodes and small prey above). The result:

(i) The banking networks is a huge networks of networks, and is massivley interconnected (and, I would conjecture, very scale free compared to other industries). So what happens if there is a shock? They built a model of 25 banks, and found that (as you'd expect from the above) if a big node went down the system collapsed - fast. This was especially true if the big banks had relatively small capital reserves compared to the rest of teh ecosystem - which is of course what they were doing in noughties.

(ii) He believes that the fact that all the banks are interlinked makes the whole thing literally "too big to fail", and he argued for splitting up the network so a failure in part A does not impact other parst - in essence a return to something like the Glass - Steagall act of the Great Depression that separated "casino" banks from high street banking.

(iii) Incidentally, the models showed that teh best thing for banks to do in the bad times is lend and not biuild up their capital, and to build up capital in good times (It's a Pharoah Story) - the very reverse of policy today. The models reckon that the current UK approach this is the best way to collapse an economy, by enrichng the banks and collapse the productive companies.

(iv) The other risk they can see is nanosecond trading is another emerging problem, as there is no governing of these systems. He made the allusion that if you put a half second delay in sending out emails it reduces virus spread.

He also made a good point re the economic "faith":

"There's an idea that some banks hold that there's an invisible hand which protects them, through market action, and not too much regulation, from bad outcomes," said May. "They're on very shaky theoretical ground there. The reason is it is invisible is thst it isn't there"

Actually its all too bloody visible, its called a bailout. The big thing that is missing in talking about banking "fitness ecosystems" is that in a Darwinian model they would all be extinct now, but have been allowed to live, unchanged. I was dying to ask him what he thought would happen next, given that - but they never picked me to ask the question

Sadly I then had to go back to work, but managed to return for the last talk, but that is for another post....... anyway, Sara Fletcher has done a blog of the day.

As I was about to hit "send" on this tonight, I caught an article from Malcolm Gladwell via Stowe Boyd: Gladwell notes that a new era of social activism on social networks is largely bollocks:

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,”

......

The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

As readers of this blog will know, we have attacked "clicktivism" too, but from the Game Theory point of view of "weak tells", ie a person who supports a cause from a comfortable settee in London or whatever by turning their Twitter picture green is very unlikely to die for the cause. We get to the same place however.

Stowe's point is that the revolution is below this, at the "small - r" level.

I think Gladwell needs to look at the little r revolutions going on all around us, like the urban food movement, Grameen-style microloan systems, and others. This is where social tools will change the world, one weak tie at a time.

I think Barabasi and May would agree with Stowe's views, but also point out that if some nodes got too big (which being a human system they would probably predict they will without some form of governance), there would be major problems! But I would also love to hear May's acerbic wit on Clicktivism

As to the facts getting in the way of Social Media Snake Oil, I live in hope......

Tonight, Vince Cable, UK Business Secretary, blurted out the inconvenient truth when he noted that:

Vince Cable will tomorrow launch an aggressive attack on capitalism with a speech that warns that the current system "takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can". In an echo of Denis Healey's famous 1974 pledge to "squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak", Cable will unveil plans to shine a "harsh light into the murky world of corporate behaviour".

The business secretary will announce the launch of a major consultation on takeovers and executive pay, with the intent of ending "corporate short-termism".

"Let me be quite clear," Cable will tell the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool. "The government's agenda is not one of laissez-faire. Markets are often irrational or rigged."

Cue howling by all the big biz meedja poodles and proxies on the TV, newspapers et al. By this time tomorrow Mr Cable's character will have been assassinated more times than a working girl in a conclave of archbishops (or is that vice, versa?) . Meanwhile, back in the real world, as Michael Arrington writes, Capitalism is red in tooth and claw - if you are outside of the closed, smoked filled dining rooms that is....

This group of investors, which together account for nearly 100% of early stage startup deals in Silicon Valley, have been meeting regularly to compare notes. Early on it was mostly to complain about a variety of things. But the conversation has evolved to the point where these super angels are actually colluding (and I don’t use that word lightly) to solve a number of problems, say multiple sources who are part of the group and were at the dinner. According to these souces, the ongoing agenda includes:

- Complaints about Y Combinator’s growing power, and how to counteract competitiveness in Y Combinator deals
- Complaints about rising deal valuations and they can act as a group to reduce those valuations
- How the group can act together to keep traditional venture capitalists out of deals entirely
- How the group can act together to keep out new angel investors invading the market and driving up valuations.
- More mundane things, like agreeing as a group not to accept convertible notes in deals (an entrepreneur-friendly type of deal).
- One source has also said that there is a wiki of some sort that the group has that explicitly talks about how the group should act as one to keep deal valuations down.

At least two people attending were extremely uneasy about the meetings, and have said that they are only there to gather information, not participate.

So what’s wrong with this?

Collusion* and price fixing, that’s what. It is absolutely unlawful for competitors to act together to keep other competitors out of the market, or to discuss ways to keep prices under control. And that appears to be exactly what this group is doing.

It was ever thus, hence anti-trust laws etc etc, problem is the regulators are always one step behind. Private Equity of all stripes is still outside of most regulators' ambit, and no OECD government has yet had the balls to resurrect Glass Steagal, which sort of sets the whole tone for Cable and Arrington's duet.

Still, true or not, this one is going to be interesting to watch play out.................

