November 29, 2005
Dare Obasanjo - Brand X vs. Brand Y: Social Effects and Competition in the Software Indistry
So what does this mean for search engine competition and Google? Well, I think increasing a search engine's relevance to become competitive with Google's is a good goal but it is a route that seems guaranteed to make you the Pepsi to their Coke or the Burger King to their McDonalds. What you really need is to change the rules of the game, the way the Apple iPod did.
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Brand X vs. Brand Y: Social Effects and Competition in the Software Indistry
November 28, 2005
Compare and contrast
An exercise for the reader (and me too when I have time) .
Nicholas Carr's Hypermediation 2.0
BubbleGen's Edge Competencies
Something else, which I now can't seem to find, where I wrote that the future would see more "indexes". Not particularly original but slightly different from the two above.
Nicholas Carr's Hypermediation 2.0
BubbleGen's Edge Competencies
Something else, which I now can't seem to find, where I wrote that the future would see more "indexes". Not particularly original but slightly different from the two above.
November 27, 2005
OPML and XSLT
Les Orchard : Yeah, I think that’s one of my biggest frustrations with OPML - I can’t trust it to always play nice with XSLT. That’s *really* all this XML Geek wants, in the end.
Multimedia outlines
Kosso compares outlines with video and audio scripts
Read the comments. Lots of people are buzzing about the idea of an outline as a way for :
a) creators of video and audio streams to organize their scripts. So as a sort of alternative to Director and HyTime
b) as a way for people to manage and navigate collections of multi-media. For example, a magazine program can be decomposed into a list of media snippets and browsed as the user wishes.
Read the comments. Lots of people are buzzing about the idea of an outline as a way for :
a) creators of video and audio streams to organize their scripts. So as a sort of alternative to Director and HyTime
b) as a way for people to manage and navigate collections of multi-media. For example, a magazine program can be decomposed into a list of media snippets and browsed as the user wishes.
November 26, 2005
World of Ends applied to SynWeb vs. SemWeb
In a long ranty comment I made to Danny I started thinking about applying World of Ends thinking to the SemWeb / SynWeb debate. Here's what I said :
In an earlier comment, I'd said something to the effect that there was an 80/20 rule. If 80% of potential users were satisfied with a format, that would make for a viable standard.
Danny asked :
So here’s an interesting one I thought of : 8-bit ASCII - where the second 128 chars are indeterminate and available to be adapted by whichever country or special interest that wants them. There’s lots of incompatibility as people try to pass files containing accented vowels from one country or operating system to another. But ASCII is a phenomenally succesful standard despite all this potential for error. Most of the time, most people, stick within the working subset.
Danny also wonders about Atom :
I don't really have a strong intuition about this either. My guess is that Atom will do well in the things where it doesn’t compete directly with RSS, such as the API. And Atom Syndication will be parasitic on the degree to which people buy-in to the Atom community for these other reasons.
RSS (in some mangled form) will become core to MS, and will be with us for a long time. Aggregator writers will keep finding work-arounds that make RSS do anything that Atom can do.
Hmm. I wonder if another way of thinking of this is a “world of ends” type argument with the data-format playing the role of the network-protocol and programs playing the role of the “ends”.
The SemWeb argues for smart protocols (ie. semantics in the file-format) whereas the SynWeb argues that semantics belongs at the edges : in the programs that produce and consume them.
The OPML format doesn’t know or care whether it’s carrying a playlist, a blogroll, a blog, a subscription-list etc. It just concentrates on allowing the data to be moved from one program to another. Meanwhile, the OPML editor is continuously being upgraded to know how to get more “meaning” from the outlines it creates.
Why is it “better” for the meaning to reside at the edge?
a) edge points can be upgraded individualistically. If I want OPML to represent my attention data I just have to upgrade to the new version of FeedDemon which will support this. If I want to upgrade to a new version of a specially crafted Attention RDF I have to get the whole network to buy-in.[1]
b) The corollary of that is that if you’re crafting a model like Attention RDF, it’s really important to get it right. Because upgrading is such a pain. On the other hand, it’s far less important to get attention in OPML perfect from the start. It can be continuously tweaked with new releases of the software.
This again reflects on the question of “applications”. OPML as a format is worse than Xoxo or some other XML. But it’s gonna be the winner here as long as Dave Winer can keep up the development momentum in the OPML editor and the rivals don’t offer a compelling alternative.
Les Orchard writes a great concept demonstrator but then abandons it. [Danny] does a lot of coding. But because [he's] focused on putting the semantics into the protocol, [he does’t treat his] programs as the primary vehicle for getting his meaning into the world.
If I want to use Attention RDF as a user, what do I do? Wait around until people have thrashed out the spec on the wiki and then install a very generic RDF database and query language? Why wouldn’t I rather follow regular updates of an existing, already useful tool, which is promising to add this functionality in small sips over time?
[1] I recognise the usual respost : about atomicity of SemWeb tags which means it isn’t an all-or-nothing thing. It’s just that I don’t see that this actually helps here.
For example, what would be an incremental roadmap for geting to widespread Attention RDF adoption?
We can’t say “well, we’ll roll out the att:readtimes tag to begin with, and then once people have started using that and seen the benefits, we can add att:lastread.”
But that’s exactly what a program-oriented SynWeb strategy can do. “We’ll start with ‘rank’ in the next version of the code, and then go from there.
In an earlier comment, I'd said something to the effect that there was an 80/20 rule. If 80% of potential users were satisfied with a format, that would make for a viable standard.
Danny asked :
There should be plenty of data points, but thinking about it they’re rather hard to pin down.
So here’s an interesting one I thought of : 8-bit ASCII - where the second 128 chars are indeterminate and available to be adapted by whichever country or special interest that wants them. There’s lots of incompatibility as people try to pass files containing accented vowels from one country or operating system to another. But ASCII is a phenomenally succesful standard despite all this potential for error. Most of the time, most people, stick within the working subset.
Danny also wonders about Atom :
It’s hard to predict e.g. whether Atom will totally supercede RSS 2.0 or fall by the wayside itself
I don't really have a strong intuition about this either. My guess is that Atom will do well in the things where it doesn’t compete directly with RSS, such as the API. And Atom Syndication will be parasitic on the degree to which people buy-in to the Atom community for these other reasons.
RSS (in some mangled form) will become core to MS, and will be with us for a long time. Aggregator writers will keep finding work-arounds that make RSS do anything that Atom can do.
November 25, 2005
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes | Linux Journal
Very disturbing. People who own the pipes want to take over and charge by the packet!
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes
::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon: Degeneracy, Disruptiveness and Preservation
Worth reading this in light of my previous post : ::HorsePigCow:: life uncommon: Degeneracy, Disruptiveness and Preservation
November 24, 2005
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The MySpace (bottle) rocket
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The MySpace (bottle) rocket
Nicholas Carr suspects the attraction of community hosting and social network sites might be ephemeral. That the sites just aren't interesting enough to hold attention, and only the act of initial migration is actually fun.
Would this be such a surprise? Isn't a lot of consumerism about the initial fun of shopping for and getting a new thing, while just having stuff is pretty much a disappointment?
If this is true, and a large chunk of the web 2.0 audience are essentially a swarm of cool hunters, always chasing the next big thing but never interested in staying in one place, what does this mean for strategy? That you need to keep developing new spaces?
