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Posted by richz at 10:14 AM

Recruiting For A Richer Web

Last week I talked about how the wide array of tools to build richer web experiences are leaving designers and web production people behind. In this post, I’ll touch on some of the things the companies behind these new technologies – Adobe, Microsoft, and others – can do to lower the barrier to entry for the alienated masses (how’s that for melodrama?).

One thing we can’t deny about the richer web, whether we’re talking about Ajax or Flash/Flex or Silverlight: it’s more complicated than the old Web. We’re shifting from a page-based paradigm to one where user “events” can cause all sorts of interesting things to occur. “When a user clicks here, pull this XML from the server, parse it and display it in this widget over there.” However way you look at it, there’s a lot more going on than “go from this page to that page.”


While developers are attacking this head-on, designers are left in a bit of a lurch. How can designers sketch out, think through and ultimately create these interactions? More importantly, how can we help them leverage the skills and knowledge they have today and build upon them, rather than purge them and start all over again. Here are some things I think can help the cause:



Looking at these trends, I can’t help but wonder two things: is Ajax the answer? (I’m not convinced it is) and, what happened to the standards bodies? Is this stuff moving too quickly to really step back and consider drafting a standard that everybody can agree to? The HTML story is telling. HTML happened and it got the head start it needed. That didn’t happen here.


At Arc90, we’re really enjoying Flex as a development platform. Adobe has put a lot of thought into bringing richer experiences to the web, and to developers. I’ve spoken to some people on the Flex team and it’s clear they’re thinking about these challenges.


And then you’ve got Microsoft and Silverlight. When it was announced two weeks ago, you’d think the web was about to immediately change forever. Not so fast. Before anything drastic happens, you need an army to make it happen. Hopefully both companies (and others) will acknowledge and build upon the skills and experience that is out there today.

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Posted by richz at 10:00 AM

The Richer Web & The Death Of Design

One of the things we take for granted about the web development explosion of the past ten years is the opening up of software-building to a far broader population than your classically-trained computer engineers. Graphic designers, information designers, your generally curious tech-savvy computer hacker. They all got to play in this new playground. It didn't require JBuilder or Visual Studio. All it required was notepad, maybe some graphic editing tools, and you were on your way. It was this strange, new place where content and presentation very much drove the building process - often times dominating it.

With very little knowledge or programming experience, you could stare at (X)HTML and just get it. It made sense (more or less). When you did need to hack a bit of interactivity, you could usually find someone's javascript on the web and tweak it or just use it wholesale. About five years ago, a new movement materialized around semantic markup and heavier reliance on CSS. The result has been cleaner, more efficiently produced front-ends where presentation style is neatly separated from content. CSS Zen Garden is a great example of this.

I've often written on this blog about the limitations of the Web to deliver richer, more interactive experiences. I've asserted that, eventually, there would be a move away from this clumsy, page-based model. Almost two years ago, Ajax caught on and richer, more interactive experiences began debuting in web browsers. At Arc90, we leverage Ajax techniques to enhance key portions of the user experience. More recently, we've invested in Adobe's Flash and Flex technologies to deliver richer applications over the wire.

As this migration away from the static web continues and continues to get validated, other players are throwing their hats into the ring. Microsoft has introduced Silverlight (effectively an Adobe Flash competitor) and just yesterday, Sun has taking another crack at it with JavaFX (their earlier attempts to penetrate the rich client space were unequivocal failures).

Each of these platforms have their pluses and minuses. And as we assess this or that platform we're left with an oddly empty feeling: what is all this stuff?

Before all this we had one markup language (HTML), one styling mechanism (CSS) and one scripting language (Javascript). You had a browsers out there that adhered to these agreed-upon standards. Yeh, we had to test across some browsers - but that's looking like a walk in the park compared to where we're headed...

Now, we've got a lot more to contend with. XAML. MXML. Javascript. Actionscript. C#. JavaFX (whatever that is). Then you've got your whole gadget/widget/pageflake (yes, pageflake) API's out there. It's getting messy folks.

We knew we were going to have to pay a price for all that richness, but I fear the entire industry is going to pay a price. Here's where my fears lie:

In my next post, I'll talk about some of the things Adobe and Microsoft (and others) can do to help us (all of us, the designers and lesser-skilled web developers) get there quicker and be more effective in this new arena.

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Posted by richz at 9:15 AM

Digg, Napster's Ghost & The Real Revolution

Nothin' like a little drama in the ol'blogo-2.0-social-sphere to go with the morning coffee. Digg experienced a mass revolt in the last 24 hours. In short, someone pointed to an article that laid out the hacking scheme to decrypt HD-DVD (something that was inevitably going to happen). Caving in to pressure from the "owners of intellectual property," Digg promptly took it down...and then took other like posts down...and then started banning users.

A mass revolt ensued. Before you knew it, Digg's front page was flooded with the pointers to the decryption information. Digg HQ had essentially lost control of Digg. There is no editorial staff at Digg. The mob is the editorial staff. Of course there are Terms of Use, but that's just window dressing. The Digg community will determine the terms of use (without the capital letters).

Now that the mob was at the door, Kevin Rose has decided to give in. In his words:

You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

Ouch. So let me understand this: the community/mob has decided (through mass action) that this story should stay up or Digg goes down. Fine. Digg Inc. has agreed to their demands. Fine. Now...who's responsible for the consequences? I can almost hear Rose's above quote ending in a whisper: "...will deal with whatever the consequences.."

This is a tough spot for Digg to be in. If the other mob - the copyright holders - go after Digg, they can try to argue that: "hey, we're just a public forum. We can't control what users put up here. Look what happened when we tried!"

Sound familiar? Napster made the exact same argument nearly ten years ago...and they lost. Ultimately, we're going to have to reconcile editorial control with responsibility. Digg can't argue that they're not responsible because they aren't in control. Ultimately, it's not about being in control, its about being an accomplice; an amplifier.

Napster's primary argument was that they were de-centralized. "We have no servers" they argued. But it turns out they did...sorta. Without getting into the technical nuances, the reason Napster was brought down was because it facilitated and enhanced illegal behavior.

Mobs don't care because you can't really sue a mob. Or can you? Maybe go after the infringing individuals? Or better yet, when that gloomy day comes and Digg Inc. is served with a lawsuit, they should ask the revolutionaries to help out. They'll have the user list after all. If the Digg community is serious about this issue, then they should be co-defendents with Digg Inc.

Now that would be a revolution.

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Posted by richz at 9:05 AM

Flex Goes Open Source

This is pretty cool news. Adobe has decided to open source the Flex platform (or specifically, the Flex SDK). Flex is as much a platform as it is a single-purpose piece of software. The result is a pretty vibrant (and growing) community that contributes all sorts of cool components that sit atop Flex.

