Zoho's spreadsheet gets pivot-tables and macros.

Thinking, even though I'm not so enamoured of them, I need to read more blogs like this.

Damn! I have to link TechCrunch, but this memo is worth it.

Ozzie clearly "gets it"; M$ re-orienting themselves around the Yasn-as-platform and the device swarm :

1. The Web is the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.

The web is first and foremost a mesh of people. . . . All applications will grow to recognize and utilize the inherent group-forming aspects of their connection to the web, in ways that will become fundamental to our experiences. In scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View. . . . To individuals, the concept of “My Computer” will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices – a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole.

The end of SkyPal? (Hat-tip Exmosis)

WTF? Craziness, no?

What EBay should be doing :

a) make development of Skype plugins more accessible. (Note that the Skype home-page doesn't have a "for developers" link, how much excited discussion is there among developers about the potential of this?)

b) EBay have got a ready made social networking service in Skype's contact lists. The clever thing to do would be to find ways to build on that social network.

c) unify Skype, PayPal and EBay accounts (much as Yahoo and Google have been doing with the properties they bought)

Intuit's financial Platform-as-a-service

Google launches Orkut Apps. in India.

This, I guess, is OpenSocial.

Update : previews.

Wow! AppDrop clones the GAE API on top of Amazon AWS!! Already!

Update : Cohesive offers another hosting option

Phil Wainewright : Is Facebook a PaaS contender?

My take ... they had every possibility of being in this area, but don't really seem to have picked up on the possibility. (Prefering instead to chase good-old-fashioned-advertising-driven-mass-media-strategies). I don't *expect* to see FB show much vision or leadership of their platform developers in this direction.

Google + Salesforce

Currently tighter integration of Google's online office-style apps. with Salesforce's platform.

Notes how viral Google apps are spreading :

Much of this will happen under-the-radar. David Armstrong, product and marketing manager for Google Enterprise in EMEA, told me yesterday that Google Apps already has half a million organizations — not individuals, organizations — signed up worldwide, with 2000 more signing up every day. But that astounding adoption rate is visible only to Google. There are no shrinkwrap packages passing through distributors’ warehouses or flying off retailers’ shelves. There’s not even any money changing hands for sign-ups to the free version. It’s just an invisible stream of bits in the ether. Adoption will be mostly unseen, until one day it will suddenly have become too big to ignore.

Meanwhile ZDnet bloggers are tracking the fast evolving cloud / platform-as-service war.

Interesting. Dion Hinchcliffe notes that Sun's had a cloud for a while ... and we don't care.

Must be something to do with Java. :-)

Or Google Reality Distortion field?

Some had to try auctioning a Twitter account.

Fun experiment and the results will be informative.

Update : StoweBoyd doesn't actually think that much of the idea. Seems to think that all the value of a twitter account is in the individual, not the collection of followers.

But I wonder if there might be an intermediete position. What if some online personalities could be more like fictional characters : the architypes here might be James Bond or Dr. Who.

Different actors play the roles but we have models and standards to compare them to. We wonder quite obsessively what the new Bond will be like. Will he be as good as the old? Will he be as "Bond" as the old.

I once read that Robert X. Cringely was not the original but a substitute who took over the original column. Whether this is a myth or not, it seems that new writers could take over an existing role, if they perform it well enough.

Might we be asking ourselves "who'll be the next Scoble?" Unlikely. But Shel Israel already seems to be moving in the direction of a fictional character.

Dion Hinchcliffe is on the case of comparing GAE and Amazon Web Services.

Simon Wardley defends GAE against detractors.

Yahoo to merge with AOL?

It's all stupid, anyway if these companies are just worried about consolidating audience. Why don't they just break-up Yahoo into a bunch of separate entities (Flickr etc.) and see what each can do on it's own?

Mary Jo Foley asks if Windows 7 will be available in pieces.

It's a sensible thought. I believe that the desktop operating system is (at least currently) a dead-end. It is no longer a place where any kind of interesting platform warring can occur. All desktop operating systems must offer similar resources (access to the capabilities of the underlying hardware, file-system, graphic user-interface including components, media handling etc. etc.)

Until the hardware changes or human requirements change fundamentally, these are more or less static; commoditized.

Windows, Mac and Linux all do a sufficiently OK job of providing for these requirements that the choice of one or the other offers little advantage to the application writer. One chooses to write for Windows because that's where the biggest market is, or Mac because that's where the most exclusive market is, or Linux because of ideological commitment.

Differentiating desktop operating systems boils down to tweaking the inessentials.

This is why Microsoft's huge investment of time, money and goodwill in Vista was a strategic mistake. One which cost the company far more than a desktop OS could ever recover.

Instead, the competitive action has moved to new loci. As I've mentioned on my other blog, there is a dramatic upheaval going on in the software world :

Applications are getting pulverized, fragmented down into smaller, more focussed, single "feature" mini-applications that I tend to call "widgets". This is happening because there are new networks for organizing and plugging the widgets together. Widgets are tethered through web protocols, RSS etc to server based applications in the "cloud" but are only distantly connected to each other.