In fact, does this mean that "stuff hosting" (whether MySpace or GoogleBase or Flickr) is actually a hit-based industry? No long tails here. Who wants to be part of a failed community or failed social bookmarking service?
The argument against the idea that this is all ephemeral is that, once developed these have lock-in properties. I won't take my bookmarks from del.icio.us because the degree to which it's become intertwingled with everyone else's data.
How compelling that vision is, is hard for me to guage. I've never used del.icio.us, prefering my own personal folded network of annotated bookmarks.
What I think is revealed, though, is a tension between personal and public / shared.
The problem with public / shared anything is that it isn't personal. Your shared bookmark list is everyone else's. Your posts in your blog are part of a continuum with everyone else's. They'll say much the same thing to the reader if they turn up as yet another bubble on the river of news. The media is the message, and the media is homogenized. And so is the message.
I want to put this together with the ongoing discussion about OPML and Attention. If your OPML is your personal subscriptions file, and that says something about where you're putting your attention, then that is a personalized slicing of the world.
It's the opposite of your del.icio.us bookmarks which are getting creamed in with everyone else's. (Although, undoubtedly you'll be able to publish your subscriptions, and probably sync. them with del.icio.us too.)
Nevertheless, there's always the tension. How much of your attention do you reveal? And, more importantly, how much do you allow your attention to be blown along with the swarm?
The swarm finds and filters good stuff for you. But at some point, you'll want to strike out on your own. To look into things no-one else in your peer group is. To manage private attention.
This is the big problem for the social host-stuff platforms. Ultimately you don't want to depend on them, not because they might be unreliable, but because they'll cramp your individuality. Blogs are a personal asset, so you'll want to be able to move them : from Editthispage, to Blogger, to TypePad to WordPress, and beyond. Ultimately you'll want full control (and archives) of your blog in some kind of format you can take elsewhere, or manage from your desktop.
If your stuff is tied to other content on the platform, that still doesn't mean you'll want to stay.
Instead you'll want to leave and have the benefits of connectedness too.
You'll still want the photos you added via Flickr to Blogger, to appear on your blog, even if you've left Flickr and your blog's gone to TypePad. As we rush to throw our content into web 2.0 applications, we're actually storing up trouble ... or rather demand - for a new wave of products which will rescue us from dependency on these platforms. For a new kind of indirection or later-binding.
Update : Actually, one pessimistic thought. The chances are that people will be driven off platforms by spam rather than because they get bored in the way Carr predicts. Can I start mis-tagging bookmarks in del.icio.us or pictures in flickr?
Nicholas Carr suspects the attraction of community hosting and social network sites might be ephemeral. That the sites just aren't interesting enough to hold attention, and only the act of initial migration is actually fun.
Would this be such a surprise? Isn't a lot of consumerism about the initial fun of shopping for and getting a new thing, while just having stuff is pretty much a disappointment?
If this is true, and a large chunk of the web 2.0 audience are essentially a swarm of cool hunters, always chasing the next big thing but never interested in staying in one place, what does this mean for strategy? That you need to keep developing new spaces?
In fact, does this mean that "stuff hosting" (whether MySpace or GoogleBase or Flickr) is actually a hit-based industry? No long tails here. Who wants to be part of a failed community or failed social bookmarking service?
The argument against the idea that this is all ephemeral is that, once developed these have lock-in properties. I won't take my bookmarks from del.icio.us because the degree to which it's become intertwingled with everyone else's data.
How compelling that vision is, is hard for me to guage. I've never used del.icio.us, prefering my own personal folded network of annotated bookmarks.
What I think is revealed, though, is a tension between personal and public / shared.
The problem with public / shared anything is that it isn't personal. Your shared bookmark list is everyone else's. Your posts in your blog are part of a continuum with everyone else's. They'll say much the same thing to the reader if they turn up as yet another bubble on the river of news. The media is the message, and the media is homogenized. And so is the message.
I want to put this together with the ongoing discussion about OPML and Attention. If your OPML is your personal subscriptions file, and that says something about where you're putting your attention, then that is a personalized slicing of the world.
It's the opposite of your del.icio.us bookmarks which are getting creamed in with everyone else's. (Although, undoubtedly you'll be able to publish your subscriptions, and probably sync. them with del.icio.us too.)
Nevertheless, there's always the tension. How much of your attention do you reveal? And, more importantly, how much do you allow your attention to be blown along with the swarm?
The swarm finds and filters good stuff for you. But at some point, you'll want to strike out on your own. To look into things no-one else in your peer group is. To manage private attention.
This is the big problem for the social host-stuff platforms. Ultimately you don't want to depend on them, not because they might be unreliable, but because they'll cramp your individuality. Blogs are a personal asset, so you'll want to be able to move them : from Editthispage, to Blogger, to TypePad to WordPress, and beyond. Ultimately you'll want full control (and archives) of your blog in some kind of format you can take elsewhere, or manage from your desktop.
If your stuff is tied to other content on the platform, that still doesn't mean you'll want to stay.
Instead you'll want to leave and have the benefits of connectedness too.
You'll still want the photos you added via Flickr to Blogger, to appear on your blog, even if you've left Flickr and your blog's gone to TypePad. As we rush to throw our content into web 2.0 applications, we're actually storing up trouble ... or rather demand - for a new wave of products which will rescue us from dependency on these platforms. For a new kind of indirection or later-binding.
Update : Actually, one pessimistic thought. The chances are that people will be driven off platforms by spam rather than because they get bored in the way Carr predicts. Can I start mis-tagging bookmarks in del.icio.us or pictures in flickr?
michael parekh on Google's "Click to Call"
Interesting story.
Google's latest ad-words let advertisers opt to receive phone calls (via Google's Jabber based VOIP).
Ultimately, this is in competition with SkyPal and Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a way of creating an online market for services with a live human at the end.
michael parekh on Google testing "click to call" advertising
Google's latest ad-words let advertisers opt to receive phone calls (via Google's Jabber based VOIP).
Ultimately, this is in competition with SkyPal and Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a way of creating an online market for services with a live human at the end.
michael parekh on Google testing "click to call" advertising
November 23, 2005
Danny Ayers on GoogleBase
[Google] is leaning a lot closer to Paul Ford’s prediction than some people might suppose.
Danny Ayers, Raw Blog
Jon Udell: Dueling simplicities
Must read : Jon Udell: Dueling simplicities
I can't do justice to this without quoting the whole thing. Better if you just go and read it.
Now that more of the cards are on the table, we can begin to compare two fascinatingly different approaches to building out the data web
...
we have both Google and Microsoft flying the banner of simplicity -- a word that can mean different things in different contexts.
I can't do justice to this without quoting the whole thing. Better if you just go and read it.
Global Guerrillas: BOYD ON AL QAEDA'S GRAND STRATEGY
I'm quite intrigued by the ideas within Fourth Generation War.
Here's a good intro to John Boyd's "grand strategy", which may have some relevance to platform wars.
Global Guerrillas: BOYD ON AL QAEDA'S GRAND STRATEGY
Of course, platform wars are usually a kind of competetition where two platform vendors compete to see who can make theirs the most attractive platform for developers and customers. Whereas Boyd's strategy is aggressive, trying to deliberately cut the opponent's informational and moral connections to the wider community.
But if we see the platform war as also being a struggle for hearts and minds of developers, those physical, informational and moral connections with the wider community may have a role.
