If Facebook were a country

Surely you’ve seen one version or another of this meme. If Facebook were a country, it’d be the Nth largest, where N varies from 9th up to 3rd, depending on how recent your data is. (Just try it on the google or on the Bing).

I tweeted the other day what I think is a better way of completing that sentence, and I’m reposting it here in hopes someone finds it interesting and starts to spread it:

If Facebook were a country, the citizens would have revolted and demand a better terms of service already!

Alright, I didn’t tweet it quite that way, but I like that wording better and it still fits in 140 characters.

How would you finish the sentence?

If Facebook were a country . . . .

Or maybe, what other memes should we start based on the same structure:

If Twitter were a country . . .

If LinkedIn were a country . . .

Miro, Kaltura, and the Generative Future of Internet Video

Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) is quickly rising to the top of my summer reading list (about which more to come in a later blog post). The distinctions he draws (based on his recent talks, see video here, here, and here) between sterile and generative platforms, and the concerns he raises about contingently generative or tethered platforms, seem to me right on target, and consistent with the issues Tim O’Reilly has been raising (along with, of course, many others) about how to translate the freedom behind free software and the openness behind open source into a world in which services and data live in the cloud.

One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube’s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause – both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].

Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.
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