PC Pro: News: Google to launch eBay competitor?

PC Pro: News: Google to launch eBay competitor?

The first effect of all this, of course, is to make structured microcontent and microformats much more widely known and talked about. Then it's gonna associate them with making money.

Might this be the step too far in the web 2.0 bubble? Will everyone think that structured metadata will create a bigger market than eBay? Or that if they only add a couple of tags to their classified it will sell faster and for more money?

OTOH, what's to stop eBay adding some XML templates and competing head on?

Or maybe if Google really go for this, eBay gets into bed with another search-engine - Yahoo or Microsoft - to build a searchable XMLified market?

All your 'base' are belong to Google | News.blog | CNET News.com

All your 'base' are belong to Google | News.blog | CNET News.com

Plenty of versions of this story going round. Too tired tonight, will post thoughts tomorrow.

OPML, incremental development, Winer's gardening etc.

Re : OPML, Scribe says :

I think there's a difference between something that's been generically designed, and something that gets hacked into new situations.

Yep, and the evidence from everywhere is that the second is better than the first. That's what "worse is better" means. It's the basic message from "How Buildings Learn" (old buildings are more freeing) and the main insight of xtreme and agile programming (do one user story at a time) It's why a complete Longhorn rewrite was guaranteed to be late (and probably not much good) while Unix derivitives will roll all over it.

The reason is clear. If you start with something that works for one application, and then hack it for a second, you're only having to solve one problem at a time. If you try to produce something generic, up front, you're trying to imagine and solve all the problems at once.

Of course, as programmers we all know that indescriminate hacking can go wrong. But that's in the situations where you don't balance the hacking with the requisite golden rule : you have to keep refactoring to keep your system flexible and in good shape.

XP doesn't advocate incremental, test-driven development, except with a great deal of refactoring to eliminate redundancy. What Ward Cunningham calls "working the code". Stewart Brand, in HBL, calls this "the romance of maintainence".

Now, it might seem strange to apply this to a format like OPML which is, by definition, pretty much fixed and not going to be continuously maintained and improved.

But in fact, OPML isn't a fire-and-forget format. It's the ecosystem as a whole which is the platform. You should interpret Dave Winer's work gardening and tending the whole OPML ecosystem (much as he's done with RSS, podcasting etc.) as the equivalent of continuous maintenence and integration.

Hacking includes Winer's careful provision of the plumbing for the ecosystem : hosting for blogs, shared outlines, ping-servers etc; it includes the search for new applications and new connections that can be made with other developers and users. Even the sometimes petulant complaints about rivals "confusing the user" or "sabotaging" the standard are, in fact, a kind of maintainence; weeding out the rivals.

That last is not necessarily a good thing, but I'm starting to suspect it is significant for the overall health of the platform. Les Orchard won't make a public spectacle of himself to defend XOXO. Winer will to defend OPML. He's continuously needling, exploring, selling and otherwise refining its "use" pattern on the internet.

In this sense, Winer implicitly understands Shirky's rule that you can't separate social from technical. The platform is the combination of the two. (In fact, all platforms are, which is what makes them so fascinating.)

I would argue, that competition threatening the niche position of OPML is probably considerably larger (and quicker to innovate alternatives) than the world of Operating Systems - especially when viral factors ("everyone else has it") are taken into account.

I don't know if the competitive pressure on OPML is actually all that great. No-one except Dave is really promoting a vision of shared outlining. There are people writing better outlining clients, who'll support OPML anyway. And people who come up with rival formats for the aesthetic reason of "doing it properly" but aren't passionate about shared outlining as a platform.

Unless these two factions have some reason to make common cause and deliberately try to destablize the OPML ecosystem I don't see it. The biggest danger to OPML is that people just won't really get what it's all about and so it languishes in obscurity.

Actually, I can see a potentially huge rival for the widespread adoption of shared outlining : wiki. If I have to bet between shared outlining / OPML, and some kind of wiki (perhaps distributed between lots of clients with transclusion etc.) I'm probably going to bet on the wiki. (But perhaps I'm biased :-)

Joel on Software - Web 2.0 - what is it?