Consider the ongoing syndication wars between Winer's (and now Microsoft's) RSS and the ATOM community. A great deal of the intemperate sniping that's going on is actually an attempt by each side to try to sever the moral ties between the opponents and the wider community. Is Winer autocratic, dishonest, untrustworthy? Is Google a "politically motivated" wannabe monopolist because Blogger doesn't support RSS?
Let's keep watching the rhetoric in the platform wars from this angle. Who (particularly companies) is trying to cut who's informational and moral links? Who's trying to confuse the other with fire and motion (or FUD)?
Here's a good intro to John Boyd's "grand strategy", which may have some relevance to platform wars.
Global Guerrillas: BOYD ON AL QAEDA'S GRAND STRATEGY
Of course, platform wars are usually a kind of competetition where two platform vendors compete to see who can make theirs the most attractive platform for developers and customers. Whereas Boyd's strategy is aggressive, trying to deliberately cut the opponent's informational and moral connections to the wider community.
But if we see the platform war as also being a struggle for hearts and minds of developers, those physical, informational and moral connections with the wider community may have a role.
Consider the ongoing syndication wars between Winer's (and now Microsoft's) RSS and the ATOM community. A great deal of the intemperate sniping that's going on is actually an attempt by each side to try to sever the moral ties between the opponents and the wider community. Is Winer autocratic, dishonest, untrustworthy? Is Google a "politically motivated" wannabe monopolist because Blogger doesn't support RSS?
Let's keep watching the rhetoric in the platform wars from this angle. Who (particularly companies) is trying to cut who's informational and moral links? Who's trying to confuse the other with fire and motion (or FUD)?
November 22, 2005
Feedburner Weblog on Feeds
The Feedburner weblog has an interesting mini-paper :
Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: Feed for Thought
Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: Feed for Thought
Darwinian Web: Monday, November 21, 2005
Microsoft and Google are being maneuvered into a massive game of chicken. I'll show everyone my Office data if you'll show your search data, and Dave is instigating it.
Darwinian Web: Monday, November 21, 2005
A VC: Posting, Subscribing, Tagging AND Search
A VC: Posting, Subscribing, Tagging AND Search
I still don't seem to have anything interesting to say about GoogleBase. Is it better to be a centralized database or merely index edge databases? Will Google be evil and prevent other people crawling and using the data? Is this an outrage?
What about poor little Craiglist and EBay and Tribe? Is this what Paul Ford was getting at?
Etc.
I dunno. All I can do is wait to see.
My main question is still ... where's Orkut in all this? Where's Blogger? Google has these great big community and blogging sites. Are they going to be plugged in?
Are we going to find our tools upgraded with the capacity to add Googlebase friendly metadata anytime soon? And if not, is this a fumble by Google?
I still don't seem to have anything interesting to say about GoogleBase. Is it better to be a centralized database or merely index edge databases? Will Google be evil and prevent other people crawling and using the data? Is this an outrage?
What about poor little Craiglist and EBay and Tribe? Is this what Paul Ford was getting at?
Etc.
I dunno. All I can do is wait to see.
My main question is still ... where's Orkut in all this? Where's Blogger? Google has these great big community and blogging sites. Are they going to be plugged in?
Are we going to find our tools upgraded with the capacity to add Googlebase friendly metadata anytime soon? And if not, is this a fumble by Google?
November 21, 2005
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: The Ping War
Ross Mayfield :
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: The Ping War
... we are in a ping server war. It's a little hard to see, but the ping server will become the new center of the net. Verisign's acquisition of Weblogs.com was the first salvo. I'm not sure Robert Cringley is right about Google-Mart, but he isn't entirely wrong. Google Base isn't just about volunteered structuring of data, but pushing pings ... The important point is there is tremendous value being the first to have information pass through your central node.
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: The Ping War
XML Developer Center: Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML
XML Developer Center: Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML
You know what I think? This would have been better having nothing to do with RSS. They should have just defined another simple synchronization format, following the spirit of RSS rather than trying to make it a kind of RSS.
You know what I think? This would have been better having nothing to do with RSS. They should have just defined another simple synchronization format, following the spirit of RSS rather than trying to make it a kind of RSS.
Danny Ayers on Simple Sharing Extensions
He's not impressed
Most everything else I find very disappointing, on many levels. I really don’t know where to start.
Ok, start with the use of fairly arbitrary strings as identifiers. The Web has a well-defined system for identifiers, the URI. They’ve also got dates in RFC 822 format here - when did these folks last check any of the standard specs? They’re using RSS 2.0 and OPML as container formats. Marvellous choice, they’re inherently uinteroperable because they don’t have their own namespaces. Party like it’s 1999.
I suppose what really irritates me most here is that they’ve also egregiously ignored the recent progress on syndication data modelling/exchange protocol around Atom. I know you shouldn’t put down to malice what you can explain with ignorance, but I can only imagine this is politically motivated. Microsoft are less likely to get community resistance to “embracing and extending” Dave Winer’s Own Syndication Stack than something community based.
...
PS. Mr.Winer, as you might expect, is gushing.
A Future So Bright You'll Need to Wear Sunglasses
Just remembered this Philip Greenspun chapter against selling packaged software.
Meanwhile I'm arguing with Umair that price can never carry meaningful information about information products.
Perhaps a better way of putting my point is this. Price is a single scalar value. But needs to carry more than one piece of information. Even with scarce resources, price reflects business model as well as value and demand for a product. For example, if my strategy is to give away razors and sell razor-blades, the price of the razor doesn't accurately reflect the cost of manufacture or the quality. That information is swamped by the information that this is a loss-leader.
But at least there are some constraints on price from material costs, and demand. In the case of information products, the constraints are much weakened, particularly the constraint that if X has the thing, then Y can't have it.
What this means is that the space of possible business models or institutional logics which determine the price is far greater than for non-scarce resources. Information sellers have a lot of freedom to experiment with different structures, bundling and unbundling etc. And the meaningful information about demand or quality which you can derive from the price is much lower.
Meanwhile I'm arguing with Umair that price can never carry meaningful information about information products.
Perhaps a better way of putting my point is this. Price is a single scalar value. But needs to carry more than one piece of information. Even with scarce resources, price reflects business model as well as value and demand for a product. For example, if my strategy is to give away razors and sell razor-blades, the price of the razor doesn't accurately reflect the cost of manufacture or the quality. That information is swamped by the information that this is a loss-leader.
But at least there are some constraints on price from material costs, and demand. In the case of information products, the constraints are much weakened, particularly the constraint that if X has the thing, then Y can't have it.
What this means is that the space of possible business models or institutional logics which determine the price is far greater than for non-scarce resources. Information sellers have a lot of freedom to experiment with different structures, bundling and unbundling etc. And the meaningful information about demand or quality which you can derive from the price is much lower.
Cringely on Google-Mart
That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the Internet. And you know whose strategy this is? Wal-Mart's.
PBS | I, Cringely . November 17, 2005 - Google-Mart
Brand as Platform
Brian Phipps is thinking about "brand" as a platform. Particularly whether you can apply the idea of an "architecture of participation" to it.
I sort of see this in the case where the product is already a platform. For example, the Apple brand is what it is to be a Mac user. But what it is to be a Mac user, partly depends on Mac developers creating cool applications.
But can it work with something that doesn't initially look like a platform? Is there always a way for users and developers to "party together"? If I make wine, can I actively listen to (and amplify) the customers' stories about how they use wine, and what it means to them?