By open sourcing Flex, Adobe is joining the party and looking to provide even more support for the community. At Arc90, we've got some really talented engineers that immediately chose to go right under the hood and do some really cool things. The result is some really valuable feedback (we've had numerous conversations with Adobe's Flex team) that we're anxious to share. This move by Adobe is welcome because it'll hopefully make this more of a conversation between Adobe and the community. Rather than give feedback and hope for the best, Adobe joins the community.

The buzz continues to get louder around Flex and Apollo. This is about keeping the momentum going and recruiting more developers. Regardless, this is a great move for the platform. Open it up and build on top of it.

Is Adobe becoming IBM? (Heh).

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Posted by richz at 10:46 AM

Subway Maps & Purpose-Driven Design

Maps are just...cool. They put us two or three miles above the earth and let us peer down, like God(s) at what lies below. By giving us this view, they ground us and give us information and perspective that we couldn't otherwise obtain and digest.

There many types of maps: climate, political, topographical and transit system maps and they all have one thing in common: we overlay information upon the geography to help serve some purpose. A topographical map is of no use to me if I'm interested in zip code boundaries.

Tina Eisenberg's excellent Swiss Miss blog points to a redesign of the NY subway map has been boldly put forth by designer Eddie Jabbour. Here's a little taste of what Mr. Jabbour's done to our beloved subway system map:

You can see a lot more by clicking the above image. A quick stare tells the story: the map has been redesigned with a greater focus on its intended purpose. Mr. Jabbour is clearly cheating here. The paths of the subway lines are downright inaccurate, but alas there's a great lesson to learn here: good information design is about cheating with information if the result better serves the consumers of that design. We're not looking to plot out exactly where the subway lies underneath New York City. We're just trying to make our way around the city, and this revised map is better aligned with that purpose.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority to date hasn't shown much interest. Ah well...

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Posted by richz at 9:01 AM

Flash, Silverlight & The In-Between OS

This morning, Microsoft (re)introduced their WPF/E platform (Windows Presentation Foundation / Everywhere) as Microsoft Silverlight. Tim Sneath has a nice summary of the feature set.

If anyone doubted that Microsoft is gunning for the a piece of the Adobe Flash empire, there's no denying it now. This is a relatively light, cross-platform runtime that will handle visuals, video and appears to upscale nicely from the HTML/Javascript world. It's Microsoft's version of Flash.

I think what's emerging is a new territory that has seldom been acknowledged before: the in-between OS. It's not web and it's not your desktop. Now that the bandwidth and horsepower hurdles are out of the way, we're seeing Microsoft acknowledge the power of a potently powerful little runtime. Adobe has focused on re-architecting Flash to go from "cool graphics engine" to a world class runtime. Apollo is how Flash ends up on your desktop. One of the key features of Silverlight is that all that code will elegantly work in the real WPF world (Vista).

For Microsoft, this is all about upsell. If they can get web developers to slowly peek their head into the WPF world, it's a big win for them. Ultimately, they want you on Vista. This may well be where Adobe's advantage lies: there is no "light" version of Flash. All the capabilties are everywhere. To really light things up in WPF, you need to be on Vista.

As for the learning curve, Microsoft doesn't have to deal with any old baggage since this is new stuff. The result is a platform that will probably feel more familiar to HTML/Javascript/Ajax developers. WPF/E seems to build upon the same development paradigm that web developers have gotten accustomed to while the Flash/Flex/Actionscript world requires a fair amount of re-learning.

Oddly (but not surprisingly), the press (and Microsoft's PR) seems to be focusing on the video features of WPF/E (cross platform, HD, etc.). This part of the story will be pretty interesting. I guess the day is coming when video will not require a browser open and an Internet connection. That's a good thing.

Microsoft has always had a huge advantage when dealing with competition because they owned the arena (i.e. the operating system) and exclusively possessed the transit system (the precious OS API's). That's changing. The success and ubiquity of Flash is forcing Microsoft to think in a leaner, more portable, cross-platform way. Nobody should underestimate Microsoft's skill or tenacity to compete, but in this case, they're clearly the visiting team.

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Posted by richz at 5:40 PM

Google Is Buying Doubleclick for $3.1B

I think I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft should buy Doubleclick. Well, it's too late, Google has snatched them up for a cool $3.1B.

We're getting to a pretty scary place folks. If we think in the context of mediums, there's radio, TV, print and then there's...Google. I don't have stats in front of me, but I'm guessing that Yahoo and Microsoft are in the single-digit percentages as far as share of market goes. And with this purchase, Google reaches out even further into online advertising. Doubleclick is in a lot of places.

There were rumors flying recently that Microsoft was in talks with Doubleclick. I'm sure this deal is as much about keeping Microsoft's grubby hands off of Doubleclick as it is about Google wanting to purchase them.

The New York Times has more here.

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Posted by richz at 9:05 AM

Apollo Is Here

Apollo, Adobe's platform for running Flash/Flex, PDF and HTML/AJAX outstide of that gosh-darn browser is here (albeit in Alpha form). Ryan Stewart and many others are talking about it today.

It's an exciting time for both developers and interaction designers. That wall between stuff you "visit" and use on the Web and stuff you download, install and run on your desktop, is about to go away. Microsoft's coming at us with WPF (and its little brother WPF/E) and Adobe's got all sorts of plans with Apollo.

The kicker for Apollo is that it will run across OS's and will allow developers to quickly and easily migrate existing web and Flash/Flex apps to the desktop. More broadly speaking, this is part of a hole trend away from page-after-page and towards a sort of widget-ification of interfaces. Smaller, bite-size pieces of content and functionality. Portals sort of do that today. But they're still mostly confined to the walls of your browser.

Well, not no more. The browser is finally letting go. All told, it's an exciting time where we may well be at the cusp of something new and exciting.

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Posted by richz at 9:53 AM

Will Wright at SXSW

Anyone who appreciates design, psychology, sociology, mass media, or how people interact with machines needs to read up on Will Wright. For the uninitiated, Wright is brains behind the Sim-series of games, including Sim City and The Sims. Beyond his game design skills, he's a fascinating person that almost always has interesting things to say.

The New Yorker published a nice writeup on him a few months ago and now, someone's been kind enough to roughly transcribe is SXSW keynote. Don't miss it.

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Posted by richz at 9:41 AM

I Twitter, Therefore I Am

Months ago, I wrote a piece about the importance of space in information design. The moral of the post was pretty simple: if you've got a finite amount of canvas to work with (e.g. a web browser), don't cram all kinds of information tightly together. If there's too much stuff all packed together, the amount of "cognitive overhead" increases dramatically for the user. Instead, space out your elements and let people think. Eliminate clutter. Let people focus.