Increasingly they are running on virtual machines which have successfully wrapped and hidden the operating system. (The browser, the Java Virtual Machine, the Flash virtual machine etc.) One thing that has helped with this is that the web-based applications store user's data in the cloud not on the local machine, and so avoid having to get too familiar with the local file-system.

This software is often self-installing or comes directly from the web. It usually needs no purchasing and relies on no infrastructure of distribution (such as shops selling boxes with DVDs in) It is promoted by word-of-mouse. The extreme example, which I believe is a pointer to the future, is the Facebook app. where knowledge of applications percolates virally through computer-aided-social-networks (YASNS) who's infrastructure helps accelerate their flow. (Google using GMail to push people into it's online wordprocessor and spreadsheet is another example.)

Widgets, then, are small, narrow focussed programs which live natively in both social networks, and data-flow networks, tethered to the cloud.

In general they eschew dependency on the desktop operating system and prefer to run in the browser, JVM, Flash (and maybe Silverlight) virtual machines. By their very existence they contributed to the decline in relevance of the desktop operating system but reignite a platform war among widget containers. There is a lot of room for differentiation in the container : who provides the best video decompression or GUI toolkit, for example.

The other coming platform war is going to be in the cloud. We are seeing the shift from companies providing basic hosting mechanics (servers, database servers) to Amazon providing a suite of cheap, scalable resources for a web-based applications, to Google coming with the beginnings of a complete, integrated development/deployment/hosting platform with Application Engine.

As Folknology puts it in a tweet today :

GAE marks the end of frameworks & the beginning of Platform 2.0. Expect this to be a hum-dimmer of a war between the big players.

Over the next five years there's going to be far more happening on both the integrated cloud development and hosting front, and on the widget-container front than on the desktop. At which point it must start to dawn on Microsoft that they can't afford to waste as much on Windows 7 as they did on Vista. It's not clear that there's any need at all for a new Windows apart from for appearances sake. And to stay in the game.

It's certainly no longer viable to keep the next Windows as the centre of attention or try to fight for world-domination there.

Windows 7 can't be the monolithic, all conquering beast that its ancestors were. Instead, far better to be a swarm of components. Cheap to produce, loosely coupled, a buffet from which users can pick and choose.

Compare Joel Spolsky reiterating his Fire and Motion riff, with John Robb on Boyd's OodaLoop

Simon Wardley comments on Google Application Engine ...

good points : warns of lock-in, notes connection with Gears and Android ... means that the Google Platform includes tethered devices.

Google App Engine to challenge Amazon, Ning etc.

Write your applications in Python ... w00t!

Update : OK, this is big, at least this is going "mainstream". Poor Ning, they had all the great ideas, Amazon too ... but it sounds like Google are taking the whole package : integrated development environment, database, python, logging, version control, multiple developers working on same code-base etc. etc. and bringing it to the masses.

But only a limited number of free accounts ...

Update 2: early chatter is complaining about Python-only, actually I'm not sure it's gonna be Python that people struggle to get their heads around ... I think it's gonna be BigTable.

Details of the OOXML standards meeting.

Hat-tip Dennis Howlett Newsgator seem to be taking Yasn-as-platform into the enterprise.

He's also blogging about Wetpaint wiki + social publishing.

Read Joel on IE8, standards and the mother of all flame-wars.

He thinks it will "break the web".

Update : he's wrong (sort of) about Postel. The point is that Postel wasn't trying to make a reference implementation. There's be nothing to stop the W3 making a reference implementation of the spec. and just telling M$ etc. to conform or be non-standard. That's not Postel's job though. His law is designed to get a flawed communication system off the ground, not to ensure standards. (As Spolsky kind of admits)

No Flash for iPhone.

Of course not.

Socialprise

Umair :

The real point is: Friendfeed is a next-gen, open version of Facebook's social feed.

This is a great test of the difference between my position and Umair's. I admire Umair's thinking a lot. And I've been forced to agree that Facebook's "DNA" is evil in many of the ways that he says.

Nevertheless, I still believe that a private or reliably discreet feed is a valuable service. And one which, by definition, only a closed YASN can supply. I can't imagine BabyRota-like services appearing via FriendFeed. Of course, I haven't seen BabyRota-like services on Facebook yet. But I still believe that they're more likely there than on public feeds.

Umair is right when he thinks about markets (where openness and transparency is a virtue) but, I believe, misses that not all "networks" are markets. I can see FriendFeed being interesting. (My feed) . But is no substitute for what a (potential) Facebook feed could be. ;

He he!

I am so not with the zeitgeist ... :-)

Yahoo goes SemWeb.

OK ... show me.

Maybe in 6 months I'll have to eat my words, come back and tell me then if this has reinvented the web or anything ...

Will IE break the web?

RWW a bit breathless over YouTube platform. What do you think?

Umair continues to inspire.

Twine apparently "disappoints".

Frankly, I'll be impressed if it does anything useful at all. (That couldn't be done just as well by the SynWeb). The SemWeb is such a dumb idea in the first place, it's kind of sad to see so many smart people pour so much into it. And kind of hilarious that allegedly clever journalist act all surprised : "hey! but it was so hyped! what a shock to find it's useless"

Microsoft buying Logitech sounds pretty unlikely on the face of it.

