職業社交網絡難以取代名片

Some 20th century artefacts have largely gone from the modern office, the typewriter and fax machine among them. They have been swallowed by computerisation and the internet. One dead-tree tradition endures: the business card.

一些20世紀的設備——打字機、傳真機等等——大都已從現代辦公室消失。取代它們的是計算機化工作和互聯網。但有一種古老的傳統還在延續：名片。

Despite strenuous efforts by mobile phonemakers and software companies to replace business cards it them with online contacts, shared like some invisible handshake by Bluetooth or wireless, the business cards remain. As long as you remember to carry them, nothing has improved on the ritual of exchanging rectangles of card stamped with your identity and details.

儘管手機制造商和軟件公司奮力試圖用線上通訊錄（通過藍牙或無線網絡像看不見的握手一樣分享）取而代之，但名片並未消失。只要隨身攜帶名片，交換這些印有自己身份和詳細信息的名片的儀式多少年來都未曾變化。

Business cards are light, portable and open. No need for compatible platforms and software to swap them — you hand them over, perhaps with a little bow if you are in Japan. Nor does the exchange endanger privacy. It is peer-to-peer networking: the only person who sees the card is the one who receives it.

名片輕薄、便攜、開放。交換名片不需要兼容的平臺和軟件——只需遞出名片，如果在日本的話，或許要略微躬身。交換名片也不會危及隱私。這是一種個人對個人的關係網構建：只有收到名片的人才能看到上面的信息。

Compare it with Microsoft’s deal this week to pay $26.2bn for the professional social network LinkedIn, with its 433m usersmembers. That works out at $60 per for each Linked-In user, or $250 for each of its 105m monthly active users — those who not only join but also regularly use the platform. It is a high price for a stack of cards.

將交換名片與微軟(Microsoft)上週以262億美元收購擁有4.33億註冊用戶的職業社交網絡領英(LinkedIn)比較一下。這相當於微軟爲每位領英用戶支付60美元，或者爲1.05億月度活躍用戶（不僅加入領英，而且經常使用該平臺的用戶）每人支付250美元。對一摞名片而言，這確實是高價。

Microsoft is, of course, buying more than that. Despite its patchy record of making acquisitions — including of Nokia’s mobile phone division and Skype, the telecoms service — at lofty prices and struggling to achieve promised benefits, Satya Nadella, its chief executive, has not lost his mind.

當然，微軟的收購遠不止於此。儘管微軟的收購記錄並不好看，經常以高價收購卻難以實現承諾的收益——包括收購諾基亞(Nokia)旗下手機部門，以及通信服務Skype——但微軟首席執行官薩蒂亞•納德拉(Satya Nadella)並未失去理智。

Apart from data about every member’s career and background, it Microsoft gains knowledge of the network of executives and professionals they know — what sociologists would call their “weak ties” and LinkedIn calls “the economic graph”. It amounts to a hoard of data to be mined for advertisers and licensed to marketers so that salesprofessionals people can pitch to potential buyers.

除了每一位用戶的職業和背景信息，微軟還可以掌握他們認識的高管和專業人士網絡——社會學家稱之爲“弱關係”，領英稱之爲“經濟圖譜”。它相當於海量數據庫，可供廣告商挖掘，也可向營銷人員許可使用，以便專業營銷人員精準找到潛在買家。

This is all pretty valuable in a faintly sinister way: LinkedIn gained $1.9bn of its $3bn revenues last year from “talent solutions”, or what is commonly known as headhunting. Most people like to be offered new jobs while companies like to know where they can recruit, for example, a Mandarin-speaking technology executive in New York with close connections in Beijing.

這些都具有稍顯邪惡的價值：“人才解決方案”，即通常稱的獵頭工作，貢獻了領英去年30億美元營收中的19億美元。大多數人喜歡別人給他們提供新的工作機會，而企業渴望知道從哪裏招聘人才，例如如何在紐約招聘一名會講普通話且與北京方面聯繫密切的技術高管。

Mr Nadella and Jeff Weiner, chief executive of LinkedIn, enthused about the deal in a torrent of buzzwords. It united “the world’s leading professional cloud with the world’s leading professional network” and would, in Mr Weiner’s words, offer “plentymore of top-of-the-funnel action”. Expect to find Linked-In contacts popping up in Word and Excel, and trawled by Cortana, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence tool.

納德拉與領英首席執行官傑夫•韋納(Jeff Weiner)用大量流行詞彙稱讚這筆收購交易。納德拉表示，這筆交易“把全球頂尖的專業雲端服務和全球頂尖的職業社交網絡結合到一起”，而韋納稱，這將提供“更多面向最大客戶羣體的服務”。可以預想，將來Word和Excel中將彈出領英社交信息，微軟的人工智能工具Cortana則會收集這些信息。

Microsoft needs something for its $26bn but itthe deal raises a fundamental question about the internet. How did we leap from business cards, with their privacy safeguards and individual autonomy, to this? Mr Nadella hastened to add thatsay nothing will be done without users’ permission but LinkedIn’s habit of constantly emailing perky updates about virtual strangers does not reassure.