Well, "space" is not only important in web pages and print materials filled with information. Space is important in life as well. And we've got less and less of it these days. Instant messaging. Cell phones. Blackberries (is it plural with an "ies" or a "ys"?). We have very little cognitive "space" these days. Instead, we're constantly getting pinged from all directions.

And now we have...Twitter. It's essentially a status monitor for people. People, all day long, update their "status" (things like "eating cereal" or "ugh, gotta do tax forms!") and their friends can keep up to date on them.

Well, like it or not, it's starting to take off. At this point, people are probably just curious. It's already become in vogue to bash twitter. And rightfully so. It's inherently evil. It combines two things I despise: unnecessary noise and people who need to be acknowledged every three minutes. It's as if we didn't exist unless we twittered.

And so, for now at least, we continue to embrace clutter. And we continue to drift farther away from the virtues of giving each other space. With space comes opportunities for reflection, ideas, beyond shallow thinking.

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Posted by richz at 9:08 AM

The Semantic Web : One Mo' Time!

There's a bit of buzz today around a new startup called Metaweb. Metaweb is creating a new type of semantically-flavored version of Wikipedia called Freebase (heh).

In a nutshell, Freebase allows the community to contribute to facts about stuff, like Wikipedia, except with one key difference: the system wants the stuff in some semantically connected way.

We've actually chatted in the office here about how Wikipedia comes oh-so-close yet it's a near miss. There's all that great stuff yet, beyond a few hyperlinks, none if it is semantically connected. Tim Berners-Lee, has been introducing (and re-introducing, and re-introducing) the "next Web" or the Semantic Web for years now. And it still hasn't caught on. The eureka for me was FTrain's excellent semi-sci-fi scenario of how Google crushed everybody by capturing the semantic web.

For me, here's the thing with the semantic web: it's like Communism. It's really great on paper. But in practice, it's rife with problems half-filled promises. I think the crux of it, ironically, is usability. For something to take off, it must provide some sort of immediate, conceivable value to the masses upon touching it. Yeh, it can sound really cool in a white paper, but guess what? Nobody reads white papers. People are willing to do stuff that makes sense to them in an immediate way.

The most popular RSS reader in the world isn't an RSS reader and makes no mention of being one: My Yahoo! collects articles and puts them in one place. It's convenient and can easily be understood. Who cares about the inner workings of RSS?

For the semantic web to become real, we need to get the data in first. And that's a somewhat daunting task. All the evangelizing in the world won't galvanize people to get started. Instead, tools like Freebase and Google Base bring it down to earth for the average user. Recipes. Used cars. Stuff that may be worthwhile. Why else would be people contribute to the semantic web?

And there lies the rub: if you look at Google Base today, it's just plain...weird. It's essentially a collection of smaller database-style apps that don't seem very connected at all. Can I be perusing their personals section and find a recipe from one of the dating candidates? Or a used car they're trying to sell? Maybe the better question is: do I really want to?

For the general population, it feels kind of, well, half-baked. How do we get the masses to pitch in not only on the "data entry" side but on the creation of the semantic structure as a whole? Considering the usability challenges of making the semantic web take off as it is, maybe this is too lofty a goal.

Either way, like RSS, the barrier to adoption isn't technology or the capabilities of systems (though there are some interesting puzzles). The barrier is people. Like Berners-Lee's other invention, HTML, we need a killer app. For the masses, the browser was the invention, even though an underlying hyperlinked web was the real magic. The Semantic Web is in need of its own killer app.

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Posted by richz at 6:57 PM

Orbiting Around Users At Adobe Engage

I'm writing this post from Adobe Engage. It's a day-long seminar that gives us a glimpse into Adobe's rich application road map and also showcases a handful of RIA's and products that are either brand spankin' new or haven't even seen the day of light yet.

Today, it's all about using Flash, Flex and the baby brother - Apollo - to deliver rich internet applications to users everywhere. Tim O'Reilly highlights one of the key themes in today's talks: using these products to engage and involve users. Broadly speaking, its great to see "user experience" being such a prominent part of the conversation here. Rather than orbiting around a bunch of technologies and just mentioning users. Engaging users is what it's about. Technology gets us there.

Some more of my thoughts:

It's a really exciting time. At Arc90, we're subjecting ourselves to the growing pains of getting good at this stuff (and we are!). We'd love to put on the lab coats and start building, but alas we have clients and clients have needs...for now. We'll just have to show them the way.

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Posted by richz at 9:08 AM

Google Apps Premier...Premiers

Google Apps Premier, Google's very own Office-Suite-in-a-box, just debuted. Information Week has a nice summary. It's a nice collection of hosted web applications, including the mighty Gmail, for businesses. It's darn cheap too - at $50 per user per year.

From the perspective purchasing, maintaining and supporting IT infrastructure, the ROI is pretty clear: pay us $50 and we'll worry about everything else. It's not only a direct attack at Microsoft's dominance of business productivity software, it's a direct on how we think about and use software generally. If anything, it brings into question the operating system itself. Put differently, do we really need an operating system anymore? Google has a damn big one. Do we really need storage anymore? Google has plenty of that as well.

While it's all got a pretty revolutionary feel, one thing the press seems glean over is the wide array of highly specialized uses the Microsoft Office platform enables. We have a client here in New York that uses Excel in a very sophisticated way - tying tables to complex modeling functions and back-end databases. Word is no different. It's a staggeringly deep application that is used for everything from drafting legal forms to handling sophisticated, cross-referenced technical documents. Google isn't after such specialized use - at least not yet. They're after what I like to call the "obvious 15." It's the most visibile, most accessible 15% of functionality that lies within these apps. That 15% is all the great majority of users need. Simple formatting, spell check in Word. Basic ledger capabilities in Excel. It's a very large market. Word and Excel look like shallow puddles on the surface, but they are very deep.

In all this, I think it's an oversimplification to just broadly categorize this as some battle of office suites. The arena is clearly marked: casual and small business use that leverages the common office suite functions. A small accouting firm. A dentist's office. A startup with a few employees. It's very appealing to just sign up and go.

This leaves me with one more future-ism: envisioning a day when that depth, richness and functionality truly marries with a Google-like distributed model. Scary...but exciting.

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Posted by richz at 8:50 AM

Indie Artists, Give Me Your Paypal Account

Dear Independent Artist:

I am a huge fan of music - all kinds of music. Music is such an important part of my life that I seek it out. I don't listen to the radio much so I scour around the Internet for something new to latch on to. I ask friends. I read mp3 blogs. I follow sites like Pitchfork. I'll go just about anywhere to get at some new music that I can enjoy, connect with and fold into my life's soundtrack.