Joel on Software - Web 2.0 - what is it?

Don't know why I'm wasting my time ranting over there. But still, here's a copy of my post defending "web 2.0"

My God! Is this some kind of international whingers convention?

Lighten up! "Web 2.0" is a blatantly tongue-in-cheek term.

As for the thing itself, who cares what it's called? Or how "new" it is? Or that it's basically a marketing term?

The important point is somebody is trying to make fashionable a bunch of good ideas which smart people have been advocating for years, but the "common sense" of the industry kept denying.

Anyone who hasn't noticed that blogs have become popular and important; or that wikis are kind of useful, and surprisingly better than you might have guessed first time you heard the idea; or that RSS is a very cheap and simple way of doing something that 10 years ago people were trying to sell you million dollar workflow systems for; or that sites built to let customers talk to each other are more interesting than sites built as corporate brochures; basically hasn't being paying attention.

Does anyone remember what it was actually like in web 1.0? When the pointy-haired bosses thought the web was another channel to be colonized by big media; and that content was to be horded away in walled gardens and doled out to greatful, passive consumers? Or that it was OK to erect technical barriers to prevent customers from leaving a service? Remember when technical conversations were trade-secrets that mustn't be allowed out of your company? And when what Joel does here would be considered commercial suicide? Remember when sites were wannabe TV adverts rather than something to help the user?

What we can hope web 2.0 means is that finally people are going to understand what Joel and Cluetrain and Philip Greenspun and Dave Winer and Jakob Nielsen and all the other people who *did* understand the web, were trying to say all those years ago.

Six Apart - Mena's Corner: The Ups & Downs of a Successful Service

Six Apart - Mena's Corner: The Ups & Downs of a Successful Service

I'm only linking this because it reminds me that scaling issues can have non-linear effects. Here's a succesful service, who's use is increasing, if not linearly, at least following some, presumably smooth curve. But then a particular hard limit is reached : the data-centre capacity, which requires a sudden, step-change at the server end, and there are an accumulated stack of problems.

Many growing services, particularly web 2.0 companies with central servers, are going to be prone to this kind of thing. Such disruptions can potentially kill an incumbant and offer an opening for a rival.

Ben Hammersley: The Hegelian dialectic of syndication formats

Ben Hammersley doesn't have much time for The Hegelian dialectic of syndication formats

I do. Or rather, let's get one thing straight. Here on PW we like the fite. It's not called "wars" for nothing. This ain't just a generic "cool new stuff in the blogosphere" blog. It's all about competition, rivalry, network externalities, exclusion and zero-sum games ... The more vicious, bitter and personal, the better. ;-)

There can be millions of standards in the world, but attention is a scarce resource, and we can't pay attention to, and develop for, all platforms at the same time. So some will win, and some will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Also, I'm not ashamed of being partisan. Although I reserve the right to swtich sides whenever I like.

Case in point. It's kind of blatantly obvious to me that RSS 2.0 has currently won the syndication war. Ordinary syndication feeds between blogs and news sites and aggregators, are going to be RS 2.0 (although not for this blog, of course, because it's on Blogspot, which is run by Google, who've taken their own partisan position. This is fun in itself.)

OTOH, as as is made clear Atom does a lot more than simple syndication. It's possible that one of these other uses might take off in a big way, and that will have some effect. For example, if developers are having to include the standard Atom library in their code for other reasons, then it might be easier for them to produce an Atom feed than think about RSS.

So if Atom wins, it will because Atom syndication will have been aggressively bundled with other Atom functionality.

One thing that's interesting. This insistence that RSS 2.0 is fixed. It guarantees stability, but may, in the long term hurt it. Obviously we need fixed layers to build on (think internet protocol or http) But these are often not backed up by a rhetoric of "fixedness". If anything, the RFC convention generally caries an assumption that stuff can be revised eventually.

How important is a strong explicit rhetoric of fixedness in attracting or repelling developers?