Is that "architecture of participation"? Or "gonzo marketting"? Or "strategy"? Or ...
I sort of see this in the case where the product is already a platform. For example, the Apple brand is what it is to be a Mac user. But what it is to be a Mac user, partly depends on Mac developers creating cool applications.
But can it work with something that doesn't initially look like a platform? Is there always a way for users and developers to "party together"? If I make wine, can I actively listen to (and amplify) the customers' stories about how they use wine, and what it means to them?
Is that "architecture of participation"? Or "gonzo marketting"? Or "strategy"? Or ...
November 19, 2005
November 18, 2005
ONJava.com: Ruby the Rival
Here's a good article on why Ruby (particularly On Rails) is disrupting the traditional Java web development solutions (ie. the big frameworks).
This is all so right. I've been railing vociferously against the pain of Java web development since 2001. (When I was obliged to do it.) It's been obvious that Java (ie. a fairly verbose, compiled, statically typed, repressive language) was the wrong platform to build web-apps. And that big frameworks like Struts were productivity killers.
The whole Java edifice is ripe for toppling. But before we celebrate further, it's worth considering that we've been here before. Lightweight, dynamic languages have been used to build quality web-applications since the beginning, when Perl was the language of choice.
In a sense, the phenomenally succesful PHP could be seen as Perl's Rails if what we mean is a Perl (I know it's not actually the same language) optimized for web-apps. Python first came to prominance as the basis of Zope, another powerful platform for constructing web-based apps. A more quixotic example, I've been very influenced by Philip Geenspun's "Ars Digita" Community System - a very early scripting platform for social web-apps - which was based on TCL.
Why didn't these see off or supplant Java?
... actually, I was about to rattle off a couple of reasons, when I realized that these were rather boring truisms and I wasn't even sure I believed them. So let's hold back ... I'll think about this some more and come back ...
to be continued ...
This is all so right. I've been railing vociferously against the pain of Java web development since 2001. (When I was obliged to do it.) It's been obvious that Java (ie. a fairly verbose, compiled, statically typed, repressive language) was the wrong platform to build web-apps. And that big frameworks like Struts were productivity killers.
The whole Java edifice is ripe for toppling. But before we celebrate further, it's worth considering that we've been here before. Lightweight, dynamic languages have been used to build quality web-applications since the beginning, when Perl was the language of choice.
In a sense, the phenomenally succesful PHP could be seen as Perl's Rails if what we mean is a Perl (I know it's not actually the same language) optimized for web-apps. Python first came to prominance as the basis of Zope, another powerful platform for constructing web-based apps. A more quixotic example, I've been very influenced by Philip Geenspun's "Ars Digita" Community System - a very early scripting platform for social web-apps - which was based on TCL.
Why didn't these see off or supplant Java?
... actually, I was about to rattle off a couple of reasons, when I realized that these were rather boring truisms and I wasn't even sure I believed them. So let's hold back ... I'll think about this some more and come back ...
to be continued ...
Software: No longer business as usual
Is the selling-software-as-product model broken?
Software: No longer business as usual
It's been obvious for years that it's under disruptive attack from two directions : free software and software as service over the internet.
Software: No longer business as usual
It's been obvious for years that it's under disruptive attack from two directions : free software and software as service over the internet.
November 17, 2005
Cringely - Paper War
Cringely on the MS leaked memos
So here's what will happen. Microsoft will make a huge effort and get some good press toward the beginning. I'm not saying they don't mean this stuff, just that they don't really know WHAT it means. They'll attract developers and, by doing so, maybe take a small bite out of Open Source, but mainly they'll just sell stuff, which for them is good enough. Then, to maintain earnings growth, they'll turn on their developers. Finally, when things still don't work right, they'll turn on their customers, jacking up prices and milking the monopoly.
November 16, 2005
Tom Coates on GoogleBase
In which Google Base launches...
I'm not going to say anything about GoogleBase until I've had a bit of time to think about it.
I'm not going to say anything about GoogleBase until I've had a bit of time to think about it.
Yellowikis
Aparently there's a wiki yellow pages for company information getting some publicity.
I have a personal interest here. I wrote a company registry module for Infoconomy back in 2000 (that site's running on Philip Greenspun's ACS). It was a good old-fashioned bit of relational modeling, handling international companies with HQs in different countries and multiple branches, categorization, partner and competitor relations etc.
When the site went live, the module was left out. No one, me included, could imagine that they'd launch with the small amount (around 50 companies skeletons, maybe 20 full profiles) of test data that had been entered during development. But researching, writing and entering the data was expensive. And this was a small startup magazine with a few journalists who realized that completing the catalogue was more work than they could handle.
Five years later, Infoconomy, and the CRM system (built by my friends on top of the ACS) seem to be still going strong. But, unless the company registry is hidden behind the subscription firewall, I don't think this feature ever did make it. Yellow-pages represent a great deal of work.
Can a wiki supplant that?
Here's what's good about a wiki. It's cheap. No one has to pay me to write a custom database application. If I was advising anyone who thought of building this kind of application, I'd start with a wiki as an internal prototype of the registry. I'd get them entering the data into wiki pages with some simple markup that could be scraped later.
I'm not quite prepared to stick my neck out and say I think Yellowikis will disrupt the yellow-pages industry. But I'd like to see it try.
I have a personal interest here. I wrote a company registry module for Infoconomy back in 2000 (that site's running on Philip Greenspun's ACS). It was a good old-fashioned bit of relational modeling, handling international companies with HQs in different countries and multiple branches, categorization, partner and competitor relations etc.
When the site went live, the module was left out. No one, me included, could imagine that they'd launch with the small amount (around 50 companies skeletons, maybe 20 full profiles) of test data that had been entered during development. But researching, writing and entering the data was expensive. And this was a small startup magazine with a few journalists who realized that completing the catalogue was more work than they could handle.
Five years later, Infoconomy, and the CRM system (built by my friends on top of the ACS) seem to be still going strong. But, unless the company registry is hidden behind the subscription firewall, I don't think this feature ever did make it. Yellow-pages represent a great deal of work.
Can a wiki supplant that?
Here's what's good about a wiki. It's cheap. No one has to pay me to write a custom database application. If I was advising anyone who thought of building this kind of application, I'd start with a wiki as an internal prototype of the registry. I'd get them entering the data into wiki pages with some simple markup that could be scraped later.
I'm not quite prepared to stick my neck out and say I think Yellowikis will disrupt the yellow-pages industry. But I'd like to see it try.
November 15, 2005
Danny Ayer's sweet spot
Danny Ayers :
Interesting point
I’ve not figured out how to express this, but I think there’s a strong argument somewhere about finding the sweet spot for communications. At one end you’ve got all the semantics in the apps, the stuff on the wire being unintelligible to anything else. On the extreme, if we all used the same object language you could have all the semantics going on the wire, you’d have complete meaning on any (virtual) machine. XML is usually down the first end, but with RDF you can move a bit further up without needing complete prior agreement.
Interesting point
November 12, 2005
Read/Write Web: Conversation: Sergey Brin of Google
I missed this. Interesting : Read/Write Web: Conversation: Sergey Brin of Google
November 11, 2005
Reading the Google Tea Leaves
Reading the Google Tea Leaves
Interesting comparasons. But a couple of minor points.
Google doesn't innovate new kinds of produts? Not if you think ad-sense / ad-words was a minor innovation on something already available from Yahoo or MS. I wouldn't agree.