I don't buy CD's. I haven't purchased a CD in a really long time. I really don't have any use for them. I don't even own a CD player. I've got a laptop. I've got desktop speakers. I've got an iPod. I need your music in a DRM-free digital form. My music moves around. I also want to share your music with my friends. Besides, very little of what I want today - with the exception of the occasional hankering for classic rock - is available at Best Buy or Circuit City. So even if I were into CD's as a technology, none of what I want can be found at retail stores.

But even if they did have your music in stock, I wouldn't bother buying the CD's. I want to have your music the moment I realize it's something I want to possess. The moment after I discover it. Better yet, I wouldn't mind having it before I even realize that I want it. In fact, that's pretty much what happens today. A friend will pass along a folder of MP3's. I'll check it out. If I like it, I'll keep it. If I don't, I'll just delete it.

So there's a twisted irony here. Even for the music I like, I'm often not paying for your music. Why? Because it's actually harder to support you - the artist - than to get your music without supporting you. Think about that. It takes more work on my part to support you. On occasion, I've liked someone's music so much that I bought a few copies of your album and never opened them or given them to friends as gifts. I'm not sure what else to do.

I'm lucky enough to live in New York City. It's a great place to find just about any flavor of live music - big or small. I constantly scour sites like Pollstar and Sonic Living to find out when you're going to be in town next. I want to come to your shows and support you. I've heard that touring is just about the only way a small artist makes money (though I don't know that for sure).

I want to support you. Especially if your music means something to me. But it's actually hard to do that in this digital age. I don't want iTunes because I don't want limitations (limitations I'm not even entirely clear about) and your music isn't in the shopping mall shops and Walmart's. And like I said, CD's are relatively useless to me.

What it comes down to is this: I want to give you some money. I'm not entirely sure what I'm willing to pay. I'm pretty sure it'll vary depending on who you are and how much I like your music. There's a good change that an album of yours that was recently released is lousy - to me at least. Then again, your album may be amazing. Or it may just have a few worthwhile tracks. For the artists that contribute to improving my life, I'd like to support you in some way but it's hard to do.

Imagine a world where the notion of purchasing music is entirely thrown out the window. Instead, artists put music out there (you're pretty much doing that today anyway) and a system exists whereby the people that latch on can give something to the artists. This isn't about a commercial transaction or gaining rights to copyrighted work. This is about bypassing the purchase process altogether and rewarding you - the artist. It's a sort of Paypal for artists. It's about decoupling the commercial transaction around obtaining music and focusing on the inimitable relationship between artist and music fan. There are at least ten artists I enjoy today that should get some of my money - at least more than I've given them so far.

I really love Album X, and I'd give the artist $7 in a heartbeat if it was easy to do so. I only liked 3-4 songs on Album Y, so I'm only going to donate $3 to that artist's cause. There's a massive amount of good will out there that artists never get to cash in because there is no simple mechanism to do so.

It is, in effect, donationware for music. And music, unlike software or desktop wallpapers, evokes emotion and loyalty. Software has users. Music has fans. We are fans that want to see more of your music. That want you to have enough money to tour. To keep doing what you're doing. We would kill to have an MP3 of an acoustic session you did last weekend - no matter how sloppy it is. We want to support you so you can keep sharing more of your creations.

So come on Independent Artist, show me an easier way to support you. I'll keep coming to your shows, but the other ways to help you are just too difficult and rife with all sorts of unnecessary hurdles. Let's short circuit everything and go straight to you. I just want to give something back to you - the artist - for enriching my life.

Sincerely,

A Big Independent Music Fan

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Posted by richz at 2:27 PM

"This Video Is Brought To You By..."

Everyone's favorite tool for mass voyeurism - YouTube - is starting to get sucked into the Google vortex. Google Video search results will now include Youtube videos as well.

This was bound to happen, but what I think is interesting here is the following from today's announcement:

Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world's online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted. (emphasis added)

Google's mama didn't raise no dummy. They know that while the destination is fun and all, it's all about the billboards on the way. Google relies on the search highway as your preferred path to these destinations.

But videos are an odd destination. We don't really wake up with a hankering to view a ridiculous local TV ad or some obscure Finnish dance video. Instead, we find out about them from others whether through emails or chats that fly around or through social sites like Digg. In other words, viral videos have us skipping the search highway altogether and going straight to the content.

On top of that, sites like Digg and blogs everywhere just display the videos themselves. It's partly why Youtube took off like it did: the videos are portable. So how does Google monetize all those videos out there? It may display ads for a few seconds before the actual video. It may pass along ads around the video player skin.

As the web breaks out of the browser and ends up in the form of many smaller pieces in the form of gadgets and widgets, web video is clearly the ultimate widget. Videos don't require any sort of installation (thanks to Flash), a link is usually enough, and they can be dropped virtually anywhere. We're already starting to see videos end up on phones and portable devices. Ultimately, for search engines like Google and Yahoo it's going to be about somehow blending that ad model with more modular, discrete experiences.

It really is becoming a bite-size web.

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Posted by richz at 4:40 PM

A Little Usage Metadata Lovin'

Fellow Arc90'er Tim Meaney shares his thoughts on usage metadata and why it's just the greatest. The Google Reader team recently put out some neat little charts that nicely illustrate your usage habits on Google Reader. Tim predicts that this trend will continue with more applications paying better attention to your habits, patterns and what you pay the most attention to.

Building on Tim's thoughts, I think its worth making a distinction between local attention data - in applications like iTunes - is a bit more digestible to me than Google watching every move I make. While the resulting data is neat, I wish there were a "Stop Paying Attention" switch somewhere that I could flip. Every so often, I just want to close the blinds.  Privacy is mostly about control. So long as I can easily "mute the microphone" I'm ok with things.

Tim will be continuing his series on usage metadata in the near future over at the Arc90 Blog.

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Posted by richz at 10:41 AM

Yet Another Microsoft Bet

Imagine you're lounging around at a Las Vegas roulette table and a Fat Cat walks up to the table and drops $30,000 worth of chips in front of you. You meekly gaze at your paltry pile of $5 and $10 chips. Soon after settling at the table, Mr. Fat Cat proceeds to put a few hundred bucks on every number and then throws down some more on black, red, odd and even. His goal? He doesn't want to lose. So he bets on everything.

This is Microsoft. They're one of the few companies in the world that doesn't have to carefully mull over their strategic direction. They can simply take all routes. Microsoft has survived and thrived all these years because (a) they're smart (b) they're aggressive and (c) they're in the unique position of being able to bet on everything without putting the entire (or even parts) of the enterprise at risk.

There's one other characteristic worth mentioning: Microsoft rarely gets it right the first time. In fact, they often screw it up. They usually arrive late to the party with their own "Edition" of the latest thing just to make sure their hat is in the ring. And they usually fall short in the first go-round. But they are relentless. And they eventually get it right. And they've learned to stomach the early losses.

