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Posted by richz at 6:15 PM

I Want a New iPod Nano and I Feel Stupid About It: A Frivolous Meditation on iPods and Immortality

Youth is to all the glad reason of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.

- Thomas Carlyle

I want a new iPod Nano.

I saw an ad for it. I’m not really sure where. It might’ve just been a billboard or a bus stop or something. Soon after, I decided I wanted one.

I don’t need one. Not only do I not need one, I can’t even put together a case for how I would even make use of one. I already own an iPhone 4 with tons of memory. My entire music collection is already in my pocket. The iPhone 4 is a far better experience for listening to music.

So why do I want one?

I wanted one because it’s new. Amazon lists it precisely as:

Apple iPod nano 16 GB Graphite (6th Generation) NEWEST MODEL

Generations of iPod nanos have lived before this one. They’ve all died before this generation. They paved the way. This sixth generation will die soon as well, probably in about a year.

I want this new nano because it represents something beyond storage size and sound quality. iPods flattened out in terms of core features years ago. It would be nothing more than a burden for me.

So why do I want one?

I want one because it’s newness represents new life. We are willing to spend money on useless, frivolous objects because they represent immortality and renewal. They represent youth and freshness. They are our own feeble attempts to defy time and find new hope and possibility.

In a warped sense we’re all grandparents, clamoring for our sons and daughters to get on with it and get us some grandkids already. As we face the inevitable march of time, we crave these opportunities for renewal.

iPods. Cars. TV’s. They all tap into our basic primal desire to live forever. We don’t want a rugged, upgradeable iPod. We want the illusion of starting over.

Posted by richz at 10:50 AM

The New Clutter

There’s a new kind of clutter littering Web pages. It’s not just the obnoxious “Refinance your mortgage” ads plastered atop and alongside articles. It’s also not just the animated nonsense that floats by as you’re trying to read.

It’s the article itself.

In the never-ending quest to get page views, the choices writers and editors are making to attract eyeballs and drive traffic are creating a new breed of low-brow, gimmicky disposable content. At its best it adds little insight and at its worst amounts to a slimy bait-and-switch (catchy headline, nothing to say in the article).

It’s the new clutter. The article itself has devolved into a flashing, animated pile of fluff. The casualty of the rat race towards ad impressions isn’t just crappy layout and thoughtless art direction. It’s awful and useless content. The formula is pretty straightforward: catchy headline, hot topic of the day, add a dash of controversy, stir into a gooey mixture and bake for ten minutes. Even better: take a jab at someone who’s on top: Apple, Facebook, etc. People love to shoot Goliath (or at least shoot in his general direction).

So where’s the good writing on the Web? It’s everywhere else. The interesting new perspectives and provocative thinking isn’t coming from Gizmodo and Silicon Alley. It’s the blogger I’ve never heard of that is blowing me out of my chair these days. They’re not writing with a hidden agenda. They’re not following a Gawker Media Formula For Success (internal guidelines that must exist).

This type of clutter only goes away if business models change and the mechanisms for determining success change along with them. There are too many good writers producing clutter on the Web today.

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Posted by richz at 10:59 AM

A Short Story On How Not To Share Things

Imagine I bake a delicious batch of cookies. They’re still warm and mushy. I put them into a bowl while they’re nice and warm and walk them into the living room where a group of my friends are lounging around. I sit down and they get a whiff of my fresh batch of cookies.

I’m proud of my cookies and I look forward to sharing them and hopefully getting a few compliments in return. I put the bowl forward for all to share and enjoy. As soon as someone reaches for one, I grab their hand by the wrist.

“$0.75…please.”

That’s not nice. In fact, it’s rude. This is why I think paywalls will fail on the Web. They’re not nice and they’re rude.

Posted by richz at 4:06 PM

Why We Built Readability

Over at the Arc90 blog, I share some thoughts on why we built Readability and where we plan on taking it. It’s an interesting time. The big players – the players that can afford to build their own mini-Internets - are already battling it out.

For us, it’s about doing it on the Web. It’s about elevating the Web providing amazing experiences around content. It will require great tools and a fair amount of discipline, but the Web can become the premium place to explore and consume quality content.

Look out for where we’re taking Readability this summer. It’s going to be fun.

Posted by richz at 10:32 AM

Growing Old Friends

Every day, many times a day, millions of people snub millions of other people on the Internet. It happens amongst those of us that are fortunate enough (or unfortunate – depending on your viewpoint) to have crossed a relatively modest threshold of social connections facilitated by the Internet and more specifically email.

The typical snubbing goes something like this:

You’re introduced to someone in person or you reach out to someone that you think is worth connecting with. You send an email.
They respond and thank you for the note and convey that they’d love to meet up some time for a drink or lunch or coffee or whatever.
You follow up with them and they never respond. Ever.

I can attest that this has happened to me. I can also shamefully attest that I’ve done this to others. I promise a follow-up and I never actually follow up.

Here’s the ugly reality of email overload: the outcome isn’t just a cluttered inbox. It’s countless people waiting to be acknowledged and – dare I say – respected. But we simply can’t do it. We can only handle so much at a time. The incredible efficiency of email and other communication tools have far outpaced and blown out our own expectations of how we should respectfully and properly communicate with one another.

As I stare at my countless emails, I know for certain that there are senders in there that deserve a response and probably won’t get it. Many times a day, every day we send the following signal to those waiting on the other end:

“I haven’t gotten to you because there are others that are more important to me right now and, I’m sorry to say, you just haven’t made it up the list.”

Doesn’t it sound awful? This is exactly what we do when the flow of emails come in. We prioritize in real-time. The chosen few will get a response. Some will get one almost immediately. The rest? They get nothing. They don’t even get a “sorry, I’m very busy right now” response. They get silence.

When we do run into someone we’ve failed to respond to, we usually pile on the “…I’ve just been so slammed with work and the whole conference thing that I just haven’t been able to catch up!” The other person usually just smiles and looks away. They understand where they’ve landed on the priority list.

Everyone applauds the hyper-connectedness we’re experiencing today. The truth is we can’t really leverage it in a very meaningful way. There are a chosen few that get proper attention, the rest just end up in a sort of long tail of human connections. They’re relegated to an almost trivial status – only acknowledged as a scored point on your “friends” or “followers” tally.

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion of late about what the Internet is doing to our brains. Nick Carr is leading the charge with a recent Wired feature and a new book called The Shallows. In short, the barrage of information that comes at us via the Internet is rewiring our brains. We’re optimizing ourselves for short, fleeting bursts of information. The capacity to focus and think deeply is under threat. I agree with much of Carr’s thinking because I’m experiencing it first hand.

Carr makes a compelling argument on the psychological impact of the Internet. What’s most unnerving to me is that some of the “content” I’m consuming (or expected to consume) isn’t a book or an article. It’s people. My diminishing ability to focus and give due attention is actually having a social impact on the people I know and the people that attempt to connect with me.

A new social protocol is emerging. We’re starting to sense that we can’t really give one another due attention. The outcome is a dilution of the basic building blocks of social mores. Words like “friend” or “connection” have been watered down and our expectations around them have diminished as well.

Take each of us in this shallow state that Carr describes and put us in a Petri dish. How will we connect? Do we just buzz around occasionally bumping into another? Can we connect deeply? Will we give one another the chance to form the subtle but deep roots that connect people in a meaningful way?

I don’t think anyone can predict how we’ll adjust and tweak our behavior to deal with these changes. We’re flooded with information today, but it doesn’t linger. It doesn’t stick around and age. The best social connections we can make are the ones that we keep around and cultivate. I hope we don’t lose that capacity to give worthwhile connections their due attention. As the writer and critic John Leonard said: “It takes a long time to grow an old friend.”

Posted by richz at 5:54 PM

The Admiral's Club & The Junkyard: What Would We Pay For In Today's Web?

When new concepts or constructs are introduced to us, we tend to quickly cement our perceptions about them into stereotypes. Over time, these stereotypes firm up and solidify. They become quite difficult to undo.

The Web today is understood to be "free" in the broadest sense. Here's the general stereotype around the Web today:

Don't put toll booths all over the Web. Let me go where I please and don't charge me money to see anything I want. It's ok to advertise because I understand you need to make money somehow, but don't charge me for content.

By "Web" I mean it in the narrower sense: browsing Web pages in your Web browser.

The above is buttressed by the loftier, more romantic notions around freedom (of both choice and information) and the general notion that the Web is the great democratizer of today. Anyone can publish, distribute and consume content on the Web today with very little cost or effort.

Welcome to the Junkyard

With such preconceived notions firmly in place, the people that create and deliver quality content on the Web (and by "quality" I don't mean your sister-in-law's blog) have created what amounts to an experience akin to wading through a junkyard. Ads on top, on the side, sliding down, peeling off, exploding. It's an awful experience.

It's so awful, in fact, that I believe that people will pay good money to experience a different kind of Web. This isn't just about delivering an "ad free" version of the New York Times. It's about creating an experience that is engaging, elegant and worthy of distinction.

We make this distinction all the time in the real world. VIP areas in clubs. First class and business class in airlines. Higher-end versions of all sorts of products from cars to coats to dog food. People have shown they're willing to pay for a better experience. In fact, a better experience is the primary differentiator. The extra $2.50 you pay into your Starbucks coffee isn't about the coffee. It's about the place, the quality of the cup and lid and yes – it's a bit about the coffee too.

Shun the Web at Your Own Peril

A few months ago, the New York Times released a product called the NY Times Reader. It's a desktop application that presents a cleaner, less-cluttered experience around reading the Times. They charge money for it (it's free to the paper's subscribes). It's a nice little app but my guess is the Times isn't seeing much traction on the Reader (I don't know this for certain, but my guess it's a niche market for such a tool).

So if people are willing to pay for that elevated experience, why didn't the Times Reader take off? It didn't take off is that it isn't the Web. It's this whole other thing that the world didn't really need. The Times feared the stereotype of the Web described above. They could've created a first class experience right in your Web browser, but they feared repercussions of putting a wall up on the Web.

Why?

Why not keep on delivering the same'ol NY Times with flying Apple ads to the masses for free and also deliver a World Class version of the Times that really takes it to another level in my browser? Would people pay for it? I think they would. As Readability has shown, people are crying out for a better reading experience inside their Web browser. While all the love for Readability has done wonders for Arc90's collective self-esteem, let's not kid ourselves. It's not that people love Readability, it's that they hate what the Web has become.

The thought shift that needs to occur isn't around charging money to see content. It's about charging money for a better experience. I want the equivalent of an Admiral's Club at the airport. I want to sip my wine and read the Wall Street Journal while the masses stumble over their bags trying to get through security.

The hurdle the NY Times and others need to get past is the overwhelming fear around messing with our view of what the "free Web" is today. App stores charge money for mobile "apps" and nobody flinches because they're not viewed as part of the Web. Desktop software enjoys the same general perception.

Eventually, someone's going to plant a stake in the ground and have a go at it. And eventually, something is going to stick. Content on the Web today reminds me of how music was littered all over Napster's scrap yard years ago. Yes, it was free, but it was one big stinkin' mess. "Yes, it was messy, but would people every pay for music?" I think that question's already been answered.

We need the iTunes experience for today's Web content.

Posted by richz at 10:23 AM

On The Web, More Isn’t Only Less, It’s Actually Nothing

There is always news. Regardless of how newsworthy particular information is, newspapers have to put out the morning paper. No matter how little or no news there is, we’re still going to get “the news” every day.

Every so often, the newspapers resort to banal gossip pieces for the front cover (if they’re the New York Post) or featured investigative reporting that isn’t necessarily timely (if they’re the New York Times). This happens when there really isn’t anything major to report.

Now imagine that, rather than a daily release of news that hits your doorstep every morning, it’s every few hours or every hour or all the time. A never-ending printing press. Welcome to the Internet.

Take a look at these old Techmeme headlines. It’s a page full of news from May 2009, but really it isn’t news. It’s just what’s being talked about at any given time in the constant 24-hour information stock exchange that is the Internet.

An often-cited reason for the looming downfall of newspapers goes something like this: “the Internet blew away the Old Media’s monopoly on information.” Yes, we can get news instantly, all the time and from an endless array of sources. But the Internet did something else to the news. By putting everyone on a 120MPH highway, it left very little room for value judgment and discretion around what is or isn’t worth talking about. Take a look at any highly successful blog or new media source and you’ll find 50-100 posts per day. If Samsung comes out with a higher capacity battery for one of their mobile phones, Gizmodo is going to write about it.

The collateral damage isn’t so obvious but it’s undoubtedly there. Amidst my 400 unread Boing Boing links are probably ten or fifteen that are probably real gems. But I’ll never know and Boing Boing sure as hell isn’t going to help me out. The strange irony here is that the end result isn’t more information, it’s less. Instead of wading through the 400 posts, I simply ignore them all. I just try convince myself: “the good stories will somehow find me.”

These days, they’re finding me less and less. Someone needs to package it up for me on a daily basis. Maybe deliver it in a nice readable form every morning…

Posted by richz at 11:13 AM

Addicted To Nothing

We are addicted to nothing. Wait, let me rephrase that: we’re addicted to being addicted. No, that’s not really it. We’re addicted to “the next thing.” Or more accurately, the “next bunch of things.” What those things are is irrelevant. We actually don’t care about their substance. We just care that they are:

Brand spankin’ new
Never seen before
Unknown
Not old
Fresh

We’re addicted to the delta; to the unread stuff that we haven’t found yet that constantly flows at us from seemingly everywhere.

Doesn’t this:

Inbox (11)

Look far more satisfying than this:

Inbox

Look how pale and skinny the empty Inbox looks. Nothing new to offer. For all we know, most of those eleven new messages are either spam or drivel. It doesn’t matter. They’re brand new. They’re an unopened gift. They’re yet another little surprise. And most importantly, they come from other people. Nobody cares about new stuff that comes from machines (not yet at least).

If your inbox is cocaine. Twitter is crack cocaine. It feeds the same beast far more effectively. The constant-ness and ever-newness of Twitter is what makes it so wildly popular. It’s not about the substance of each of those tweets. None are very life-changing. It’s about the sheer volume of stuff that is constantly produced.

I follow 50 people on Twitter. With all due respect to this esteemed group, nothing anyone says is very interesting. Wait, some of it is sort of interesting…for a moment. Sometimes I smirk. Sometimes I click through to a link. But generally speaking, it’s all a bunch of frivolous bullshit coming at me. It’s stuff flying across the CNN ticker constantly. Developing Story. It never really stops developing does it? It just goes on and on.

And yet I’m hooked. I’m hooked to the delta of stuff that I’ve missed since I last checked. As soon as I consume it, it’s all old and stale and I get hit with a tinge of sadness. That’s how addictions go I guess.

I’ll just have to wait for another hit.

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Posted by richz at 9:25 AM

Inventing The Semantic Web…Again

Over at Semantic Universe, they’ve published my article on inventing the semantic web again. The basic premise is that you can come up with a brilliant invention in the lab, but if the masses don’t connect to it (especially if it requires the masses to be fully realized) it’s really not much of an invention.

Few would doubt that the Semantic Web isn’t the “right thing.” The only thing that remains is to figure out how exactly to bring it into the context of people’s individual goals and needs. Until then, it’ll continue to be relegated to academic gymnastics.

Posted by richz at 9:25 AM

Big Media’s Big Head Start

A common theme that tech pundits enjoy ruminating over is the mass democratization of media by way of the Internet. The line goes something like this:

Gone are the days of an extreme concentration of power to mass communicate. Large television networks are giving way to an endless number of video “channels” on the Web. Newspaper journalism is engulfed by a wave of newly-enabled publishers that can reach anyone and as often as they like. Distribution channels around music and movies seem antiquated in this new era of immediate-gratification-entertainment delivery.

In other words, the handful of megaphones that a lucky few had (and held onto with sweaty palms) are drowned out. Everybody’s got a megaphone now. I don’t need to be published. I just publish. I don’t need to be signed to my record label. I just put my music out. It’s all one big hyper-specialized sea of endless “channels.” The restrictions are gone. May the best content win.

Not so fast. As we “transition” from this old way of how things work to the new way, the Old Guard has caught onto something: they control the precious few channels that are still far more distributed today.

NYTimes bldg Here’s a random article I pulled up from the New York Times columnist Gail Collins. I have no idea what it's about. I didn’t bother looking. It’s from October, 2008. So what’s so special about this article? It has 437 comments. 437! I’m not trying to take anything away from Ms. Collins, but if comments were any sort of gauge to the power or reach of her message, she’s be absolutely prolific in the blogging world.

But alas, she doesn’t live in the blogging world. She’s a columnist for the New York Times. What traditional publications like the New York Times and others are realizing is that they can translate their favorable position in old media (for lack of a better term) and leap far ahead of guy in his shorts blogging from his bedroom.

Just this morning, I tolerated four minutes of Good Morning America to notice they had a guy twittering during their cooking segment. A handful of times, they mentioned that we should be following them on Twitter. And so, people follow: 397,119 people follow (it’ll probably be more by the time you read this).

As for little ol’ me. Well, I enjoy a modest existence on this blog and I’ve just broken 100 followers on Twitter. Let me pitch my credentials on Larry King and you’ve got a very different story.

New media has tried to create its own megaphones based on mass validation. Delicious, Digg and the like. But it doesn’t really work. The celebrities (and yes, a link has its 15 minutes of fame too) come and go very quickly. It’s a transient existence. There have been a few bona fide new media franchises: Perez Hilton and Boing Boing come to mind, but they’re very few and far between.

I’m not trying to suggest some ugly conspiracy where Old Media slowly seeps into new media. It isn’t just about big media’s head start. It’s also about new media’s inability to provide a limited number of reliable sources that we can count on to consistently give us good content. That’s the problem with enabling the masses. You’re left dealing with the masses.

And so, it pains me to know there’s a really incredible blogger out there that I’ll never find…unless she goes on Larry King.

Posted by richz at 1:22 PM

Fullsize : Building On The Good Ol’ Web

There’s a great little pitch at www.addfullsize.com :

Fullsize is an attempt to get a new <IMG> attribute called fullsize into the next version of HTML. Hopefully this site will get the attention of the W3C, and they will add fullsize to HTML and make it a standard.

In essence, it’s trying to cut through all the libraries, tools, frameworks and technical hoops you have to jump through and propose a really simple way to create full size views of images. The creator (Drew Wilson) even created a JQuery plugin the drive the point home. It’s a very slick useful little tool.

What bugs me about ideas like that is that their path to true adoption is at the mercy of the W3C (HTML 5 anyone?) and worse, the cabal of web browser providers. I’ve written in the past about how the new wave of dynamic, AJAX-y Web stuff is great and all but it left a massive population of enablers behind. Tools like Fullsize are brave attempts to invite the masses back into the fold.

What we need is a way to flip a switch and enable simple, easy-to-use additions like Fullsize with very little additional work. How about a way to get this stuff out there without waiting seven years for the W3C or Internet Explorer 9?

I may have to bug the mad scientists at the Arc90 lab for this one…

Posted by richz at 10:33 AM

The Internet’s New Inconveniences

The Internet is awesome, right?

It’s so awesome that it’s changing entire landscapes and uplifting whole business sectors. The music industry is all confused. Newspapers are gasping for air. Television and film are trying to sort themselves out. During the dot-com era, we just thought the damage would be contained to bricks & mortars (“Watch out Home Depot!”).

You can debate the good or bad of it and wax nostalgically about how good books and newspapers feel in your hands, but you can’t question the undeterred march of the Internet. It is rendering once vibrant and alive business models dead.

The latest flailing victims are the newspapers. News is dead by the time it gets on paper today. The stranglehold on the dissemination of information is no more. News is everywhere, all the time and delivered to us not by some cabal of journalists but by everybody. Say a prayer for the specialized magazines of the world as well. The day of hyper-specialization (outdoor speaker fetish anyone?) is upon us. Anything you want is out there for you, immediately.

Asking how newspapers will survive is like asking how a terminally ill patient will survive. It’s the wrong question. In their current form, newspapers won’t survive. They may exist in some new form with their brands and good will in tact, but good’ol survival isn’t really in the cards. So the question remains: in this day and age of all-the-information-you-want-all-the-time-instantaneously, what could we possibly want newspapers for?

Well, it turns out the Internet brought along its own baggage. It isn’t just the information I want or the information I care about. It’s everything. Everything is coming at me all the time. I am left flagging, tagging, saving, emailing, printing, starring and occasionally ducking for my life as all this stuff comes at me from all sides.

Here’s why I still visit the NY Times regularly: I know that the staff of the NY Times is adhering to a certain level of quality and integrity around what they publish. The NY Times has reserve of good will it’s afraid to lose. As such, they care about what they put out. Everything that lives under their domain name can make or break their reputation.

The outcome for me isn’t just that I get quality journalism and Op Ed pieces. For me, it’s significant: I know that what lives underneath their masthead has been scrutinized and filtered for my benefit. There’s an implicit contract between the NY Times and myself. They deliver content of some basic level of quality and I continue to value their good name.

Swarms of bloggers are not going to replace newspapers because for them there is no masthead. There is no brand to squander away with shoddy reporting or idiotic commentary. The ones that do gain my respect do so by doing two things:

They consistently put out quality content.
They don’t leave it to me to be editor-in-chief.

The second point is the real kicker. I love Andrew Sullivan and I enjoy Gizmodo, but you’re doing me no favors by posting 45 times a day. At that rate, you’re talk radio. I may listen in for 15 minutes but the rest of the time you’re not talking to me.

Newspapers already have a head start today. Any average editorial piece will garner hundreds of comments. As an independent blogger, I can only dream of such a discussion around anything I write. The question that remains is what to do with all those eyes and all that good will.

Newspapers need to dive into that swarm of content out there and provide a service: find the good stuff for me so I don’t have to. I trust the NY Times and if they decide to publish or republish something, I know they’ve made certain that it isn’t garbage.