Where's Orkut? Surely the basis of a portal. And a comparison of MS, Yahoo and AOL in the social networking space would be interesting.
I think Umair Haque may have a more telling point :
Interesting comparasons. But a couple of minor points.
Google doesn't innovate new kinds of produts? Not if you think ad-sense / ad-words was a minor innovation on something already available from Yahoo or MS. I wouldn't agree.
Where's Orkut? Surely the basis of a portal. And a comparison of MS, Yahoo and AOL in the social networking space would be interesting.
I think Umair Haque may have a more telling point :
What's really happening in this space? Google has become one of the world's hyperefficient market makers. All these products are just ways to create goods (aka "inventory") to sell on that market, and, by doing so, to raise switching costs on both sides of the market).
Yahoo is not nearly such an efficient market maker. It has struggled to build a market like Google; while it's had some significant wins recently, these have been premised largely on price competition - the fact that Yahoo is a bit cheaper, not that it's market is more efficient.
November 10, 2005
Google is Building Yahoo 2.0 (by Jeremy Zawodny)
I think this is smart :
Google is Building Yahoo 2.0 (by Jeremy Zawodny)
Yep. That's a pretty good strategy sometimes. Take an existing succesful theme. Copy it. Add a twist ie. do at least one thing dramatically (ie. noticably, addictively) better. And do the rest as well as the incumbent. That's kind of the way nature works, one mutation at a time.
Well, it's only a heuristic. In reality Google tend to do two things dramatically better. Google was two twists on search engines : PageRank and radical simplicity of it's page-design. GMail was two (or maybe three) twists on existing webmail : mega-storage, better interface (and maybe exclusive invites). Google maps is two twists on existing mapping services : amazing interface, impressively hackable. AdSense is three twists on existing ads : context dependence, anyone can join in, unobtrusive.
Twists are useful. They're what get you talked about yet understood. "X is like Y but with Z." They're also what make it hard for users to switch back. "I wouldn't go back to Y now because I'd miss the Z".
Of course, there's no law that says the initial incumbent can't add Z too. But there's less of a message there. Catching up with GMail is not enough to make me switch away.
If they press me for details on this theory (that only happens about half the time) I say that it's as if someone decided to re-invent more and more of Yahoo's popular services in random order, giving them a fresh user interface, less historical baggage, and usually one feature that really stands out (such as Gmail's storage limit or Google Talk's use of Jabber).
Google is Building Yahoo 2.0 (by Jeremy Zawodny)
Yep. That's a pretty good strategy sometimes. Take an existing succesful theme. Copy it. Add a twist ie. do at least one thing dramatically (ie. noticably, addictively) better. And do the rest as well as the incumbent. That's kind of the way nature works, one mutation at a time.
Well, it's only a heuristic. In reality Google tend to do two things dramatically better. Google was two twists on search engines : PageRank and radical simplicity of it's page-design. GMail was two (or maybe three) twists on existing webmail : mega-storage, better interface (and maybe exclusive invites). Google maps is two twists on existing mapping services : amazing interface, impressively hackable. AdSense is three twists on existing ads : context dependence, anyone can join in, unobtrusive.
Twists are useful. They're what get you talked about yet understood. "X is like Y but with Z." They're also what make it hard for users to switch back. "I wouldn't go back to Y now because I'd miss the Z".
Of course, there's no law that says the initial incumbent can't add Z too. But there's less of a message there. Catching up with GMail is not enough to make me switch away.
November 09, 2005
Visual Studio Express
Microsoft are providing free-as-in-beer development tools.
Is this enough?
And here's the interesting small print :
Translation : we don't have the courage (yet) to turn our back on the principle that software should be a product. This is just a free offer / loss leader.
Translation : yep! This is still absolutely part of our forced upgrade policy. We want you all on .Net 2.0, now!!!
Is this enough?
And here's the interesting small print :
We originally announced pricing of Visual Studio Express at US$49. We are now offering Visual Studio Express for free, as a limited-in-time promotional offer, until November 6, 2006. Note that we are also offering SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as a free download, and that this offer is not limited to the same promotional pricing period as Visual Studio Express.
Translation : we don't have the courage (yet) to turn our back on the principle that software should be a product. This is just a free offer / loss leader.
Can I develop applications using the Visual Studio Express Editions to target the .NET Framework 1.1?
No, each release of Visual Studio is tied to a specific version of the .NET Framework. The Express Editions can only be used to create applications that run on the .NET Framework 2.0.
Translation : yep! This is still absolutely part of our forced upgrade policy. We want you all on .Net 2.0, now!!!
PBS | I, Cringely . November 3, 2005 - It's Deja Vu All Over Again
Cringely on Microsoft Live :
PBS | I, Cringely . November 3, 2005 - It's Deja Vu All Over Again
Update :
Here's how it goes inside Microsoft:
Bill Gates: "We need web services!"
Jim Allchin: "What are you talking about? We'll just build them into Longhorn, which will ship in 2003, 'er 2007."
Bill Gates: "Off with his head!" (Allchin is carried from room.)
Bill Gates: "We need web services!"
Ray Ozzie: "I'll give you web services. This is Microsoft, home of a million technologies. I'll be right back." (Leaves room.)
Ray Ozzie: (returning) "Sorry, no web services after all. They were perceived as being in conflict with Windows and Office and therefore purged."
Bill Gates: "Bring me the checkbook!"
And so Microsoft business development minions are scurrying everywhere looking for companies to buy that have products to redeem the promises Microsoft has already made.
PBS | I, Cringely . November 3, 2005 - It's Deja Vu All Over Again
Update :
Microsoft will spend whatever it takes to retain control, which could mean ANYTHING. Seriously, ANYTHING. Windows for free? Don't be surprised if it happens.
The "Service Wave"
Dave Winer has the Gates and Ozzie memos
Hmmm. No comment on the real content yet (except Gates and Ozzie are pretty bland and self-congratulatory.)
Except here's a first reaction. Ozzie describes the need for a web-platform including advertising, identity etc. Usual web 2.0 stuff. He thinks MS can build it.
But can MS treat it as a "product" and sell it?
Hmm. Maybe everyone should read The Age of Access (get the book from the "Amazon" link), and my my thoughts on Steve Antler's class war between products and services.
The product / service distinction is a deep one for software / knowledge companies. Free software / commons-based peer production is at a saddle-point. Does an economy (or a company) choose a full "service strategy" and thus embrace free-software, commons-based production? Or does it choose a "product strategy" which means embracing intellectual property and the restrictions that implies?
Microsoft is built around championing the product view of software. Even after embracing the web and .NET. If it really plans to reorient itself around services then it has to also embrace peer-production (and free-software is a complement to that).
Or does it? What if MS try to have it both ways? Selling software and content and selling access? I think MS will pull itself apart, as the service and product branches fight each other internally. For example, when MSN Spaces wants to provide more sophisticated free tools and support for developers (to compete with Ning / JotSpot / Rails), but this canibalises "Live Studio"'s customers?
At the same time, a lot of MS's market for tools are for building internal products. These can't be supported by advertising - especially not contextual ads. Are you gonna tell an ad company what you're thinking about internally? (Although that might be kind of interesting in a radical transparency way :-)
So MS will want to rent access to it's development tools. But this creates a strange dynamic : it's cheaper for the open / commons based development communities (who presumably don't mind ad-supported tools that know what's going on with their work) than for secrecy-based companies who have to rent the tools. (Essentially they're renting privacy) How much is privacy worth?