Yesterday, Microsoft showed a few of its bets by releasing WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere) and the latest flavor of their Expression series of design tools. In short WPF/E is "is the Microsoft solution for delivering rich, cross-platform, interactive experiences including animation, graphics, audio, and video for the Web and beyond." In short, it's Microsoft's early version of a Flash player. It'll eventually run in Firefox and Mac platforms. It'll leverage a subset of XAML and Javascript. This shouldn't be confused with good'ol WPF - which runs on the Vista desktop (and IE7 I believe) but is built via full blown XAML and C#/.Net.

For the designers out there (interaction designers and otherwise) there's Microsoft Expression Blend (the "blend" I guess meaning the blend between design and development). It's the graphical/visual/markup-editing tool that (sort of) brings this stuff together. It's their version of Flash Professional (sort of) or Flex Builder. Depending on how you look at it. There's a lot flying around here. These pieces somehow play with Visual Studio and Asp.Net and Atlas (their Ajax implementation).

You can't help but draw a parallel between Adobe and Microsoft. A two-way highway with both cars going in opposite directions. Adobe heading to the desktop. Microsoft heading towards the world of quote-unquote "cross-platform." Flash/Flex/Apollo in one corner. WPF/XAML in the other.

There's just one question begging to be asked though: how far would Microsoft go towards truly cross-platform? Would they go as far as delivering a runtime that effectively marginalizes the value of their desktop? Code written for WPF/E won't work on WPF. Microsoft has effectively delivered a platform that is incompatible with itself. I'm sure there are arguments for why this is the case. I'd be interested in hearing them. It'll also be really tough to pierce the loyalty of designers and their tools.

In any case, this is clearly a new arena where the Web, richer experiences and the desktop come together. Adobe and Microsoft seem to be leading the pack with establishing the platforms and tools to light up this new world. From where we're sitting at Arc90, it'll be fun to watch...and play along.

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Posted by richz at 2:18 PM

Wonky Over Widgets

Everybody's going wonky over widgets (or gadgets, or dashboards, or...). There's even a conference dedicated to widgets (Om Malik has a write-up on it).

We're trending away from the browser - and it's going to keep going. In my oh-so-humble opinion, there will be two players left standing when it's all said and done: Microsoft and Adobe. It's going to be fun to watch. And the designer in me is all sorts of giddy about being able to create more seamless, targeted experiences outside of the browser. I've written at length about this in the past and the time is nearing. Yippee!

Update: Speak of the devil. Techcrunch talks about SpringWidgets - yet another widget platform by Fox Interactive that actually uses Flash on both the desktop and web. Smells a lot like Apollo. It's funny how two different species of business are going at this from two different directions. The content providers (Yahoo, Google, Fox, etc.) and the software platform people (Adobe, Microsoft).

Over at the Arc90 blog, I talk further about these trends and the skills and technologies that are going to lead the way.

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Posted by richz at 11:17 AM

Google Acquires Jotspot

Not sure why this one isn't making the rounds yet. Google has acquired Jotspot. No more new accounts (for now). Jot is a virtual office suite with calendar, spreadsheets and the like. Not sure how (or if) this folds into the Google Office plans.

Google's clearly aiming their sights on small businesses/organizations that just want a simple turnkey solution for your typical operational tools - email, calendar, spreadsheets etc. They've already acquired Writely. There won't be many little players left in 12 months I'm guessing. They'll either get acquired or relegated to a small slice of the pie.

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Posted by richz at 5:14 PM

Google Gobbles Youtube

This apparently just happened. Google has acquired Youtube. As to what they're gonna do with Youtube - I'm sure plenty of bloggers and "experts" will speculate. Youtube cornered it and there was no unseating them. Google and others have learned that once a particular destination tips, its nearly impossible to unseat them. Google Video could hardly make a dent (along with others).

It'll be fun to see how Google morphs Youtube into something viable. It has become the ad hoc Internet TV platform. It is a delicate thing though. At some point, you've got to take control of what's happening. Like it or not, there are copyright issues to be worked out. The snag is figuring out if the changes you impose turn it into something else. That's the tricky part. Delicious and Flickr have remained practically untouched since Yahoo snatched them up. I still can't tell if those were viable acquisitions as well. I plead ignorance on such moves. I just can't find the rational thinking behind them.

Anhow, it's done. The 'Tube is now Google property. Congrats to both companies. This is a pretty big deal any way you spin it.

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Posted by richz at 3:03 PM

Microsoft vs. Google (Again)

Yesterday everybody was talking about Google Apps For Your Domain. Google's new collaboration service that ties together Gmail, Gtalk, Calendar and Google Page Creator. Many observers, along with Google itself are quick to point out that this is not a competitor to Microsoft Office. People are framing it as a complement to the Ofifice suite that brings the power of collaboration to the platform.

Of course, while it may not compete with today's iteration of Office, it's clear that both companies are headed down a similar path. Microsoft's Office Live and other Live offerings attempt to bring the centralized, collaborative benefits of Live to Office.

While Office is great, it's still a pain to pass around documents through email for revision and editing. It's still a pain to set up your own Exchange server for small businesses. It's still a pain to make files centrally available. So the need to elevate Office from isolated desktop platform to a more centralized collaborative platform is clearly there.

As I read over the details around Google's offering, I can't help but think how hokey the whole thing is. Enteprises live inside of Microsoft's Office platform, especially Outlook. The idea of somehow mashing together Google with Office is is going to be difficult for a lot of people to stomach...or even bother with.

This battle is for Microsoft to lose. This is not about technology or who can house the largest data center to run all this stuff. We all know that both companies have the will and the means to do that. The winner here is going to be the one that makes this happen for end-users in a seamless fashion.

Microsoft has it all wrong with Sharepoint. Why? Because it's a destination. Nobody wants to go elsewhere to handle their stuff. They live in Office and they want to stay there. Google is going to face a similar problem. Users don't want more web URL's. They will only tolerate a slight shift within their current work environments. What this means is that Microsoft needs to augment Office in a subtle, unobtrusive way and simply "turn on" these capabilities. If they do that, Google doesn't have a shot.

Microsoft's biggest enemy is Microsoft. Their culture isn't about subtle augmentation. It's about caking on shrink-wrapped products on top of products. They already have the eyes. Everybody uses Office. Everybody uses Outlook.The spies have alread infiltrated. Why send in more spies in the form of Sharepoint or the absolutely confusing Live platform (is it Office Live? Or just Live?).

