October 05, 2007
October 03, 2007
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)
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)
October 02, 2007
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.
Joshua Allen responds to Marc Andreesen's types of platform.
He says the new platforms are about "data". That's rather like Tim OReilly's "Data Inside" aspect of his web 2.0 definition.
But a) it's not the whole story. And b) it leads to demands for "opening" the platform by making the data migratable.
It's not the whole story because, in addition to data the's user, her social connections and social conventions are the platform. When you think about it, this is true even with Windows, which is why UI consistency is such an important part of a platform.
On social platforms, the lock-in comes not from just having the data walled up in your silo. It also comes from your network being the place where people tend to do X. And if, on somebody else's platform, people don't tend to do X, then they won't shift the X-related applications over.
Because of his "open-data" perspective, Allen, I think, under-estimates the importance of the hosting issue, although he understands it perfectly well.
This is the same debate that's had around Software-as-a-service. It's that "additional intelligence" which is the killer thing that social platforms can offer : doing stuff with social data that cuts across users and across applications. That's why Amazon's database is so much more valuable than everyone hosting their own "I bought and like this book". It can figure out the most popular or "readers who bought X also bought Y".
Yes, theoretically, "scutter" applications can run around a widely distributed microformats, but my bet is that the difference in efficiency and difference in privacy control is actually so great, quantitatively, that it can lead to qualitative differences of application.
He says the new platforms are about "data". That's rather like Tim OReilly's "Data Inside" aspect of his web 2.0 definition.
But a) it's not the whole story. And b) it leads to demands for "opening" the platform by making the data migratable.
It's not the whole story because, in addition to data the's user, her social connections and social conventions are the platform. When you think about it, this is true even with Windows, which is why UI consistency is such an important part of a platform.
On social platforms, the lock-in comes not from just having the data walled up in your silo. It also comes from your network being the place where people tend to do X. And if, on somebody else's platform, people don't tend to do X, then they won't shift the X-related applications over.
Because of his "open-data" perspective, Allen, I think, under-estimates the importance of the hosting issue, although he understands it perfectly well.
It's obvious what benefit a Ning or Salesforce.com would get from keeping your data and code on their servers; it's less obvious what the benefit to you is. There are only two real reasons such an arrangement would be a benefit for you :
If your data, aggregated with data from lots of other customers of the provider, can provide some additional intelligence.
If the provider gets dramatic economies of scale beyond what you could get on your own. In the case of a Ning or a Salesforce.com, this one is dubious. There are only a handful of companies who buy electricity and bandwidth in enough volume to offer hosting cheaper than Amazon. Companies like Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft.
This is the same debate that's had around Software-as-a-service. It's that "additional intelligence" which is the killer thing that social platforms can offer : doing stuff with social data that cuts across users and across applications. That's why Amazon's database is so much more valuable than everyone hosting their own "I bought and like this book". It can figure out the most popular or "readers who bought X also bought Y".
Yes, theoretically, "scutter" applications can run around a widely distributed microformats, but my bet is that the difference in efficiency and difference in privacy control is actually so great, quantitatively, that it can lead to qualitative differences of application.
October 01, 2007
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.
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.
September 25, 2007
September 18, 2007
Marc Andreesen has a great blog-post that starts with an attempt at defining what a platform is.
He breaks it down into 3 levels :
Level 1 platforms provide an API for external applications to call their services.
Level 2 platforms (eg. Facebook) help the external application present themselves by incorporating the applications within their UI. I'd say that we're really talking about platforms which provide a "callback" to the application.
Level 3 platforms host and execute the application themselves. With the benefit that the platform can broker richer integration between the applications. This is obviously what Salesforce's Force does. And, of course, Ning - the best part of this email is that it signal that Andreeson is trying to promote the "development environment" idea of Ning which was the exciting idea that kind of got lost when they rebranded it as "just another social network". (Asde : In fact, does Ning have what it takes to become a budget Force / AppExchange rival?)
He goes on to make a very good point :
He breaks it down into 3 levels :
Level 1 platforms provide an API for external applications to call their services.
Level 2 platforms (eg. Facebook) help the external application present themselves by incorporating the applications within their UI. I'd say that we're really talking about platforms which provide a "callback" to the application.
Level 3 platforms host and execute the application themselves. With the benefit that the platform can broker richer integration between the applications. This is obviously what Salesforce's Force does. And, of course, Ning - the best part of this email is that it signal that Andreeson is trying to promote the "development environment" idea of Ning which was the exciting idea that kind of got lost when they rebranded it as "just another social network". (Asde : In fact, does Ning have what it takes to become a budget Force / AppExchange rival?)
He goes on to make a very good point :
Second, beware overfocusing on the apps of the past when thinking about the platforms of the future.