The Internet is amazing, but it isn’t tailored for me. I need help figuring out what's worth my time. The cockroach that survives this annihilation isn’t the means of distribution, it’s the brands. Whether it’s the old brands like the Times or someone new, the value of editorializing and filtering will be associated with some brand that I trust and respect. Those brands that make sense of all this insanity will win.

So where’s the business model in all this? I’m not really sure. I can only speak from a prospective customer’s perspective. I spend approximately 35% of my time sifting and the rest of my time digesting all the information that comes my way.

If someone can give me that time back and only hand over the quality stuff, I' would pay for it. I’d pay a pretty penny to make those inconveniences go away.

Posted by richz at 9:12 AM

Bulletin: Social Web Apps Are Turning Us Into Infants

The Guardian reports that Lady Greenfield, Professor of synaptic pharmacology at Oxford and the director of the Royal Institution, is warning that social sites on the Internet are turning us all into a collection of blabbering infants. Some choice quotes:

[S]ocial networking sites "are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity".

Oops. Greenfield goes on to put forward the possibility that there’s a link between all this short attention-span theater and the tripling of prescriptions for attenion-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Oops again.

Another interesting observation:

Social networking sites can provide a "constant reassurance – that you are listened to, recognised, and important".

This facet of it is really interesting to me. Growing up, I never had casual friends, only a few close friends. As we gather buddies, followers and “friends” through social networks, you can’t help but wonder if this key distinction – from a real friend to one that you added to your list on Facebook – will be lost on a new generation (or already is).

Posted by richz at 10:04 AM

Here Comes The Hurricane. Let’s Go Surfing!

Yes, these are trying days for most businesses. Cutbacks, layoffs, the rounds of statistics seems never-ending. It all seems to be signaling the same thing:

Hunker down, board up the windows and ride out the storm.

This looks like prudent advice, but that’s not what everyone is doing. In the midst of all this chaos and uncertainty, some actually take risks and exploit the dynamics at play.

Tim Meaney’s maiden blog post on the brand-spankin’ new Kindling blog explores these ideas further:

Companies that invest in their future during this period, a period where existing markets are shrinking or drying up entirely, stand a better chance of emerging out of this in a stronger position than competitors that do not.

Well put.

For the unfamiliar, the Kindling Blog is a resource for discussions around innovation and ideas within groups, and of course Kindling.

Note: The title for this post was inspired by this dude:

Posted by richz at 2:06 PM

Welcome To The Biggest Laboratory Ever

Spreading around the ol’ blog-o-sphere is Google’s Flu Trends. In essence:

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together.

Pretty cool. Really cool actually. What Google is doing here is combining a couple of dimensions of data: where you are geographically and flu-related search queries to determine how the flu virus is spreading.

A few years ago, I talked about Google Base and what I then called the “Incidental Semantic Web.” In short, what I was talking about then is how the monitoring or mining of data artifacts out of selfish behavior can lead to some really interesting insights. That’s exactly what’s happening here.

We search for flu remedies and symptoms on Google because we’re selfishly motivated to learn more. We have no interest in contributing to some database that reports on the spread of the flu. That selfish motivation is precisely why Google can trust (relatively speaking) the data coming in. In other words, this ability to predict the spread of the flu is an incidental byproduct of millions of discrete, selfish acts.

I think this is just the beginning. Imagine synthesizing results from not only search queries, but eating habits (via “smart” refrigerators), drug interactions (RFID is making its way onto prescription bottles) and many other "sources” of data. For example, imagine finding a a far less likelihood of diabetes in cultures that eat extraordinary amounts of cauliflower.

Today, we take a guess about the correlation of different factors (Vitamin X reduces Disease Y) and kick off a study where we then decide to watch and gather data. Tomorrow, we’ll just check the data that comes out of our everyday lives.

Posted by richz at 6:57 PM

Breaking News: Windows 7 Is Vista

The buzz around Windows 7 is starting to build. Since it was formally introduced by the Windows 7 team, the speculation about features, date of release is starting to get louder and louder. We can all start to hear the humming of the Microsoft PR machine: “The days of suffering through Vista are nearly over. We’re going to right this ship with a new and improved, streamlined operating system.

Guess what kids: Windows 7 is just Vista…with some more stuff. It’ll feel faster and more responsive in some key areas because the Vista team will have finally gotten the opportunity to do the various pieces right. In fact, Microsoft has already drastically improved Vista. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now and the various upgrades (Search 4.0, the Service Pack) have improved things dramatically. The operating system runs very nicely for me.

But all these patches and repairs aren’t going to repair one key bug: the stigma and negative sentiment around Windows Vista. You can’t combat that negativity with a laundry list of patches and updates.

So what do you do if you’re Microsoft? Purge the Vista name and move on. The number “7” just sounds more efficient and streamlined. Yeh, there are a handful of “features” that look more like new mini-apps than a true overhaul. And of course, you’ve got the benefit of a tweaking and cleaning up Vista. Personally, I think Vista has matured into a capable, reliable operating system. But alas, fixing software is one thing, fixing perception is a whole other thing.

I’ve reviewed the changes in 7 and honestly, it looks really promising. The mindset seems to be all about streamlining and improving the user experience. I’m all for it. But don’t be fooled. This is Microsoft rebooting the Windows brand.

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Posted by richz at 9:09 AM

Documents & Settings 2.0

Anyone that’s used Windows XP in the last 10 years knows about the venerable Documents & Settings folder. It’s essentially a user-centric dumping ground where your “documents” (i.e. just about any asset you create) and your application-specific settings were stored.

Of course, it was a lot more complicated than that. You couldn’t ever just grab your documents and settings folder and just drop it on a new PC and hope things will go well. Installed applications have free reign to store their settings just about anywhere, including the system registry and other folders.

Part of the appeal of cloud-based hosted applications like Gmail and the Zoho suite is that they not only store your applications, but your data (“documents”) and state (“settings”) in one convenient place. It’s a pretty compelling selling point. Let’s take a look at each facet of what is really “stored” online.

The Application Itself

Let’s face it. It’s far more convenient to visit a URL than get hold of a CD installation disc and install. When we install software locally, It ends up in only one place (instead of everywhere) and updates are cumbersome at best (via patches and updates).

Unfortunately, online applications aren’t anywhere near the power and richness of desktop applications. Think Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a powerful and abundantly rich desktop application. It’s safe to say that a Web-based equivalent of Illustrator is years away. Even Web-based spreadsheet applications can’t compete with the power and speed of their desktop counterparts. So while Web-based applications are great, they’re just not their yet. Even applications like Google Spreadsheets feel slow and crippled compared to their desktop siblings.

Your Documents

Another convenience of online applications is that they keep track of your created assets like spreadsheets or documents online. This is also very convenient. You can easily pull up your assets without lugging your laptop around. There really is no reason to have the assets you create located in one offline location. This is one of the most appealing aspects of online apps: my stuff is available to me wherever I am.

Still, as mentioned above, I’m still married to certain desktop applications. Despite the ability to store my created assets in the cloud, the disparity between online and desktop apps is very wide. My own solution is to use a smart syncing platform like Dropbox or Microsoft’s Live Mesh. Both of these tools nicely sync up specially designated folders to the cloud. Everywhere I go, I’m able to access my stuff and I still get to use my heavy duty desktop applications like Microsoft Word and Photoshop.

Your Settings

Here’s the most serious missing link for desktop applications. Regardless of which machine I’m sitting down on at home or at work, my copy of Illustrator should boot up and have my palettes, my toolbars and my own specific settings ready to go. Today this is nearly impossible because desktop applications today are not designed to abstract out and isolate their settings to a more portable state.

While my documents are syncing nicely everywhere, I still find myself configuring and reconfiguring toolbars on my different installations. It’s not an overly complex tweak to make settings portable, but software developers need to buy into it.

My Portable Hack

One of the coolest hacks I’ve been able to pull off is to drop my portable version of Firefox into a Live Mesh folder. Since everything is self-contained under the install folder, my Firefox state syncs up on my three devices. My awesome bar, bookmarks, current set of tabs, even the add-ons I install sync up seamlessly across all my devices. It’s pretty great.

The Right Recipe

I would love to see more desktop software developers think about settings differently and more portably. We’ve solved the documents problem for the most part, but the wall still exists between the way state is treated online versus the desktop. There are a few rare exceptions. Digsby, a universal IM client, stores your settings on their server. Instead of setting up your four or five individual IM accounts every time you install it, you simply log into your Digsby account and your settings are downloaded instantly. Smart.

Beyond documents and settings, this is about bridging the chasm between desktop software building and web software building. Eventually, the two cultures need to realize they’re addressing the same set of problems. It’s not an either/or scenario. It’s about leveraging the strengths of each to come up with something better than either can deliver alone.

[Ed. – I apologize for the use of the '”2.0” label in the title of this post. I know the term has been beaten to death, but I’m simply not ready to give it up. Hey, at least I didn’t jump on the cornball 3.0 bandwagon.]

Posted by richz at 10:09 AM

Google, Billboards And The Threat Of The Side Streets

Here are a couple of snapshots showing off Internet Explorer’s new Visual Search capability.

I pulled both off of the IEBlog. Their most recent post explains how anyone can integrate Visual Search results by pointing the way to an Opensearch Description file.

What struck me about this feature is how truly dangerous it can be to the likes of Google (well, really just Google, there are no other relevant search engines out there). I use Google search all day long. I spend an average of 5-15 seconds on Google search results. Google, for me and for many that use it, is just a trajectory point. It’s a brief trip on the speedway before we jump off to the next exit: our real destination. Those few seconds are precious to Google. By rendering themselves indispensible to getting to where you want to go, they’ve assured millions (or billions) of travelers will use their highway.

Nick Carr put it nicely:

For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes.

Google’s “main business” is search ads. Plain and simple. So long as you need to travel through Google’s highways, you’ll be barraged with billboards that make up Google’s bread and butter. Of course Google would love for you to stick around longer and rely on them for more than search. That’s why you have a wide array of Google services out there. But let’s not delude ourselves, Google nailed search and search is their cash cow.

But what if the highway went away? What if I

didn’t need to navigate through Google to see search results? What if the search experience – an experience that is very transient to begin with – became a desktop experience, or an edge-of-the-browser experience? In that world, where would the ads go? In short: what if we don’t need the highway anymore?

There’s an additional dimension to “do online” that I think Nick fails to cover. Today, “being online” pretty much means being inside your web browser (and a bit of instant messaging). But as the Internet evolves, and as we shift from the page-based paradigm to a packet-based paradigm (think Twitter and RSS) and as developers build more custom-tailored services that live outside of the browser, that highway becomes less relevant. What if I could just take the side streets? Without a highway, where will they put the billboards?

So how does Google keep you on the highway? Well, one way is to provide destinations of their own as mentioned above. Another way is to get on your desktop…somehow. Google Desktop has been around for awhile. Google Chrome (Google’s new browser) is another attempt to have a hand in dispersed content and services on the desktop. Google isn’t shy about staying involved in your online life, and they shouldn’t be.

Google may end up in an odd spot. They may find themselves fighting against a technology trend because it threatens their core business. That’s an awkward place for a technology company to be. Just ask Microsoft.

Posted by richz at 1:04 PM

Centralized Headaches

Gmail had its biggest failure yesterday. Both Google Apps and regular Gmail users were affected. For many people at work here at Arc90 - there was no way to get to your email. The outage affected tens of millions of users.

Email is not about sending and receiving messages anymore. It is about storage. It is about your professional and/or personal archive that you dip into many times a day. With a solution like Gmail, we've chosen to centralize everything: the user interface, our history of information (both messages and attachments) as well as the all-important task of sending and receiving mail. And here lies the flaw around such over-zealous centralization: when it goes down, it all goes down. Let's just be thankful that our data returned this time around. The worst-case scenario is the permanent annihilation of our email history.

Centralized Data

There is no reason why our email history should be soley centrally stored and tapped as needed by a web browser or mobile device. For all time, email lived in numerous places, especially in enterprise environments. Outlook may tap Exchange server for messages, but it mirrored your content locally. If your Exchange server went down, you had your data. Now everyone is talking about how we all need Google Sync for Gmail so we can recreate the benefit of mirroring local and cloud storage. A common, widely-available feature in enterprise email is now highly sought after again in an unduly complex, roundabout way. Syncing is a pain in the ass.

Centralized Interface

Imagine your IMAP or Exchange server going down and the outcome isn't just no email but no email client. If the mail server goes down, Outlook or Apple Mail won't load at all. Again, we drank the centralized browser-centric Kool Aid and failed to see how we actually took some steps back. I don't need a server to send down buttons and levers around my information each time I access email. Marc

Which Direction Are We Coming From And Which Way Do We Go?

So which way do we build out? Do we work our way back and out of the browser with tools like syncing and such or should we web enable existing client apps? Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo touched on this very point:

When it first shipped I was looking forward to a platform like Google Gears but after I thought about the problem for a while, I realized that such a platform would be just as useful for "online enabling" desktop applications as it would be for "offline enabling" Web applications. Additionally, I came to the conclusion that the former is a lot more enabling to users than the latter.

The culture of web applications, with its focus on "shipping software" and "access anyware," has gleaned over key features that while not sexy or enticing, really show their value when the s%#t hits the fan.

Yesterday was a low probability/high impact event. They are going to happen. What we can do is tweak the chain of dependencies so the failure isn't so centralized and far-reaching. Oddly, it may require that the "revolutionary" culture of Web software take a good look at taking a backseat to desktops for once.

Posted by richz at 6:51 PM

Fight Night : Abstraction vs. Interaction Design

One of the things that differentiate Arc90 from your typical technology shop is our fervent belief in abstraction. Wikipedia has a nice, terse definition (narrowed to computer science):

A concept or idea not associated with any specific instance.

In other words, when we're presented with problems or asked to come up with solutions at Arc90, we'll often go up one level (or two, or three) from the particular problem at hand and think more generically about a solution. This will often result in systems that are more flexible and extensible and less tightly-coupled to the problem at hand. This facilitates reuse and better positions us (and our clients) to deal with similar problems down the road. Very often, we can leverage what we've built with some minor tweaks as new but similar challenges crop up.

There's another benefit to abstraction: it cuts us (or at least part of us) out of the picture. Yes, we could create a new report every time a client asks for one, but why not give them a platform that allows non-technical users the ability to create their own reports as they need them? We just provide the facility, supporting tools and necessary support.

The outcome of such an approach will often lead to establishing and publishing standards around the business artifacts that travel around. XML and loosely-couples services are our friends in this world of abstraction.

Arc90 : Rock Stars!

So all this higher level thinking should give us automatic Rock Star status right? Well, not exactly. We also tout ourselves as a shop that values and imbues design into what we build. Not just software design (we do plenty of that) but experience design and interaction design. There's just one snag: in the world of interaction design, abstraction is not your friend. In fact, it doesn't even exist. Good experience design is paying close attention to exactly what abstraction gleans over: the ugly, exception-riddled reality of everyday business.

A good user interface embraces such realities. Heck, it's based on such realities. Good interface design says: "I want to learn about how your work. I'm here to fit into your world." It's a custom-tailored fit. It's not about meeting a need and positioning for the next twenty needs. It's all about getting it right now.

"And In This Corner...Weighing In At 185lbs..."

So far I've pitted abstraction against interaction design as if they were enemies. This is not the case. Abstraction is all about plotting a strategy around how to build forward-looking software ecosystems. Interaction design is about the very edge of that ecosystem. The edge that is actually touched by people. You can design the most elegant, abstractly-architected system, but if the tools and interfaces don't make sense to end users, what have you really achieved? From the viewpoint of software architecture, experience design is tactical. It's about immediate gratification in many ways. It doesn't care that a particular view requires 20 SQL joins and would "tax the database." It's all about what makes sense to the people using it.

It's an interesting tension that we continue to struggle with at Arc90. We want to build forward-looking, flexible systems but we also don't want to handcuff our clients. Yes, we're empowering them, but with power comes responsibility...and the opportunity to screw things up on a grander scale. Hence the need for well-designed, nicely-tailored tools and interfaces.

"Well Which Is It Young Fella?"

The trick is to separate the two disciplines and to not let one poison the other. An interaction designer shouldn't care about the elegant API that lies underneath. And the software architect shouldn't be designing solely around user goals. It's all about respecting both philosophies and not letting one suffocate the other.

In fact, that separation is critical. Just as it's fatal to think about a software architecture as an afterthought of an interface prototype, it's just as dangerous to view a user interface as an afterthought of a software system. It's about respecting and creating some space for (and between) both disciplines.

This way, nobody gets hurt.

Posted by richz at 11:18 AM

Visiting = Installation

A couple of nights ago, I'm walking through the local market trying to figure out what to whip together for dinner when I quickly convinced myself to just order take-out and save my famed culinary skills for another night.

So I whip out my trusty iPhone (not the new one) and decide to use Modern Technology to order dinner via Seamless Web. So I hit the URL and I wait...and wait...ah here comes some of the interface...I wait some more. I'm still AT&T's crappy EDGE network, so the damn thing is taking forever. But beyond the network, the entire experience of loading the interface before I can get at the content just plain sucks.

Cache Money

One of the slickest features of web browsers, desktop and mobile alike, is the ability to use some smarts to cache the assets that would typically have to go over the wire from servers scattered all over the globe. The dark world of exactly how browser caching works eludes me to this day, but it goes a bit like this:

Browser makes a request for a URL resource and it's related assets.
As the content starts to get served up, the browser realizes that it has a lot of this content so instead of just swallowing all the assets wholesale, it actually has a little conversation with the server to find out if it can just use the same content it retrieved last time (since it hasn't changed) or grab it anew. This is called a conditional GET.

The result is a perceivably better browsing experience...maybe. The rub is that the browser has to do this for every resource - referenced graphics, stylesheets, etc. It's admittedly more complicated than this. If you're the masochistic sort, feel free to peruse the wildly engaging prose behind HTTP/1.1, RFC 261, Section 13.

The caching mechanisms built into today's desktop and mobile browsers are designed to handle typically static content. Newspaper and magazine articles, blog posts, image galleries and the like.

"Please Wait While I Check For Updates To Your Software Every Three Seconds"

Now back to my ten minutes of pain in a supermarket aisle while I wait for Seamless Web to load up on my iPhone. What am I really waiting for? Listings of restaurants? Menus? Nope. I'm waiting for my iPhone and Seamless Web's servers to have a long-winded conversation about how to deliver the interface around Seamless Web. Buttons. Drop-downs. Interface controls.

It's a complete waste of time because for all intents and purposes Seamless Web is an application. It's an application that should live on my iPhone and its content - restaurants and menus - should be the only thing that is delivered on request. Instead, I wait for an unnecessary dialog to occur.

There should be a way to tell a browser: "I'm not a magazine site. I'm a full-blown application. Don't ever bother checking for new content until I tell you to (akin to a "Software Update"). When a user visits my URL, just load it locally." In other words, when I visit Seamless Web, it's interface should pop up instantaneously on my iPhone. Forget the is-it-last-modified nonsense. It should just be there.

Taking The Long Way Home

I'm as excited as the next person about all the cool new applications springing up for the iPhone. Native, Internet-wired applications are cool. The way we've chosen to address the "Web application problem" is to build native applications that tap data services. This way the interface and controls get delivered once and your computer or device only worry about data interchange. Still, it seems like we're taking the long way to get there. Platform-specific SDK's and development tools are a much bigger pain in the ass than straight-up web development with some new caching directives.

Beyond just caching it's about treating certain URL's like applications. Visiting the first time = installing the app. Visiting every time after that = loading the app locally. The primary responsibility for servers is serving up content. Yeh, they also deliver the app (that first visit) but just sometimes - and rarely. For mobile devices, this distinction takes on a whole new urgency. Such devices are ill-equipped to have a rambling dialogue about whether content is new for every graphic and stylesheet. Why bother?

This way I can quickly order Chinese food while loitering the produce aisle of the supermarket. Can you think of a better cause for such change?

Posted by richz at 11:21 AM

Arc90's Ben Sgro At The Last Hope Conference

Arc90's very own Ben Sgro (aka mr-sk) will be giving a talk on Saturday July 19 here in New York City at The Last Hope. The Last Hope is the seventh (and apparently final) Hackers On Planet Earth conference.

Ben is one of our most resourceful and curious ~~hackers~~ engineers. If you're ever in midtown Manhattan, feel free to drop by our offices and pick up some coffee from Crazy Eddie's (our own home-grown in-office coffee shop) via RFID purchase and have the system talk back to you (no I'm not kidding). Here's a summary of Ben's talk:

The 1970s was an era of technological breakthroughs. Exciting projects and groundbreaking discoveries were made by hackers, government, and commercial entities. Today we should consider ourselves lucky to be sitting in the front row for the birth of the robotics industry. Nearly 40 years after the birth of the computing industry, our lives are merged with the Internet. Similar to the 1970s computing industry, early robotic developments are complex and their practical applications are rare. Less than 40 years from now, our bodies and minds will be merged with the robotics and technologies we are creating today. In our lifetime, we will see software merged with robotics that mimic humans, surpass them, and proceed to yield creations of their own. There will be no distinction between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality. AI, robotics, and other emerging technologies will result in the Singularity; a fundamental paradigm shift for human kind.

This presentation will dive into the Singularity, current and emerging robotics, and discuss where hackers fit into all this. Various robotic platforms will be on display as well.

Fascinating stuff - or creepy, depending on your point of view. Then again, Crazy Eddy has more personality than your typical Starbucks barista these days.

Posted by richz at 12:43 PM

Self-Interest, Narcissism And It's Impact On Data Quality (Or: How Broadway Showtunes Destroyed The Internet)

Netvibes, a pretty sweet portal site with a wealth of features just put out a new feature called Buzz. Today, any user can star an article on Netvibes. Buzz essentially lists out the links that have been starred the most by Netvibes users in the past couple of days (sliced up by 1, 6, 12, 24 and 48 hours). The result is a sort of Digg-like tally. Sort of.

