Ross Mayfield's Weblog: The Ping War

Ross Mayfield :

... 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.

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.

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 ...

Fractals of Change: Bubble 2.0 – It’s The APIs

Fractals of Change: Bubble 2.0 – It’s The APIs

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 ...

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.

The Flickrization of Yahoo

Business 2.0 - The Flickrization of Yahoo

Google Base today is a glimpse of Google 2.0

Google Base evolves the core Google Search into a Google Search and Directory service

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.

Koders Search Plugin

Koders release a search plugin for Eclipse and Visual Studio.

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.

Danny Ayers : Semantic Web-enabling Google Base

Danny Ayers : Semantic Web-enabling Google Base

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.

Danny Ayer's sweet spot

Danny Ayers :

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

Read/Write Web: Conversation: Sergey Brin of Google

I missed this. Interesting : Read/Write Web: Conversation: Sergey Brin of Google

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 :

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.

Google is Building Yahoo 2.0 (by Jeremy Zawodny)

I think this is smart :

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.