M$ are not a hardware company (if they can help it). And it's not clear what Logitech might offer (although speculating wildly, something tabletty?) Nevertheless these kinds of peripheral companies are going to be worth watching. They're going to get more interesting as the PC blows up into the device swarm. Some of them probably have some innovative devices which will become platforms in their own right.

Semi-related, I notice Gosling is pushing the Blu-ray connection with JavaFX.

"I think that a lot of the software development community--which I find really, really frustrating--is fixated on Web apps. They write their stuff on the server, it generates HTML, and there is this really big piece of the community that thinks that that is the universe," Gosling said.

"There's a lot more to it," he said. "Blu-ray is a pretty interesting corner of it."

Thinking more about Microsoft's recent announcements and the fact they seem to be back playing "own-the-infrastructure" again, perhaps we should pay more attention to Cringley's theory of the Yahoo bid.

Could they be this Machiavellian? Is it all about simply disrupting Yahoo as a rival while syphoning off talent and ideas? All the while, the real game is against Adobe to own the Rich Interface Application protocols? Eventually, of course, leading to the evolution of Office into the main client for cloud-based applications? (Routing round the browser and Google etc.)

Of course it can't work. I mean, Microsoft have been failing to get their act together to do this for the last 12 years or so. But M$ are now under new, allegedly smarter, management. They may finally be figuring this out. A Microsoft who get sociality, YASN-as-platforms, clouds, services etc. and who are quick and agile enough to bring their massive developer and user bases to it, are going to be formidable.

Platform-wars-wise things are getting very crazily interesting.

Simon Wardley recently linked this document about standards and a possible attempt by Microsoft to create a new internet-wide document standard. Think Office as the client to a proprietory M$ web.

Interesting that they might still be trying to play this game. Does it become easier if everyone assumes they've given up?

Steve Gillmor on Ray Ozzie :

The most important lesson Ray has learned is that we no longer are bound to applications in the monolithic evolution that produced Office. In this new Internet operating system, applications become modules or services that can be loosely coupled together under user control on demand, as needed.

In other words a "pull-platform" for widgets. See this evolving in the direction of "Yasn-as-platform" (where the platform is fundamentally social), and "device-swarm" where the computer explodes into a swarm of networked devices.

Nice try, Microsoft. Seems like Ozzie pushing things forward.

We'll find out if they can really do it.

IE8 support for standards is good news. Compare IE4 ... M$ always support standards when they know they're the underdog. But still not clear what having a browser buys them. And developer support in finding bugs is very nice. (Will help a lot in day-job)

Clearly they "get it" WRT what I was saying here. Flash vs. Silverlight vs. JavaFX (and Android somewhere) is the battleground that counts, both for rich widgets-in-YASNS and for the device-swarm. M$ are pushing Silverlight. Not sure I like the emphasis on advertising, but I see where it comes from. As always, Microsoft's secret weapon is their development tools and community. Visual Studio is ready for Silverlight.

Actually, we shouldn't be surprised by this. "Rich Internet Applications" or this kind of media player / virtual machine is a "sustaining innovation" ... it follows the logic that traditional proprietory software companies like Adobe and Microsoft and Apple are used to : building sophisticated code-bases, having total control over the user's experience, working with your own protocols, supporting it with good tools etc. This is not a game of insinuating yourself into and taking advantage of a massive community defined by open standards. Google would be hopeless here. But M$ will be good.

Of course, it's Apple and the iPod ecology which has persuaded everyone that this is still the game. But interestingly they aren't playing here ... unless QuickTime is due for a revamp. Not sure what's under the bonnet of iPhone etc. but perhaps Apple no longer want to be associated with "platforms" ... perhaps the idea is too geeky for their end-user focus. So Apple could use Silverlight (but rejecting Flash? Interesting, do they see Adobe as more of a rival in "cool-space" than Microsoft?)

In short ... Microsoft are a softare tech. company. This is all about software tech. So they do it well. But that may not guarantee success if Apple's consumer focus trumps. JavaFX is gonna be dead if someone somewhere doesn't come out with some tools to help work with it - which seems less than likely. Even Adobe can't afford to rest on their laurels. They're now head-to-head against M$ in the game that M$ is best at.

Two views on standards :

Institutional view

An "organic" view. What we think we know about network externalities etc.

Twitter plug-in for Firefox. The coral reef keeps growing.

iPhone (and probably Android) are pushing mobile networks to become higher-bandwidth data networks.

Murdoch getting his fingers into Yahoo does, of course, make horrible sense.

Bah! :-(

Umair has a new blog.

Joel on the new CueCat.

Hmmmm ... ok, except that at some point taking photos with a phone is going to be easier than typing in a URL ... if not today, then sometime t in the future. And at that moment, this kind of thing starts to make sense. And actually I´m pretty sure I read about these things already being used in Japan.

Also, bar-codes (2D or otherwise) are still ways of giving ids to things, whose importance is only increasing, even if we eventually move on to RFIDs.

Microsoft + Yahoo = much less than sum of parts.

Umair explains pretty well.