There's a really important but subtle distinction here. Netvibes is not asking anyone to explicitly post or vote on a particular link. Instead, it's simply peering over the shoulder of users that are going about their normal, every day usage.

This distinction is important because it ensures that the results are not polluted by hidden agendas, or skewed by the more heavily weighed votes of superstar users. It's fairly safe to say that the integrity of the data is better because the user goals are selfish.

Yeh, we may star an article because we want it get popular (just as we may tag a link on delicious) but the real end goal for most users is to better organize and file away stuff they like. The problem with sites like Digg is that the end is social. With tools like Buzz and Delicious, the end is personal - with a collective social benefit as a by-product.

Google fights this battle all the time. It's constantly on the look out for sites that are trying to game the Pagerank system to end up higher in search results. Google's power lies in its ability to mine and leverage selfish behavior that is oblivious to collective outcomes. If you don't do that, you end up with a collective outcome that starts to have a singular, self-reinforcing identity. Which to me is more akin to joining a club.

Ultimately, this is about the distinction between machines listening in and explicitly asking. When machines observe and unobtrusively listen in, you get the real story. When they put a microphone in front of you and ask a question, you get aspirations of popularity, validation and celebrity. Youtube and blogs are a great example of how much we like to watch ourselves and hear ourselves talk. The problem arises when we try to put all that information together and find meaning in it. The more its about me, the better the collective outcome. The more its about you noticing me the worse the collective outcome.

Maybe we should be ban Broadway celebrities from the Internet.

Posted by richz at 2:03 PM

How Do You Solve Yahoo's Indigestion? Pass Some Gas!

(I apologize in advance. This is one of my less appetizing metaphors.)

Anyone that follows tech news has undoubtedly heard about the mass exodus out of Yahoo. The departures are a mix of startup-acquired leaders (Flickr and delicious) as well as executives from the Old Guard.

At first glance, it's a pretty shocking to watch the large swaths of Yahoo's leadership disappear. Watching it all from the outside, you'd think the whole company was imploding. The end is near!

Then again...what were all these people doing? I get the funny feeling that nothing will materially change at Yahoo with all these people departing. That's not meant as a knock to the talent that's on its way out. I'm sure they're all very capable people. It's really more a statement about Yahoo's all-over-the-place strategy and how 95% of it is going nowhere.

Yahoo, and Google for that matter, are their very own Internet bubbles. They are, in and of themselves, their very own environments for incubation. They have a handful of revenue-generating businesses that effectively provide "funding" for all the other "startups" that spring up inside their walls. And like most startups, most of them fail. Except that unlike the real world, where running out of money means you stop existing, within a large organization you can politic your way into daddy's pockets to keep subsisting. This leads to the inevitable dragging down of the entire business.

Google is in precisely the same situation. Youtube is wildly popular yet monetization is still a puzzle. Gmail, Google Apps and many other initiatives are themselves ventures that amount to a tiny fraction of Google's revenue. The key difference between Yahoo and Google is that Google's search business is wildly successful, providing significant cushion for these other initiatives (for now at least).

A bubble bursting is a good thing in the long run. It displaces talent and focus and resets expectations. The first wave of Internet startups needed a reboot in 2001. Google and Yahoo are really just bubbles in and of themselves. think it's good for the organization to revisit the value of its various initiatives.

Diverse organizations like Yahoo and Google don't really "burst" per se. Nonetheless, it's healthy to let out some gas every so often. While it may seem like an unraveling to everyone else, it could well be the healthiest thing for Yahoo.

Posted by richz at 9:50 PM

Google, Corn Syrup And Treadmills : Our Boundless Desire For Achievement And Inconvenience

Last week, I pointed to an article by Nick Carr in this month's Atlantic magazine: Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nick talks about how the Internet is having a dramatic effect on how we think. In short, he asserts that the Internet, with all its bite-sized chunks of content, is conditioning our minds such that our ability to focus for longer periods of time and our ability to think more deeply is compromised.

I tend to agree with Nick's theory, though I'm not sure what Google has to do with it (other than making for a snazzier article title). The measurable unit of information is undoubtedly dwindling. From 30 minute sitcoms to two-minute videos. From ten page articles to a two paragraph blog post. From a feature-length album to .99 cent songs on iTunes. I will be the first to admit that I don't let songs finish these days. I also find myself having a lower tolerance for giving a movie a chance. I tried watching Semi Pro (the new Will Ferrell movie) on the plane. I couldn't get past the first 15 minutes (then again, that may be because the movie sucks).

I think there's another dimension to the Internet's impact on our minds that Nick hints at but fails to focus on. As technology and the Internet has evolved, we've outsourced a lot of the mental labor we used to do "in house." Some examples:

We rarely remember phone numbers any more (with the exception of a very small minority). Our cell phones and contact lists take care of it for us.
There is no incentive to worry about recall ability. In the past, information retrieval was part of the mind's responsibility. Between wifi and web-enabled phones, laptops and Google, you rarely need to recall anything anymore. In the mood for Nino's pizza in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NY? Just put in "nino's 11209" and its right there.
Who needs spatial reasoning or a sense of direction? For $99, you can have a GPS device tell you what turns to make to get to your destination.

So beyond the pummeling of our attention spans, we're undoubtedly offloading a lot of mental labor to machines. And the machines are getting more and more powerful. The real magic of Google isn't just finding you what you're looking for, but surmising your intent and then finding you what you're looking for. In other words, as Google gets smarter it requires less and less explanation from us as to our intent. Drop a UPS tracking number or an airline and flight number and you'll see what I mean. Google isn't just searching web pages anymore. Its aspiring to be an extension of our will.

So the real question remains: is this bad for us? Whether we're talking about conditioning our brains to only tolerate 100-word blog posts or offloading any sort of mental tasks to machines, are we setting ourselves up for mental atrophy?

To help try to answer this question, it's worth looking at what's happened to our physical well-being as technology, modern conveniences and most notable the automobile came into our lives. It turns out that dream car culture we all sought after just made us less active and sedentary. Combine that with the mass availability of all kinds of contraptions (people drive lawn mowers) and the mass production of corn syrup-inspired food stuffs, and you end up with an obesity problem. In other words, the conveniences ended up being crutches. We became fat and lazy.

So how do we respond? Well, for the most part, at least in the United States, we haven't formulated much of a response. We've just now started to acknowledge obesity as an epidemic. Still, we're consciously aware of the need to stay fit. So how do we make sure our physical body stays in shape in a world where physical activity has been deemed unnecessary? Well, our answer is to simulate worlds of inconvenience. Say hello to the treadmill.

A treadmill is a ridiculous contraption. It serves no real purpose at all. Imagine how a 16th century farmer would respond to the sight of a treadmill. He would demand to see the real ends of such a machine. Does it create electricity? Does it churn butter? Does it power a mill? Your neighborhood gym (you know, the one you signed up to but rarely visit) is a Museum Of Human Inconvenience. It's our way of staying healthy and feeling good in the midst of the luxuries of modern living.

Google is corn syrup for our brains. It's a man-made invention that tastes really good. It's cheap. And it's damn convenient. Just as our modern physical conveniences led to physical atrophy, our informational conveniences will lead to mental atrophy. The question is whether we'll become consciously aware of our fat and lazy brains and invent the equivalent of a modern exercise club for our minds.

In the end, I think we'll be OK. Just as we can't help but stay active in the physical world, many of us will feel compelled to "fill up" all that newly-available mental bandwidth with new exercises and fresh thinking. Our circuitry is already wired for us to seek out goals and then go after them. We can't help it. While these luxuries (or crutches) will continue to permeate our lives and potentially make us dumber (or softer), our innate desire to seek out, pursue and achieve something does not go away.

Even if that "something" may be six miles on a treadmill.

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Posted by richz at 2:06 PM

You Say You Want A (Web) Revolution?

A revolution is all about a mass uprising. To cook up a revolution, you need a few key ingredients:

A mass of people with a common cause (it also helps if they're really pissed off with the status quo).
An articulation of the cause, ideally presented in a digest or pamphlet form for easy consumption.
And of course, a way out. In other words, a real, tangible way out of the existing status quo.

The last bullet is key because it's not enough to just pass off some fantastical scheme to change the world. The way out needs to make sense and be somewhat grounded in reality. In other words, you need to enable and empower the masses. The status quo can really suck but if the masses don't see a way out and feel confident in it, you're not going to get that mass uprising.

Notepad.exe Is Mightier Than The Sword

Fifteen years ago or so, the Web showed up and almost immediately, the masses were armed. Just about anyone could quickly make sense of HTML. You could create an experience...with graphics! Soon after, you could add sound (.wav files!) and animation (animated GIF's!) to really create an amazing (at least it felt that way back then) experience. Let's forget for a second that anyone in the world could visit your creations. Let's go back to...oh I don't know...1989. What would it take to create an entire interactive experience that included content, graphics and sound? Forget word processing documents. You can't really interact with those. You needed development tools and a computer science degree.

After the Internet landed, the only prerequisite was notepad.exe. The creation of software was wrestled away from the object-oriented C pseudo-aristocracy and handed back to the masses. The masses were given a way out, and a true revolution ensued. The brave among us even dipped their toe in Javascript.

The content explosion that became the Internet eventually would evolve even further as non-programmer types slashed and hacked their way through old-school Active Server Pages. Other technologies like Coldfusion and PHP sought to take the masses even further. You didn't need a computer science degree to change the world.

Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

Fast forward to 2003 or so, and we start to see glimpses of something exciting happening to the Web again. People started to hang around an obscure back alley of Javascript that would eventually redefine the Web experience for good. Google Maps was born ("whoah, what is this?") and Jesse James Garrett (insert Ennio Morricone music here) slapped a label on it: Ajax.

Before you knew it, really exciting things were happening on the web. Web applications were starting to feel like real (i.e. desktop) applications. And the line between the browser and the desktop was getting a whole lot blurrier.

Throughout this Second Coming, various technology leaders began putting forth technologies to truly marry the power and reach of the Web and web services with rich, powerful clients that run on your desktop. In addition, frameworks like JQuery and Prototype have made rich web building a lot easier (thought it's still pretty hard).

And so the race has begun to convince the masses to yet again join another revolution. There's just one problem: there is no way out this time. The scepter has been handed back to the former ruling class. To really create exciting things, you need a computer science degree. Actionscript 3, the backbone of technologies like Flash, Flex and Adobe AIR is a full-blown strongly-typed programming language. Microsoft's Silverlight and WPF simply arm the masses that are already building .Net desktop applications.

Even Javascript, once the playground of curious hackers, has been hijacked by computer scientists. People are actually programming properly on Javascript today, which sucks for everybody else.

Webmasters Unite!

I'm not going to be delusional and presume that all this new stuff doesn't require some additional skills. The interactions are undoubtedly more complex. Yes, the brave among us are free to venture forth and learn these new skills. What I'm asserting here is that the keepers of the Web platforms of the future: Adobe, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple and others have failed to think through making their platforms accessible to the non-programmer types that made the Web what it is today. In other words, they've failed to enable and empower the masses. The guy who knew how to edit HTML and fiddle with Javascript is completely turned off by the Web of today. There is no avenue of empowerment.

How important is empowerment? Why not just let the computer scientists do their thing? It's important because when you empower the masses, you discover new conduits towards invention that you would never otherwise reveal. The Web today is a great example of this.

"Take Everything You've Learned And Chuck It Out The Window"

So what can lead to empowerment? Let's revisit the good'ol tags that got everybody giddy in the first place. Here's how you drop an image into a web page:

<img src="[the location of your image file goes here]" />

I'm of course excluding a whole bunch of optional attributes (width, height, etc.). Now let's see how you drop images in Adobe Flex:

<mx:Image id="loader1" source="logo.jpg"/>

Microsoft's XAML is a real beauty. At first it seems somewhat innocuous:

<Image Width="200" Source="myimage.jpg"/>

But it turns out this is the bad way to do it (i.e. it uses up more application memory). Here's the proper way (comments are Microsoft's, not mine):

<Image Width="200">
<Image.Source>
<BitmapImage DecodePixelWidth="200"
UriSource="myImage.jpg" />
</Image.Source>
</Image>

Now here's the near-miss from Mozilla's XUL:

<image src="images/banner.jpg"/>

So problem number one: the masses have a already invested a ton of knowledge in an existing markup language. Yes, we'll no doubt have to augment it to accommodate all the new fancy stuff, but why mess with what people already know (and technical reasons do not count)?

Weapons Of Mass Adoption

Beyond leveraging what people already know, the real damage is caused by abandoning the philosophy that made the web so accessible to so many in the first place. Let's play God and create a few new tags:

<shoppingCart>
<minimize action="toTray">
<audio href="...">
<video href="..>">
<map zipcode="10017" height="..." width="...">
<slideshow> ... </slideshow> (used like the <ol> or <ul> tags.
<div draggable="true">
<image resizeable="false">
<widget href="..." width="..." height="...">

You get the idea. On top of this, you could implement existing web code to do some new and exciting things. An RSS feed? It's a perfect alerting system. Just add a couple of attributes that turn on intermittent desktop alerting as new updates.

There are many other examples. I'm sure programmers will scoff at the "gross oversimplification" of these suggestions. But guess what, that's what the Web 1.0 revolution was all about: gross oversimplification. The brilliance of the invention was not some algorithm or infrastructure change. It was the handful of readable instructions that made the web accessible to a much broader audience.

The Adobe's and Microsoft's of the world should take heed. If you really want a revolution to happen, start paying attention to the masses that do not know a lick of object-oriented programming and start handing them the weapons. Yeh they'll fumble at first, but before you know it you've got an army.

Posted by richz at 9:34 AM

The Utility Computing Myth : The Real Reason Why The Sight Of A Fedex Truck Makes Me Giddy

So here's the crux of the utlity computing mantra: all that processing power and hard drive space on your desk isn't needed for a great majority of applications. Instead, we'll have big, huge datacenters serve up applications over the web that help you get your work done. You'll pay either a subscription fee or stare at ads to subsidize their existence. No more $199 for a box with a CD in it.

The days of downloading, unzipping, installing and and then "loading" software are numbered. Instead, we simply visit a URL and bam...instant application and away we go. So watch out Microsoft and Intel, we don't need kick ass PC's anymore. Watch out Seagate and Maxtor, we don't need your hard drives anymore. We just need a thin client good enough to run a browser. The revolution has begun. Right?

Wrong.

Anyone that's messed with web-based word processors like Zoho Writer or Google Documents knows that they're nowhere near as impressive as their desktop counterparts like Microsoft Word. They lack the responsiveness and fidelity and are short of a multitude of features. We're ok with it in some cases because it's damn convenient,

Still, web applications have come a really long way. They're getting better and better. If you want to see the future, check out Adobe's Buzzword. It's a very impressive, Flash-based word processor that gives anything you'd install on your desktop a run for its money and it requires you to just visit a URL. So maybe this is the revolution, right?

Wrong.

Let me put this in a not-so-subtle way: regardless of how you got your software, software still needs to be impressive and competitive. That datacenter is doing two distinct things, and neither are very revolutionary (in my opinion):

1. From Pony Express To Fed-Ex Next Day

First, they're eliminating all the Old World steps that were once necessary for delivering software to you. CD's. Registration Keys. Big, huge installable downloads. All those features don't need to be sent in one big crate anymore. The prerequisites to using software are virtually gone. Just go to a browser, wait a few seconds and off you go. This is how Youtube took over the world and Real Player died an ugly death.

2. Real Estate For Your Bytes

Second, the datacenter will house the assets we create with these tools. Images. Documents. Spreadsheets. They're all stored centrally and available to me wherever I am. This opens up new opportunities for collaboration and sharing and of course, it's very convenient. There's still an important privacy barrier but let's assume privacy is a non-issue for the sake of this post.

I Don't Need A Mult-Billion Dollar Datacenter In North Carolina To Resize An Image

For whatever reason, everyone is equating this with the end of traditional software as we know it. As far as I see it, that CPU on your desk is needed more than ever because it's still doing all the work. Yes, the software is being delivered differently, but the processing is still happening locally. Yes, Buzzword fires up in your browser, but it's your computer that's doing all the magic. In fact, one could argue we need faster processors on our PC's because so much of today's software is interpreted on the fly.

The Adobe AIR platform is all about delivering desktop convenience through a seamless (or near seamless) install experience. AIR is about leveraging what your PC can do, not what some monolithic datacenter in Indiana can do. Of course, your data can still be stored centrally and there's no longer a need to go through cumbersome installations, so the advantages are clearly there.

Many have argued that this notion of utility computing will transform the software industry. Computing power will be metered out like electricity as pay-as-you-go infrastructures take over. Undoubtedly, this shift will have an impact on business infrastructures. Small businesses will no longer need to host mail servers and web applications. They still have to make platform choices and still have to either buy, build or subscribe to software, but the IT headaches, to a large extent, will be outsourced.

Back To Square One

Even so, you still need and want great software. It's important to distinguish the "utility provider" role that Google plays for example (providing storage space, support, uptime, high-bandwidth) with the "software provider" role that Google plays (providing spreadsheets, word processors and email). Amazon, Google and Microsoft are going to provide the utility infrastructure. That's a given. As a result, the "utility" end of the value proposition will quickly commoditize, if it hasn't already done so. The differentiator lies on the "software" end of things - in effect where its always been.

Regardless of where your software originates and its means of delivery, if it's better than a competitors, it will win. This key fact has not and will not change. And to win, you will still need to take advantage of the power on people's desktops and laptops. Technologies like Silverlight and Adobe AIR reaffirm the need to marry a click-and-run experience with the richness and power of desktop software. But more importantly, they validate the importance of delivering better software than the next guy, however way it gets there.

We may well pay for hosted software like we do electricity today. But the real variety of experience and innovation will not lie in the power outlets, but rather what we plug into them.

Posted by richz at 11:02 AM

Microsoft's Home Field Advantage : Mesh

As technologists, we can't help but pay attention to the walls and obstacles that litter the technology landscape. We think about them. We curse them. We go to great lengths to navigate around them. What we have to be wary of is allowing that landscape, obstacles and all, to forcibly narrow our view of what is or is not possible.

A great example of this is the distinction between what would call a "desktop" or "OS" and the Web. The Web has taken on application-like characteristics, and the desktop is becoming increasingly Web-like. We spend an enormous amount of mental labor thinking about how it's all going to come together. Where's the data? How do we sync it? What about mobile devices? Other devices? Game consoles? And how do we share things? How do we allow people to collaborate? These are all difficult problems that are shaped by the constraints we assume are immovable today.

Microsoft has let loose the PR machine on Live Mesh. The news wires and blogs are just now digesting the news. A glimmer in Ray Ozzie's eye just a couple of years ago, Mesh is unique and ambitious because it's based on a premise that most technologists feared working back from: people neither care about nor are aware of where their digital assets live.

People simply want everything to be everywhere. Their phones. Their media centers. Their laptops. They want everything to simply be incarnations of a single digital identity. They don't care about the "cloud", the syncing puzzles, the challenges of making offline work seamlessly. Mesh is the first initiative I've come across that is working back from that notion.

In essence, if you plug anything into your Mesh, everything is everywhere. The music in your living room will also be on your phone, on your laptop and in your car. This all happens by virtue if being plugged in. Not because you're moving files around on portable drives.

What's really interesting about Mesh is that it isn't just about files. Lying within is a syncing protocol that any application can tap into and enjoy the ability to sync everywhere.

And what of the coming age of utility computing? Here's my take on it: nobody cares about how an application gets to you. We're moving from CD's and DVD's to installable executables to zero-step installs. So what? Yes, we may be headed towards a world of subscription applications, but that's a business model shift, not an end-user experience shift. The real significance for end users is:

The ability to get rich, compelling applications quickly and with little effort. That's happening today on the Web (Ajax, Flash) and it's going to get better. And...
The ability to get to your information assets from anywhere with zero effort.

Mesh is attacking the second bullet head on. Its vision sees all these clients and devices - the web, mobile, desktops - as simply nodes of a larger representation. Of course, to tackle such a vision, you need to be able to exert enormous control over the wide array of devices and platforms out there. It's arguable whether anyone else can even consider it. Mozilla is sort of trying this with their lab initiative called Weave but there are certain hard realities that Mozilla and anyone else is going to have to face.

Microsoft is working with what they got. Windows. XBox. Windows Mobile. The list goes on and while they've mentioned support for Macs and such, you've got to believe that this is all about leveraging their position on their current platforms. What's interesting here is that the web and the browser is marginalized within this vision. It places players like Google in an odd position. While Microsoft has tried (and failed) to play on Google's turf in the search engine wars, Mesh hints at a shifting of the playing field. In this vision, Microsoft has home field advantage.

Of course, there's still execution. It takes a lot of guts and a hell of a lot of resources to go after such a grand vision. Microsoft obviously has the resources. There's still a lot to do and prove out before this vision is realized.

Posted by richz at 9:42 AM

From Web To Desktop : Respecting The Mental Barrier

In the latest issue of Portfolio magazine, there's an article about the rise and fall of Joost. Joost, backed by CBS, seeks to bring TV-quality programs to the Internet. I myself remember the buzz around Joost about a year ago. I badly wanted a beta invite after hearing the tech blogs praise Joost as the perfect marriage of great content and Internet convenience. When I finally got one, I'll admit I was impressed at first. Eventually, the impetus to load it up at all faded and I uninstalled it.

Recently, Joost has been beset with tougher times. In short, Joost just hasn't caught on and is in danger of fading out as yet another tech venture lesson-learned. The article cites numerous reasons for Joost's hardship: the Internet TV space got suddenly crowded, Joost suffered its own internal growing pains, among other reasons. The one reason that hit me across the head when I re-visited Joost today. After seeing an attractive, content-rich landing page at Joost.com, I was directed to this:

While the install is fairly trivial and requires just a few clicks, the ease-of-use bar has already been set by Youtube, and this user experience doesn't meet it. The problem was nicely summed up by the co-founder of one of Joost's competitors (emphasis mine) :

"The download may seem like a small barrier," says Brad Hunstable, co-founder of user-generated video site Ustream, "but it's a huge mental barrier."