Finally, I'm a critical rationalist, so obviously I think dialectics is bunk. But if we take it seriously for a moment, Hammersley is applying it wrong. The triad has to occur in time, and RSS 1.0 precedes RSS 2.0. The real triad would be something like RSS 0.9X (thesis - easy but no namespaces), RSS 1.0 (antithesis - generic, formally correct, but complex), RSS 2.0 (synthesis - a bit more extensibility with namespaces, not much more complex). Atom is the antithesis to RSS 2.0 as the thesis of a new triad. We wait to see what the synthesis will be.

Danny on the SynWeb

Danny gave a thoughtful response to the SynWeb stuff

I started a reply, but it got long and isn't finished yet. Coming soon ...

Joel on eBay / Skype and architecture astronauts

Joel on Software - Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Joel says EBay lost the ability to code new stuff (unlike Google et al), so had to buy their way into new competencies.

He also rants against Web 2.0

I'm happy to be sceptical over the next bubble (though please can I be on it this time?) but I wouldn't dismiss web 2.0 too quickly.

Clearly, there's nothing really new about web 2.0 stuff. It's just a rebranding of what smart people have been saying right all along : that the killer app. of the web is letting people communicate and work together, enabling them to act rather than treating them as a passive consumer demographic.

There's a certain amount of fuzziness, and attempt to squash fashionable but not terribly relevant things (AJAX) into the story. But at least they are talking about what were the good ideas rather than the bad ones.

It is, of course, one of OReilly's manufactured memes like "open source" and "P2P" - the latter of which inspired Joel's original anti-architecture astronaut rant. However, here I don't see any "architecture" claims. There are "patterns", yes, but not the same kind of oversimplified abstraction as P2P.

Is "scraping" the new spam?

Of course, we approve of deep-linking, or remixing and repurposing other people's data and content. That's the remix culture of web 2.0. :-)

But there's a real cost when scrapers become a burden on the sites providing the data.

Intuitively it seems to me that this active consumption of Craiglist's resources by Oodle makes this a different case from the current Google vs. the publishers fracass.

Google has a negative externality on publishers. By providing the same information that's in the books it reduces their sales. However, it's doing this without placing any active burden on the publishers.

The conflict between Google and the publishers is between business models. Whereas publishers still have a business model which involves restricting information (to those who've bought the book), Google's is based on the refusal of intellectual property rights to sell more service.

In the Oodle vs. Craiglist case, Craiglist doesn't seem to be "ostensibly" complaining about lost sales but about the actual use of it's computer time and energy (a genuinely scarce resource). Here one business model is simply parasitic on the ongoing work of another agent.

Will be interesting to watch how people feel about each of these cases. Which business models will get valorized? Which rejected?


Update : follow on article

Alternatives to the Semantic Web?

Danny Ayers asks about Alternatives to the Semantic Web?

My rant got pretty long, so I've put it here. (This is also notice, that Platform Wars is now going to be my main place for talking about the Semantic Web, as it mainly interests me as a battle-ground between some rival theories.)

[quote]One of the reasons the Semantic Web vision appeals to me is I lack the imagination to think of alternatives[/quote]

Sure you can. Take the defining feature of the semantic web (the URI) and negate it. :-)

[quote]and it also seems to make sense to use URIs as the key identifiers. Er… but that’s the Semantic Web.[/quote]

Agreed (with second part). And that's the crux of the matter.

I'll suggest the alternative to the SemWeb is the SynWeb, a web which doesn't need "key identifiers". A world with lots of online data, marked up with syntactic cues which make it easy to parse (eg. good old fashioned XML, or Markdown or YAML); more powerful tools and libraries for parsing and querying data with these formats; plus lots of programs which scoop up the data and combine them in interesting ways.

The difference is that the knowledge needed to give semantics to the data resides in the programs which do the combining, rather than in a schema which has been prepared earlier.

Why is this "better" (easier, more plausible)?