I am a little more positive about Yahoo than Umair ... in the sense I see them doing some interesting and sometimes smart things. Search Yahoo here. Whether these little experiments are enough to upset the Yahoo DNA, I don´t know. I would suspect Umair is basically right. Getting merged with MS will side-track Yahoo from noticing when the smart things they do are working. And Microsoft will continue to fail to get anything about the web until they stop thinking of themselves as a software product company.

The funny thing is, that some people do imagine this is a good idea. Not sure what those people imagine, something like markets are fungible maybe? What they seem to ignore is that software companies, web-tech companies are idea companies. And ideas are not fungible!

Windows 7 to be integrated with Microsoft Live!.

What does it mean though?

MS has two problems :

- the desktop OS is almost a commodity. There are few applications that need Windows's specific services (as opposed to equivalents on Mac, Sun, Linux, or Android) It's hard to imagine Windows 7 doing something that other OSs aren't thinking about or couldn't quickly copy. (LINQ for serious applications? Drivers for multitouch Surfaces? Everyone will have something like that. )

- the PC is about to explode into the device swarm.

How does closer integration between Windows and Live! help in that context. It's not a winning move for MS to make their Live! services dependent on Windows 7. Will they exclude XP and Vista users from Live! in 2010? Unlikely.

After that, they can only compete on "seemless experience". But every time Microsoft compete against Apple on anything resembling an "experience", they hardly have the upper hand.

Now, the natural tethered client of an online service is a light-weight virtual machine like Flash, Silverlight or JavaFx. Not a whole operating system - users will want their virtual machines to play well together in a common sandbox, supporting
copying, pasting, dragging and dropping etc.)

There is scope for some individuation and platform warring among standards for these virtual machines. MS may be able to make Silverlight-only services, but they'll certainly have to make Silverlight run on Mac (and at least condone clones running on Linux)

This kind of virtual machine is also a natural for the device swarm : eg. Flash on Chumby, Java VM on mobiles ... Silverlight on XBox?

So while the desktop OS becomes a commodity, this space is going to get hot as the VMs compete for developers' attention. Particularly smaller devices are only likely to come with one of these virtual machines pre-installed. They'll compete on video-handling capability, graphics library, back-end data synchronization, bredth of applicability etc.

In a sense, the Java vision is finally coming into its own ... although whether Java turns out to be the victor is another matter.

Phil Wainewright on DevPay

Dave's interesting take on commodification ... it's gonna put prima-donna developers out of business?

I'm not sure I totally buy the idea that people will put more of their data up for themselves. In a recent chat with Folknology we were discussing who would be the natural company to bring customers directly into the cloud. Ie. who would resell Amazon et al's commodity infrastructure and storage as non-exploitative way of managing your online identity (as opposed to evil Facebook, Microsoft or Google who want to own your online identity and relationships in order to resell you.)

Perhaps blog-software providers like Six Apart or Wordpress? Perhaps EBay who already controls some important information about your trustworthiness? Although Amazon provide this infrastructure, it seems like there's a conflict of interest with them wanting to sell to you.

Ironically, it may be that this conflict of interest makes it especially hard for a web 2.0 internet playa ... anyone too closely associated with an advertising funded model seems suspect. Anyone too closely associated with data-mining, collaborative filtering or Amazon-style "users who bought this also bought ..." are suspect.

Outside speculation ... could it be Apple who have the genius to create a slick iMe device they can sell to you, containing your electronic identity and social network, tethered to an always on phone system? (Perhaps in the form of a little voodoo doll, that has your face. :-) ...

Or some other name more closely associated with personal communication than online networks? Actually, could Microsoft would be in with a chance if they promoted it as the next development of Outlook rather than try to make it part of some grand everything-under-one-Live-umbrella scheme.

Remember ... the user is the platform.

Sun buys MySQL

Tim Bray's predictions for 2008 ... worth reading.

Ning faces the same issues as Tribe

Tim O'Reilly compares iPhone vs. Blackberry to Excel vs. Lotus 123

Very interesting article on the fact that there are no "neutral" markets or auctions (in the sense of not producing a prejudiced outcome)

Leads to and ties with a Tim O'Reilly on automated vs. human decision making

(hat-tip : SJ)

I'm not, myself, particularly entranced by all the "human improvements on automated search" (Mahalo, Knol, Squidoo) etc. I don't find myself thinking "I must find out about X but I don't trust Google to give me the right answer, I'll go and see if there are any experts over at ..." What I tend to do is start with Google, and find it's almost always sufficient for my requirements ... or at least starts me browsing in the right direction.

What Google *is* pretty lousy at is product recommendations (which is what so many of the rivals point out) but frankly going to a search engine and saying "what should I buy?" is pretty stupid. And ignores the fact that blogs do a pretty good job of that.

So I'm just not seeing all this "pain" that people claim to be having from Google being gamed by the SEOs.

Very obviously a PageRank type algorithm, even if it was working perfectly, wouldn't be the place to discover idiosyncratic, offbeat resources. The only way you're likely to find those is through a skilled editor / curator or interesting social network. But, again, blogs are already great for editor-curators. And maybe some other social networking services handle the social routing. In particular, one thing I'm noticing is that I'm getting a *lot* of good links flowing to me through Twitter.

Update : Wikia's problem is that no-one is going to understand it (I mean the process) in time for it to get useful or interesting.