That's right. Joost's content is only available via a downloadable application. You can't watch Joost videos in your web browser. Contrast this with Hulu and you quickly realize that Joost's own user experience strategy proved to be one of its most debilitating barriers. Joost is already onto this. They'll be delivering content via a web browser some time in 2008.

As platforms like Adobe AIR proliferate and as end-user web experiences are delivered to the desktop, there are some key concerns that any product designer or product manager must heed:

Users equate the browser window as access to the Internet. And just as importantly, the desktop is not the Internet. Most people have no clue about technology or Internet trends. The Internet is "the window to the rest of the world" and my desktop is...not.
Gauge your value and assess whether people will tolerate the "work" to get to it. This is critically important. If Flash-based click-and-play video were not available on the Internet, Joost would be competing within a completely different competitive milieu. Instead, they're asking users to jump through hoops without the value differentiation that would make it worthwhile. If the series finale of The Sopranos premiered on Joost, I'm guessing a lot of people would've tolerated the experience.
Do not forego the social power of hyperlinks. Internet-powered desktop applications must support the equivalent convenience of URL locations. Via email or chat, we constantly hand out our exact location on the Internet for others to share. The use case is obvious but worth repeating:
- I find a cool video on Youtube that I know my friend Chris will enjoy.
- I copy the URL out of my browser window.
- I paste the URL in my friend Chris' chat window.
- Within seconds, Chris is watching the same video.
It's not just "a few more clicks"; it's 500% more clicks. We might as well call this the "Realplayer Lesson." Does anyone remember the epic battle between Windows Media Video and Real? Flash came along and put videos one click away and the battle was over in months. Adobe AIR, for example, does an admirable job of making the install experience much less painful than usual. Still, we have to be wary of these artificial steps that a user is forced to go through.

The prospects of Internet-powered desktop applications is very exciting. Speaking to the second bullet above, I genuinely believe there is a a lot of value to be had with marrying the desktop experience with web applications. Features like offline use, file interactions (uploading, syncing etc.) and notifications would greatly enhance the experience around web applications.

Still, that "mental barrier" mentioned above is a formidable one. If we're to successfully bring new experiences to the desktop we must tread carefully as we deliver the experience that leads to it.

Posted by richz at 9:37 AM

Digg Is Just A Dude : The False Illusion Of Pluralism And Democracy In Social News Sites

I like Digg. I can't say I'm an overly active user, but I genuinely enjoy perusing through the top links every so often. The comments, most often comprised of witty banter, are often as entertaining as the link itself.

Digging around through Digg last night though, I noticed how the Digg user base pretty much represents this single collective personality with a fairly predictable set of views. If we call Digg...umm..."Dougg" for a brief moment, a particular character with very clear ideas, beliefs and interests materializes.

So what's Dougg like? Well, I'd venture to say:

He is clearly a guy (probably between 18 and 25 years old).
He's politically far left.
He's against the war in Iraq.
He's either an atheist or agnostic.
He's voting for Obama.
He detests Microsoft and loves Apple.
He's generally anti-establishment and anti-status quo.
He plays a whole lot of video games.
He's far too impressed with HDR photos.

So in short, Dougg is pretty predictable and not very diverse. It wouldn't be a stretch to conclude that Dougg doesn't like country music or say, Ronald Reagan's legacy. What's interesting about this characterization of Digg is that highlights the tendency of mobs to eventually settle into a recognizable identity that reinforces itself and as a result, doesn't really evolve over time. While Digg does allow anyone to post virtually anything, the stuff that's going to rise to the top and get "published" for the world to see is fairly easy to predict.

In other words, Dougg is pretty set in his ways. Digg isn't a megaphone that presents wildly divergent views and ideas. It's really no different than pegging The FillInTheBlank Tribune as a "beacon of liberal thinking" or a "conservative rag." While publications may actually go to great lengths to put forth some level of objectiveness, Dougg makes no such apologies. He doesn't have to. He has the luxury of hiding behind his supposedly democratic flavor of editing and publishing.

Who knew that this experiment in pluralism and community would end up so lop-sided?

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Posted by richz at 11:22 AM

A Response To The Digital Rights And Righteousness Post

Christopher Fahey, the blogger behind Graphpaper gives a thoughtful response to my post on stealing (or not stealing, depending on your position) music. It's a reply beneath that post, reprinted here because I think it makes some key points regarding digital rights.

I have an answer, of sorts: The very idea that you can even call a piece of music your own, as if you "own" it, is flawed and unnatural. Ownership of music is a phenomenon that didn't exist a century ago, and is about to return to that condition. Ownership of music is a phenomenon tied inextricably to the now-dead 20th century industry of mass-producing physical objects on which music was recorded. The only reason we (both consumers and artists) even think that "owning" music is rational is because we've spent our lives under the influence of that weird industry.

When you write "Did we buy vinyl and CD's all these years because we didn't have other, cheaper means to gain "ownership?"", I think you put your finger right on it. The place to focus, then, is on how musicians can exist without selling recorded music. The answer lies, in part, in pre-20th century history, before music could be bought and sold.

It's time to figure out how to charge for something else besides charging for the music itself. This is what Kelly's article is really about.

Taking possession of someone else's creative work and calling it your own is wrong.

I would agree with this only insofar as (a) taking credit as the work's creator is wrong, and (b) using the music to sell your own product or service without the creator's permission is wrong. Enjoying the product as an individual consumer, on your own terms without paying the creator money, however, is not wrong. The "deal" that you fear you are violating by downloading copyrighted music (the deal that the artist and the label owns the music and is selling not just the physical ability to listen to it, but the very right to listen to it was a false deal to begin with. All they were selling was the hard copy, not the intellectual property.

If an artist really wants to have strict economic control over their music, they must refuse to release it digitally or physically and must exclusively perform it live for audiences willing to pay for it. This is, of course, ridiculous if you interpret it literally. But for many artists, this is virtually how they survive, using their recorded music as a promotional tool for where the real money lies: live gigs, t-shirts and souvenirs, endorsements, appearances, and licensing of their music for other products and venues.

I've addressed this on my own blog, I hope you can check it out: http://tinyurl.com/2do3dg.

Posted by richz at 10:39 AM

Google Is Not A Cologne You Can Sniff : The Daunting Challenge Of Rebooting People's Minds

Word of the Yahoo! layoffs are spreading around today. If anyone doubted Google's Reality before, they won't be now. Between Microsoft's bid for Yahoo! - it's largest buyout attempt ever at $45 billion, and the bleeding Yahoo!'s been feeling for awhile, the Big Google Monster seems invincible. When you've got Microsoft acting all fidgety, you know you're doing something right.

So what is Google doing right? Well, they have the best search engine around. I use it at least twenty to forty times a day. I'm locked in and I don't really consider going elsewhere. On a rare occasion, if I've hit a dead end here or there, I'll look to Microsoft's Live search or Yahoo. Still, it could be argued that Yahoo and Live's search engines are as good as Google's. I'm not sure if that's the case. In fact, I haven't bothered to try to find out. Google works and I have no reason to leave.

The Default Setting In Our Minds

Google is winning and is so difficult to unseat because they've established themselves as the default setting for search in people's minds. Does it really matter that Live's search is as good? Better yet, does it even matter that Live's search is better? It's too late. Changing the default setting in our heads requires a lot more than that. It requires something seismic to happen. Either an incredible new feature needs to arrive or Google needs to screw up badly. I don't see either of those scenarios materializing any time soon.

As far as brand monopoly goes, Google is getting there. Google is starting to equal the search. The act of "googling" is already accepted as a newborn verb. This sort of brand domination is nearly impossible to unseat, regardless of whether your product is better or not. How much does mindshare and first-to-market matter? Take a look at this chart:

The above shows Mapquest's dominance of map searching that persists to this day, as reported by Hitwise. Note that Google Maps is slowly gaining ground, but they've still got a long ways to go.

Mind you, Google wasn't the first to do search. Alta Vista was supposed to be the premiere search engine. Or does anyone remember Hotbot? It turns out that Google was that much better. Google's arrival really was a seismic event and we're seeing the outcome of that shift today.

Still, this bit of reality persists: even if you're better than your entrenched competition, if their stuff works and people are comfortable with it, you're not going to eat into that mindshare.

This is as much about comfort and familiarity as it is about quality of service and feature sets.

"Mmmm! Smell My Magazine!"

So what of all those young, fresh brains that haven't set Google as their default search just yet? How do Google and Yahoo get to that switch? Well, it's tough. You need to somehow wedge your way into that first experience. The default laptop or desktop install. The default search setting on your browser. Today, Google enjoys excellent brand awareness. Friends and family are probably going to point you to Google. So its pretty tough.

There's another snag though. Because Google is a service that really has no physical representation (i.e. a shrink-wrapped box on a supermarket shelf), there really is no shelf-space to vie for. How does Yahoo get people to try Yahoo?

If you pick up any men's or women's magazine, you'll find a fold-out ad with some cologne or perfume infused in the flap. You sniff it while your cheek bumps into some attractive, brooding supermodels, and almost instantaneously, you make a judgment. It's an incredibly effective way to experience a new product you may have never even heard of two minutes prior.

Microsoft and Yahoo are having a real hard time "stepping in" to your magazine-flipping experience on the Web. When you're in Google's ecosystem, it's no mistake that you'll never see a semblance of Yahoo and Microsoft. Google has done an excellent job of walling off and keeping you within their walls.

The challenge for anyone looking to unseat an entrenched brand like Google is significant. In light of all this, the definition of the challenge at hand is tweaked. It isn't: "how can we deliver a better product and win new customers?" It's more like: "how can we cause an earthquake to happen such that people's minds are reset and are compelled, or even forced to consider our product?"

Posted by richz at 10:27 AM

Digital Rights And The Elusive Path To Righteousness

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Matthew 5:6

Kevin Kelly (executive editor of Wired) put out a brilliant write up on his blog last week entitled Better Than Free. In it, he breaks down the hard realities of traditionally copyrighted works spreading on the "Internet copy machine" as he calls it. The harsh reality is undeniable: works can be copied on the Internet. And as such, they are inherently free.

Kevin then goes on to talk about intangibles that surround the consumption of copyrighted works that we are willing to pay for because these intangibles simply can't be replicated and distributed freely. He calls these intangibles "generatives" and he outlines eight of them. "Immediaacy","personalization" and "findability" provide new value that we otherwise didn't think much of in the pre-Internet Interstate distribution days.

It's an eye-opening article but it somehow leaves me feeling like something's still broken and unfixable, and so we're left scrounging for other, more ephemeral sources of value.

Can we all agree on this single premise:

Taking possession of someone else's creative work and calling it your own is wrong.

Now I'm fully aware that in this new world of bits streaming across the wire, "taking possession" is very much an outdated and loaded term, but even if we sterilize the definitions at play, the question still stands: is it wrong?

Is it wrong to come across a new band on Pitchfork, type their name into Isohunt, and within an hour or so, have that album on your hard drive and iPod? The chorus of anti-DRM advocates is strong out there. Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow comes to mind as someone who's shed light on just how ridiculous DRM really is. How useless, futile and unduly cumbersome it is. DRM is going away. Amazon MP3 is the future and we're all heading there.

Still, that same question lingers: is it wrong? If an artist has made clear that their work is not free, is it wrong to just take it? Is it doubly wrong to give a copy to a friend of yours?

Kevin's article is bold because it's acknowledging certain realities and instead looking constructively to other avenues of sustainability. For me, it still leaves some unnerving questions unanswered. Before this sea change, was the entire music distribution industry rife with false value? Was it a matter of time before they got theirs for charging us $16 for a CD? Did we buy vinyl and CD's all these years because we didn't have other, cheaper means to gain "ownership?" In other words, were we cornered into this unfair corner of capitalism? Or did we actually believe in the system? Are we simply hostages that have been freed? Or is there something inherently wrong with how we're behaving today?

I'm not entirely certain. Hopefully I or someone else will have a moment of enlightenment and help clarify whether we're just a bunch of jerks stealing music or if the music industry's party - a party where they grossly over-charged for admission - is just over.

Ok, enough questions. Anybody have some answers?

Posted by richz at 1:19 PM

Google's Worst Nightmare

So what's Google so freaked out about? Recently posted on the official Google blog, regarding the Microsoft's proposed buyout of Yahoo!:

Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services?

Google's incredible success to date teeters on a single, easily-overlooked prerequisite: that we continue to travel around the Internet through a web browser. Without that trip through the Web Browser Highway, Google's billboards that dot that highway would never be seen.

If you can envision an operating system that neatly taps into various web services - email, instant messaging, photo sharing, collaborative documents and spreadsheets - without requiring a web browser, you can start to sense why Google would be freaked out. An argument can easily be made that we don't need to make that trip through the web browser to get at all these great services. Hell, an argument can be made that the web browser is a less-than-optimal way of doing things. That the services should and eventually will live on your desktop.

If you combine the massive population that Yahoo! enjoys with the power and immediacy of pre-installed, click-and-go tools right on the desktop, Google's plans look a lot murkier. It comes down to that critical entry point. Today, Google got its hooks in because the browser and URL box was the great democratizer. You weren't competing for prime shelf space on the desktop. It was inevitable that Microsoft would lean back on the OS to more deeply hook into services that we typically access through a browser.

And what of search? Forget all these fringe services. Search is Google's bread and butter. It's where something like 98% of their revenue comes from. Well, the thing with search is that its really just a means to an end. We spend an average of, oh I don't know, 10 seconds on a search results page? Then we quickly move onto the valued destination we were seeking. Still, it's that brief trip down the Google Highway that Google cares about. That's where we stare at Google's billboards. If you threaten the need to take that trip (which incidentally happens solely in a web browser today), you threaten Google's existence.

Wouldn't it be nice to hit a simple key combination in Windows (Windows key?) and just type what we're looking for and see the results streamlined right there on the desktop? Or how about Apple's Spotlight feature? Just open up Spotlight and search the Web. The browser only comes into play after I've selected the destination I want to go to. If you stop and think about it, the hop we make through Google is useless. Google is just a utility that gets us to where we want to go. We don't need it in the browser. In fact, I'd prefer it not even be in the browser but rather maintain its own modal state outside.

Either now or later, Google is inevitably going to have to deal with Microsoft. I'm guessing something like 90% of all search originates on a Microsoft operating system. It is only natural (or wily, depending on your allegiance) and in many ways more ideal (or more sinister, again depending on allegiance) to start to deliver these services in a more seamless, integrated manner.

In many ways, Google has every right to be concerned. A world without browser-based search results - or browser-based anything for that matter - is a pretty scary place.

Posted by richz at 11:11 AM

Hide The Children : Microsoft Set To Acquire Yahoo!

Based on the big blob of write-ups at the ol' Techmeme, tech bloggers are all abuzz about Microsoft's proposed acquisition of Yahoo! My guess is the acquisition will happen. Some thoughts:

Is this really all about ads and search? I'm guessing that's a big part of the story. So I'm left asking - is Microsoft's value heading to the Web, or is Yahoo's value headed to the desktop? Or both?
Redundancy anyone? Who survives:
- Windows Live Photo Gallery vs. Flickr
- Windows Live Favorites vs. Delicious.
- The list goes on: maps? chat? shopping?
Related to the last point, how does a Flickr or Delicious culture survive a Microsoft-ification?
An operating system has acquired a suite of web services in many respects. I'd expect Google and Apple to continue to draw closer.
What of all the great developer support Yahoo!'s contributed over the years? Does that get swallowed by the big MSDN monster?

So how big of a Web presence will MS+Yahoo be? Add the red and green lines and subtract some for "overlap tax":

Posted by richz at 10:57 AM

Keys, Locks & Cheap-Ass USB Drives : A Path To Internet Identity Salvation?

Last week I whined on about how OpenID is a great invention that most people aren't going to get their heads around. I asserted that the big problem was that unlike inventions like email, people don't have a familiar metaphor to work against. The label of "curmudgeon" has been leveled against me in the past. So in the spirit of constructive dialogue, I'm going to humbly put forth an approach to make centralized identity a little bit easier on the Internet.

Let's See, What Do We Have In The Metaphor Box...

Looking around us, there are a few things we carry around that help us function on the actual (not virtual) world. A driver's license. Some credit cards. A bank card. A passport. Our house keys. Our car keys. All of these have a bit of our identity implicit in them. They help you get into places nobody else is supposed to get into: your house. Your bank account. Your car.

People are comfortable with walking around with something that helps them get to their stuff and stops others from getting to their stuff. The lock & key metaphor is a powerful and pervasive one.

Now If We Only Had The Internet's Version Of A Lock & Key...

What you need is a way to easily walk up to any computer and identify yourself quickly and easily. No logins. No nothing. We need a simple easy way to identify ourselves. At ATM machines we just swipe a card. When we get home we just insert a key and turn. Why not for computers and the Internet? What would it require? To start, it would require a key and lock be build into every machine. Well it turns out we do and it's called USB. Let's walk through an imaginary use case:

Jane heads over to her friend Sally's house to hang out for awhile.
She kindly asks Sally to user her PC to check her mail and see what's going on at Facebook.
Jane takes out her USB key dangling off her key chain and plugs it into Sally's computer.
Immediately, Jane is asked to put in her password just once.
As soon as Jane puts in her password, the status bar in Internet Explorer identifies Jane as the current user.
Everywhere Jane goes on the Internet, the various applications know its her. Even when she signs up to new destinations, her data is ready to go.
Once Jane is done, she yanks out her USB key. As soon as she does so, she's immediately no longer logged in anywhere.

That's it. It's pretty simple...and I actually think my mom can get it. No offense to mom, but she's a great measuring stick here. USB drives are damn cheap and every desktop and laptop on earth has the "keyholes" to receive all the keys out there. No more signing onto comment threads in blogs. No more hassles with 35 accounts we have floating around. It's the promise of unified authentication packaged in a way that actually makes sense to the masses.

I'm not going to get into implementation in this post. I'm sure the technologists can get their wheels spinning pretty quickly around an approach like this. The browser (or desktop) would obviously need to be smarter (Firefox plugin?). And OpenID? This can all still happen with OpenID. In fact, that little USB drive could carry a mini OpenID server just for you...or link up to one in the cloud.

Now where the hell did I leave my keys...

Posted by richz at 10:32 AM

OpenID & The Dilemma Of Great Inventions That Nobody Can Get Their Heads Around

Ever heard of OpenID? If you read this blog, you probably have. Do you think your mom or uncle Dave has ever heard of OpenID? I'd say probably not (unless either of them are active members of the OpenID foundation).

For the less enlightened, you can find a pretty good (not great) explanation here. The problem OpenID is trying to tackle is a big one: people have different representations of their identity littered all over the Internet. Amazon. Flickr. Yahoo. Ebay. Your bank. We log in and out all day long. OpenID is an attempt to create a central representation of yourself on the Internet.

It makes a lot of sense. We've got a great way to identity of web destinations through a consistent, scalable model: the URL. Why not have a single place that represents me that others can "visit" and that I can then approve. It nicely turns the tables. If you want me inside your walls, you sign up to me.

Except there's one problem. Nobody, and yes I'm intentionally excluding all the dorks that read this blog and loiter around Techmeme, knows what the hell OpenID is or, more importantly, how to make sense of it.

Yahoo announced that it's 250 million users will be able to take advantage of OpenID (more at Techcrunch). That's a big step for the OpenID initiative. Yahoo is huge. Still, I'm not sure if that really helps OpenID tackle its biggest issue.

So what is OpenID's biggest obstacle? Well, I think it's this: it lacks a conceptual model or easily-accessible metaphor that non-technical people can get their heads around. To highlight this, I'd like to compare two technologies and the lessons learned from each.

Email : It's just like regular mail, except with an "e"

Consider the vocabulary around email:

Inbox
Sent Items
Forward
Sender
Reply
Attach
Signatures

Email exploded in large part because it extends the widely understood concept of regular mail. Hell, even spam makes sense. Everyone gets junk mail in their regular mailbox. When email came along, adoption took off when we were able to visually reinforce the mailing process (i.e. evolving from Compuserve to Yahoo Mail).

RSS : The weird, weird world of subscribing to orange boxes

RSS is damn cool and it's good to see the sort of strange slow-burn adoption of RSS over the past five or so years. It's a great, time-saving way to track a lot of sites that frequently update content. Great tools like Google Reader and FeedDemon have made it even easier to track tons of content very easily.

Still, if you apply the Mom Test to RSS, it fails. If you apply the Mom Test to email, it passes with flying colors - with your mom or just about anyone else. RSS lacks a real-life sibling to help people understand its purpose and value. "It's like subscribing to a magazine" doesn't really cut it. As a result, RSS enjoys modest but by no means mainstream adoption.

Technology Is Easy. People Aren't

OpenID is a brilliant stroke. It's simple and graspable - from a technical perspective - almost instantly. It's similar to RSS in that way. RSS has been embraced on the implementation side because of its dead-on simplicity (contrast that with the cluster***k that is ATOM, and the value of its simplicity is even more visible). But like RSS, OpenID badly lacks a narrative that offsets the conceptual barrier that most people will have towards it.

So while the Yahoo announcement is big on the implementation side of things, it's probably going to amount to very little in reality. AOL & Microsoft also announced OpenID support months ago and the net effect has been pretty much nothing.

So the lesson learned here? You may have pegged a real need out there. And you may have figured out how to solve it. But you've still gotta sell it to the masses. And that sell shouldn't be underestimated or treated as an afterthought. They have to hear it and it has to resonate nice and clear. Otherwise, they're just going to glean over it and move on.