Microsoft's DNA is about product offerings: PRODUCT NAME - YEAR. Outlook 2003. Sharepoint 2007. SQL Server 2005. They build software. Price it. Sell it. You install it. Configure it...and then hope your users will adopt it. If Microsoft keeps ignoring that their hooks are already in, that will be Google's opening.

Microsoft can learn a hell of a lot from Apple's success. Apple's products are secondary to the overall experience. The iPod/iTunes synergy is a clear example of this. Apple attacked all the problems with an entire platform rather than bolt-on products here and there. Buying music. Organizing music. Making music portable. The goals override the "pieces" that help you get there. Microsoft already owns the experience today and they need to leverage it. Google is aiming at the shortcomings of the Office sweet from across the ocean. It's a bold move but Google's got the right culture, right now, to make a serious attack.

A final thought, I don't buy the "this isn't a Microsoft Office competitor" line for one bit. These applications are getting richer and more powerful, through good'ol Javascript & AJAX by the day. They're going to keep getting better. This isn't Google just making the world better. It's a stealth move that is exploiting a weakness in the current platform to sneak into the workflow. Once in, all bets are off.

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Posted by richz at 9:47 AM

Selling Out The Cool Chaos

Netscape's (via Webloginc) Jason Calacanis has put forth an offer to effectively pay the most active users on Digg, Newsvine, Reddit and the like to post at least 150 link stories up per month on Netscape's Digg-ripoffinspired site. It's worth noting that Netscape is seeing nowhere near as much activity as Digg currently enjoys.

It's a good idea. Calacanis brings a street smart, Brooklyn attitude to the conversation. I'm a Brooklyn native myself and I often bring that realistic pragmatism to my thinking. Mr. Calacanis is right: everyone's gotta eat. A couple of thoughts:

The idealist in me really loves the organic qualities of Digg. I have a friend that works in a public relations firm and she tells me they're absolutely terrified of sites like Digg. They would never go near them because they fear getting "found out." Digg is in many ways an antidote to the existing top-down PR/marketing aparatus. It introduces chaos - a cool chaos - and somehow, order comes of it. By formalizing and paying certain people to do the work, you're transforming this energetic source of ideas and energy and turning it into...yet another content site. In other words, part of Digg's charm is it's anarchy (even if it's not really anarchy). It's not a PR firm. It's not a traditional portal site beholden to a massive media conglomerate. It's loved because it's not all those things.

Maybe I'm just being sentimental. It's sort of like when you're annoyed that your favorite band (that you're quick to point out that you discovered) finally "sold out" and signed up with a major record label. Next stop: Starbucks compilation CD's.

The only other point I'd make is that it's hard to replace motivation and keep the purity of why people do things. I'm all for capitalism but when you replace one motive (a love of sharing things and getting acknowledgement from others) with another (money), something is compromised.

Or is it?

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Posted by richz at 3:47 PM

Google Releases Gadget Desktop Designer

The gadget wars just keep getting hotter. Microsoft's Gadgets released an SDK a few weeks ago, Yahoo!'s got their whole gadget (sorry, widget) thing going on. Even Opera has widgets these days.

Google makes the latest push by releasing Google Desktop Gadget Designer. It looks like a graphical interface that simplifies building gadgets.

What's interesting about all this gadget/widget stuff is how each player is looking to better position themselves on the desktop ecosystem. It's all implicit acknowledgement that the Web browser, however powerful, will eventually give way to more discrete, umm, "widgets" of functionality that will live all over your desktop experience. Microsoft's Live Gadgets are advertised to run seamlessly in Vista's upcoming Sidebar. Google's Gadgets which run in their My Google interface can also be leveraged on their desktop download. Even Adobe is looking to re-introduce Flash and PDF as technologies that live away from the browser and on the desktop through their Apollo initiative.

It's an interesting trend that challenges both technologists and interaction designers to think about information and functionality in smaller, more independent forms.

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Posted by richz at 11:12 AM

Digg V3 Coming Monday While Beta.Netscape Seems To Languish

All the buzz today is around the upcoming upgrade of the mighty Digg.com. Basement.org has had the pleasure of being dugg four times over the past year and I can tell you first hand, there are few phenomenas on the Internet as powerful as the Digg Effect. The onslaught of traffic is downright scary. Digg is one of those rare sites that has found that sweet spot. It's oddly addictive and rarely disappoints.

About a week ago, the new Netscape beta debuted and there was a lot of buzz on the Internet about its potential. It's effectively a Digg clone with some social and editorial aspects sprinkled in. So how is the new Netscape doing? Well, a quick visit today as of this post and it doesn't look like a whole lot is going on. The top stories are have only a handful of diggs...I mean votes. Such is life in the Web 2.0 world. We get all excited for about 6 minutes and then we move on ("we" being the geeks that love plaiyng with apps).

In all fairness, I'm not sure how broadly Netscape has let it be known that this thing even exists. A quick visit to their main site (under www) doesn't show any links to the beta. So who knows.

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Posted by richz at 11:47 AM

Google Heart Adobe

Similar to the deal with Dell, Google is partnering with Adobe to bundle the Google toolbar with Adobe's (formerly Macromedia's) Shockwave Player download.

Now let's be real. The Shockwave Player isn't exactly on any Top Downloads list these days. But of course, that's not what this is all about. It's about bundling Google wares with "various Adobe products." And of course, among the many various products is the mighty Flash runtime - arguably the most widely deployed platform in the world.

And why is this important to Google? Well, Google is going to need to fortify itself from the inevitable changes that will point users, by default to Microsoft properties. That's why they've paid Dell and now Adobe real money. As I've clamored about in the past, Google's primary entry point today is the browser and URL and to stay competitive they must establish alternative entry points. Toolbars. Google Desktop. Gadgets. Widgets. Extensions. You name it.

PDF & Flash are a great way to sneak Google into the experience because they're just about everywhere. People will download them - unlike that Google Backpack nonsense that was put out months ago. Flash is even more effective because the download is practically transparent these days. It just happens. And that's what Google wants to piggyback here.

These moves are all about Microsoft. Microsoft will get search to "good enough" and then use its leverage, i.e. it's ownership of the operating system we all play on, to make it far easier to end up on Windows Live or other Microsoft destinations.

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Posted by richz at 10:41 AM

From Google With Love

Ever watch the old James Bond movies where 007 somehow gets kidnapped and wakes up in some elaborate lair that was built into the side of a mountain on some remote island? Just behind the natural landscape are these uniformed workers, toilling away to help some evil rich guy realize is sinister master plan to rule the world.

Well, reality seems to be following fiction. Google is quiety ("shshshsh!") building these massive data centers fit with massive cooling systems. These Googleplex's (I'm not sure if I'm using the word properly) will house...everything. Everything about what we do. What we want. What we seek. What we produce. What we write. Email. Photograph. Listen to. Watch. Buy...(insert generic maniacal plan-to-rule-the-world laugh here).