Cringley on Multicast

EBook predictions ...

Meanwhile, sounds like Yahoo is following a sensible strategy of pushing their YASN-as-platform via their web-mail account and integrating other web-apps.

Flickr too?

Bill Gates says Microsoft is all about software (more or less the way I said it to Gaping Void (scroll down))

Don't think Gates sounds like he knows much about what's going on today though ...

Dave Winer on Twitter's Business Model

Hugh is still calling this TV 2.0

A lot of people are hating on "2.0" names now have always hated on "2.0" names, so I'm not sure I'd be pushing it the way Hugh is. But I don't care one way or the other about "2.0", I can usually negotiate whatever terminology other people want to use.

However, I really don't like the idea of calling this "TV".

Like I said before, for me "TV" is all about "broadcast" ie. DRM, intrusive advertising, big-media dinosaurs etc. And, unless they turn out to be surprisingly clever and agile I don't think this is going to be about them.

Yes, 2008 may be the year that the big, cheap LCD in your living room is assimilated into the device swarm. But there'll also be little screens (Chumbies, portable gaming machines, mobile phones and video players), and non-screens (Nabaztags, Orbs)

Yep, Dave's done it again.

Update : And, of course, if Dave's FlickrFan takes off. It really won't be hard at all to upgrade it to do video, and then river of checkbox news.

For the BBC or NBC or Fox or CNN, now would be a great time to start paying attention and trying to get into this.

If I was Apple, I'd be dropping the price of the MacMini to take advantage of this launch : "Buy a MacMini NOW for only $400 before end of January and get Flickrfan preinstalled". OTOH, if I was Microsoft I'd assign a couple of people on helping port this application to Windows PDQ.

And if I was Flickr ... you know, I'd at least mention it on my blog.

Update 2 : Now, I wonder if this kind of newsmap would work well on a big screen.

Update 3 : Bonus Link. Remember this? :

Winer has nothing like the resources of Apple, but look, he's created the same shape of platform : he's got the content, he's got the nice reader, he's got the flow going through his middleware. And now he can start innovating on top of that.

Good end of year round-up from Marc Canter.

... we believe within one year they’ll be LOTS of social media features being plopped into existing productivity software, Intranets and legacy apps, etc.

Meanwhile Dave launches his photos from Flickr over RSS to your TV thing.

Dennis Howlett's wishlist for 2008

Hugh Macleod still musing on, (talking himself into more business with) Microsoft.

I'm a) answering both one ugly bit of sophistry that came up in the comments :

2. The US Government's paradox is that, while monopolies might be illegal, for Microsoft, as a publicly traded company to act in any way other than it has would also be deemed illegal.

This is clearly wrong. No company has a legal obligation to its shareholders to do illegal things. And even if they did have a legal obligation to do *wrong* things, anyone with any integrity would avoid them like the plague.

If you stop to consider the same argument being applied to, say, bribing foreign governments or abusing human rights, that should become obvious.

And then b) addressing the wider question.

I can understand that there's a genuinely interesting challenge to try to make Microsoft relevant and exciting again.

But I don't, honestly see how that can happen *yet* - they haven't been nearly humbled enough and still in transition between Gates / Ballmer and whatever is coming next.

Yes, they need a new idea. But chasing any new technological trend can't be it.

Microsoft's big idea, which has sustained them for 30 years, and really was visionary when Bill Gates was promoting it in the 70s, was that, with the right intellectual property laws, you could build a "pure software" company, selling directly to the end-users rather than be part of, or a supplier to, a hardware company. And as a pure software company you could get your product onto everyone else's hardware in every office, in every home.

I see Microsoft as the best-case scenario for a proprietory software company. But that turns out not to be good enough. We need more and more powerful software on a more complex ecosystem than anyone, even Microsoft, can keep under control. And the only way we can have that is through open platforms and protocols, free (open-source) software, "peer-production" and software-as-a-service. All of these are deeply inimical to Microsoft's core DNA of wanting to "own" software platforms.

If MS is to have a future, its "next big idea" can't be one type of device or another. (There's going to be a multiplicity of different types of devices. More than Microsoft can produce or even write drivers for.) It can't be "advertising" because advertising itself is under huge transformative pressures.

No, the big idea has to come after MS have exorcised the notion of "software as product" and started with a clean slate.

Hugh Macleod thinks Microsoft is going for TV 2.0

Well, it's not really surprising. Both MS and Apple have been trying to get there for .. well ... ever. However, "TV" for me means "broadcast" with all the bad things that implies : DRM, intrusive advertising, platform owners who want to dictate the conversation.

The question is, how much of this "broadcast" platform survive? And how closely do Microsoft and Apple want to tie themselves to it? As the computer explodes into a swarm of connected, "smart" objects and appliances scattered around our lives. (Nabaztags, Chumbies, Robosapiens and their various offspring) I wonder if the focus really should be on "TV"

Interesting presentation on commodotization in IT.

Wave of Flash phone-apps?

Databases are now a commodity.

And Amazon are commoditizing hosting.

Quick note : Blahsploitation is no more ... long live "Composing"

James Governor gets stuff.

Hmmmm ... M&A becomes about merging and pruning social graphs?