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Posted by richz at 11:23 AM

Looking Forward To The Past : The Longing For And Inevitable Return Of The Analog Experience

After World War II, the U.S. experienced a period of peace and prosperity. Well, the "peace" part is arguable. While we built our homes and highways and focused on the nuclear family, the nuclear arms race quietly chugged along all the while. As for the "prosperity" part, few would argue that they were, at least on the surface, good days for America.

We'd just beaten down the evil Axis and it was time to bring our boys home to prosperity. The G.I. Bill guaranteed homes for every American soldier. Mom was coming out of the factory and headed to the kitchen. Dad was putting in his day at the office and looking forward to a nice home cooked meal. Junior was focused on his first car and his first kiss.

Technologically, the "automation" of the home elevated to the Nth degree. Vehicles, appliances and other gadgets seemed to take away a lot of the labor associated with doing just about anything. Here's an ad for the "Speedster":

push_button_kitchen_1950_small-1

I'm not entirely sure what this thing does. It might just be an oven, but this highlighted a pervasive sentiment back then: convenience was paramount. Anything that could be automated or made easier was inherently good.

Looking beyond gadgets and appliances in the home, the years following WWII saw a boom in distribution infrastructures. The interstate highways built with government subsidies made it far easier to establish a successful "business template" and replicate it all over the country. Businesses like General Electric and McDonalds thrived on their ability to deliver convenience in a predictable and uniform manner. From their perspective, it made great sense. If you've sorted out something that works, replicate it.

As the years went by, things didn't exactly go as planned. The utopian proved to be flawed. The sentiments in the 60's were in many ways a reaction to what turned out to be some false assumptions of what makes people happy. While we look back on the artifacts of that era and can't help but be charmed by the retro-slightly-off-futuristic aspects of it all, we can't help but react to it with a bit of a snicker or the occasional "that's just ridiculous."

Today, we're shunning convenience and automation. We want experiences around the things we do. We don't want to press a button and get pancakes and eggs. We're willing to drive to that charming diner that's been around for a hundred years and enjoy farm fresh eggs and organic pancakes. It turns out that all that shortcutting deprives us of something.

In all this, I think there are some important lessons to be learned as we design the tools, applications and gadgets of the future that are supposed to provide us with convenience but in fact turn us off in many ways.

~~User~~ Machine Interaction

In thinking about interaction design, we rightly focus on the user. We call them "user interfaces" and "user interactions." But the interaction isn't one way. It's a dialogue and the machine has plenty to say. Think about the experience around the convenience you're delivering. A lot of the joy that people experience with machines isn't purely out of the proverbial output, but how that machine interacts. What does your machine do when something goes wrong? Is it patient? Is it forgiving? Is it helpful? Does it anticipate and accommodate what the user is going to do next?

Respect The Analog

People love experiences that reinforce what we understand about the physical world. Innately understood phenomena like gravity and inertia help us understand what's going and actually add a bit of joy to a user's experience. Check out this Flash physics demo. It's a lot of fun...and it's not even a game! Anyone that's flicked the album list on an iPhone can quickly see the value of adding that analog-like experience. It requires more work that can appear superfluous from an engineering perspective, but its very much worthwhile.

Convenience Is Good...But Not Free

More broadly speaking, we should be wary of what we assume to be conveniences that people want and at the costs of providing them. It turns out that making the cake from scratch is way more fun than tearing open a plastic wrapper because there are good things to take away from that experience. As we define our value and design around it, we should be as sensitive to what people don't want as to what we're certain they do want. It serves us well to respect that delicate balance.

[Disclaimer : This blog post was written on a Steampunk Keyboard Mod. Aww...yeh!]

Posted by richz at 3:58 PM

Software's Obesity Epidemic

So I'm trying to streamline my software life today and one of my pass-times is to fish around and listen to new music before it "graduates" into the hyper-organized world of iTunes. My need was simple: a lean, low-overhead MP3 player that can load in a snap and not be in my way or slow my system down. I fished around a lot and couldn't really find anything to my liking.

Then I thought about Winamp. For those old enough to remember, Winamp set the bar years ago for media players way back when MP3 had come into our lives. It was small, fast and completely badass. It did what it was designed to do beautifully. Here's a snapshot of what Winamp looked like for years:

Nothing crazy. A media player. Shuffle. Playlist support. Worked just fine. So I decide to go to Winamp.com to grab it. Well, it turns out Winamp has grown up a lot since version 2.0 (pictured above). The new version has all kinds of features and a "Pro" edition with even more features. But in looking for something lean, Winamp's svelte physique was no more. In fact, he'd gained a lot of weight:

The above is a chart of Winamp's installer file size as it has evolved from version 1.0 through today's version 5.5. The bars represent kilobytes. Version 1.5 of Winamp comes in around 350kb in size. The current version nears 9MB (or 9000kb) nearly twenty five times the size.

Now I know, there are all sorts of new features in Winamp 5.5 that are missing in 1.5. And some of them may be worth a boost in size. Let's say version 5.5 is, oh I dunno, five times better (a tall order if you ask me). That still doesn't warrant a 25X increase in installer size...which will translate into a larger memory footprint, a greater demand for CPU cycles, and so on.

The unmitigated piling on of features is an evil thing. It's like a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet. Yeh, its great to be able to eat as much as you want for one low price. The problem is your stomach is only so large and you start feeling gross after awhile. When I wear my product manager hat, I like to follow one particular rule: before adding a new feature, weigh its benefit against its cost. It's cost in terms of complexity, dilution of the broader value of your product, its performance impact on your product and...is it adding to the overwhelmed (gross?) feeling of using unnecessarily bloated software.

Digging around, I was able to find a huge list of all the old versions of Winamp on oldversions.com. I grabbed version 2.0. It has the one feature the newer versions don't: it's slim and fast and loads in a split second. And yes, it actually feels good to use something so lean and efficient.

Posted by richz at 10:57 AM

The Return Of The Thick Client

The New York Times has an article up about how faster chips are leaving programmers in the dust. In short, all these multi-core CPU's coming out are really hard to program against. Programmers have to write "parallel programs" to fully take advantage of the additional lanes on the CPU highway that AMD & Intel are laying down. It's complex stuff and Microsoft is putting some of its biggest brains on it.

One of the hottest topics in technology today is the advent of utility computing. Increases in bandwidth and computing power has many industry observers asserting that the bulk of the CPU labor doesn't really need to happen on the PC under your desk. Services like Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Salesforce.com have proven that you can deliver a lot of the common computing tasks in a centralized way. No more installation DVD's. Just visit a URL and start using centrally hosted software.

It's pretty damn convenient. But in its current incarnation, its drastically lacking the richness and highly interactive experience associated with desktop applications. Anyone who's used Excel 2007 and Google spreadsheets notices the difference almost immediately. Of course, Google spreadsheets is brand new and running in your browser. So it's not exactly a fair race...yet.

For Microsoft, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to invest heavily in optimizing their software to run as close to the metal as possible. Today, Google is investing in the web browser as the "platform" to deliver their applications. That's going to have to give at some point if they seriously want to compete with Microsoft. No matter how much you trick out Ajax, it's not going to come anywhere the power and capabilities of applications like Microsoft Word and Apple's Keynote, for example.

So where does this leave the promise of rich internet applications (RIA's)? I tend to agree that applications will stop being installed on DVD's and CD's. Boxed software will undoubtedly go away. But the delivery mechanism doesn't tell the whole story. There's still the issue of "platform." If CPU's are outpacing software development, Javascript, AJAX and the plethora of browsers that sort of play nice are just going to end up playing catch up. They're way too high up on the stack to realistically leverage advances in hardware.

If we're truly looking to marry the power of rich software with the reach of the Internet, then we have to look to the players that have viable platforms that can continue to evolve and stay in lock-step (or at least near lock-step) with the ever-accelerating pace of hardware: Microsoft and Adobe. In Adobe's last Flash update (Update 3), they've added multi-core CPU support. You can also bet that Microsoft's Vista and Silverlight will also play close attention to taking advantage of the latest hardware features.

The challenge for Google - if its really serious about going after Microsoft's bread-and-butter productivity software business - is to somehow find a way to lock into and take advantage of a platform that is: (a) universally available and (b) malleable enough to scale up and evolve as hardware improves.

Two years ago, I half-jokingly argued that Microsoft should buy Adobe. At the end of the post, I winked that Google should buy Adobe instead. I agree that we're headed towards massive server farms and a world of utility computing but that trend shouldn't be confused with the clear competitive advantage of delivering powerful software to the desktop. Think Photoshop. Think mind-blowing 3D games. They can all make it over the wire...but you still need that rig - and the platform that knows how to take advantage of it - under your desk.

Posted by richz at 2:37 PM

Del.icio.us And The Unwashed Masses : Why Del.icio.us Is Still Just a Dorky Web App That Your Mom Could Care Less About

Read/Write Web points to something I find both sad and a little perplexing: del.icio.us, the granddaddy of social bookmarking sites, isn't catching on. They don't really dig into why it isn't catching on. Still, it's a bit disappointing. I ran an Alexa chart and the results were even more disappointing:

Note: I always take in Alexa charts with the proverbial grain of salt.

So what gives? Why is a service that is as cool and useful as del.icio.us not able to catch on? Some theories:

Nobody really needs a way to centrally store their bookmarks. The browser is just fine. Ouch. This one hurts. As much as we'd like to think that the sea level of technology is rising and lifting us all towards enlightened levels of productivity and social interactions, reality is quite different. Most people keep a few bookmarks - their bank, some news page (CNN and such), a handful of special interests...and that's it. Most people also don't need their bookmarks centrally stored. They use one computer and their bookmarks are on it.
Most people don't understand what del.icio.us does. Another big factor. Read/Write sort of alludes to this by pointing out that 8 of the top 10 delicious tags are technology related. Ask your uncle what del.icio.us is and he'll probably just tilt his head and lose interest almost immediately. Also, del.icio.us' web presence isn't exactly inviting. I've always loved its minimalist style, but for the uneducated, it doesn't help a whole lot. Compound that with the 15-minute tutorial that "tagging" deserves and you're left with a real challenge.
People don't feel compelled to share del.icio.us with others. Unlike viral sites like Facebook and Youtube, you don't need to go back to del.icio.us to reap its rewards. If I find a worthwhile link on del.icio.us, I'm just going to share that link with others, not its representation in del.icio.us.

I personally love del.icio.us. I think it's a great service and I don't mind taking the time to evangelize it. However, I think there is a lesson learned here: sympathize with your audience; appreciate what they don't understand (or don't care to understand); and finally...figure out what you're really going after.

It could well be argued that del.icio.us targets a niche need (bullet #1 above) and not much else. I'm skeptical of that excuse though. The needs and wants can get pretty blurry if the value is there. It's more a matter of making that value accessible. And good, thoughtful, empathetic design is the only way to get there.

After all, nobody really needs an iPod. Or do they?

Posted by richz at 5:01 PM

The Internet User's Bill Of Rights (First Draft)

Way back when, I'd written a brief post about Google's laser-guided missiles. In short, I'd argued that, as Google's services become more pervasive, the more of our behavior they could monitor and mine for more targeted advertising. The more they watch, the more accurately they can target us. This all isn't necessarily a bad thing...except that hardly anyone knows how or where Google is watching them.

Enter Facebook. Of late, Facebook has been taking some slack for the Facebook Beacon. It effectively allows third parties to pass along to Facebook something about your activity on their sites. After, say a Fandango purchase, Fandango pings Facebook back with what you've just done. If you subsequently visit Facebook, you'll find your action for all to see ("all" being anyone that can see your feed).

So now, not only are all our actions being monitored (thanks Google for kicking that one off) our activity is being shared among third parties without our knowledge (thanks Facebook).

The image “http://www.usconstitution.com/billofrightshand.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. All of this isn't inherently bad on its face. The problem lies in how all this stuff is happening behind our backs. We need to draft some sort of Bill of Rights for web users that services like Google or Facebook can opt into. Something like:

[Service] shall, clearly and in plain English, explain to users precisely which of the user's activity they will be monitoring.
[Service] shall, clearly and in plain English, notify users if anything about their activity is shared with other services.
[Service] shall provide all users with a simple and clearly visible way to opt out of having any facet of our activity monitored or shared with third parties.
[Service] shall provide all users with a simple and clearly accessible way to purge all data about their activity. If a user's activity data is purged, [service] shall guarantee that all purged data is destroyed and unrecoverable.
Should any terms of use change subsequent to joining [service], all users should be notified in a clear manner imediately.

The above is by no means exhaustive but it at least starts the conversation around what we're unwittingly giving up for all this power and convenience.

In many ways, the Internet is viewed as an extension of existing media ("New Media"). Such a framing fails to recognize how much of a departure the Web really is. Radio and television are passive. I'm not even sure my cable company knows what I record on my DVR box. The Web is a whole other animal. We need some sort of checking mechanism so various services can speak to, market, differentiate and recognize that we understand that there is a cost for all this cool free stuff.

Just as we feel slightly more comfortable when we see a Better Business Bureau seal or a Verisign logo, I'd like to see these services displaying (or paying the price for not displaying) a similar insignia: "We Adhere To..."

Today, these conversations around privacy bubble up and you'll hear the usual "hmmm...that's creepy" comments. I don't think that's really going to address much. It's good business for the likes of Google and Facebook to let the chatter die down and just get on with life as usual. What's needed is a framework and a standard for them to adhere to.

Posted by richz at 11:25 AM

Amazon's Kindle And The Death (And Attempted Resurrection) Of The Physical Integrity Of Objects We Care About

(Best basement.org post title ever? Maybe.)

Amazon released the Kindle a couple of days ago. It's an eBook reader with "revolutionary electronic paper" that let's you purchase, download and read books (up to 200 or so) on this handy little device. It doesn't require a computer and costs $400.00.

Physical objects that carry and represent content as we know them are dying. The book. The CD (or album if you like). The DVD (or Betamax tape if you like). They're all going away. In some ways, that's a good thing. Last Christmas, I strolled into a Best Buy in Brooklyn and snickered at all that floor space dedicated to CD's. I thought it was ridiculous and wasteful. An outdated model that retailers were still hanging onto for dear life.

Still, the grumpy old man in me feels like we're letting something significant slip away.

"Can We Please Get Five Minutes Alone?"

I've actually touched on this point in the past. There is something deeply intimate about the relationship between author and reader that is indelibly bound to that physical object. 150 books on a Kindle doesn't exactly recapture that intimacy. Finding a book; grabbing it; committing to it and then deciding to share that intimacy with the author is part of the book reading experience. Books, unlike newspapers, magazines or blogs, reach depths that make them unique and oftentimes deeply personal for the reader. Grabbing a book off the digital shelf on a Kindle is undoubtedly convenient but that sense of privacy - of being alone with the author - is gone.

Today, it's all getting mixed together in one big, generic carrying device. The result is the genericization (that can't possibly be a word) of digital packaging. When you're listening to Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, you're "using" iTunes. When you're reading The Power Broker, you're using a Kindle. The content, crowded into a single, generic bin, is secondary. It's taken a backseat to the intentionally neutral delivery mechanism. The creative work's physical manifestation is gone.

"We Used To Have A Bookshelf Right Over There, But We Replaced It With A Dell Optiplex Server."

We keep too much stuff around as it is these days. All sorts of junk that means nothing (or very little) to us. We produce more than we can consume and as such we're a disposable society. It just turns out we don't really want to dispose of anything. So we collect Tupperware (I think I'm supposed to capitalize that) and that juicer and those old Collector's Edition Star Wars Episode III posters and...the list goes on and on.

Books and other creative works are different. They're capable of representing something more than just a Made-For-TV doo-hickey you impulsively bought. A book can grip you; leave an impression on you; matter to you unlike just about anything. A great album can have that effect as well.

"Happy Birthday Honey. Here's Your $75 Best Buy Gift Card."

One of the best expressions of how much a creative work matters to us is our desire and enthusiasm to share it with others. Did you ever buy someone an album or book that you've already experienced? It's an exciting feeling to share a connection about something with others.

Today, we buy points or credits or gift cards that get you points or credits. There's nothing physical to share anymore. Nothing to unwrap on holidays or birthdays. It's all virtual. How do we replace memories like this?

"Here's Our Latest Product. It Features Glimpses Of Reality!"

What's funny about the march towards the digitization of creative content is that when designers and software developers go the extra mile to recreate physical reality, we're blown away by it. Coverflow is a great example of this. Does anyone actually use coverflow? All this energy was put into recreating flipping through a bunch of CD's. Amazon has invested an enormous amount to make sure we can look inside the books we're thinking of buying.

It's all an attempt to marry the conveniences of technology with the things that really matter to us about the physical world. These efforts (and I'm guessing there will continue to be more of them) are trying to recapture the unique experience of having something in our hands that we care about.

"Where we goin' buddy? The meter's runnin'."

The image “http://www.westland.net/coneyisland/articles/images/con-nathans.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. As I look up at this post, I can't help but feel like this old Coney Island cab driver I'd run into once. He rambled on about how $.25 could get you a root beer and a Nathan's hot dog "so huge you couldn't even finish it." He was angry about how things had changed and nostalgic about how things were.

Despite this being a technology blog, I can't help but feel like that old cab driver. Scrolling through your book collection on a Kindle is definitely more convenient than perusing books (with that odd sideways head tilt) on a bookshelf. Still, I can't help but feel something's missing there.

Someone needs to convince the old cab driver in me that it's really not that big of a deal. Be careful though, he's getting grumpier by the day.

Posted by richz at 11:00 AM

From Viral Marketing To STD's

Ok, let's line up the evidence:

I walk into a Starbucks and the song playing in the shop is instantly availabe on my iPhone or iPod Touch. Starbucks is now in my ~~pants~~ phone.
Google is watching over my shoulder as I search and as I read my email. Weird, creepy "Mid-Life Crisis?" ads are known to show up alongside emails.
I'm on Facebook. I'm not really active. I have an account but I rarely log on. Yet, I'm getting poked, probed, super-poked, jabbed, tazered via email and through other means. Every time I log on, I'm asked to answer a series of questions triggered by someone's "friend request" (what a weird transaction) that I hardly know.

And now, Facebook has decided that the line between advertising and talking (and poking and probing) has blurred. I am not just the consumer anymore. Glassy-eyed staring into my new 50" LCD TV. I am the carrier. I am the means by which the marketing message travels.

And it's not just a message anymore. It's an action. It's a new verb - like Super-poking. Except now the actions are products...or our "friends" are products...or something. I'm not really sure. It's all really, really creepy.

My biggest fear is the lack of notice. Just give me notice of what I'm in for. It's a crime to knowingly carry a sexually transmitted disease and have unprotected sex with someone without their knowledge. Unless you look really closely, it's really hard to tell that Google is tracking your search patterns.

Sit me down and give me options and explain the implications of what I do. Then let me decide. Today, we're just strolling into bed, not aware of the consequences. We've submitted ourselves.

Nick Carr summed it up nicely: "Infect me. I'm yours."

Posted by richz at 10:20 AM

Enough With The Lists

As if there aren't enough examples of information overload in our lives. Our iPod's hold 50,000 songs. Our cameras take 2,000 pictures. And the list goes on. And speaking of lists, I've grown to hate the list-ification of information. "10 Things That..." or "20 Reasons Why..." And so on.

And then you've got the grandaddy of all lists: Smashing Magazine. Mostly geared towards web design and development, their lists are frickin' huge. I dutifully bookmark half their lists because...umm....I swear I'm going to need them later. I'm sure of it.

The image “http://www.menonthemove.com/images/Storage_01.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. And so, I'm left with this big list of lists (or links to lists) that serves more as a sort of security blanket than as some valued information source. Just as Americans keep piling on stuff and putting it into storage (the storage business is booming these days), we just keep accumulating stuff with the desired intention to consume it later. The problem is we can't possibly consume at the pace we're producing.

So do we throw it all out? Nope. We store it. The same goes for information on the web. There's too much of it...and in a lot of cases the stuff is actually pretty good. So we collect it for umm...future consumption (at least that's what we tell ourselves).

The result is the de-valuation of information. It's less about the quality of any discrete piece of content and more about the numbing consequence of sheer abundance. I'll close with a quote from Will Sheff, the front man for the rock band Okkervil River. Here he's talking about file sharing, bootlegs and digital media in general, but he stumbles on this very topic:

The Internet – with its glut not only of information but of misinformation, and of information that is only slightly correct, or only slightly incorrect – fills me with this same weird mixture of happiness and depression. I sometimes feel drowned in information, deadened by it. How many hundreds of bored hours have you spent mechanically poring through web pages not knowing what you’re looking for, or knowing what you’re looking for but not feeling satisfied when you find it? You hunger but you’re not filled. Everything is freely available on the Internet, and is accordingly made inestimably valuable and utterly value-less.

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Posted by richz at 3:20 PM

"Back In The Day..."

"Remember the time when you had to get hold of a CD or DVD, rummage around for a serial number, go through a 20-step installation process, and wait around for 15 minutes to install some software? How ridiculous was that?"

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced it's going to inevitably happen: software will eventually stop being shipped on physical media. We're seeing archaic glimpses of that today in products like Google Docs and Yahoo Mail. But they don't feel like desktop applications yet. They're still very clunky and Web-like. The groundwork is being laid to deliver even the richest of applications over the wire. Adobe, maker of some of the most visually-rich and complex applications, is already saying that's where it's all headed.

It'll take time but we'll eventually get there...and we'll look back on the way we do things today and snicker.

Posted by richz at 11:17 AM

Climbing Out Of Failure

If you're planning on building a product for mass consumption, a customer facing web application, a piece of software or software service, a social network-style service, really anything that involves throwing your hat into the free market, know this: your product will fail.

Ok, that sounds fatalistic and slightly melodramatic, but it's a hard reality. Most, check that, just about all products fail. It's even worse: good products fail. Quality products that seem to solve real problems will fail. But wait, it gets even uglier: some really lousy products succeed. Sometimes due to really sly marketing and PR and sometimes due to dumb luck.

