missing, presumed fed.

I’ve been watching Facebook’s hamfisted attempts to monetise their user base by selling your personal data to advertisers, with increasing amazement. It’s one thing (and a very Web 2.0 thing at that), to struggle with your business model, but another thing entirely to do it by:

1. Spinning that your customers don’t care about privacy.
2. Obfuscating their controls and settings
3. Taking your data out of your control and selling it, anyway

The EFF have some good coverage.

I don’t know anyone who actually, actively likes using Facebook, so you’d think that the ground was ripe for a competitor, but sadly I get the feeling that most of the current competitors, would like to do precisly what Facebook is doing, if only they had the balls and the market power.

But there is some buzz building around some new start ups with very different models.One is Diaspora – a new start-up that aims to create a distributed, person-centric alternative to Facebook that puts – and keeps you in control of your personal data. I have invested through Kickstarter and if you care about this stuff, I invite you to join me.

I should be smack in the middle of the Laura Ashley demographic. Or at least L should. We even live in the kind of country idyll that they use in their catalogues. But every time we try to give them money we bounce off.

Recent encounters have been as follows: I went into my local store, saw a nice mirror with a good discount in the sale, chatted to the assistant about it and then said “I’ll go home, talk about it and come in next week if we want one”. I did, we did and so I went in on the following week only to be told that the sale finished at the weekend. Yes they knew last week. No, they didn’t think to mention it.

Sales people should get fired for not closing a sale with information like that.

However, two months later, the sale is back on – just for a few days it appears – so we order the mirror on the website. Or try to. It won’t take any cards. The error message says words to the effect of “card declined”. So L sends an email. Two days later we get an email back saying they will reply to our email by email within seven days. When we eventually get a reply (by phone, four days later in the middle of the school run) we learn the payment bit of the website was just broken, however, there’s no attempt to help us order the damned mirror.

“Oh, we’re having another sale in a few days, you could try again then.”

If I was shopping at Poundstretcher, then maybe – just maybe – I’d expect this. But Laura Ashley position themselves as purveyors of English Country Taste to the middle class, a bunch picky often to the point of obnoxiousness. If you want to continue to take their money, you’re going to have to be better than this. If someone from Laura Ashley’s retail training team reads this, might I suggest you take your staff to a Barker & Stonehouse store and see how it’s done. Better still, Leather Chairs of Bath whose handmade heirloom leather sofas cost less than yours?

And did I mention that the mirrors take TEN (or seven or nine, maybe) weeks to arrive?

Radio 1 Newsbeat is carrying an analysis-free plug for Near London, a company who launched into closed beta this week. What is their product? A 3D model of Oxford Street, where you can walk up and down and look at products in the virtual windows.

Oh, Dear God.

It’s over 15 years since I started building commercial online shops, sites and spaces and while everyone – businesses, developers, retailers and  - most of all – users, have grown and learned a lot in that time, somehow a small minority keep returning to sites of our most spectacular failures. Most prominent in this graveyard of naivety, is the 3D Room.

Nothing chills the blood quite like the MD (or more usually, the Marketing Director), walking into the client meeting you’re having and declaring: “I’ve just had a excellent idea. What our shop/website/forum/AOL area needs as a front page is a 3D picture/space of our office/shop/warehouse/newsroom. If you want to read the news/check our timetable/look at our product you (simply) click on the newspaper/timetable on the wall/clothes on the rack.”

You then have to spend the rest of the morning explaining to a key executive of your client that awesome though his leadership powers and visionary business skills are, it’s unlikely that in the five minutes he’s spent thinking about this (or possibly ecommerce in general), that he has found the formula for success that thousands of other poorly, briefed executives have previously tried and failed so to do.

And yet the 3D room won’t die.

There are many reasons, but I think the main one is that most executives are immigrants in this new land, while their customers are increasingly digital natives.

Immigrants navigate this new world clumsily, without the benefit of native language skills. Their amazement at being able to do anything at all, suppresses the critical ability to think rationally about the the efficiency or usefulness of the feature in question. Immigrants navigate the structures and strictures of the digital world, slowly and painfully. There are few roadsigns for them to follow and like Alice through the Looking Glass or Milo in the Lands Beyond, their expectations can lead them astray more often than they realise.

So when they see a structure whose function they recognise, they jump on it like Elvis on a double cheeseburger. No matter that their customers won’t come, or if they do they will regard it with curiosity like a museum of Victorian plumbing, they’ll peer, scratch their heads and walk away. No matter that they have a nagging doubt that maybe it’s not good for them, they still chow down.

Worse still, the presence of something they recognise, stops them from plunging into the Brave New World where their customers live, so like expats in some overseas tax haven, they either cling to each other around the poolside bar in the hotel. Or they bunch together on the Tourist Bus, following the herd of other immigrants from one popular spot to another, without a thought as to whether this will be helpful to their business or their customers

[Here's a checklist. Does your business have any of the following: Facebook page? Twitter Feed? Product Blog? Flash games featuring product placement? Virtual shop in Second Life (counts double)?. While your website still has 28-day shipping, non-live inventory feed, English-only (call for shipping to Canada, no other foreign orders); email-only customer support (please allow 2 business days for a reply); no relationship with your retail stores (or actively competes with them) and no customer loyalty?]

Still, they’ll all be dead soon. Let’s just hope that unlike the town planners of the Sixties they won’t leave too many eyesores scattered around our native lands that we have spent time bulldozing to build anew.