Actually, open development platforms remind me of source-code search like Koders and CodeFetch which allows massively parallel code-sharing. Where does that fit in here? If search is the heart of internet services (as proved by Google), is code-search the heart of a peer-based community software production platform?
This matters to MS because in their souls MS are a geek company. From their first product Basic through QuickBasic to VisualBasic and VisualStudio, MS dominance has been based on giving their system developers some great tools, and their application programmers both the tools and sneak-previews of their platforms.
It's hard to imagine an MS managing to maintain control over their ecosystem without also owning their own development tools and using those to drive their agenda. It's the energy that powers their fire and motion.
MS couldn't let their application developers use Java and become dependent on Sun's timetable and agenda. Nor will they let themselves become dependent on Ning or Rails for their Live offerings.
OK, coming back to the memo. Ozzie's "seamless" checklist is a bit vague and all encompassing. His moving forward doesn't mention tools. (Except "lightweight development" which is necessary but not sufficient.) There are sensible foci : reducing complexity - given that the explosion of this is what makes life so difficult for MS and that extreme simplicity (worse is better) is what makes the web so succesful; agile development (faster release cycle, one user story at a time); standards.
Ozzie is smart. Microsoft are too. And Microsoft are on the Cluetrain
But the web-as-platform is disruptive to Microsoft, not just because it's new, innovative and different but because it breaks their "software as product" business model. And they need to find an alternative way to get paid. If they can't, it won't be the web-as-platform which loses.
If MS want to dominate the web-as-platform they also need to find a way to own enough of the developers' tools that they set the agenda. And that's going to be tricky without embracing free software. An experiment with genuinely freeing the source of something would send a very interesting signal that they were really serious here. But it would also be very controversial. It would be an admission of "failure" on their part.
But MS can't have it both ways. They can't acknowledge the service model without also acknowledging the product model is broken. And that will be the real test of their mettle.
Hmmm. No comment on the real content yet (except Gates and Ozzie are pretty bland and self-congratulatory.)
Except here's a first reaction. Ozzie describes the need for a web-platform including advertising, identity etc. Usual web 2.0 stuff. He thinks MS can build it.
But can MS treat it as a "product" and sell it?
Hmm. Maybe everyone should read The Age of Access (get the book from the "Amazon" link), and my my thoughts on Steve Antler's class war between products and services.
The product / service distinction is a deep one for software / knowledge companies. Free software / commons-based peer production is at a saddle-point. Does an economy (or a company) choose a full "service strategy" and thus embrace free-software, commons-based production? Or does it choose a "product strategy" which means embracing intellectual property and the restrictions that implies?
Microsoft is built around championing the product view of software. Even after embracing the web and .NET. If it really plans to reorient itself around services then it has to also embrace peer-production (and free-software is a complement to that).
Or does it? What if MS try to have it both ways? Selling software and content and selling access? I think MS will pull itself apart, as the service and product branches fight each other internally. For example, when MSN Spaces wants to provide more sophisticated free tools and support for developers (to compete with Ning / JotSpot / Rails), but this canibalises "Live Studio"'s customers?
At the same time, a lot of MS's market for tools are for building internal products. These can't be supported by advertising - especially not contextual ads. Are you gonna tell an ad company what you're thinking about internally? (Although that might be kind of interesting in a radical transparency way :-)
So MS will want to rent access to it's development tools. But this creates a strange dynamic : it's cheaper for the open / commons based development communities (who presumably don't mind ad-supported tools that know what's going on with their work) than for secrecy-based companies who have to rent the tools. (Essentially they're renting privacy) How much is privacy worth?
Actually, open development platforms remind me of source-code search like Koders and CodeFetch which allows massively parallel code-sharing. Where does that fit in here? If search is the heart of internet services (as proved by Google), is code-search the heart of a peer-based community software production platform?
This matters to MS because in their souls MS are a geek company. From their first product Basic through QuickBasic to VisualBasic and VisualStudio, MS dominance has been based on giving their system developers some great tools, and their application programmers both the tools and sneak-previews of their platforms.
It's hard to imagine an MS managing to maintain control over their ecosystem without also owning their own development tools and using those to drive their agenda. It's the energy that powers their fire and motion.
MS couldn't let their application developers use Java and become dependent on Sun's timetable and agenda. Nor will they let themselves become dependent on Ning or Rails for their Live offerings.
OK, coming back to the memo. Ozzie's "seamless" checklist is a bit vague and all encompassing. His moving forward doesn't mention tools. (Except "lightweight development" which is necessary but not sufficient.) There are sensible foci : reducing complexity - given that the explosion of this is what makes life so difficult for MS and that extreme simplicity (worse is better) is what makes the web so succesful; agile development (faster release cycle, one user story at a time); standards.
Ozzie is smart. Microsoft are too. And Microsoft are on the Cluetrain
But the web-as-platform is disruptive to Microsoft, not just because it's new, innovative and different but because it breaks their "software as product" business model. And they need to find an alternative way to get paid. If they can't, it won't be the web-as-platform which loses.
If MS want to dominate the web-as-platform they also need to find a way to own enough of the developers' tools that they set the agenda. And that's going to be tricky without embracing free software. An experiment with genuinely freeing the source of something would send a very interesting signal that they were really serious here. But it would also be very controversial. It would be an admission of "failure" on their part.
But MS can't have it both ways. They can't acknowledge the service model without also acknowledging the product model is broken. And that will be the real test of their mettle.
November 08, 2005
Amazon Mechanical Turk
A new war. The Amazon Mechanical Turk vs. Skypal (as another platform to sell human services)
November 07, 2005
Google Print's network effects?
Mahashunyam is wrong here
There's no network FX for advertisers here.
Sure, the value to advertisers scales as the audience scales. But this differs from oldskool broadcast media how, exactly?
Advertisers don't benefit in the slightest from other advertisers using the ad-platform. Contrariwise, it just drives up the cost-per-eyeball - exactly the way it does in traditional media.
Yes, the connections between different Google "components" (as Scoble calls them) are valuable. But this has nothing to do with network effects.
I guess someone could argue that Google's readers benefit from there being more advertisers (more choice of informational links) and advertisers benefit from extra readers so there's a positive feedback going on there. But this is a kind of feedback that could exist in any media situation. It's not exclusive to Google and not what we normally mean by network effect.
Therefore, the network FX are indirect because the utility of the network increases to advertisers through the increase in the number of common users.
There's no network FX for advertisers here.
Sure, the value to advertisers scales as the audience scales. But this differs from oldskool broadcast media how, exactly?
Advertisers don't benefit in the slightest from other advertisers using the ad-platform. Contrariwise, it just drives up the cost-per-eyeball - exactly the way it does in traditional media.
Yes, the connections between different Google "components" (as Scoble calls them) are valuable. But this has nothing to do with network effects.
I guess someone could argue that Google's readers benefit from there being more advertisers (more choice of informational links) and advertisers benefit from extra readers so there's a positive feedback going on there. But this is a kind of feedback that could exist in any media situation. It's not exclusive to Google and not what we normally mean by network effect.
November 04, 2005
Threats to Ning
So what are the threats to Ning?
Ruby on Rails : very trendy with influential developers. Imagine 37signals trying to do a Rails-based rival?