The Simple "Success" Of Services

At Arc90, we're incubating some products that aren't tied to client work. The measure of success (or failure) in the services business is very different, and far simpler: if the client is happy, you've succeeded. While we bitch about the ball-busting client, we can't deny one thing: having a sole arbiter brings clarity and direction towards any effort. The customer isn't just always right, they're also always around and ready to tell you what they want. Yes, we often get urges to murder them and hide the bodies, but that tangible, real and finite feedback is often taken for granted.

"Almost Done" Does Not Equal "Almost Successful"

The image “http://www.cuttergallery.com/Images/Marsh/Marsh-VISIONARY.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. Building a product for mass appeal is not for the weak of heart (or stomach). While the initial high from an idea may carry you some way, the buzz quickly dies. It's replaced with a long road that brings little gratification. You may have nailed five of your eleven requirements, but you will not be rewarded until you're near the end. It's the "almost pregnant" problem. A viable idea is borne out of a complete vision.

Once you buy into and bet on that vision, you need to strap in and be ready to go all the way...or don't bother. You'll have failures along the way. You'll expose that half-executed (or quarter-executed) effort to some people, and it'll fall flat. And it'll feel like failure. You'll inevitably ask: "should we stop?" You'll burn through money, energy and people's morale. So why keep going?

You keep going because until you fully execute on that vision, you'll never know of its viability. Do you need to reach 100%? Not really, but you do need to cross that line where the vision - in the case of product, the answer to the problem or pain you're trying to attack - is before you in tangible form. Only then will you know if you've got something worth keeping (or abandoning).

The Moving Finish Line

There's yet another rub in all this. As you're trudging towards that finish line while you endure those pangs of failure, you begin to notice that the finish line is...moving. This "answer" to the problem you're trying to solve needs to change and morph into something slightly different than you'd envisioned. As it starts to come into focus, you begin to realize that things (sometimes some fairly fundamental things) need to change. It turns out that "perfectly clear vision" of yours isn't so perfect and clear.

If a team isn't open to considering and folding in that new knowledge into product's evolution, it can rarely succeed. A product effort evolves as it comes to fruition. There's nothing instantaneous about it. The only fixed variable is the problem, and as we navigate towards that problem our product (our "solution to the problem") needs to change.

"What Are You Prepared To Do?"

There's a memorable scene in 1987's The Untouchables. Elliot Ness, the federal prosecutor put on the case to crack down on the Chicago mob, is partnered up with Jim Malone, a tough, weathered Chicago cop that knows the mob all too well. They meet in a church and Ness (played by Kevin Costner) is lamenting about how tough its going to be to bring down the mob. He rambles on for a bit and then Malone (played by Sean Connery) resets the conversation and asks bluntly: "What are you prepared to do?"

His question isn't meant to be melodramatic. He's laying out an important threshold. He's asking Ness if he's serious about going after the mafia and if so, is he willing to go the extraordinary lengths to bring it down. In other words, he's saying "if you're not willing to go all the way with this, don't bother."

I see new products crop up all the time these days. The Web 2.0 ecosystem is exciting because it affords small groups with very little money the opportunity to build something for the masses. But the realities haven't changed: it takes a lot to translate a good vision to a good product. It takes patience, flexibility, open-mindedness...and a strong stomach.

Posted by richz at 10:36 AM

Some Thoughts On Adobe Max

I'm writing this post on a flight back to New York from Chicago where I attended the Adobe Max conference. It was an interesting and engaging conference overall. Adobe has a lot going on and looking back on the three day event, I thought I'd share some thoughts:

Adobe OS

Adobe, for the first time, is hocking a platform. It's a confluence of technologies that include Flash, Flex, AIR and PDF and don't be fooled, this isn't just some more software. It's a portable and very powerful and compelling software platform. It's what Java was supposed to do five or ten years ago but never did. The Flash runtime as a real software platform has arrived.

How powerful is the Adobe OS? Check out Buzzword. It's a web-based word processor that puts Google Docs look like...a web-based word processor. Buzzword runs in your browser (and soon on your desktop via AIR) but it ain't no hacked-together Javascript word processor. It's a user experience that rivals - and in many ways surpasses - that of full-blown desktop word processor. It's an incredibly thoughtful and engaging user experience.

Software A La Carte

Photoshop Express. Share. Buzzword. Connect. Adobe is making a serious play towards service-based zero-install software. Don't expect Photoshop in all its glory over the wire any time soon, but the pieces have been put into place. Adobe is no longer only about the 40 minute, two DVD installation process.

These sorts of initiatives pit Adobe against the likes of Google and Microsoft for delivering software-as-a-service value. It'll be interesting to see how far they take things.

It's also worth nothing that Adobe is investing heavily in establishing this ecosystem without a lot of near-term returns. Unlike Microsoft, which charges for both the ecosystem (the OS) and the tools, Adobe gives the OS (the Flash player and AIR effectively) away for free.

A Building Frenzy

Generally speaking, I was pretty amazed at how much Adobe has going on all at once. Some of it is compelling. Some of it you're left scratching your head a bit. Much of it is the fusing together of technologies that were previously separate before Adobe and Macromedia merged. In this regard, they feel a lot like Microsoft: betting on every number at the roulette table and just seeing what hits.

Executing On The RIA Vision

You have to give Adobe credit. They saw a vision of where media was evolving into richer, more interactive media. Where the static, klugey web would give way to richer more dynamic experiences. Where these experiences would finally become unshackled from the browser chrome. That vision is coming together as we speak and its impressive to watch a company the size of Adobe navigate towards this vision.

The Missing Ingredient

As a partner in a young services company that leverages many of Adobe's technologies, I see one piece of the puzzle missing: talent. The hack-and-get-away-with-it web developers are not invited to this party. The complexity of the RIA world coupled with the pace at which Adobe is moving ahead is leaving (at least from where I'm sitting) a serious talent drought that is materially reducing the pace at which the ecosystem can evolve. The tools need to keep getting better...and easier. The Adobe OS's biggest competitor is Ajax, not because its better but because it is closer to the web application building experience that most enjoy today.

Generally speaking, it was a good time. We met some interesting people and learned some new things. It's fun to see this community forming around all these new technologies, especially the bringing together of design and software development backgrounds into a single "space" where we're all both experts in some ways and novices in others.

Now let's sit back and see what comes out of this world...

Posted by richz at 4:11 PM

Rechargable Ideas

This is why the Internets is cool. You can share an idea, and name that idea and if the idea is interesting enough, it can catch on. Since sketchcast.com debuted, the idea of "sketchcasting" finally found a tool that made it a whole lot easier. Next thing you know, the term "sketchcast" is showing up in over 320,000 Google results. I'm guessing there aren't a lot of false positives in there because the term didn't exist three months ago.

You have to appreciate the organic nature of the Internet. Your idea or concept still has to fight for attention, but if and when people do connect to it, it spreads on its own fumes. It's this self-sufficiency that makes the Internet so powerful. In the old days, it required brute force to blast out an idea. Marketing campaigns. Conventions and presentations. Branding and co-branding. And so on.

I suppose this is what's called a meme, but I'm not sure if that's accurate. I personally prefer to distinguish an idea that people actively connect with (like the term "ajax") and something that you just pass along (like a 30 second Youtube video).

There is one other wrinkle to all this. We'd like to think that this all happens in some elegantly organic manner. Little by little the masses congeal and form an Idea Movement of sorts, but alas the megaphones are still out there. You could make a strong argument that an idea like sketchcasting would've never reached such heights without the Techcruch post. Either way, it's fun to track its proliferation.

Someone needs to call Sharpee for a co-branding deal.

Posted by richz at 9:52 AM

The Google Search Box & The Outsourcing Of Our Brains

We've all done it:

"What was the name of that actor from that movie?"
"I forget his address. He used to live in or around New Brunswick."
"I'm pretty certain it was 1983. Not 1984. Let me me check.."

By typing in a few spuriously connected words into a search box we get our answer. Hell, I still type "pizza ninos 11209" to get the Nino's Pizzeria phone number.

We've come to accept the harsh fact that we use our mobile phone address book as a crutch. Excluding maybe three or four numbers, we've committed none of them to memory. Why should we? They're all right there in our pocket. The mobile phone, that wonder of communication, is a crutch. And we use it.

Well if the mobile phone is a crutch then Google is a wheelchair. Google is getting smarter. Other search engines are as well. As a result, we've outsourced part of our mental labor to the Internet. Face it, we recall a lot less not that the search box is everywhere. It's no longer about getting to a computer anymore. Wifi is everywhere and its on our phones as well.

I wonder where we're headed with all this? Does this dependency make us better? Do we reclaim that bandwidth for far more umm, "advanced" processes and higher thinking?

Now that I've vented a bit, I'm not entirely sure what to do. Do I stop using search engines for "quick lookups"? Flush my cell phone's address list? How do get my fat brain off the couch and start exercising some more?

One of Google's lofty goals is to "organize the world's information." That's all well and good. Access to information is a powerful, seemingly altruistic end. Or is it? Digging slightly deeper, I'm not sure its about accessing the world's information as much as it is about making the world's information immediately accessible...which begs the question: who said we wanted all information to be a few clicks away?

I'll close with yet another bit of Short-Attenion-Span Theater. This one has a somewhat relevant message though:

The above is a clip from Nitin Sawhney's Prophecy (an excellent album).

Posted by richz at 9:25 AM

Microsoft's Silverlight : Yet Another Hedge

When I think of Microsoft, I imagine a big fat gambler strolling into the casino in a three-piece suit and a cigar. He saunters up to the roulette table, drops a pile of $100 chips and proceeds to put a chip on every number, black and red. He can't lose.

Microsoft is in that enviable (or despicable, depending on your view on things) position of being able to address, attack and react to every single strategic threat that comes its way. It has such vast resources that it doesn't really need to sit down and think about which strategy is best. It can simply deploy them all.

Microsoft has just released Silverlight. What is Silverlight you ask? It's essentially a "cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for streaming video, games and other multi-media content" (Beet.tv's words). In other words, it's a Flash knock-off that the world didn't really need.

So why would Microsoft build Silverlight?

Consider this: Adobe just released numbers that show a 90.3% penetration for its latest version of Flash (version 9). What sort of real numbers does this translate into? Over 2.5 billion installations. Vista, on the other hand, has seen 60 million licenses ship by the end of June 2007. Now, it isn't entirely fair to compare a full-blown operating system to a lightweight runtime like Flash, but Microsoft is concerned nonetheless. Adobe has larger plans for Flash. They see it on the desktop (via Adobe AIR) and as a platform for building business applications (Adobe Flex). They also see it eventually running on smaller devices.

The world doesn't really need Silverlight. If you run down its feature list, it doesn't really bring anything new and innovative to the table. While some heralded its "immediate importance," that's feeling like a whole lot of hype at this point. Truth is, its just another $100 chip on the roulette table. It's a hedge that may well slow down and potentially eat into a competitor's market share. As for consumers, it brings little of value and maybe some unnecessary confusion.

Posted by richz at 9:54 AM

Jumpin' The Fence

I really enjoy catching up on the 100 or so feeds that I track. I also really, really enjoy a handful of feeds that are just personal favorites of mine. To use a semi-contrived analogy: every day I take a walk through my RSS neighborhood. I visit the same places. Some I pass by without stopping in because I care less about them (or I'll get to them later). Others I run to if I find out anything new is going on.Then there's the destinations that have a 24 hour-a-day house party. 50-100 updates occurring every day (e.g. Engadget and Gizmodo). All things considered though, its an enjoyable excursion. I genuinely like catching up.

But here's the problem...

I never leave this neighborhood. I find myself constantly strolling around the same streets and avenues, listening in on the same voices over and over again. Yes, on occasion some one moves in (i.e. I subscribe to a new blog or news source) but generally speaking, I don't venture out much. My reading list is walling me in and I'm starting to become more and more conscious of that.

On the flip side of all this, basement.org is a destination itself. I'm fully convinced that there are many out there that would enjoy reading some of the posts on here but really have no way of finding out about them. Of course, there many tips on how to better promote your blog, but the reality is what it is: the democratic nature of the Internet is still limited to logistical realities. A user can only stumble on so much that is new. Instead, we visit the same places - over and over and over again.

So how can we better venture out to other neighborhoods on the Web? There are many ways. Social bookmarking and voting sites like del.icio.us and Digg and Stumble Upon help to an extent, and the occasional discovery after a few searches can help, but generally speaking, it's hard to leave. It takes energy and you have to wade through a lot of junk to find something worthwhile elsewhere.

Then there's the elite neighborhoods. The gated community that has your "A-List bloggers" that you'll often find loitering in Technorati's top 100. It's a weird, oddly segregated place where some very influential people (whether deservedly so or not) somehow set the tone for the blogging world on a regular basis. Weird.

I'm going to make more of a conscious effort to venture elsewhere - somehow. I'll share any tricks or ideas that help me along (if I find any). If I get lost, there's always the express back to the same old place. For now, getting lost sounds pretty good.

Posted by richz at 11:20 AM

Person = OPML. Own Your Social Links.

So now that the Facebook orgy has settled down a bit (no, it's not the next Microsoft or the next Internet), people are starting to take a good, hard look at Facebook's implications as the de facto place where your identity, and the links to your identity from others, lives. Dave Winer and the kids at Mashable are starting to raise the issue of lock-in. In a nutshell: while Facebook opened up its platform for others to build within their walls, the nucleus of all that building - your identity and the links that propagate out of it - is Facebook's.

In other words, if the paths that define social networking were the radio spectrum, Facebook is effectively the FCC. And so, the conversation around "open social networks" is starting to happen. Fred Wilson rightly points out that the masses that are using Facebook really don't care if its open or closed. In fact, most don't really know what that means.

So why do we need an "open social network"? But wait, what exactly is an open social network ("OSN"). Well, I'm guessing a key requirement is one where you can take and move your core data - i.e. everything that a service has collected about you including your profile, your friends, your links, everything - and allow you to take it and move it elsewhere or not move it at all. Similar to the laws that came down regarding the transferability of cell phone numbers, we ultimately must be able to take our stuff (and it really is our stuff no?) and leave any time we please.

You can't do that with Facebook today. You can "deactivate" your account, but that just sort of puts it in Sleep Mode. Your data is still there. Facebook reserves the right to keep "archived copies" of your content even after you explicitly remove it.

In the end, it's about being able to say "thanks for your service, please give me my things, I'm leaving now." What that requires is a standardized, agreed-upon way to represent your personal assets. This way, if you choose to move elsewhere, you can. And above all else, your links - the connections you have with others - go with you.

So this got me thinkin'...

A person's links (and here we're talking about people links, not web links) is really just an OPML file. An OPML file is just a list of links usually used to store RSS feeds. It's a subscription list. Except here what we really want to link to is other people's OPML's. A "contact subscription list" if you will. In other words, a person equals one OPML. Each OPML contains important information about the person (e.g. photo link, profile info, etc.) as well as the list of OPML's (i.e. other people) that that person has some sort of relationship with.

Your OPML should be able to live anywhere. If mine happens to be on basement.org and it's properly compliant, I should be able to join and blend into any social network. Note the power shift here. Services like Faecebook can offer OPML management services, but the decision as to who manages and maintains that OPML is up to the owner of it: me. It is an XML representation of you and your social network.

Google Reader is a great web-based RSS reader. I've invested a lot of time compiling about 150 feeds that I track through Google Reader. They're tagged and organized to my liking. And most importantly, I can take them with me any time. Just about every RSS reader allows you to export your reading list of feeds to OPML. That ownership and portability that exists for online news sources and blogs can exist for other people as well.

Ultimately, any social network that's worth its weight shouldn't view such an approach as threatening or antagonistic. If what Fred Wilson asserts holds true - that people don't realy care - then why not open things up anyway? The end result will be a more vibrant and transparent ecosystem for other actors to play in. Something that everyone can benefit from.

Posted by richz at 10:16 AM

Help Prevent Social Tagging Pollution

At the risk of sounding like an elitist, I've stumbled on an oddly perturbing corollary. It goes something like this:

As a social service graduates from the early-adopter/niche population to the general population, its collective content gets markedly worse.

This is best clarified by an example. Del.icio.us has been the favored method of tagging and social bookmarking for geeks for years now. Since Yahoo acquired them and especially of late delicious has become more and more popular. And rightly so. it's a great service.

But with popularity comes...how should I say this...pollution. If delicious is aspiring to become the bookmarking site for the masses, then it's well on its way to pretty much sucking. The less savvy among us will bookmark and tag things that aren't really worth sharing like:

Entry pages to well-known sites like Forbes.com.
Junk headlines from MSNBC and gossip sites (have you seen what the most popular searches on Google are? Who is Kim Kardashian?).
Links to stuff people want to come back to, like the landing page for a big sale on cellulite treatment.

And so on.

I wonder if this highlights an unwritten rule of social media: the more people you add to the mix, the more polluted the pool. It makes sense. In the name of fair use and democracy, we can't rightly shun the masses from using a service as tasty as delicious.

So what do we do? How can we elevate certain assets as "better than most"? Plain-vanilla voting isn't going to work because the same population that is putting up junk is also voting on junk. Maybe we need a class system for people on the Internet. Something akin to a "credit rating."

Then again, one man's junk is another man's treasure. Maybe we just need to somehow allow the populations of certain circles to elevate and support one another. If I start to collect a lot of Nascar links, then when I ask delicious (or Flickr, or Digg) for interesting stuff, it'll provide me with results that better fit my tastes. It's specialization, except organically grown.

The junk that gets in the mix is akin to spam, yet far more subtle. Email spam is inherently impure. Social junk is less about ulterior motives and more about noise (or at least perceived noise). This is partly why certain blogs are so well regarded. They've done the cleansing for you in a sense.

Ok, I'm done with my elitist rant. So umm, who is Kim Kardashain again?

Posted by richz at 10:30 AM

Legos vs. Action Figures

When I was a little kid, you could easily group my toys into two distinct categories: Legos and everything else. "Everything else" including things like action figures, your occasional gun, fighter planes (I really liked planes) and a Transformer here and there. But the life span of those toys was very limited. I'd play with them, act out some imaginary storyline, and then eventually get tired of creating a world around this toy in my hand. Yeh, I'd seen Star Wars five times already so I was definitely into the characters, but how many action scenes am I supposed to re-enact? I was playing out a soap opera. And seven year-old boys aren't really into soap operas.

Legos were a whole other story. Yeh, the box they came in suggested what to assemble (fire truck or fighter plane or whatever) but I never paid much attention to that. I had my own ideas. Almost immediately, I wanted to build something - from nothing. And that single Lego piece really is nothing. It is, both figuratively and literally, a building block. At first glance, it's far less impressive than an intricately detailed action figure. Yet by having so little going on, the burden shifted to me to create something meaningful out of it. With all due respect to Han Solo, someone else already had their fun building that world. I'm just getting their leftovers.

So there's an odd irony here. Tools (and these really are "tools" that are used to achieve another end) that appear more constraining ("What am i supposed to do with this?") in fact better position us to do something creative and amazing.

In the 1970's, Steve Wozniak holed himself up in his living room with a set of chips, some circuit boards and a handful of technical manuals. With those constraints in place (due to lack of money and access to more expensive and elaborate equipment), he was left with little more than a collection of electronic parts, his own tenacity and some wild ambition.

The result? Some of the earliest innovations in personal computing came out of that living room. The constraints Wozniak was confronted with fueled his determination, and in a sense, forced him to focus on a narrower set of possibilities. Wozniak is legend today and the Apple II (the direct descendent of his work) was an enormous success.

What if Wozniak had been hired by IBM to head up their R&D group? He probably would have had all kinds of hardware, software and people at his disposal. Would he have made the same headway in the same amount of time? I highly doubt it.

Technology moves fast. Really fast. It seems as though as soon as you've mastered a scripting language or some graphics tool, the next version comes out with a whole new set of features. I personally love that its in constant motion, but it can feel overwhelming at times. I get a little bit excited and a little bit depressed all at once when I read about yet another tool or function or library that I should know about but don't. Yet at the same time, I feel like shutting down all those channels, picking a smaller set of tools (i.e. constraining myself) and going from there.

So close all those unnecessary programs. Uninstall all that extraneous stuff. Unsubscribe from all those feeds that you're not really that interested in anyway. Also, and I know this one is tough: stop upgrading. Stick with what you have and make better use of it. Faster and bigger isn't always better. In fact, it's a deceptive crutch that can hinder us in many ways.

Hmmm...I wonder if there are any Pentium II's out there for sale...

Posted by richz at 9:38 AM

Adobe's Opportunity

A few days ago, I outlined the different ways design can be infused into a product development process and asserted that the iPhone is the most drastic example of aligning your entire business around a sound design. Furthering the theme, Business Week has an interesting article that makes a similar assertion: CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them. Think Steve Jobs And iPhone.

I'm still scratching my head in amazement wondering how technology behemoths like Nokia and Samsung could let Apple, a mobile phone non-player, step into their space and in a single moment, instantly put them two years behind.

What were the management meetings like in Nokia, Motorola and Samsung last week?

Of course, this isn't just about design. It's about alignment around design. The only way to realistically make this kind of leap is to put out a reference design that seems relatively impossible...and then go figure out how you're gonna pull it off.

Diving slightly deeper, the iPhone is an incredible example of software and hardware synergy. The software team wasn't working against some pre-defined API. When that hardware got delivered to them it was custom-tailored to exactly what the design demanded. I firmly believe that this is why the product feels so revolutionary by today's standards. This is also why Macbooks and Macs feel so much more "together" than Windows-powered PC's and laptops. Apple has to work against three or four reference designs. Microsoft has to accomodate tens of thousands of distinct pieces of hardware and millions of combinations.

So how can the other guys catch up or even surpass what Apple has pulled off? Well, it's clear they need to not rely on pre-packaged tools or components that are far from revolutionary and then just piece them together. Software from vendor X and hardware component from vendor Y is not going to win in this game. Instead, they need to do what Apple did...unless someone can come up with a wickedly powerful software and hardware platform that people can build on. Something that can compete with the power and fluidity of the iPhone experience.