Because it's much easier to decide what something like an "author name" means at the point where you're producing and consuming it - ie. in the context of an application which actually wants that information - than it is to correctly determine what it means in advance, in general, for all possible producers and consumers[1].

This is the way meaning works everywhere else - eg. in natural language, the meaning of a text depends on the interpretations made by the author and the reader, in the pragmatic context of what they're communicating about. It's not formally fixed as the sum-total of the meanings of all the words.

Could the SynWeb bring all the benefits of the semantic web?

Most of them. In the sense that any particular application you can think of that requires that someone write a specific program (P1) to put data from A together with data from B, can be done in the SynWeb. In that case, the knowledge is going to reside *within* the program P1.[2]

The one thing that the semweb promises that the non-semweb can't is the "miracle" applications : where A and B produce data without any knowledge of, or deliberate co-ordination with, each other, and a user of program P2, which is a generic semweb joiner without any special knowledge of A or B, finds that the two forms of data are such an exact fit that they can usefully be combined.

I guess the degree to which you believe in the semweb promise is the degree to which you think that such miracle situations will occur in real life. Personally, I think that the hard part is understanding the data from A and B sufficiently well to see if and when they can be combined at all.

Anyone who can do that can probably write a P1, containing that insight. Manipulating the relevant XML, especially with today's XML libraries, isn't so hard. And I think the SynWeb will see yet more powerful syntax processing and querying tools.[3]

The semweb scenario presupposes users who can't write such a quick custom script to combine A and B, but can understand the data (and the schemas) well enough to notice and formulate (in some sort of query language) sensible joins.

I may be wrong, and I'm always open to counter-evidence, but I still can't think of an example where this has actually taken place (ie. two datasets have been usefully joined by a program which didn't explicitly know about these two data-sets.) Any suggestions?[4]

Notes

[1] Sure you can use something like RDF as a representation format of data for a specific application for one set of users. But in this case the URI isn't actually buying you anything over any other sort of locally produced UID. So the differentiating feature of the semweb isn't actually being used.

[2]

In the comments : [quote]And writing scrapers is reasonably easy to do. I think this has got a lot of potential. There’s more work to be done on the software, but to me it is the best attempt at doing useful RDF that I have seen so far.[/quote]

Of course it's the best attempt at doing anything useful.

But scrapers are the living embodyment of the SynWeb.

Scrapers are the avatars of the theory that programs, not URIs, are what give meaning to data. They're stocks of rival knowledge about how to interpret it.

They're what the SemWeb wants to dispense with. Or rather, would be dispensing with if things were going its way. Instead, the proliferation of scrapers is a strong hint that it's not working out.

[3] RDBMS analogies with the semweb are wrong. The RDBMS is basically a powerful SynWeb tool. Meaning is relative to the applications. The design of a database is typically internal to a project or organization, and meaning derives from this context. To the extent SPARQL is just a good graph-shaped database it might also be a good SynWeb tool.

[4] I think some people have already mentioned the capability of adding data from other ontologies as a passanger on RSS 1.0 feeds, but unless the feed-consumer is doing something interesting with this data, without knowing about it, it still isn't doing anything that a P1-style program in the SynWeb couldn't do.

Multi-applications ...

Scribe asks:

If it has emerged and evolved out of a varying set of applications, what does this imply about its suitability for future applications? Especially if all those applications are from 1 person's needs. Will this ad-hoc approach prevent it from being adapted, as well as adopted?

Hmmm. What would you say about a species which seemed to survive in a varying set of environments. What does this imply about its suitability for future environments? :-)

Dominant Design

OK Dominate Design should actually be "Dominant" design.

Search Engines as platforms

Could a search engine be a pluggable platform? With an architecture of participation?

Dave Winer and Ryan Tate think so.

Is this what RollYo is hinting at?

the XML format with no friends

OTOH :

isolani - Semantic Web: OPML - the XML format with no friends

;-)

Cringely on Apple

Cringely has been predicting Apple's move into video for ages.

Here's his take on the video iPod story.