JotSpot : although here, the Microsoft connection is a wild-card. Will this help or hinder them getting developer mindshare?
Ruby on Rails : very trendy with influential developers. Imagine 37signals trying to do a Rails-based rival?
JotSpot : although here, the Microsoft connection is a wild-card. Will this help or hinder them getting developer mindshare?
November 03, 2005
Sun's new "Web 2.0" services -- Sun Live?
Using the new Sun Grid service, virtually any consumer with a Web browser will be able to upload proprietary documents, and have them automatically converted to Open Document Format (ODF).
Good idea. I wonder if anyone's doing this for Excel files?
Sun's new "Web 2.0" services -- Sun Live?
The audio generation thing is good too. Wonder if they'll support all those obscure audio HTML attributes like <azimuth>
I'm also waiting for someone to come out with a service to mash-up audio ie. cut sections of audio out of existing podcasts, stick them together, reverse them, add effects, overdubs etc.
Web Developers Moving Past Java -- part 1
Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!!!!
Web Developers Moving Past Java -- part 1
(Oh, you can tell I'm biased ;-)
Keep in mind that I'm suggesting Java will be dead like COBOL, not dead like Elvis. For the hardest enterprise problems, Java is safe for at least three to five years--things like sophisticated and scalable object relational mapping, two phased commit, and the like. Java is being threatened in a much more common, and I think important space: how do you build a simple web application that fronts a relational database? Especially a database schema that you control? This industry solves this particular problem over and over, and Java's not very good at it.
Web Developers Moving Past Java -- part 1
(Oh, you can tell I'm biased ;-)
Meta question on Blogger comments.
This is very strange. Someone posted a comment here, which looks like it came from me. It's got my name on it, and links to my profile.
But I didn't write it. Is this a bug in Blogger? Or some kind of trick by the commenter. Seems a perfectly good comment, so I don't see what the motive is. Anyone else noticed this phenomenon?
If this is a bug in Blogger, it would be nice you'd explicitly sign your comments to get the recognition you deserve. :-)
But I didn't write it. Is this a bug in Blogger? Or some kind of trick by the commenter. Seems a perfectly good comment, so I don't see what the motive is. Anyone else noticed this phenomenon?
If this is a bug in Blogger, it would be nice you'd explicitly sign your comments to get the recognition you deserve. :-)
XFN vs. FOAF
Ryan vs. Danny
FOAFers complain XFN is half-baked. And that it confuses pages with people. A URL is apparently insufficient to be a UID for someone. Though Ryan appropriately responds that
Danny disagrees :
The first of these would certainly create confusion, and there's no type-system in XFN to stop it. The second point I'm not sure I get so I'll reserve judgement.
Ryan's other big point : Microformats are designed for "humans first, machines second".
That seems important. Any format with two (potential) user constituencies is probably in better shape than a format with only.
Danny is being a bit disingenuous about this by saying
FOAFers complain XFN is half-baked. And that it confuses pages with people. A URL is apparently insufficient to be a UID for someone. Though Ryan appropriately responds that
Second, why can’t URLs be used to identify people? Homepage URLs are as meaningful as email addresses (or hashes of email addresses, as I believe FOAF uses), so why can’t they be used to identify people?
Danny disagrees :
What happens if someone made a statement about the URL, say providing its dc:creator?
The use of a URI is questionable for the purpose in any case, see Identifying things in FOAF.
The first of these would certainly create confusion, and there's no type-system in XFN to stop it. The second point I'm not sure I get so I'll reserve judgement.
Ryan's other big point : Microformats are designed for "humans first, machines second".
That seems important. Any format with two (potential) user constituencies is probably in better shape than a format with only.
Danny is being a bit disingenuous about this by saying
XFN markup isn’t really any more human-friendly than FOAF’s RDF/XML, and what’s more without a machine to interpret the stuff there’s not much for the human either way.
Scobleizer - Yahoo’s new pretty maps are doomed (and so are Microsoft’s)
Scobleizer : Yahoo’s new pretty maps are doomed (and so are Microsoft’s)
Good points. The Google eco-system has lock-ins due to the synergy between it's various components. For Yahoo or Microsoft to break that they need to explicitly address those barriers to switching.
Read it all.
Good points. The Google eco-system has lock-ins due to the synergy between it's various components. For Yahoo or Microsoft to break that they need to explicitly address those barriers to switching.
Read it all.
More platforms ...
Might the recently announced, though somewhat vaporous, "Office Live" actually be a platform rather like my suggestion for Ning?
Is Microsoft Gadgets a platform?
Should I just go get some sleep?
Is Microsoft Gadgets a platform?
Should I just go get some sleep?
Scoble on Microsoft's two diseases
1) We look at the world only through a businessperson’s eyes.
2) We have no clue about the power of influentials.
Scobleizer : The new Robert Scoble Services agenda
Microsoft mash-ups
Phil Wainewright :
Let the great Microsoft mash-up begin
Can Microsoft be seriously suggesting that partners and customers will be able to connect to these services from any platform, and mash them up however they like (subject to paying the required subscription fees or accepting the obligatory advertising, whichever applies)? I'm not sure that Microsoft really does have the nerve to carry this through, but it should: its consummate expertise at fostering developer ecosystems could really light a fire under its on-demand platform if it gets the API offering right. That would make today's announcement one of those landmark dawn-of-a-new-era moments: the day the great Microsoft mash-up began.
Let the great Microsoft mash-up begin
Joel on the "Marimba Phenomenon"
Does ship-early-and-often really work for a huge company doing massive PR pushes that's going to get millions of people checking out their early release?
Joel on Software
Danny Ayers : Microsoft Unplugged
They’ve one or two high-profile setbacks recently, so this is probably around Plan C. I’m sorry, but I get the distinct impression that they’re still clinging to the sinking ship of Microsoft as Platform, and this looks like an act of total desperation following the realisation that the Web wasn’t under their control.
If this is their 5-year plan, then that’s also probably their remaining lifespan as one of the giants in the industry.
Danny Ayers, Raw Blog : � Microsoft Unplugged
November 02, 2005
O'Reilly quotes Ozzie
My favorite line, from Ray Ozzie: "Some say that the internet itself is the platform, and in many ways that's true. The internet has always been described as a network of networks, and it's now becoming a platform of platforms, as every web site is potentially a platform."
O'Reilly Radar > Live Software
Bubblegeneration on Ning
Umair Haque has problems with my suggestions for Ning :
OK, some good points. But I think they're wrong.
1) Cast your mind back to 1995 and imagine someone assessing the market for blog-hosting who says : "this won't be important, the number of journalists is tiny."
The existance of a new price-point for publishing created a much bigger market because a larger number of people got involved. Remember that my post was a response to the question "what (in web 2.0) is disruptive?" and I argued we should stick to Christensen's notion. In these cases "disruptive innovations" make something available for the first time, to people outside the traditional market.
Of course, building little web-applications is probably not as large a market as building little web-based opinion columns, but the size is yet to be tested.
Here are some people who might be building applications if the price was right :
2) Against free software. There are two costs to developing applications : one is the cost of paying Microsoft (or Sun or IBM) for the tools. The other is the time to understand the tools and actually develop the application. Of the two, the second is usually more serious. And free software doesn't offer any improvement here. There are libraries and toolkits and languages available for developers, but they work at much the same level as the commercial ones. And often the commercial tools are slicker and build the product with less friction than the free ones.