Enter Adobe

The big guys need help. They need a platform that can enable the next generation of mobile devices deliver a far richer experience than available today. They need a platform that can leverage the work that's already been done and knowledge that is already invested. The platform also needs to be really lightweight without compromising power. The big guys need Flash.

Adobe's strategy around Flash, Flex and AIR isn't just about widgets on your desktop (at least I hope it isn't). It's about finally decoupling from the browser and breaking out to just about anywhere. A single platform that delivers a rich user experience across platforms and devices. By abstracting away dealing with the hardware, a massive population of designers and developers can be leveraged.

PBS' Robert Cringely shares this sentiment in a write-up from a week ago:

Flash is well understood, and the development environment is highly evolved and therefore efficient. There are many experienced Flash designers, so the pool of available talent is potentially much larger. GUI design can be done by people who don't require intimately specialized knowledge of the underlying hardware. GUI elements would be portable across device models and even device categories. Think how the right-facing triangle of the "Play" button started on tape recorders, moved to VCRs, and is now on CD players, DVD players, DVRs, iPods, and any hardware or software that records or plays back content.
GUIs would evolve much more quickly and cost less to create. There could be standard interface libraries for all types of uses, and the similar GUIs would lower the learning curve for users. Talented interface designers would be in demand. User interfaces would be potentially upgradeable. More interesting, GUIs could be user-specific: the same cell phone might have a "Grandma interface" for one user, but a very different GUI for teens. And there's no reason why that should stop with cell phones.

So there does appear to be hope for the "other guys." It'll be fun to see how aggressively Adobe goes after the mobile platform market. Flash Lite is pretty good, but the Holy Grail is Flash 8 or 9 running on something really small and powerful. They're probably still going to need to partner with (or buy) someone on the hardware end. Hell, if Apple can have that kind of influence, why not Adobe?

Adobe is just now reaching the desktop beachhead with AIR and Flex. There's still a lot of headway to make there. But the desktop/mobile dichotomy is officially dead thanks to Apple. Those widgets and mini-apps that look so nice on your desktop would fit beautifully on a little screen in your pocket. Imagine visiting a web page and having the options "Drop On Your Desktop" and "Drop On Your Mobile" available. One code base, many destinations.

As for me personally, I've come to terms with the fact that just communicating with Sprint seems to renew my contract. So I just gawk at the iPhone from afar and just keep...ahem..."surfing" on my Treo.

Posted by richz at 11:01 AM

Offline Applications & The Task Of Unlearning

The blogs and the mainstream press is all abuzz about Google Gears. One of the key differences between web applications and desktop applications is the ability to use them offline. With Gears, developers can now tap into an API that allows for local storage (via SQLLite) and syncing of activity without being connected to the Internet. Google Reader is one of the first applications to support Gears.

This was pretty much inevitable and it checks off yet another item that differentiates the web and desktop software. The Financial Times spins it as yet another step towards taking on Microsoft. I think that's a bit of an oversimplification but the point is valid.

As we continue to see the line blur between desktop and web, an often overlooked challenge still exists: getting users to fully understand what's changing and why it should matter to them. The desktop paradigm: files stored in folders that I can "take out", work on and put away, is a very powerful one. Call it what you will, but the ability to control assets locally and then, at your discretion, pass them along others is a deeply-ingrained metaphor that works for most. Yes, there's value in centrally storing a spreadsheet. But there's also a cost in not really knowing where this asset lives. How do I give it to someone else? How do I delete it? How do I move it?

Of course, those of us well-versed in 2.0isms write these questions off as a failure to understand this "new way of doing things." Not so fast. People understand the representation of a file. For just about everyone, a file - whether a spreadsheet or document or image has what I like to call "cognitive integrity." In other words, it is clearly represented as its own "thing." It has a name (i.e. the filename). It has volume (i.e. file size) and takes up something akin to physical space. These perceived characterstics, which seem silly to harp upon as we move towards an increasingly centralized utility computing world, are incredibly powerful. This is partly why I think PDF is still so pervasive today. It's not only about a printable representation. It's about an indisputable representation of something.

Today we sign up and just start doing stuff in a web browser. Files (if they're still called that) don't really move around as much. We just sort of collaborate or share them (sort of). They float in some perceived ether. Tools like Google Gears will help us work offline and it will make a lot of sense for syncing states in an application like Google Reader. But I'd argue that people really want files and folders. They want things in their hands and then they'll send it elsewhere at their discretion.

It'll be interesting to see how designers approach the challenge of helping users grasp and take advantage of the shifts that are occurring today. Before we embark on that path though, we should make certain the value is really there and that it outweighs the unlearning process that will inevitably have to occur.

Posted by richz at 8:32 PM

Google Installing Spyware On Dell PC's

The OpenDNS blog has an excellent write-up on some really um...sorta evil practices that Google and Dell have teamed up to deliver to their customers. In essence, it's spyware. Error URL's are really common with inexperienced users. The redirect leads you to a page full of ads. No help. No suggested correction. Nothing. It's slimy. A huge percentage of computer users have no idea they're looking at advertisements. In fact, Google's ads don't look like advertisements at all. It's just text on a page. No fancy animations or colors. Just a bunch of text that pretty much looks like search results.

Even worse, this tool is buried away in some non-descript application that you have to manually uninstall. As Google continues to grow, they're finding that it's going to have to pay for those precious default settings. Huge numbers of people never change things when they first plug in that PC. So Google has partnered with hardware makers to install toolbars and the like. That's fine and good. But there is a line where you're effectively misleading novice users with ads that look like bona fide search results.

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:

Keep Supporting CSS For Styling – And Maybe For Layout. The last five or so years has seen an amazing grass-roots movement towards leveraging cascading style sheets not only for styling but also for layout. Adobe’s Flex platform already has limited support for CSS - that’s a great start. It would be great to see the principles of CSS - to separate styling from content – continue to be supported. Beyond look and feel, CSS is often used today for the layout of container elements in XHTML. While it’s broken in some places and requires some voodoo tricks to attain the desired outcome, it’s an important step because it allows the markup to more closely resembe a semantic structure.

Long Live XHTML (Sorta). I’ll pose this suggestion in the form of a question: why do tags like <h1>, <p>, <a> or <ul> have to disappear? Yes, we’re building more software now than content-heavy web pages, but the web is still mainly about content. It’s hard to stomach all these new markup specs that are showing up. It seems nobody bothered to consider extending XHTML. Or how about a conversion tool of sorts?

Down To The Pixel. One of the great things about web development is you can grab the elements as they are, or you can really dive in and change the look and feel of just about everything without having to write a lot of code. Of course, you can do that with these new technologies but you’ll be confronted with a very steep learning curve. I know that both Adobe & Microsoft are addressing the designer-developer workflow with new tools, but they’re far off from providing the relatively easy granular power the web offers.

Where’s My Timeline? Developers think in objects interacting. Designers think in time – the experience unfolding as the user interacts with a system. In the old days, a site map could nicely lay out the world that a user can traverse. With all this new interactivity, it’s getting a lot harder to “map out” the possibilities. Adobe has done a great job of attacking both sides: the Flash timeline for desingers, the Flex object model for developers. Now they just have to somehow bridge the gap between the two. In the past, the hand-off was “production-ready” front-end: xhtml, css, images. What’s the hand-off gonna be here? Can a designer map out the different pieces and get them ready for wiring?

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.

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:

Pick Your Platform. With all these proprietary technologies being pitched, developers are being forced to pick their platform for rich web development. Rather than a single, agreed-upon set of standards, we've now got three (or four, or five).

What Of The Designers? You can't help but worry about those designer/front-end production people out there. They're no confronted with this whole new set of expectations. Not only is software richer, but the ways to make it richer just got a lot more complicated. Furthermore, there are now pre-requisites to getting going. In the past, you needed notepad (or some replacement. Today, you need an IDE like Flex Builder or Microsoft Expression. The pick-up-and-build aspect of the web is being threatened.

Bring Back Ugly, Ubiquitous Interfaces One of the web's flaws was a blessing in disguise. Because there never existed a formal forms model or strict interface guidelines, you saw a great explosion in both graphic and interface creativity. Now that various players are pre-packaging interfaces, I fear that we're about to see a wave of awful looking windows forms hit the web as armies of VB developers start hacking together Silverlight applications. This point is related to the previous one: if we leave the designers out of the picture, we can't combat this.

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.

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.

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).

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Headache-Inducing Possibilities. The possibilities of Apollo are exciting and humbling all at once. The ability to bring together desktop power with the social aspects of the Internet makes my head hurt (in a good way).

Out-Of-The-Browser Thinking. In my opinion, Apollo's potential won't be fully appreciated for a bit. Today, we seem to be asking: "how do we make this product better with Apollo?" Eventually we'll be asking: "what can we build in Apollo that is simply impossible today." Revolution vs. evolution. It's gonna take a bit to break out of the desktop/Internet dichotomy we live in today. Ryan Stewart touches on this as well.

No more URL's. No More Back Buttons. No More Browser. While the techheads may write off the end of browser chrome is ho-hum, the impact on end-users is drastic. In fact, it may even be jarring at first. But there's no doubt that utility belt-type URL destinations will scream for Apollo.

Don't Forget The Designers. With this new breed of software, let's not forget the designers. Not just the graphic designers, but front-end web designers. From the elegance of XHTML to the raw power of CSS, designers have invested a lot of time and energy to get good at this stuff. As these apps get richer, it's getting harder to keep them involved and contributing.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-~~ripoff~~inspired 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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

Posted by richz at 10:22 AM

"Your Edges Are Our Edges"

Consder the following:

You can search for and watch millions of video snippets on sites like Youtube and Google Video. Sitting down and watching a film for 90 minutes (or God forbid, two hours) is becoming less and less tolerable. Feasting on 10–60 second snippets of whatever is becoming the norm.
For $0.99, you can own one of millions of songs of just about any album on Apple’s iTunes service. Mix. Reorder. Customize your own playlists. The notion of picking up a CD, heading to the park, and letting the tracks unfold in sequence seems almost archaic.
The hot new basic currency for written text is the blog entry. The newspaper or magazine articles that…*gasp*…run for multiple pages are threatened. And books? Pfft. Forget books.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 information - however way it comes to be.

Posted by richz at 1:13 PM

People Acquisitions

Are the Web 2.0 applications that spring up these days just portfolios that highlight the talent behind them? Are the creators of these Web 2.0 startups just prospective hires for the Web 2.0 Big Three (Yahoo, Microsoft & Google)? Are some of he "acquisitions" that have transpired over the last year (Writely, Flickr, etc.) really just masked attempts to grab talent and fold it into the Big Three?

I bring all this up because I just found out that Gtalkr is no more. The guys behind it are now Google employees and the applicaiton itself is no longer up. Now this wasn't an acquisition per se (otherwise we would've heard from Google) and I doubt we'll see Gtalkr return any time soon. Nevertheless, it makes you wonder about how the Big Three perceive all this Web 2.0 silliness: as a nice shortcut to finding smart, innovative talent. Ultimately, this battle is going to be won out by talent. It is clear that the real assets behind these startups are the people behind them.

Posted by richz at 3:57 PM

Minimizing Search

These days, it's all about search. Google is changing the game with search. Microsoft has validated Google's position by scrambling to make their own search story happen. Search, and the money associated with search through ads, has established a new arena in technology where none existed really. Quality search results and findability hold the key to billions of dollars.

It's all pretty understandable. Correlating advertising with search results have proven to be wildly effective. It is turning the advertising world on its end. When we're perusing through a magazine or lounging around while a TV ad comes on, very little of our consciousness is committed to focusing on the ad. Interspersed between articles or television programs, ads are, by definition, disruptive. In today's age of mass marketing, our brains are by now very well-conditioned to tune out at appropriate times. Besides, the ads rarely have anything to do with what we're focusing on in the first place.

Searching for something is a whole other ballgame. Unlike reading or watching TV, we are engaged in a dialogue. We ask a question. We're also in a task-oriented mindset and anxious to get the right answer. We're paying attention. When results come up with ads alongside them, we're in a markedly elevated state of attention. The search engine already has a head start on traditional media: it knows we're already engaged.

Despite it's near hypnotic power, we don't stay around very long. Thought about from a use case perspective, the search process sits somewhere in the middle. We may print out the results. We may write something down. The most likely scenario is that we're just going to click through and move onto our intended destination. For all it's engaging abilities, the search engine is just a means to an end.

As an interaction designer, I would love to whip together a nice little interface that allows me to quickly see search results, click on them and quickly jump over to the destination in my browser. In other words, why do I need to use a whole browser to essentially execute on an interim step? Why can't it be this thin slice of search results in a side bar within a browser or desktop? Or off of my mouse pointer? A better experience can be had if we're willing to compartmentalize and make portable the search results step.

With all of the toolbars, add-ons, extensions and desktops that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! put out, every one of them land you in the browser. The driver here is not a user case but rather a business case: those ads need to be shown.

Others have talked about how search is headed towards commoditization. If that's the case, then keep the brand name and the bells and whistles and just give me that information in a portable way. It may run counter to the business ends, but it's definitely the right thing for users.

Posted by richz at 9:36 AM

The New Web 2.0 Frontline

The war drums are beating. Google has shown the world that delivering quality search results and services can translate into a hell of a lot of money. Microsoft, never one to sit idle while major trends ripple through the technology world, has its own plans to attack the web-based services and applications space. And let’s not forget Yahoo! They’ve fully embraced the Web 2.0 trends by acquiring companies like Flickr and del.icio.us. The war drums are not only beating, but they’re getting louder and louder. Everyone is focused on the battle and the combatants but few consider where this battle is being fought. The battlefield today lies inside your web browser. That’s all about to change.

A fundamental premise for winning this battle is the ability to get users to interact with your services. Once they’re talking, the next step is to pay very close attention to them. Gather their search queries. Read their emails. Index their documents. Google has shown the world that the undeniable need to seek out and find good information leads to a lot of money. To date, the web browser has been the primary gateway between these various services and users. The billions of dollars that Google is generating is hanging on a single, simple URL. If any of these players can capture that entry point - or jeopardize or supplant it, they will have won a key battle in the war.

But there’s a wrinkle in all this. Not many people have noticed, but the browser is starting to show its age. As simple API’s continue to proliferate, and as simple push technologies like RSS continue to gain adoption, the browser itself is beginning to…leak. Information and these key entry points are starting to show up in other places.

Visiting both Yahoo! and Google in Microsoft’s Internet Explorery 7 web browser generated the following, tweaked landing pages:

Frontline_1

Frontline_2

Notice how both pages attempt to entice the user to change their default search box (Firefox has a similar capability). The URL, as a primary entry point, is clearly being threatened by new browser capabilities. We should not underestimate the millions of users who buy Dell’s, plug them in, flip them on and just start using the Internet. They are not interested in tweaking or refining. They simply want things to work. A very large percentage of searches start from within that little search box that sits near the top of your browser.

As the critical entry point for users shifts from URL to some readily available interface control, the various combatants will find themselves standing on a different battleground. Specifically, they’re standing on Microsoft’s soil. If you venture beyond the web browser, it is invariably Microsoft’s territory. This critical distinction conjurs up memories of Netscape, and antitrust and icons and desktops. Google has already raised concerns about Internet Explorer 7 and it’s ever-present search box that defaults to MSN Search. The New York Times article nicely touches upon the crux of the issue:

That slice of on-screen real estate has the potential to be enormously valuable, and Microsoft is the landlord.

Google’s concerns are completely justified. And as you can see from the screen captures above, they’re going to make every effort to speak to users and help them make the necessary tweak to move away from other web properties and back to Google. As to whether this practice is anti-competitive on Microsoft’s part is a much harder argument to make. The feature is not some useless tactic to torpedo competitors but a rather useful one that brings more power into the users hands.

Google Heart Firefox

Another clear hint that it’s not just about the web page but the browser itself is Google’s commitment to Firefox. The standard Firefox installation defaults the homepage to Google. Google donates $1 to the Mozilla Foundation if you download Firefox. And just recently, they’ve gone ahead and promoted Firefox on the sacred Google homepage (if viewed through Internet Explorer). The end game is clear here for Google: maintain some control over the software that sits on people’s computers. It’s also worth noting that Firefox contains the same quick search that, of course, defaults to Google results.

Goodbye Browser. Hello Desktop.

The big players know full well that the battlefield is going to expand even beyond the web browser’s chrome and onto the desktop itself. All three players have their own flavors of “Desktop” applications. Google has sprinkled various pieces of their services (maps, news and others) into their desktop application – Google Desktop. The goal for all three is the same: build relationships between their web properties and users. Create a dependency. Gather usage metrics. Get to know these users and target them with ever-more accurate ads. It’s a pretty straightforward strategy.

Microsoft’s Two-Pronged Attack

You can’t help but watch this unfold and surmise that this is all playing nicely into Microsoft’s hands. As Internet applications become more sophisticated, the appeal of bringing them directly to the desktop in a more targeted manner is very strong. The result is a smoother end-user experience where data and services are intermingled throughout the desktop experience.

The next phase in this battle will be fought on the desktop. Microsoft will invariably use it’s position to squeeze their competition at every opportunity. With Windows Vista and their Live initiatives, they are planning already planning an exodus away from the browser.

On one end, you’ve got Microsoft Gadgets. Today, developers can easily build little widgets that can live on Microsoft’s Live personal portal page. Hundreds have already been built. Google provides developers with a similar capability for their personalized portal page. But what’s interesting about Microsoft’s play is that their gadgets will actually run outside of the browser, either on the desktop or the Vista sidebar. There’s already an SDK available for the latest build of Vista. So it’s clear that Microsoft views the Gadgets and the Live initiative in general as not just another set of web applications but a suite of services and content that fit holistically into Microsoft’s grander picture.

Microsoft is also attacking from the opposite end - the desktop. They’ve completely reworked the presentation layer for their operating system. Sitting atop this layer is the XAML markup language. XAML is to the Windows desktop what HTML is to the conventional browser. Developers can create a Windows front-end that is wired to web services via simple XML. Users will be able to click on a link in an email or web page and a full-blown application can spawn. No download. No installation. The potential impact of XAML may well be massive. Imagine solutions and content delivered in a perfectly tailored way right to your desktop. Widgets. Toolbars. Floating controls. All tied directly to services and content. An eBay wizard for adding items. An Amazon wishlist application. The possibilities are very exciting.

Where Do The Ads Go?

If all these great services are headed away from the browser and onto the desktop, the proverbial question has to be asked: where do the ads go? Will users tolerate advertisements on the desktop. The desktop is clearly perceived as a personal space today. Users infer a clear delineation of the windows that allow them to peer into the rest of the Internet (i.e. browsers, chat clients) and their own personal world. Sure, we’d love to see Google results streamlined into a sidebar or widget, but let’s face it, Google is in no hurry to move as away from the web. The web is where the ads are.

This all highlights one precariously painful reality for a company like Google. The billions in ad revenue hangs on a single thread: the URL destination. All roads need to lead back to the web for Google to sell ads. As the desktop continues to light up with content and capabilities from the Internet, the relative importance and dependancy of the URL destination will continue to diminish. Users will not go someplace to do something. They’ll open a box or run a program or click on a toolbar.

The New Guerilla War

As content and functionality continue to leak out of the browser, the weapons needed to win this battle are going to change. Microsoft owns the arena and the other players will use every means possible to offset their clear advantage. It doesn’t surprise me one bit that Google is lobbying the government against Microsoft’s supposed “unfair advantage.” This time around though, Google may have a much tougher time convincing others that what Microsoft is doing is unfair. As Jeremy Zawodny points out, there’s a bit of a double standard at play here. Google is no babe in the woods and they’ve made some pretty overt moves to try to position themselves as the default search engine for users.

Beyond this highly sought-after entry point for search, the PC experience outside the browser will progressively be wired more and more to the Internet applications and data. Will Google complain over an envelope icon that launches a desktop client that is wired directly into Live Mail? Will Yahoo! complain that it’s del.icio.us social bookmarking site is being unfairly threatened by a seamless implementation of Live Bookmarks? The list goes on and on.

By moving software away from the browser and decentralizing it, the nature of the battle fundamentally changes. Whereas the battlefield was clearly delineated prior, the war zone is now far less tangible. It’ll be interesting to watch the different tactics materialize. A lot of mindshare and money is at stake.

Posted by richz at 2:44 PM

Masses And The Machine

There's some buzz going around that Digg isn't such a great model of Internet deomcracy. There are some posts flying around about how Digg is somewhat corrupted. The story itself has actually been dugg on digg over 500 times (as of this posting).

This raises an oddly implicit assumption that we seem to be making about social sites like Digg, Flickr and the like: the entities that house and maintain this information are fair, impartial and mildly benevolent. Just as we hold other publications to a higher set of standards, we've come to expect a certain level of good judgment and prudence by these services.

One could argue that the burden is even higher for such services. Since the content is not a product of any single person's mind but rather that of the community, it's integrity is instantly elevated to near sacred status. Oddly, where humans are expected to fact check and police information that is authored, in the realm of socially-created content, we want humans to stay out of the picture. Only the masses and the machine are trustworthy.

Posted by richz at 12:43 PM

Sneaking Web 2.0 Into The Enterprise

Nicholas Carr's blog Rough Type (an excellent blog by the way) shares some thoughts on a new MIT Sloan Management Review article by Andrew Mcafee entitled "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration."

The article is basically an argument of how many of the pillars of Web 2.0 - tagging, RSS, blogs, wikis - can really help the dissemination and flow of knowledge through enterprises whereas previous efforts have consistently failed.