Nick Carr has a good follow up ... noting the importance of Excel

It's all vibing off everything Sig says.

I wonder if anyone remembers John Seely Brown going round a couple of years ago saying social software was for "exception handling" in the enterprise?

Final thought ... enterprise software will be "sexy" when it can do graphs like GapMinder.

Steve Gillmor on Silverlight etc.

Bebo (which is already aligned with OpenSocial) decide to clone the Facebook API too so Facebook apps will run on it.

Dave Winer says that FB supporting this effort is the "end" of OpenSocial.

He may be right, and that's a bad thing.

You can see an allegorical image of Facebook with a devil on one shoulder and and angel on the other, whispering advice in its ear. Facebook could choose to be "good" or choose to be "evil". Opening its API was good, Beacon is evil.

"Good Facebook" would be competing as infrastructure for social applications, providing more ways to let applications writers help you benefit from your social network. "Evil Facebook" thinks applications are merely a complement. It competes on "owning your social network" and reselling it for its own benefit.

While it's not actually evil to allow Bebo to clone the API. Being too blasé may demonstrates that FB are only really thinking about the dark-side strategy. Same problem is true of OpenSocial. If social-application hosting is seen as a commodity, YASNS have to compete on exploitation of your social data.

Kindle : subscription not advertising?

Umair brilliant today :

The original purpose of the corporation - and of business - was to make everyone involved in trade better off.

Stop and think about that for a second - everyone.

Somewhere along the way, in the annals of corporate history - we lost that purpose.

And the firm became what the commenter's describing: a value-shifting machine, not a value-creating machine.

So: the fact that people can even think that such a design makes economic sense - businesses exist solely to maximize profits, at the expense of consumers - speaks volumes about what's really wrong with th larger economy today.

Quick update on ODF and OOXML

Salesforce becomes a YASN

Serious Facebook apps. appearing.

Widgety Goodness

Interesting analysis of the fragility of SemWeb meta-data. Calls for explicit human viewable and "auditable" meta-data.

Of course, it's hilarious that the SemWeb people haven't yet managed to solve the problem of how to "address" things with URIs. :-) After all, people have been addressing things successfully with URLs for years.

What is apparently difficult is being clear exactly *what* is being addressed. Because SemWeb promises we can be unambiguous about that, but then seems to have problem distinguishing whether we're talking about the "sense" or the "reference".

In contrast URLs have no problems refering because we're not too fussy about what they refer to.

Could there be some kind of "uncertainty principle" here? One which says you can know "what" a thing is or "where" it is, but not both at the same time?

Robot wars

(Frankly Xeno looks way too "Chucky" to me.)

Now this is the way to run a cool enterprise software company.

I wonder why Google don't merge Orkut and Blogger.

Marc Andreesen thinks the entertainment could become more like the tech. industry.

Apple vs. Amazon

Personally, I think some kudos should go to Amazon for even raising this possibility.

Can't blame Amazon for borrowing the iPod strategy wholesale. It worked spectacularly for Apple. Why change anything?

Why I'm a Dave Winer fan.

Dave on his new Chumby :

6. It would be nice to have a USGS earthquake widget. It could be two-way since the Chumby has motion detectors.

Yahoo to evolve email and other services towards YASN.

Sensible strategy, as long as the execution is OK

In fact, Google totally taking over ...

My word!

This is bloody aggressive.

I'm going to have to start talking about Google's November Blitzkrieg, a sudden, vicious attack on three fronts : against Microsoft, Sun and Facebook (with MySpace rapidly surrendering and getting with the program).

The article makes a convincing case that this is a decisive blow against Sun's mobile platform aspirations. What is likely to happen is that they'll either sue for peace by falling into line with Google, and accepting the effective merger of Java and Dalvik now under Google's leadership and fully open source. Or they'll fight on, but without any real chance of success.

I'm right behind Umair on the mind-boggling evil dumbness of Facebook's advertising play.

I was a fan of Facebook, of both their intelligence and ambition, but no more. The problem is that Facebook really had something, a potential, that I believe few other commentators understood. It seemed like Mark Zuckerberg had grasped something that eluded the minds of some of the smartest observers around. Now it looks like he didn't really "get it" either. Maybe he was just lucky? Because the new FB advertising platform is going to abuse the enormous power it has. Whether it breaks apart as millions of users flee the deluge of spam or just congeals into a large glob of sticky gunk around the consumtariat, Facebook is blown.

Huh? Confused? Let me put it this way ....

Hey! Kids! Make Pepsi your friend and win FREE Ringtones!!!

Or whatever ... brands have a myriad of incentives to get someone in your social network to sign them up as a friend. Think they won't do it? Think again ...

Think the kids you know will have integrity enough to resist? Maybe the price has to be a bit higher. But you get the idea. If friendships have value to predatory brands then they'll be scheming to get them.

What all this reminds me of is those sites, back in the day, that used to require you to give your credit-card details in return for a short-term trial; and would then kept charging you a bit every month, in the hope that you either didn't notice, or found it too much trouble to jump through the hoops of cancellation.