But it isn't enough to shake the very foundations of network TV and bring Uncle Miltie back to life. And that's the point. Five TV shows are an EXPERIMENT, not a business. The experiment going on here is all on behalf of the major movie studios, the very outfits that haven't yet signed on to distribute their movies through iTunes. The studios want to see how the market accepts these TV series distributed in this format, whether the ability to download the shows has a material impact on their broadcast viewership (ratings), and most especially whether we see a surge of pirated copies of "Lost" - copies that can be traced back to iTunes distribution.

Scribe is sceptical

Scribe doesn't buy the OPML cheerleading yet.

A little optimistic, I feel.

I don't know if 2006 will be the "year" of OPML. But I'm certainly betting on OPML to trounce OML, XOXO etc. And to drive a great many new applications.

A couple of reasons :

First. I downloaded and looked at Taskable (http://www.taskable.com/). I haven't found a use for it myself, but it is kind of intriguing.

Like RSS it "bends" internet space in a new way. When I started to see what was going on with blogs and syndication I called it the "flow internet" : a sort of alternative web, based on fixed people and mobile information. (Rather than fixed information and mobile "surfers")

It just kind of felt different.

This Taskable thing is the same. The information feels like it has a new "shape".

And it's a different shape from syndication. That's why I don't think RSS will simply expand to include the same applications.

Of course, the tree vs. list thing is part of it. But it's also which bits are dynamic and which bits fixed. Unlike an RSS feed, the data is not, itself, sequenced in time. It's permanent. But it can change over time, as the host updates it.

Secondly, part of Winer's genius is that he can recognise useful (if mundane) applications for his stuff; unlike his opponents who normally start with an aesthetic point to make : "want to do outlines in XML? here's how to do it properly".

Dave's OPML strategy, in contrast, is a sequence of little applications. First OPML as native format for Radio Userland. Then as a format for keeping your blogroll. And your subscription feeds. (If you were using Radio) Then as a directory of favourite music. Then, later, as a directory of podcasts.

Then, as the native format for OPML-the-editor. And in the process, becoming part of the organizing principle behind Scripting News.

In each case, people have been working with the format, getting used to it. I don't see XOXO woven into people's applications the same way.

The recent TechCrunch story was the real bombshell. Suddenly Dave's putting a subscribed-to outline, publicly on his site for everyone to see. It inspires a frenzy of activity as blog software and aggregator authors rush to support this.

Until then, OPML was largely private. Something you used for your notes, or to produce HTML. Now it's become a public language for communicating and people are going to be looking for new applications.

Dominate Design

Ben Hyde on Dominate Design

Dominate design is a term of art among the folks who think about innovation. Dominate designs emerge in design spaces as innovators progressively “mine-out” the options in the design space. Once the dominate designs emerge it becomes possible for complementary activities to gather around them - i.e. they create new design spaces. I like the term because it avoids calling these the best designs. The emergence of dominate designs is extremely contextual and path dependent. Owning the dominate design, being the early into that part of the design space, and encouraging the emergance of the compilmentary stuff is all part and parcel of the gold rush in and around one of these design spaces. Careful though. It is rare tha a single dominate design emerges from a design space; more typically a bloom of designs emerges. How skewed the user’s adoption of these designs turns out varies. There are, for example, a handful of dominate designs for operating systems. Typical power-law stuff.

Hadn't come across this term before. But it might be useful.

John Robb's Weblog: Platform wars in the Auto Industry

John Robb sees a platform war between hybrid and non-hybrid engines in the car industry

Here's where it gets interesting. They are starting to think in terms of platforms and ecosystems (although they are very wrong in thinking that this is as simple as a betamax and VHS format war, it has broader implications since it is a platform war)

Based on the quote : Larry Burns, GM vice president of research and development, says the biggest lesson from that war [VHS vs. Betamax] was that sitting on the sidelines and relinquishing control would be risky.

Alex Barnett blog : 7 reasons 2006 will be a big year for OPML

Alex Barnett blog : 7 reasons 2006 will be a big year for OPML

Welcome to the Ning developer community!

Seems like my beta came through today ...