Sweet! LinkedIn just offered me a widget to embed my Behance portfolio.

I like this for two reasons :

1) I'm about to start taking my Behance / artistic portfolio more seriously. (More on that soon, over on Composing.) So it's handy for me personally.

2) LinkedIn and Behance are a good complement. LinkedIn still fascinates as an example of a successful YASN which isn't competing directly with Facebook. And Behance is another example of a purposive social utility which seeks to tie its portfolio hosting to more specific products and services for creative people.

I wonder if this signifies any deeper connection between the two companies, or whether it's just that the OpenSocial Behance widget became available for OpenSocial containers such as LinkedIn.

How advertising people see widgets.

Over on SmartDisorganized I've been tracking and playing with spreadsheets, particularly the online variety. I'm becoming increasingly impressed by the potential of online spreadsheets as containers for mashups and widgets. In particular EditGrid which comes with embeddable queries to Amazon and Ebay "out of the box" seems to be pointing in a very interesting direction.

Whereas the online equivalents of Word or PowerPoint are more or less dead-ends, as I've said before spreadsheets (in particular Excel) are grossly underexploited powertools, not to mention the repositories of most of the world's semi-structured data.

I've also said that Excel is so good that this is all Microsoft's market to lose if they screw up the transition to a new kind of spreadsheet : the spreadsheet as front-end / dashboard to all the enterprise's information streams. A flexible mashup builder which can be configured by a reasonably smart / well trained user or the IT department or an integrator.

We are a hairsbreadth away from the socialized spreadsheet fulfilling this destiny. But I'm waiting to see who's going to give it to us. Will Microsoft succeed in reinventing Excel? Will Google pump up the capabilities of their spreadsheet to compete? Will an outsider with a technically superior web-native sheet (like EditGrid) manage to sneak in-front of both?

How to add third party widgets to SocialText

Trouble with third-party widgets at Ning.

Microsoft Office in Silverlight?

Comcast buys Plaxo... bringing YASNS to television?

The whole tone of this smells very bad.

More about Sun selling JavaFX to broadcasters than to end-users.

Still a couple of things sound good.

JavaFX script? WTF?

Unlike many other Java scripting languages, JavaFX Script is statically typed and will have most of the same code structuring, reuse, and encapsulation features that make it possible to create and maintain very large programs in Java

A scripting language designed for client-side RIAs which has the static typing that you need for "large programs". If ever there was self-serving, self-deluding talk it's Third, enterprises want to reuse their existing Java skills and assets in moving to RIA.. Are enterprises going to write RIA client widgets?

Widgets will get written by small, clever independents. Or more likely, graphic designers who started with Photoshop and Dreamweaver and painfully taught themselves Flex the way they taught themselves PHP. They won't get written by the mass-armies of mediocre java-school programmers who live inside the enterprise.


Meanwhile Project Caroline is allegedly their answer to Google Application Engine.

Zoho's spreadsheet gets pivot-tables and macros.

Google launches Orkut Apps. in India.

This, I guess, is OpenSocial.

Update : previews.

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.

No Flash for iPhone.

Of course not.

Widgety Goodness

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

Google leading a consortium of YASNS for a common application API is, of course, a fantastic idea.

I can run my app. on Ning, Orkut (which, if you live in this part of the world is a big deal), SalesForce (!!!) and LinkedIn? I am there, baby! (Or at least, just as soon as my FB application is done, I'll be porting it there. ;-)

Will it work to overthrow Facebook? Who knows?

One question is, what resources of access to the users the API will offer developers? This is where the cultural component of the YASNS becomes tricky.

The "killer" part of the YASN-as-platform is what it lets you do with people. And that varies with the culture and privacy policies of the YASN.

The crucial test here will be not "do these networks all provide the same API call to place a chunk of HTML on the user's home-page?". That's pretty boring and not what YASNS-as-platforms are about. (Aside : in fact, a good high-level language ought to be able to abstract away from those differences. ;-)

No, the crucial test is "will their query language (equivalent to Facebook's FQL) allow the same kind of searches to be done on the social network?"

The paradox is, that if the answer to that question is "yes" then all these social networks have just turned themselves into commodity web-hosting. In fact, it's worse than that. They'll neither be able to compete with each other on applications - everyone will have the same - nor on what I call "link-management" (ie. relationship-management) - because that's exactly what a common query language will standardize. So the only thing they have left to differentiate themselves is ownership of your social-network data.