Brands are going to sign up your friends in a burst of naive enthusiasm or by using shameless bribery, and will then send out a slurry of low-level spam, keeping it just low-profile enough (compared to everyone else's spam) to not irritate people into actively cutting their connections. (Although the best thing from the brand's point of view, would be to get their hooks into highly connected people, and then drive drive them away from Facebook altogether, leaving their accounts as little zombie beacons, broadcasting nothing on the newsfeed but the brand's message.)

Update : Bonus evil

Update 2 : BTW, there's only one brand I "love" enough to pimp for free to my social network. And it's intimately connected with the Caps-Lock key ... ;-)

Zbigniew says : Myspace or Facebook? I put my bet on ...

Oh all right, Umair wins. Facebook are evil and stupid. Doh!

Don Dodge gets it.

What if? - OK, what if I am a friend of someone on MySpace. Cool, my name and picture appears on their friends list and anyone can see it. But what if this MySpace friend joins a PornSpace social network site and wants to import his friends list to that site? Now my name and picture shows up on his PornSpace page as a friend of his? Hey, wait a minute, I didn't agree to that. How do I control where my name and picture go once I become a friend of someone? Will there be guilt by association?

It's coming up to Slashdot's 10th anniversary. So here's an interview with Cmdr Taco

He sounds happy enough, but I can't help thinking Slashdot as a brand which was / is really under-exploited. Malder sounds positively over-conservative when he talks about not wanting to change a working formula. I stopped reading Slashdot regularly years ago. Although I still "respect" it, and if it managed to excite me, I'd go back there.

But it just keeps on doing the same thing. Compare /. with, say, O'Reilly . Slashdot had the technical reputation and audience that could have made it a serious competitor to O'Reilly in the whole publishing geek-books, organizing conferences and inventing new memes game. Why didn't it?

(Of course, Tim O'Reilly is very, very clever and uses his publishing company brilliantly. (The only people who seem to have managed to generate any similar excitement in this area are the Rubyistas in Pragmatic Programmers / 37 Signals.) )

And it's strangely defensive to say that Slashdot isn't trying to be Digg or Reddit etc. The point is, these guys used to be innovators (Everything 2?) why aren't they playing with new ideas? Why no Slashdot social network, or publishing company, or cool use of social software on Sourceforge? (They're buying their wiki from someone else.) Why no code-search like Koders? Why does ThinkGeek seem to be selling a lot of tat novelties when it could have been experimenting with user-contributed T-shirts like Threadless or promoting serious hobbyist electronics the way O'Reilly does with Make?

Someone with some attitude could still do something dramatic and exciting with Slashdot / Sourceforge. I'd like to see it.

Interesting ... neither Dave Winer nor Umair Haque share my opinion on Facebook advertising. Winer thinks it's a real challenge to Google, not a "sustaining innovation" that Google can copy. Haque thinks that advertising is the big thing for YASNS but thinks MySpace are well ahead because of their openness.

Hmmm ... well, they're both smart, I'm pausing to reconsider this a bit further, but I'm still more persuaded by my previous analysis than theirs.

Haque's probably right that if anyone can make a big success in the YASN-as-advertising-platform game, it's MySpace. (And I guess that means Google just handed them the game by creating OpenSocial)

But I still don't think that this is what YASNS are really (should really be?) about.

Hmmm ... lots of people want it, but I think Facebook's new advertising platform is likely to be a mis-step. A social-utility is NOT a media company. Nor is it an Ad-market.

Of course, Facebook still have to figure out how to get paid, but advertising is going to drive them into thinking that they are one of these preceding categories.

But no succesful web company has succeeded by thinking it's a media company. That's what destroyed AOL and has Yahoo in deep trouble.

Google showed that you can be phenomenally successful as an Ad-Market. But too many companies (particularly Microsoft it seems) took the wrong lesson. The lesson of Google is not that "Adverts are a great business to be in". The lesson is that "disrupting big inefficient value-chains by the clever marshalling of new technologies and new ideas, is a great business to be in".

(Aside : Umair is good on a parallel theme.)

Now, I still think that the opportunity for Facebook (or similar social platform) is to grab a large piece of the market for modelling organizational structure and "wiring people together" which is currently scattered through all kinds of large, inelegant, enterprisey dinosaurs that cost billions to buy and maintain. That's a disruption on a grand scale with commensurate rewards.

OTOH, if Facebook thinks it's going up against Google and Microsoft as an Ad-market, or MySpace and YouTube as a media company, then it's picked the wrong battle; one where it has little disruptive capacity. Any sustaining innovation it can offer in these fields (more relevant adverts through deeper demographic knowledge) can be quickly copied by Google (who are, anyway, pushing to commoditize the whole sector of social networks qua media markets)

Google playing catch-up with Facebook as widget hosting is not a threat to Facebook. Facebook trying to play catch-up with Google as an ad-network is possibly a self-inflicted defeat.

Ahem ... like I've been saying. There's nothing really wrong with the OpenSocial or openness or even common APIs for social applications. It's just that in practice it's pretty much impossible to square the conflicting privacy concerns, and requirements for user's control over their own data, with widgets except in a walled garden owned by one trusted platform owner.

You'd need an entirely new security model.

Currently ...

Security issues are the main problem. “At the moment security is up to the container,” Marks said. “It’s clearly something we need to work better on, authenticating between sites.”