I've worn the hat of Paranoid Blogger before when I wrote about Google's Laser-Guided Missles. That article seemed to resonate with a lot of people. Well, you gotta put those missiles somewhere. I'll admit, I'll often find myself laughing at my own paranoia. But then again, Google's ambitions (along with Microsoft's and Yahoo's) are pretty scary. These big data centers are going to house all kinds of details about us. And will we always know what aspects of our behavior is being stored away?

O'Reilly recently pointed to a study where Google is looking into using your computer's built-in microphone to analyze ambient sounds. These sounds will be studied and analyzed (can you hear the big machines humming?) to determine which television show you're currently watching and promptly return Web content related to that show.

O'Reilly goes on to talk about the frightening, AI-run-amuck scenario. I'm not sure about all that, but the immediate feeling I get is: creepy. Who is that guy with the trenchcoat who keeps following me around?

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Posted by richz at 2:30 PM

Google's Design-Driven Enthusiasm

In regards to the irrational exuberance often associated with Google's offerings, Techcrunch's Michael Arrington asks: What drives this kind of blind enthusiasm?

Anyone who follows basement.org knows I'm not a Google fanboy. But sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade: Google has done an outstanding job of building a near rabid brand loyalty. By saying less (they have virtually no traditional advertising campaigns) and by masking some relatively impressive technical feats with a simple, dumbed-down design, they've created a mystique around their brand.

Stepping back, Google's name is synonymous with searching on the Web, but its goodwill is also a product of their commitment to simplicity. Google, like Apple, is a great case study in the importance of delivering technology in the context of a simple, intuitive experience. They are an experience design success story.

I would respond to Arrington's rant with the following question: why was it such a big deal when the iPod was released? Portable digital music players had been around for years. It was a big deal because it was better-designed. And that difference is not trivial. That's not to say that Google Spreadsheet or whatever else Google puts out will be better. It's just that, right now, Google has earned the benefit of the doubt. Gmail and their core search products have set the tone.

Now is this free ticket that Google's been handed an Unlimited Ride? I seriously doubt it. You still have to bring real, differentiating value to get noticed. Had Google Spreadsheet been their next offering after search, few would doubt that it's reception would've been huge. After 20 or so offerings, not so huge.

Speaking more broadly, the loyalty and enthusiasm Google is capable of conjuring speaks to the value of delivering a good product wrapped in a compelling end-user experience.

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Posted by richz at 10:22 AM

"Your Edges Are Our Edges"

Consder the following:

We don’t sit down for meals much anymore these days on the Web. Instead, we just snack a whole lot. The Web relentlessly slices, dices and serves up entertainment and knowledge. Some have heralded this trend as the True Web, a grand democratization of information. Whereas access to such riches were only available to a privileged few, the Web delivers all these pieces to the masses. Categorized. Searchable. Retrievable. Easy to digest. As the artifacts of our world are consumed and infinitely linked together in this web of snippets, few would doubt that we are all gaining something. I also think we’re losing something as well.

The major search engines of today, most notably Google, have come to realize the power of owning information and content. When I use the term “owning” in this context, I don’t mean “taking possession of” but rather the notion of learning, studying, scanning, copying and indexing. Once digested, the content is now searchable and retrievable by a search engine. We’re all being told that the digitization and indexing of the world’s information is a good thing and in many ways it is. We’re still reaping the rewards of the hyperlink. As more content, and more types of content come into the fold, the sum of all this content becomes that much more potent. Connecting all this stuff is wickedly powerful. There is no denying that.

And so, we are nearing an age where Google and its brethren are indexing everything, connecting it all together, and readying it for easy retrieval. Anyone can find anything at any time. Complete knowledge is no longer the exclusive domain of a priviliged few. By moving the world’s Library to the digital realm, the playing field is being leveled. In a recent New York Times article by Kevin Kelly (now only available under the Times’ subscription service), Mr. Kelly extolled the virtues of surfing from book to book, as the major search engines are on a relentless course to scan and index the world’s books. Beyond finding and riding links between books, we’ll be able to mash up books to create our own creative interpretations.

“I just love real books.”

In response to the supposed coming of the eBook revolution (a revolution which in fact never came), I’ve often heard friends talk about how they love their real books. They appreciate the actual physical object in their possession. They can’t pin down exactly why they prefer physical books. Their arguments most often default back to a sort of nostalgic, almost romantic view of books.

I’ve never heard a good, sound rationale as to why real books are better and shouldn’t go away. I think the slicing and dicing of creative works sheds some light on it. A book is, in many ways, a conversation. A direct link between reader and author that brings with it a certain tempo, atmosphere and intimacy. An emotional reaction will rarely occur in the first few minutes of reading. Instead, we’re slowly drawn in and if we’re enjoying it, a relationship ensues. That direct, unencumbered link is sacred. And that object – the physical book – symbolizes that relationship. A conversation over cocktails comes nowhere near the level of intimacy we can expereience with books.

Welcome To Short Attention Span Theater

Some of my favorite albums of all time are albums. The sequence of tracks give the whole a greater meaning than its parts. While the individual songs may be distinct, the album itself is often its own experience. It often conveys a mood or time and place. An album like Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy is more an opus than an album. Not only setting mood and setting but conveying a common thread throughout the songs. Should you be able to slice this album’s tracks to your liking? I wouldn’t make a judgment about that. I just think it would be a shame to not experience the album as a whole.

The tangible lines that separate these creative works are disappearing. Today, we struggle to conceptualize the physical counterpart to all these creative works. All this “stuff” is just floating out there. We see glimpses of it in search results and in samples here and there. As consumers, we’re not just consuming anymore. We’ve been handed tools. We’re now conditioned to participate. Remixing and collecting and compiling. We are not only consuming anymore. We carve to our liking, taking the pieces we want and regurgitating them with a hint of our own identity.  

The casualty in all this is the original creative voice. Whereas it once had hundreds of pages to speak, it now has a blog entry. Or minutes of music. Or seconds of film. It has lost the benefits of that physical artifact. I imagine that Vietnam memorial wall. It is both a tribute and a fallacy. Each person drowned out in a sea of names. All perfectly spaced apart and alphabetized. Step back from it and you see nothing but a gray blur.

It isn’t just about how a book feels in your hand. It’s about how that book’s physical independence and integrity stands for the author’s voice. It is a manifestation of the creator’s soul. As the Digital Machine steamrolls across all of this content, that voice is lost. It is drowned out by the overwhelming shrill of the masses.

In a recent appearance at a booksellers convention, the author John Updike gave an impassioned response to the supposed virtues of digital books and libraries:

Books traditionally have edges. Some are rough cut. Some are smooth cut. And a few, at least in my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic ant hill, where are the edges? The book revolution, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets. So booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity.