微軟的260億美元需要回報，但這筆交易提出了關於互聯網的一個根本問題。我們如何從隱私有保障、個人自主的名片跨越到社交網絡？納德拉倉促補充道，沒有用戶許可，絕不會動這些數據，但領英不斷髮郵件通知其實是陌生人的信息更新的習慣無法讓人放心。

As LinkedIn’s user agreement (the legalese to which you consented without reading) puts it, users own their data but they grant “a worldwide, transferable and sublicensable right to use, copy, modify, distribute, publish and process, information and content that you provide . . . without any further consent, notice and/or compensation”.

正如領英的用戶協議（那些你未經過閱讀就同意的法律術語）所表述的，用戶對自己的數據擁有所有權，但“授予領英以下非專屬權限：全球性、可轉讓、可再授權、無須取得您和他人同意、無需另行通知或補償您或他人即可使用、複製、修改、傳播、發表、加工您通過領英‘服務’提供的信息和內容的權利”。

This is data ownership but not as we knew it. Nor is it the way the internet was meant to work. “The internet was designed to be decentralised so everybody could participate . . . [Instead] personal data has been locked up in these silos,” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who invented the world wide web, said last week.

這是數據所有權，但不是我們瞭解的所有權。這也不是互聯網應有的工作方式。萬維網之父蒂姆•伯納斯-李爵士(Sir Tim Berners-Lee)上週表示：“互聯網的誕生旨在實現去中心化，讓所有人都可以參與……（相反）個人數據現在被封鎖在這些豎井中。”

In other words, instead of everyone in effect owning their own business cards and exchanging them, the modern internet economy operates by large companies requiring THEM to users to hand over all the their virtual cards and blending them on databases. Companies such as LinkedIn and Facebook then make money by targeting advertisements and services, guided by the clouds of data, with users offered benefits in return.

換句話說，取代人人都手持名片進行交換的是，由大型公司運營的現代互聯網經濟要求用戶交出所有的虛擬名片，並將它們融合進數據庫。於是，領英、Facebook之類的公司就可以以雲數據爲指引、通過針對性的廣告和服務來賺錢，同時爲用戶提供好處作爲回報。

Sir Tim was speaking at a “decentralised web” summit in San Francisco, an event intended to rally software engineers to, in his words, “tweak internet architecture a little bit” and thus restore its peer-to-peer roots. He wants individuals to hold their data and choose how software interacts with it, not for Microsoft to bundle it all in “the world’s largest professional cloud”.

蒂姆爵士上週是在舊金山舉行的一場“去中心化網絡”峯會上發言，用他的話說，峯會旨在鼓勵軟件工程師“稍稍調整互聯網架構”，從而恢復其個人對個人的本源。他希望個人掌控自己的數據，選擇怎樣與軟件進行互動，而不是讓微軟把所有數據捆綁入“世界最大的專業雲端服務中”。

It is similar to the idea behind the blockchain — that financial and other contracts could be settled across peer-to-peer networks rather than relying on a company or central bank to approve them. As he Sir Tim noted, “cyber space” was originally crafted as “one, big hippy encampment” free of traditional laws and commercial contracts, such as long and dense user licences.

這類似數據區塊鏈背後的理念——金融及其他合約可以通過個人對個人網絡達成，而無需依賴一家公司或中央銀行的批准。如蒂姆爵士所指出的，“網絡空間”最初被構建爲“一片巨大的嬉皮士營地”，不受傳統法律和商業合同（如冗長難懂的用戶許可）的約束。

Whether Sir Tim can return the internet to its halcyon past is another matter. Hundreds of millions of people like the deal they get from LinkedIn, Facebook and others. They do not have to pay, unless they subscribe to premium benefits, and they obtain free access to some slick, useful applications.

蒂姆爵士能否讓互聯網重回昔日的寧靜是另一回事。億萬用戶喜歡他們從領英、Facebook及其他社交網絡得到的協議。他們不必付費，除非訂購高端服務，而且他們還可以免費使用一些巧妙又有用的應用。

But putting individuals back in charge of their own “economic graph” would not stop them from volunteering data when it suited them. It would be a familiar world in many ways, rather like having a business card.

但讓個人重新掌控自己的“經濟圖譜”不會阻止他們在適當時自願分享數據。那將在許多方面是一個我們熟悉的世界，就像擁有一張名片一樣。