Lots of people got confused by the idea of apps running in the browser because when they thought of apps, they thought of the apps they used already on their PCs -- Word, Excel, Powerpoint -- and not the apps that would get built on the web -- eBay, Amazon, Salesforce.com. Now, it turns out in the fullness of time that word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation apps are also moving into the web -- as Google is demonstrating. But way before that happened, the web led people to create lots of new kinds of applications that were not possible on the PC.
A new platform typically enables a new set of applications that were not previously possible. Why else would there be a need for a new platform?
September 17, 2007
September 15, 2007
September 14, 2007
Salesforce's new open / social / online application platform..
This is massive. As the culmination and synthesis of several of the most important trends going on at the moment. This is going to blow up the enterprise software market the way the microcomputer blew up the mainframe market.
- any company can "rent" - as a service - an enterprise-class database-backed infrastructure from Salesforce.
- any programmer, or small company, can write applications for it.
- the applications will talk to each other via Salesforce's protocols.
- developers don't have to *sell* their application through the usual "sell big expensive software for humungous amounts of money, with lots of free lunches, kick-backs, professional sales-teams and special companies owned by the son of the procurador" channels; instead you just make your app available for companies to rent at ... erm "a flat $25/month/user".
(In fact, if Salesforce go the viral method - currently raging in Facebook - where you can encourage your friends (or in the case of business, your suppliers and customers) to install the application, then your app. can spread like wildfire *without* having to market it at all.)
Effectively, large suites break up into a swarm of widgets and mini-apps sitting on top of open, and standard, protocols and storage.
This is massive. As the culmination and synthesis of several of the most important trends going on at the moment. This is going to blow up the enterprise software market the way the microcomputer blew up the mainframe market.
- any company can "rent" - as a service - an enterprise-class database-backed infrastructure from Salesforce.
- any programmer, or small company, can write applications for it.
- the applications will talk to each other via Salesforce's protocols.
- developers don't have to *sell* their application through the usual "sell big expensive software for humungous amounts of money, with lots of free lunches, kick-backs, professional sales-teams and special companies owned by the son of the procurador" channels; instead you just make your app available for companies to rent at ... erm "a flat $25/month/user".
(In fact, if Salesforce go the viral method - currently raging in Facebook - where you can encourage your friends (or in the case of business, your suppliers and customers) to install the application, then your app. can spread like wildfire *without* having to market it at all.)
Effectively, large suites break up into a swarm of widgets and mini-apps sitting on top of open, and standard, protocols and storage.
September 09, 2007
September 06, 2007
Multitouch will drive Apple's products? whereas Microsoft focus on voice? Except Microsoft have surface?
September 05, 2007
August 28, 2007
August 17, 2007
Hmmm. I'm pretty slow discovering Inside Facebook which is a mine of information about the fast evolving Facebook platform for both developers and about software companies who make Facebook apps.
August 04, 2007
Fascinating discussion by James Hong about Reinventing HotOrNot (part1, part2, part3)
"PEOPLE are the killer app" is probably attained the status of a truism in the social software world. But it's still worth keeping in mind as a "guiding star".
As an intriguing aside. HotOrNot is now smothered with adverts for illicit dating sites. Hadn't really looked at or thought about this before (honest!) but when you start to consider it, internet dating really is bringing a hell of a lot more liquidity and plasticity to what you might call the "sex market".
And in the process, the incumbent institutions (eg. marriage) are getting pulverised. In the UK, the Tories are currently banging the drum for marriage. But look how the internet is a) revealing the degree of dissatisfaction within it, and b) helping people route-around the restrictions it places on their erotic lives.
Is online dating creating a more efficient sex market? And if so, does that mean that more people are now getting more sex? Is that turning up in any other social statistics or having further knock-on societal effects? Are we happier? More at risk from STDs? More dissatisfied?
"PEOPLE are the killer app" is probably attained the status of a truism in the social software world. But it's still worth keeping in mind as a "guiding star".
As an intriguing aside. HotOrNot is now smothered with adverts for illicit dating sites. Hadn't really looked at or thought about this before (honest!) but when you start to consider it, internet dating really is bringing a hell of a lot more liquidity and plasticity to what you might call the "sex market".
And in the process, the incumbent institutions (eg. marriage) are getting pulverised. In the UK, the Tories are currently banging the drum for marriage. But look how the internet is a) revealing the degree of dissatisfaction within it, and b) helping people route-around the restrictions it places on their erotic lives.
Is online dating creating a more efficient sex market? And if so, does that mean that more people are now getting more sex? Is that turning up in any other social statistics or having further knock-on societal effects? Are we happier? More at risk from STDs? More dissatisfied?
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