OpenSocial could potentially have functions, such as add friend, and bridge between social networks, but security gaps get in the way. “It comes down to the permission model from Unix. It treats applications as agents of users. The model needs a bit of refinement–you don’t want to delegate read/write access permission to others.”

How much flexibility to build into the APIs is a concern. “If you delegate back to the container, a gadget can send mail. It’s different than a gadget asking to send mail itself. It’s a fine line to walk. If you protect it too much, you are making it unusable and people will walk around it,” Marks said.

OpenSocial could hook into an instant messaging buddy list, but it could allow invasive scenarios such as clicking on a friend and seeing the friends full buddy list.

ZDNet are taking apart "Android"

- threatens the PC

- a Java alliance?

- FUD?

Google really are deluging us with announcements and new platforms at the moment.

Android

A good reminder that standards made by committees tend to be doomed.

Why?

Well, first the committee can have conflicting agendas and be trying to push the standard in inconsistent directions (eg. both small and comprehensive)

Second, the committee is going to tend to be meeting and discussing away from the individual participant's urgent day-to-day requirements. A company will keep its real requirements private and try to solve them internally, rather than sharing them with (potential) rivals on the committee. So the committee will be working with inadequate information about the real application of the standard.

Third, some people will be attracted to committees because they are abstraction astronauts who like considering things at the very generic level but may not have a good grasp of detailed requirements.

Fourth, committee members may believe they should look to the future and can ignore short-term failings of their standard because "obviously" in a few years potential users won't need to be backwardly compatible with today's kludges or will have got the message that there is a better way to do things.

Fifth, some organizations will be on the committee not because they have a real requirement from the standard but because they feel the need to be seen there or to be part of the standard-setting or to try to find out what other people are up to, or even to sabotage the standard.

This is definitely worth a read and keeping an eye on.

GMail's support for IMAP (the mail protocol that supports synchronization of folder-structure between mail clients and servers) Ultimately may push other email clients towards supporting GMail's "tagging" rather thant "foldering" model of email management.

And, once you have a generic "tagged" message synchronizing and managing architecture, why stop at email? What about other docs? The proliferation of other messaging protocols and streams (eg. Twitter, RSS, Jaiku, River of News etc.)?

Because of the way IMAP supports the nesting of folders, supporting IMAP meant that Google had to figure out a way to hierarchically nest labels. So, along with the introduction of IMAP support, Google has introduced the slash (”/”) as a means of telling GMail that one label is a parent to another. For example, in GMail, the parent-label “Northeast” could have child-labels as in “Northeast/Massachusetts” and “Northeast/Connecticut”. On the client side, such a hierarchical taxonomy would be reflected in parent and child folders with no limit to nesting depth.

The introduction of hierarchical tagging begged two more globally directed questions for Google; First, will the hierarchical tagging be made available in other Google services (ie: Google Reader, Google Docs, etc.). Second, when will (note, not “if”, but “when”) Google’s customers be able to unify their taxonomy across those other applications so that users can see everything that’s tagged with the same label (eg: “Northeast/Massachusetts”) regardless of what service it comes from.

Hierarchical tags ... that's like square circles. Except in this case it might be a felicitacious synthesis.

Yahoo Kickstart ... FacedIn / LinkBook from Yahoo?

Trebor Scholz and Paul Hartzog: Toward a critique of the social web via 4h4r0n

So Facebook doesn't need to start worrying yet ...

OpenSocial People does not support queries.

If I read it right (after 5 mins, I admit) the API supports getting one friend by id or all friends. But no query that filters friends by link-type. Which, if you think about it, means that there really aren't any social applications that you can build which don't need to go beyond the scope of the API ... which means that all the interesting social applications are still gonna have to be platform specific or modified on a YASN by YASN basis.

Damn! Haven't even had a chance to look at OpenSocial yet ... IRL getting in the way.

Dare Obasanjo fun

Although I don't think this (has to be) true yet

Here we go ...

TechCrunch both right and wrong .... OpenSocial can't claim victory until the users turn up.

But wrong ... because they still think it's all about squirting one chunk of HTML / Flash / Javascript into another.

And if their OpenSocial apps start to gain more traction because they have more functionality, they may just start to put those Facebook projects on the back burner. (With OpenSocial, for instance, full applications can run on members’ profile pages, whereas on Facebook there are substantial restrictions on what developers can do on those profile pages).

OpenSocial apps aren't going to have "more functionality" in any meaningful way. Because social applications are not like desktop or browser applications. The only functionality which is important to social widgets is "social functionality" and that is dependent on the richness of access to, and the sophistication of manipulating, the social graph itself.

OpenSocial is extremely unlikely to be able to offer as rich a functionality in this sense as Facebook (or, indeed, any particular YASN) can, because it's got to be a least-common denominator between a number of very different philosophies of what a YASN is and is for.

Having said that, this is a very cute thought :

Joining OpenSocial could actually be a brilliant move for Facebook, especially if it can become the advertising network of choice for social apps. If Facebook can make it easy for Facebook developers to port their apps elsewhere and power those apps with Facebook ads, why wouldn’t it do so? Checkmate, indeed.