*A collusion is when two cartels run into each other

We have often explained that Apple's strategy is always to enter (create) a new market and own the 15% or so of the most profitable market sectors, and have done so since the Apple II. Many people have taken umbrage with this, misunderstanding revenue for profit. Revenue is what startups boast of, profit is what businesses still alive 5 years later have. Superprofits means you are still around 40 years later. The graphic above explains all you need to know about this strategy. It's from Fortune:

We are also impressed with Apple's ability to monetize its innovative products through selling high-margin consumer products that drive strong earnings results and growth trends for Apple shareholders. A case in point is the mobile phone market, where most handset OEMs struggle to post a profit or even 10% operating margins (except RIM and recently HTC), while we estimate Apple boasts roughly 50% gross margin and 30%+ operating margin for its iPhone products.

In fact, Nokia, Samsung and LG combined sold roughly 400M mobile handsets worldwide in the first half of 2010 with a combined value share of 32% of handset industry profits, while Apple sold roughly 17M units over the same time period and captured an estimated 39% of industry profits, or greater than the top three global handset OEMs combined. Apple leads the industry in every metric except for unit share...

The quids*, as they say, est demonstratum.

*quid = bucks, dosh, wonga etc etc - specifically in British £ denominations. The above is, in fact, a word play on the Latin......

The text below was from a post to the VRM forum, and it is informed by the analysis we did on "FreeConomics (see the O'Reilly Web Expo presentation here)

I think we are in danger of making the error of thinking that privacy is largely a technology rather than an economics problem.

If you use someone else's platform they will have to eventually extract rents from it to sustain it. The less relative power you have, the more exacting the rent. If you won't pay the rent in cash, they will take it in other ways, such as datamining and/or selling your details.

The only - and I mean only* - way this will change is if one either:

(i) pays the price for keeping a neutral "Trusted Party" up and running
(ii) ditto to keep one's own data.

My view is that the economics of "keeping your own data" is easier to pay for as "business as usual" rather than something most people will actually pay for separately. Thus one option is P2P tools one can download a la Skype, that create a credible alternative

The other parties that can fairly easily run the "Trusted party" system are:

- the ISP, as part of your monthly subs.
- The payment network (Visa, Paypal) as part of the payment service

On the "free" internet, someone is subsidising everything, and if you can't see the free lunch then it's you

* Apart from accepting advertising of course, but that is so interlinked with datamining online these days.

TechCrunch reports today that Facebook is building its own smartphone:

It was a little less than a year ago that we broke the news that Google was working on a phone of its own – which was eventually revealed as the Nexus One. It was about that time, says out source, that Facebook first became concerned about the increasing power of the iPhone and Android platforms. And that awesome Facebook apps for those phones may not be enough to counter a long term competitive threat.

Specifically, Facebook wants to integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone. It can only do that if it controls the operating system.

TechCrunch also notes that facebook is vigorously denying this without denying it, as it were:

We’ve been taking a beating today on our story about Facebook working on a branded mobile phone. Just like last year with the Google Phone, lots of people threw tantrums about how we made the story up right up until Google launched their own branded phone, the Nexus One.

And that’s what’s happening today, due in no small part to Facebook PR issuing what looks like a blanket denial of the story this morning. “The story is not accurate!”

Except the story is accurate. Facebook has been working with hardware manufacturers to explore building their own phone. We don’t know the timing, and we don’t know how deep the software stack is that Facebook is contemplating building, but we know that as of very recently the project was alive and well.

There is in fact a bit of a rush by various players to try and build their own walled gardens in the emerging mobile smartphone world, the belief being that if you can trap the consumer onto your device and deeply integrate with their address book etc then they won't get off your service. (And the worry being that Apple and Google will do it to you if you don't)

And on mobile people actually are used to paying money....

However, it reminds me of the early days of the online media world in the early 1990's, where just about every player with half a pretence of an interest in the emerging Internet market was looking at the end to end value chain they could own, if they could wall in enough customers.

It never came to pass, for 3 main reasons:

(i) No one player had the resources to put together a compelling enough offer across the value chain from content through to device to persuade people to lock themselves in

(ii) Users did not like the idea of being locked in to one service provider and acted against it, forcing interconnection (the same happened with SMS, the first mobile data service)

(iii) Technology moved on, allowing open access to be set up easily (HTML, Web Browsers etc).

In this arena they are also assuming that the mobile telcos will remain passive, yet they see all the data and have that most golden of gooses, the customer credit card (and a s a recent Pew survey noted, customers most want to pay for things via their mobile bill).

So, what to make of Faceboook's alleged attempt to buck the trend and bunker-hunt its users? The biggest issue it has is it doesn't own any end device marketing and delivery capability, and thus credibility. Google, despite all the horses and men at its disposal, was woeful at selling its own device (heck, even Microsoft has struggled) but at least they and MSFT have OS level control. Facebook can't use Android or iOS if they want any form of control of their own walled garden for long.

Maybe they can do a deal with Nokia/Symbian or Microsoft, who both need some sort of lever into the "smart" smartphone market and will have to burn money in buying their way in anyhows - but that limits facebook to whoever uses those phones.

No, endgame is they will have to try and install a deeper software suite that uses the user's address book onto Other People's Phones, and will have to buy their way in (otherwise why would anyone do it?) but they will be unable to make it walled off for long - competition, consumer inclination, mobile telco self interest and regulation will probably all conspire against them.

But then the early 1990's were littered with abandoned walled gardens as well, and everyone today seems to have forgotten the past - or rather is seduced by the "it will work this time" cry of the new apostles.