Customer is however a convenient term for a payment processor, where everyone is either a merchant (customer) or payer (customer's customer).
"Customer" emphasizes the transactional side of the relationship. If your check bounces, or you pirated your copy, etc., you're no longer a "customer".
I think there's a deeper issue at work here that something like App.net addresses.
There is a complete disconnect between buyer and seller. When someone is using Twitter, they are paying for it by selling their data, but this is just implied.
I think that the industry could solve a whole bunch of issues by:
1.) Charging for their service.
2.) Paying people for their data.
It could be that both balance each other out. It could be some other mechanism. Maybe you earn money, maybe you hold on to your data and you just pay for the full cost of using a service.
Whatever the solution, I think we should start using the term 'customer' and making explicit what is already implied when we're using a 'free' service.
I guarantee over 99% of Facebook's billion+ users have no idea that's really how Facebook is making their money. Sure, they might see the ads, but they don't know how those ads really work.
As for calling users "customers" because their data is being sold, well, no, that's not an accurate name for them per the definition of "customer":
cus·tom·er/ˈkəstəmər/
Noun:
A person or organization that buys goods or services from a store or other business.
A person or thing of a specified kind that one has to deal with: "a tough customer".
The label "customer" implies a conscious action of making a purchase. Twitter users are not actively purchasing anything, they're just creating usage data that makes money on the back end.
I wouldn't be surprised if lawmakers set to make it so everyone had the right to make sure their information was not sold to advertisers.
I'm personally under the impression that regulation causes more problems than it solves in the majority of situations so I'm hoping that the industry self-regulates and companies like Facebook and Twitter allow me to pay for their services and opt-out of their business of selling my private information to others.
I'm not really sure why you defined "customer" for me. I never said that Facebook and Twitter users are currently customers, but that they should be.
It is dishonest to have the business taking place "on the back end" of things and to purposefully hide such transactions from people.
I also find it arrogant to think that it is advantageous to shield such financial complexity from people because they don't want to think about it or won't understand it.
So if Facebook and Twitter want to continue to be dishonest and arrogant companies, by all means, let them continue, but I think it will be part of their ultimate demise, either from increased consumer awareness on topics such as information privacy and digital identity, or from legislation.
So, we are using the site, but we don't directly give them money to do so. Instead, they get money by putting ads in our faces while we use the site.
Now, the Facebook/Twitter user can be a customer in this scenario, just not of Facebook or Twitter. We (typically) are customers of the advertisers who want us to buy a car or sugar water or a widget.
So, the store analogy isn't quite apt for this... instead you could think of it more like a TV network. They don't call the people who watch their shows customers or users, but rather "viewers". TV network's customers are the businesses that buy time to air their commercials.
Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that Facebook were a perfectly mercenary, ruthless organization, straight out of HN's collective imagination: it cares nothing about the people using its software, and eats, sleeps, and breathes nothing but monetization. (This view is itself another instance of naive cynicism, but let's grant it to get on with things.) Facebook is still critically reliant on non-paying users continuing to use it; without them, no possible road to monetization exists. Those users are a party to the transaction; they come willingly, and Facebook has no army to compel them to come again tomorrow. Viewing users as inanimate "product" that can be manufactured and sold would be stupid; the "product" is not something that Facebook produced, bought, manufactured, or otherwise has any proprietary claim over.
This relationship is actually pretty close to the relationship that print media have to their readers; your subscription pays for approximately 0% of their revenue; advertisers make newspapers and magazines work. It's also close to broadcast television, where you literally contribute no money to the revenue of the businesses producing programming. It doesn't follow that television studios should view you as inanimate "product"; indeed, television studios work very hard to produce something that real people enjoy, because without those people freely choosing to watch they are out of business.
A much more sensible aphorism would be: "If you're not paying, you're not the customer, you're the audience." This has greater explanatory power, for the behavior of free web service, advertisers, and the audience, which is a willing party to this entire transaction, as the "product" soundbite obscures.
- if you have a 'real life unit' call them a person
- if you have an organization, call it an organization (although organization's are made up of people and ultimately it's people in the organizations that will be accessing your application, so you're back at person there too)
- if you have a machine, call it a machine
- Agent - Entity - User - Principal