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Posted by richz at 11:09 AM

Flash Beyond The Browser : Adobe Reveals More Details On Apollo

I've been going on like a broken record about how the browser will be challenged as the primary window to Internet-driven applications and content. Everybody and their uncle is taking a crack at it. Everyone has some sort of desktop download. Widgets. Gadgets. You get the idea.

Just about any attempt to get to your desktop requires a download and installation of some sort of appliation - a major barrier to widespread adoption. Adobe, following their merger with Macromedia, are working on a little known effort called Apollo. PDFZone has some insight on the effort and sum it up nicely:

The idea behind Apollo...is to enable apps currently made from Flash and PDF to "move beyond the browser" by assigning Flash-based apps a desktop icon that can be launched like traditional apps and utilities.

Adobe's Apollo may be a dark horse in this race if they can make sure they leverage the massive install base of Flash players out there (and PDF readers for that matter). If Apollo is going to require its own install to run, then I think Adobe will be falling back onto the same playing field as the other players. The secret sauce, in my opinion, is to provide users with a dead simple ability to cross the browser's chrome onto the desktop. No simple feat, especially considering the security implications. Adobe will face other challenges that will make this easier said than done, but this is a key requirement I believe.

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Posted by richz at 10:35 AM

Microsoft's Repackaging of RSS

One of the cools things developers can do with RSS is apply a CSS or XSL skin so that users see a nice explanation and formatting of the feed rather than a bunch of XML. Feedburner's XSL skin is probably one of the most popular ones out there. Here is the TechCrunch version. For the technically inclined, here's a nice tutorial on dressing up RSS with XSL.

Anyway, I was playing around with Internet Explorer 7 Beta and noticed that any reference to an external XSL or CSS (for example Feedburner's) is summarily ignored. Instead, IE7 applies its own built-in skin for viewing the feed.

Here's the view that most browsers would see today followed by a view of the same feed in IE7.

Now, you can make a fairly compelling argument that what Microsoft is doing is a good thing. Providing a simple consistent way to educate and inform users about RSS is a positive step. However, the potential of RSS and the competitive advantage Microsoft will inevitably have with Vista and IE7, this may very well result in a hijacking of a technology that to date has flourished in large part due to its platform indendence.

RSS is capable of doing a hell of a lot more than just delivering headlines and news feeds. It is an incredibly powerful platform that Microsoft is very committed to. While my gripe may seem trivial today, as Microsoft evangelizes more specialized uses of RSS, the gravity of this important step will resonate later.

In the IE7 feed view, there is some explanatory text up top. I think the link to the word "feed" in the instructional text says a lot:

You are viewing a feed that contains frequently updated content from a website.

Despite its proliferation amongst technophiles, RSS is still unknown to the great majority of the world. They will be introduced to RSS for the very first time by Microsoft. And they will perceive RSS as a Microsoft product that is part and parcel of their browser and operating system. As to whether this is a good or bad thing is for another blog post (or two). Good or bad, few would dispute that this will be an inevitable consequence of Microsoft's plans for RSS.

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Posted by richz at 10:34 AM

The Bite-Size Web

I think we're going to start to see an interesting side effect on web pages and blogs as content and services become more granular. Content providers, the Yahoo!'s, AOL's, publishers, magazines etc., will start to provide their content, in a dynamic form, for placement on other web pages.

This goes beyond adsense and such. It's more a highly targeted yet fully plugged-in view of content. As data and presentation continues to separate, the "big bite" aspect of the web will give way to this more targeted approach. Today, I visit My Yahoo to just get the weather or a sports score.

Yahoo! and others are already delivering that content in a more discrete format. Their desktop widgets are already fueled by such services. Techcrunch just recently gave a glimpse of Yahoo!'s upcoming finance widget.

It's pretty neat stuff and I think it's implications are more than subtle. As content and services get delivered in such ways, we (the users) will have to travel less from destination to destination. This is part of the promise of portal pages like live.com or Netvibes. Pick what you want and put it on your own portal page. But the implication here is even greater. Other content creators, most notably bloggers, will be able to tap into third parties for content as well.

People have talked about the value of separating presentation and data and the flexibility it affords. There hasn't been a lot of talk about slicing vertically and delivering these smaller, bite-size pieces of functionality. As simple API's and technologies like RSS continue to propogate, and as developers start to think in the context of discrete services rather than web pages, the Web is transforming into a Bite-Size Web.

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Posted by richz at 2:04 PM

The Danger of Corporate-Branded Information

Today, the major search engines are widely perceived as service providers that study the world's accessible information, organize and index to provide good, relevant search results. They make their money by presenting targeted ads alongside these results.

There is one tacit and very important understanding in all this: the world's information is non-proprietary. In other words, it is the byproduct of thoughts, ideas, communications, and such that are going to get created anyway and not solely owned by any one entity (especially a search engine). The Big Three know how important impartiality and credibility is. If people stop trusting you, they will stop using you.

But will the search engines only be services that index information that is created elsewhere? Or will they create their own information? Yahoo! and Google already have their own versions of Answers. These are services where "experts" (or anyone really) can answer questions. That "data" is created and housed by the search providers. Nick Carr points out that there's an odd disparity in search results that seems to favor their own versions Answers. He astutely points out that the key metric in all this - relevance - seems to have been compromised.

I don't disagree. In fact, I think this speaks to a larger trend that I think we're going to start to see: these "service providers," in order to stay competitive and stay ahead, are going to do more than just passively index the world's information. They're going to move towards creating it and owning it. Much of Google's strategy is about not only being the after-the-fact search engine, but the place where information is created or acquired, is housed and is shared. Documents. Emails. Monitoring search habits. Even more pervasively, providing their own versions of Internet access.

It's all about getting a head start. To compete, it's far easier to help create that body of knowledge than to go find it. You can have a hand in not only the artifact itself, but the context, motive and structure that brought it to life.

The danger here is towards the integrity of information. If left unchecked, these utilities (and they are really evolving into "utility companies") will shift the ownership of information from that of the public domain into their own respective proprietary arenas. What may be local listings or health advice from one provider may be very different for another. People today assume that information is somehow sacredly protected and relegated to the public realm.

Ultimately, it is the tension between getting your customers to trust you and getting ahead of the competition. We can all hope that a freely competitive milieu will somehow police itself, but that's wishful thinking in my opinion.

As search engines evolve into information creators and proprietors, the "good faith" bar should be raised. Will that information make it back into the world? How quickly? In some modified form or as it was intended? The Big Three are no longer passive spectators. They aren't even just active participants. They are orchestrating. And with that power comes a greater responsibility to maintain the integrity of