What I'm hoping for from Ning (or similar web-development platform) is something that can produce an order of magnitude efficiency for producing "stereotypical" applications. Free-software is not offering those savings in development time.
3) Once again, I beg to differ. One of the strange aspects of the new web is that lots of old ideas are being re-invented. Is vbulletin somehow less susceptible to competition by something better than Hotmail was to GMail?
4) Good point, in the sense that it looks at first glance as if Ning is only aimed at the very edge of the network, the individual user. What I was suggesting was that Ning didn't exactly drop this emphasis, but supplemented it by looking at the nearly-edge; created a tool for small ISVs and web-development agencies to more cheaply build customized, stereotypical applications for their customers. This is certainly pushing things further out than the current tools do, but not looking to final "end users".
Postscript on names : Oh, and it's not like web 1.0 names were all that. Seth Godin (and others in marketing) have the opinion that it's more important for the name to be unique and findable. "Generic" names are hated. del.icio.us, I can't help feeling succeeded despite the name. Or maybe it's a kind of "fuck you, we're impossible to remember but we don't care" name. I don't use it, anyway.
Not a bad idea, but there are a few problems with this strategy.
1) The market is not huge
2) There are many (many) substitutes, most of which are open-source (=free)
3) Most of the end-user markets are winner-take-all markets; ie, there's not a huge gap for a Metafilter, in, say, finance - Mefi's already got it covered.
4) But the biggie is really that Ning is a layer commoditizer. Ning's bet is esentially the peer production/cheap coordination bet - that the core atomizes, and so value shifts to the edges of the value chain, and Ning will be able to grab a share (somehow). Positioning as middleware contradicts these economics.
OK, some good points. But I think they're wrong.
1) Cast your mind back to 1995 and imagine someone assessing the market for blog-hosting who says : "this won't be important, the number of journalists is tiny."
The existance of a new price-point for publishing created a much bigger market because a larger number of people got involved. Remember that my post was a response to the question "what (in web 2.0) is disruptive?" and I argued we should stick to Christensen's notion. In these cases "disruptive innovations" make something available for the first time, to people outside the traditional market.
Of course, building little web-applications is probably not as large a market as building little web-based opinion columns, but the size is yet to be tested.
Here are some people who might be building applications if the price was right :
- Anyone who uses a spreadsheet. These were once specialist tools for accountants and financial analysts. Now spreadsheets are probably the most widely produced "applications" written.
- Anyone who has an idea for a "mash-up" of two pieces of data from other sites. Mash-ups now range from custom Greasemonkey scripts to Ning apps. to SPARQL queries on RDF databases to cutting and pasting AdSense ads or the Iraq Body Count box into their blog's gutter. People understand this principle, even when they don't understand how to make it work. Easy, stereotypical application development would help these people.
- Anyone who wants "customized" applications / services on their site. At the moment, you can use out of the box blogging software, wikis, discussion forums etc. Or you can pay someone to produce bespoke applications. There's still a large gulf in between. The small business who loves the existing out-of-the-box customer feedback form, but would just like to add one more field which allowed their customer to add an invoice number. Suddenly the small developer needs to charge another 10,000 dollars for another week's work. What if that sort of customization could be brought down to an hour's extra work in a higher-level configuration language?
2) Against free software. There are two costs to developing applications : one is the cost of paying Microsoft (or Sun or IBM) for the tools. The other is the time to understand the tools and actually develop the application. Of the two, the second is usually more serious. And free software doesn't offer any improvement here. There are libraries and toolkits and languages available for developers, but they work at much the same level as the commercial ones. And often the commercial tools are slicker and build the product with less friction than the free ones.
What I'm hoping for from Ning (or similar web-development platform) is something that can produce an order of magnitude efficiency for producing "stereotypical" applications. Free-software is not offering those savings in development time.
3) Once again, I beg to differ. One of the strange aspects of the new web is that lots of old ideas are being re-invented. Is vbulletin somehow less susceptible to competition by something better than Hotmail was to GMail?
4) Good point, in the sense that it looks at first glance as if Ning is only aimed at the very edge of the network, the individual user. What I was suggesting was that Ning didn't exactly drop this emphasis, but supplemented it by looking at the nearly-edge; created a tool for small ISVs and web-development agencies to more cheaply build customized, stereotypical applications for their customers. This is certainly pushing things further out than the current tools do, but not looking to final "end users".
Postscript on names : Oh, and it's not like web 1.0 names were all that. Seth Godin (and others in marketing) have the opinion that it's more important for the name to be unique and findable. "Generic" names are hated. del.icio.us, I can't help feeling succeeded despite the name. Or maybe it's a kind of "fuck you, we're impossible to remember but we don't care" name. I don't use it, anyway.
November 01, 2005
Ruby vs. Python : Community friendliness?
Ruby and Python are two fairly evenly matched languages in their technical capacity. But Ruby is getting a lot of people excited, while Python (sniff) is lagging behind. This is partly to do with Ruby on Rails, a very easy-to-use and pretty, web-application platform. Python's equivalent major web-platform, Zope, was lauded as powerful, but is pretty heavy and bureacratic.
But might the personalities of the communities also play a role? MF Bliki: RubyPeople
But might the personalities of the communities also play a role? MF Bliki: RubyPeople
Common Craft - Social Design for the Web: Project Platform Wars
I'm in no sense a Mac fanatic. I've never owned a piece of Apple hardware or software and don't intend to. But I think this is a sad, if instructive, story :
Common Craft - Social Design for the Web: Project Platform Wars
Two species - Mac and Windows - contested a space. The Mac succesfully invaded, proved more succesful, but was then stopped by a bureaucratic decree.
Robert Axelrod has a good discussion of what makes for a succesful species : initial viability, robustness, stability. Initial viability is the capacity to thrive when surrounded by other species. The Mac clearly demonstrated this. Either it was inherantly more compatible with the Windows protocols and software or, it encouraged smarter users who were able to make compatibility work.
Windows reinvaded the space through neither inherant nor externalized virtues, but through the shere momentum of numbers.
The platform issue got escalated, as it had the potential to cause major problems. As it turned out- the answer was simple. Our project leader simply said that the company uses Microsoft products and that means that all diagrams, wireframes, etc. need to be done in Visio because of future hand-off to enterprise teams.
Common Craft - Social Design for the Web: Project Platform Wars
Two species - Mac and Windows - contested a space. The Mac succesfully invaded, proved more succesful, but was then stopped by a bureaucratic decree.
Robert Axelrod has a good discussion of what makes for a succesful species : initial viability, robustness, stability. Initial viability is the capacity to thrive when surrounded by other species. The Mac clearly demonstrated this. Either it was inherantly more compatible with the Windows protocols and software or, it encouraged smarter users who were able to make compatibility work.
Windows reinvaded the space through neither inherant nor externalized virtues, but through the shere momentum of numbers.
NamePros.Com - FAQ: Adsense Revenue Sharing
Interesting. Here's a discussion board with Adsense Revenue Sharing.
Seems to fit Umair Haque's intuition (which I was rather sceptical about here) that there was room for pulverising payment for content even smaller.
Seems to fit Umair Haque's intuition (which I was rather sceptical about here) that there was room for pulverising payment for content even smaller.
Ross Mayfield on MS
Ross Mayfield on Microsoft's expected announcement of a move into selling more services delivered over the web.
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Turn on a Dime
Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Turn on a Dime
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