Listen up : if the "common API" includes a common query language and set of relation-types and query permissions, then this is a big incentive for the YASNS to more jealously try to defend their "ownership" of your social network and will disincentivate them from sharing it or allowing "cross-network queries".

However, I don't expect that that's what's going to happen. YASNS-as-platforms have got to realize that they are offering a platform for relationship-management and they'll try to compete by offering different link-management features. So on LinkedIn you'll be able to filter and segment and query your social-network by different criteria from those available on Orkut. And the kind of things you can do with relationships will be the reason you choose LinkedIn rather than Orkut (or vice-versa).

And, if I'm right, and YASNS do see that their strategy is competing on link-management services, then any common query language defined within the consortium is necessarily a lowest-common denominator. And developers will be focused on taking advantage of the more comprehensive and sophisticated relationship management facilities which are only available on a particular YASN. So in practice the number of really interesting widgets and applications which can run across the different YASNS is going to be trivial.

ps : shame I didn't see Tribe on the list of consortium members. That could at least keep them in the game if these applications run on it.

Apple / Google ... together ...

In fact, this is a very interesting and plausible idea in a lot of ways. Apple are now great at producing attractive, user-side appliances. Google make some great server-side hosted software (eg. Gmail) and are trying hard in other areas (eg. Google spread-sheet) And obviously their core search / advertising platform is very impressive.

But let's run this through my yasns-and-widgets / Hagel-unbundling framework as a filter. The question it raises : who is doing what in customer-relationships / product innovation / infrastructure?

At first glance it looks like Apple are the customer-facers, while Google do the back-end infrastructure. In which case, who's doing product innovation?

And that surely isn't quite right - are Apple really customer relations people? In some ways, their creative / design-oriented approach is more product innovation. While some of their treatment of customers betrays a less than customer-focussed attitude.

But it sure isn't Google who are doing the CRM ... unless we see it in their planned revamp of Orkut + Gadgets. And, in fact, it looks like Google are also doing product innovation in software.

Or is the whole Hegel model wrong? And Apple and Google can happily work out a partnership while sliding easily backwards and forwards from one role to another?

Update : Cringely comments and suggests personalities are going to play a much bigger role; Jobs wants it all.

Very Important statement (actually essay / braindump) on my thoughts on widgets and YASNS over on my personal blog.

Here's a left-field thought. I wonder if Enso has the capability to wrap the GUI, the browser (and therefore web-based services), the way Windows originally wrapped DOS?

It is, after all, closer to the user than all these things.

Kind of an old-skool platform strategy ... but may yet work. Especially if you can write "widgets" for it (or at least Python scripts)

Further clarification : here's a comment I tried to leave on Joshua's post (mentioned below)

Strange that you say that UI standardization isn't an issue on the web. What about the Jakob Nielsen "users spend more time on other people's sites than yours" school of usability design?

Actually, the world of Facebook apps. and widgets is the first time I've started to see that an old-style platform strategy may be possible. Here the basis is something which which is a hybrid of technology, namespace and social convention. Of which Facebook's "news-feed" is the archetypal example. Facebook's news-feed is not merely technological : which is why other generic data-sharing feeds like RSS or Twitter aren't equivalent. It's also a social convention within a particular namespace and community: I'm willing to look at data that an application writes on my friend's feed, even though I haven't installed the application or explicitly subscribed to it. This is different from the open web - I wouldn't welcome an ordinary web-application that my friend used, randomly spamming my email. (Similarly, if too many bots started writing to Twitter, that would kill that particular community pretty damned quickly, it's not part of its culture either.)

Facebook's platform power ultimately rests on their ownership of this complex but delicate socio-technical hybrid. If they can nurture and grow it, such as giving both users and applications, more and subtler ways to manage it, more nuanced types of relationships between people, with more fine grained privacy control and applications that access these both through the APIs and patterns of software behaviour, then I think they have something that's very hard to escape from or reproduce elsewhere.

This is no longer about just data, or arguments about open access to it. It's data + social data + social conventions.

Me commenting on Umair's criticism of Facebook.

This is an important step in my thinking about widgets, SaaS and YASNs-as-platforms that I'm trying to write something more comprehensive and coherent about. Meanwhile, there's a lot of the ideas in that comment.