I generally agree with this premise. We've seen enough over-bloated feature-laden X Management Systems that promise to finally solve the challenge of getting the right information out to the right people in large organizations. The Enterprise world has a lot to learn from some of the basic tenets of Web 2.0: less complexity; highly focused goal-oriented user interfaces, rapid development. Unlike the general Internet population which is more akin to the Wild West, the typical Enterprise's user population is far more focused and the Enterprise itself provides invaluable context to what's going on with in. It's a built-in noise filter.

Nicholas astutely points out a snag in this promise though. Most users are consumers of the artifacts of web 2.0. A small population actually creates the content. Furthermore, those content creators have the best knowledge and the least time to share it. They're very busy. Sure, the techie early adopters will be giddy about it, but the key players will glance over these cute little tools and go back to their routine.

He's right. But I think there are creative ways to address this. One way is to fuse content-generating activities with actual responsibilities. Is there a status update? Put it on the wiki. Don't email a group of people. You can further reinforce this by tying incentives to using these tools. This requires a top-down mandate real vision by management. A rare thing if real money isn't tied to it.

But there's something else we can do. Rather than training people and hoping they'll play with a new tool, we can work within their current toolset and work practice. We can build software that pays attention to how they work. We can, in very subtle ways, introduce simple but powerful tweaks to their current user experiences. If posting to feed were as simple - and similar - to writing an email, the cost is far lower for the user. Couple that with the very real benefits of Web 2.0, you've got a better shot at infusing these things into the work day.

Posted by richz at 8:13 AM

Feedback Loop 2.0

You have got to love the twisted little feedback loop that is the Web these days. Last week, I whined like a child that Netvibes' front-end was a bit too cramped. Yesterday, I posted about a neat little tool called Stylish that allowed you to hack at any sites CSS with Firefox.

This morning, I open up Firefox to find that the Netvibes team actually made the changes. It's an oh-so-subtle change, but man it makes a difference. Very cool.

Imagine watching a TV show and phoning into the network and telling them they need to shift their camera angles; or emailing your favorite magazine to tell them that their article layout in their print edition needs to change. Only on the web.

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Posted by richz at 9:42 AM

Coming Soon : Google Canvas?

Man, I'm all about gossip and conspiracy theory today. No, not that kind of gossip. I'm talking about geeky Gossip 2.0.

Some kids at Google have put out an open source implementation of Mozilla's (and originally Apple's) fine little Canvas drawing capability for Internet explorer called ExplorerCanvas.

Now why would Google go to the pain of creating a Javascript implementation of Canvas? Is it that whole 20%-of-your-time-is-for-whatever thing? Or is Google working on a cross-browser drawing tool of some sort? Or is this a way to break beyond the limited set of GUI elements associated with web apps (you can draw just about anything with this tool)?

Who knows. It's Friday. Nothing wrong with a little dirt now and again.

Posted by richz at 8:33 AM

An Interview With Feedlounge's Alex King

Feedlounge is one of a new breed of web-based feed readers that provides a rich online experience for managing your feed subscriptions. Only live for a few months now, it’s garnered a loyal following of…get this…paying customers. I recently had a chance to have an email conversation with Feedlounge’s Alex King.

How many people were involved in the building of Feedlounge?

It was primarily me and my partner Scott. Brian, an intern at Scott's consulting business, did a bit of work on it too, especially as we were getting started last year. We recently added another team member to focus on performance and scalability and allow Scott and I to return our focus to building a great application.

How long did you work on it before it went live?

We went live with our private alpha release about 5 months after we began development. Our public release on Jan 16th, 2006 was almost exactly 1 year after we began development.

How did you "fund" the development effort? Your own time and/or money? Outside help?

FeedLounge has been 100% bootstrapped by Scott and me. We've absorbed both the soft costs (development time, opportunity cost, etc.) and the hard costs (servers, bandwidth, etc.). We'd had some interest from outside groups in helping us with funding, but for a variety of reasons none of them have gone through.

It's also a little hard to know how best to spend the money if we took it. It we accepted enough capital to bring on additional staff and grow for 6 months, we'd also be risking having to shut down the service after 6 months. By growing organically, we hope to build up both a happy user base and a sustainable service.

If I'm not mistaken, Feedlounge was never a free service after going live. Why didn't you make it freely available, at least at first?

This somewhat goes back to the fact that FeedLounge is funded by Alex and Scott, not a big corporation or VCs with deep pockets. When we first started work on FeedLounge, I had no idea the cost that would be involved in offering a feed reading service. Scott had a much better idea, and I quickly became educated. :)

As we've talked about in some depth in the FeedLounge blog, we ran through both a shared server and a dedicated server during our private alpha before purchasing appropriate hardware. Even on the better hardware, we had to make a number of back-end changes to improve performance about a month after our initial public release.

If we'd thrown open the doors in our public release and allowed anyone to use FeedLounge for free (without the gating affect of being a paid service), we would have overwhelmed our hardware and wouldn't have generated income to allow us to expand our infrastructure.

We do still plan to release a free version of FeedLounge that will be both ad supported and feature limited. However, we will only do so in a manner that is sustainable and supportable. In my opinion, to do otherwise is irresponsible. While we have not announced a timeframe for the availability of the free version, it is something we are working on.

What do you think differentiates Feedlounge from other web-based readers like Rojo and Bloglines?

I think the primary difference is the powerful and efficient reading interface FeedLounge delivers. Traditionally, people have had to choose between a the speed of a native application and the flexibility of being ability to access their feeds from any computer with a web-based feed reader. FeedLounge uses AJAX and DHTML extensively to enable FeedLounge users to read the same way they can in a native application. In FeedLounge, the arrow keys work, the space bar works, page up/down works, there are shortcut keys for marking items read/unread, for flagging and tagging items, for opening and closing feed tags and for changing views. On top of all these features, performance is fantastic and you can still access it from any computer (using IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera) without needing to install anything.

While our interface and user experience are the main reasons our users choose FeedLounge today, we've also begun to expand beyond being a better reading experience. Last week we released TagThru, the ability to pass tags from FeedLounge on to other tagging services (our first implementation allows users to also tag in del.icio.us).

We have a variety of other API style features and additions planned as well.

How did people react when they saw that, unlike 95% of Web 2.0 services out there, this wasn't free?

As we expected, the reaction was very mixed. I'd say there were basically two groups:

- If I see value in it, I'll pay for it
- I'll never pay for anything online, everything online should be free

Did you do any sort of marketing beyond the usual community buzz?

We've been talking about the way in which we want to approach this.

We think it's something we need to do.

So now that FeedLounge is out there, how is it doing? Is it your (and your partner's) full time job?

FeedLounge is doing quite well. People are signing up, posting about it in their blogs and perhaps most importantly giving us honest feedback. From day one we've had open forums where anyone can post (even if they're not a FeedLounge user) and we've gotten invaluable feedback from the users in the forums. More recently, we added a feature voting page where anyone with a forum account can add to the feature list and vote for the features they'd most like to see added to FeedLounge. We're trying to be very responsive to the priorities of our users, as indicated by this list.

FeedLounge is definitely a full time gig for both Scott and I in that we put in 40+ hours/week on it. We do have some other projects going at the same time. For example, I have no intentions of abandoning my Tasks Pro software and have been continuing to develop new features and push out new releases over the last year. Our business plan calls for organic growth of FeedLounge, and we're seeing what we expected.

Do you see it growing in terms of paying users?

Yes, we've seen steady growth since our public release.

Alex, thanks for your time on this and best of luck with Feedlounge.

Thanks, Rich - it's been my pleasure.

Posted by richz at 2:09 PM

The Ultimate Convergence Device

Cnet has an exclusive preview of a device that will no doubt redefine portability and convergence in personal technology. The E-vri-thin by Convergenics is a true achievement in technology.

Posted by richz at 10:03 AM

Reality Revisited

So the Reality Check 2.0 post from a couple of days ago got quite a response. It obviously hit a nerve on both sides of the spectrum regarding Web 2.0.

A couple of thoughts: First, I was pretty surprised at how many people agreed with the piece. Most of the readership of Basement.org are technophiles themselves, so I expected more defensive arguments.

The other thought is a bit more subtle. Reading over many of the comments, I think people are equating (or at least mixing up) good practice, good innovation and the evolved philosophy that has evolved out of Web 2.0 thinking with automatically translating into fail safe business models. I think that's a dangerous leap to take and I don't think the defenders of the trend should consider a different level of scrutiny. Good ideas and practice don't equal a sustainable business model...necessarily.

Above all else, it's about breaking through to the rest of the world. Whether you use Web 2.0 or 9.0, that's the Holy Grail. And it's a very hard thing to pull off.

Posted by richz at 9:11 AM

Reality Check 2.0

Does anybody out there use Rollyo? How about Newsvine? 30 Boxes? I'm not going to even bother asking if anyone has a Eurekster Swicki up (or what exactly a Swicki is for that matter).

I think it's really important to occasionally step out of our own bubble and assess whether or not all this "stuff" is really breaking out of our world and into the rest of the world. Ironically, the most un-Web 2.0 platform of all, Myspace, defies all logic.

So how is Web 2.0 doing generally? If you use Alexa to chart out some of these startups, you often see prettty rocky mountains. Typically, there's an initial spike around the buzz of a release of some sort (what I like to call the "Honeymoon" or "Techcrunch" phase), and then things settle down.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. They could settle down to some solid, sustainable numbers. However, if we put aside the fact that just about all of these ventures charge no money, all we've got to hang our hat on is a growing user base (for the purpose of advertising and such). Unfortunately, except for a select few, nobody's really on that path. Take a look at a few charts:

As you can see, it's not that easy to get on a growth path and keep going. As for those spikes? Well, that's just us (the technophiles) screwing around and playing with this stuff. Of course, there are some exceptions but they're few and far between (Netvibes seems to be on a nice path).

In any respect, it's all relative. How are all these ventures doing against the survivors of Web 1.0? Mind you, I don't think it's fair to compare Rojo to eBay for a handful of reasons. How about we compare stats from the sites that report and blog on all this stuff (Engadget, Boingboing, Techcrunch and Lifehacker) against an old school player: Cnet:

I know it's kind of hard to read, but take my word for it, the aqua line in the graph is Cnet.

Of course, all this comparative analysis is anecdotal and isn't meant to prove anything concrete. The real point of all this is to shed some light on how we can get caught up in our own noise. Your grandma doesn't know what tagging is. Your uncle is not using Rollyo. People on the street are not using Gmail. They're using Hotmail.

There's one other point worth making about all the Web 2.0 zaniness. Prior to and since Google bought Writely, everyone's been talking about how software as services are going to change the game. I think that's a bit ambitious. I think it's going to be increasingly difficult to prove out that people really want to their applications, and more importantly, their private data out on the Web. Furthermore, the entrenched players are not going to give up territory that easily. Take a look at this movie of the upcoming Office 2007 suite. It's going to take a lot of Ajax to compete with that.

This post could easily be written off as one long bitch session. It isn't meant to be one. I think for companies to succeed, it's worth highlighting how hard the game really is and who else is playing. More importantly, it's important to focus on how we get past our technical circles and penetrate the general population. It's a very difficult nut to crack. Just ask the Old Guard, it took them years to get there..and they're not about to give it up so easily.

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Posted by richz at 8:27 AM

AjaxWrite Doesn't Use Ajax(?)

Ah, the price of being a buzzword. It turns out that ajaxWrite, Michael Robertson's latest venture, doesn't even use Ajax. Or at least, the ajax that was defined by Jesse James Garrett way back when. It's built primarily on XUL, a cilent-side scriptiong and GUI langauge for the Mozilla platform.

Anyway, it's all just a heap of marketing spin I suppose. But then again, the spirt of these types of apps is to undermine the classic installable applications like Microsoft Office. You're not going to do that by building it on a language that is only supported by Mozilla/Firefox, which is only run by 7% of your typical users.

Technologies aside, it isn't a very good implementation of a web-based word processor. We'll see what they put out on Wednesday.

Posted by richz at 8:42 AM

ajaxWrite

MIchael Robertson (of mp3.com and Lindows fame) is investing in a new venture that is primarily focused on creating Office Suite-like applications that are powered by Ajax. They've just announced their first release: ajaxWrite.

AjaxWrite alone isn't very impressive. It only works on Firefox and it's feature set pales in comparison to Writely and others. It also has a cheesy feel to it (I can't really put my finger on it). But ajaxWrite is just the beginning. From Michael's blog post:

But ajaxWrite is just the start. We have a library of applications we have been working on to replace most of the standard PC software titles. Every week we will launch a new sophisticated program on Wednesday at 12:00 PST on ajaxlaunch.com.

Dang. A new application every week? That's pretty impressive. As usual, there is no business model around this stuff as of right now. And I'm still not entirely convinced that people really need a word processor in a browser. I think they want their documents to be accessible from anywhere, but I think we need to get past the "Ooooh!" factor of seeing application-like behaviors in a browser and think about the real value it brings - and the potential problems it causes (privacy, security, etc.).

Posted by richz at 6:15 PM

Google's Laser-Guided Missiles

PCMag.com has a good summary of a lunch Google's CEO Eric Schmidt gave to journalists recently. He addresses a lot of the Google-related hot topics these days.

On the Writely acquisition, Schmidt brushed off theories that it was a play to compete with Microsoft Office. He said the real purpose of the acquisition was part of Google's strategy to "collect and organize the world's data."

This is pretty frightening to me. The next logical question is: why does Google want to do this? So they can gain a better understanding of who we are, what we want and what we care about. Which begs the next question: why does Google want to collect and organize the things that matter to us? To make them readily accessible for a fee from anywhere? Or is it to deliver more targeted results throughout the Google experience? For example, I search elsewhere away from my documents; Google connects the dots between the content of my documents and my search terms.

I can't help but worry about this insatiable desire to consume, digest, index, study, analyze, extrapolate from and finally act upon the behaviors and artifacts that make up my life. In a word, it's creepy.

Luckily, we have the option to not use Google. I'm already making choices today. I don't use Gmail. I don't log in to personalized Google. No toolbar or desktop installed. Just search. When I walk into Best Buy, I don't want their sales people knowing a damn thing about me except for what I want them to know. Google's no different. I don't mind the ads, and in all fairness to Google, they seem to genuinely care about informing users about privacy.

Schimdt assured the journalists that there was plenty of growth left in ad revenue. "Better targeted ads" is the secret sauce. I tend to agree. Advertisers would pay more for them. Google is striving for accuracy. We are the targets. The evolution of search ads went from bombs (carpet bombs at first) to missiles. Google sees room for growth in continuing to refine and perfect how accurately an ad can hit its target. The questions that needs to be added to the discussion is: how does that happen? Is there anything Google isn't willing to watch, store, collect, monitor, whatever to meet this end?

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Posted by richz at 9:20 AM

Google : In Your Face!

In the new version of Google Desktop 3 (which is coming out of beta today), Google has introduced a quick way to get a search box in your face. Just tap Ctrl Ctrl and up comes this:

Now I have to admit. This is damn handy as all hell. I complain about Google lots, but I search Google all day long. That search box is the gateway to Google's business - everywhere. And the more prominent, accessible, and readily available they can make it for us, the better for them.

Unfortunately, I don't like the rest of Google Desktop (bloatware in my opinion). If only I could just get this tiny little feature.

One alternative, and a favorite Windows tool of mine, is Dave's QuickSearch. It's a free application that puts a little search box in your tasktray or desktop toolbar. It searches Google and 325 (yes, 325) other search engines and websites. It's very handy.

Just as an observation, I think Google's success is going to rely more and more on further invading the Windows user experience - beyond opening a browser. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I don't know how Google is going to compete with features that come installed on Windows. My guess is a very small percentage of users go and install this stuff (vs. the masses that just plug in their Dell boxes and go).

Posted by richz at 9:41 AM

The Grass Is Greener On The Enterprise Side

James McGovern recently talked about large enterprises and why they don't care about Ruby. He touches on something I've noticed in consulting for large enterprises here in New York CIty.

There's no doubt there exists an invisible wall between the web community and Web 2.0 startups that enjoy using technologies that are more grass roots than Big Corp (Ruby/Rails, Ajax, MySQL, PHP, CSS, etc.) and traditional business that is still heavily reliant on your classic "enterprise" platforms (.Net, Java, Oracle, SQL Server). I think there are a few reasons behind this.

First and foremost, the decision-makers in large organizations can't miserably fail if they pick a vendor and technology that is widely marketed, established and recognizable. If a Microsoft product fails, nobody will their MIS director "how could you pick them?" In contrast, if they choose some open source XML database and it fails, he's going to feel the brunt of a backlash on that decision. Risk aversion is already rampant in large enterprises and many idiotic decisions are made because people are too conservative with their choices. Throw some homegrown platform into the mix and you've got chaos in their world.

Within the enterprise arena, building is just the beginning of an application's life span. Once released into the wild, maintenance, upkeep, updates dominate both time and money. Large organizations need the peace of mind of knowing that their is a large player behind their solutions; that their people are not only competent but also replacable with others (compare replacing a .Net developer with a Ruby developer); and that many of their tools and libraries are not their own but rather products that have been proven elsewhere. Agile development has its merits, but agile maintenance dominates the enterprise work day.

A final point worth mentioning is the level of complexity often associated with Enterprise applications. Heavy, complex transactions, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, heightened security requirements. These are all important requirements that simply can't be slammed through with a three or four developers without a spec in sight. Documentation is a critical because it's not only a means of communication but an artifact that survives the departures and arrivals of different participants. You can't give a five minute walk-thru of apps of this size.

With all that said, I think enterprises have a lot to learn from agile, web 2.0-style development. The focus on usability. The spirit of "just get something done" that can help offset the common paralysis that exists within these organizations. The ability to look at technology as a means to solution, rather than a shopping cart full of shrink-wrapped vendor products. These are all important lessons to be learned within the enterprise.

One of the things we're seeing today is the bigger players (IBM, Microsoft, Sun) embracing (i.e. "packaging") these trends and providing them to their customers under their own banners. IBM has done a great job of bridging the Linux and Java communities to the enterprise. In the end, I think that's what this is all about: relationships and trust. These organizations have relied upon and want to continue to rely upon their partners to help them make decisions. Let's not forget that technology for most enterprises is a services group. There is no room for experimentation and renegade development efforts that "might fly." They just want stuff to work in a predictable (read: boring) way.

So the Ruby fans shouldn't feel bad if it doesn't penetrate the enterprise. Big business is a pretty boring place. It's more fun to play outside anyway.

Posted by richz at 8:47 AM

AJAX & The Enterprise End-Game

A friend and colleague who runs operations and technology at a financial services firm in New York City recently passed along some thoughts on AJAX in the context of their use in an enterprise.

When you are preparing your future software development strategy, remember that AJAX is not the end game. It's a pit stop on the way to better things.

This may seem obvious to a small group of programmers that understand how to leverage DHMTL and XML/HTTP to do things that most of us never imagined in a page-to-page browser paradigm. However, “popular” press and buzz in the software community glamorizes the use of AJAX as if it is some sort of new frontier. AJAX is not the new frontier. AJAX is a stop-gap. AJAX is one of several creative ways to deal with the extensive limitations of the browser-based world as we know it. Now that we are beginning to overcome the page-to-page mentality, AJAX is a nice toolset to leverage in the near-term while we wait for the big boys to develop something viable that gives us this highly-specialized skill.

Don’t get me wrong, AJAX is great. We deploy it in our business every day. We leverage it the way many other people do to slowly creep away from the painful experience of paging in the browser. However, we leverage it is a transitional platform, not as the end game.

When you surf around the web on the latest AJAX frameworks and implementations, just remember that in the not-so-distant-future, you will be adapting much of your AJAX skillset for something better. In a few years, we will all be chuckling about the use of AJAX for dynamic interaction the way we do about using CGI for transactions. People will still use AJAX and people still use CGI but it’s only a short-term solution.

All of the above is critical because within organizations, the time and resources invested in training and education paths is very important. Do we let people tinker and see what happens? Do we start to formally train them? Do we put standards in place? And most importantly, is this the right strategic bet? For most organizations, their technology groups simply take what their vendors hand to them (Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc.).

Above all else, it's important to view AJAX less as an end-game than as a tool in the larger context of delivering richer, more intuitive experiences to our users. To give it more weight than that - i.e. to perceive it as an end in itself - could prove to be a mistake.

Posted by richz at 3:32 PM

Google Acquires Writely

The rumors were true. Google has acquired Writely. What does all this mean? Adsense in your documents? Is Google Office (or whatever) coming together? Is everything I type about to be folded into some weird semantic pile of spaghetti that is linked to all sorts of weird "resources"?

Who knows. Congrats to the Writely team. Bring on the $200 Linux appliance! Google's gonna take care of the rest...for free...for now...or something.

Posted by richz at 1:28 PM

Who Needs Calendaring?

So that not-so-subtle Web 2.0 hype machine has kicked in again. Who'd blame Google? I remember selling a pair of Gmail accounts for $70 a pop on eBay (no joke). Techcrunch has leaked some screenshots of the upcoming Google Calendar.

So allow me to indulge for a moment and ramble on like a bratty teenager...

Who the hell needs a personal calendar? Beyond work (where 90% of us are using Outlook/Exchange), what are people planning exactly? Maybe I need to find more friends and be more social. I don't know. And no, I don't have a need to "share" my calendar with non-work people. If I'm going to a show or meeting people for dinner, email and a few phone calls is just fine.

Let's not delude ourselves folks. We are not in an age of invention. Online calendaring could have prospered years ago when it first debuted. It sort of has in some corners (Yahoo! comes to mind) but there's no way you can tell me that there lies some dormant need among the masses that justifies this newfound interest and invesment in a bunch of calendaring apps.

And Google is no less guilty (or vulnerable). Somebody. Anybody. For the love of all things big and small. Shut your doors and charge $10 a month to see if I'm dead wrong (or if I need more friends).

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Posted by richz at 1:53 PM

Google CFO Speaks, Stock Slides

Google's CEO hinted at some investor conference that growth from their search business was slowing and that they'd need to find new ways to generate revenue. The stock dropped nearly 12% before rebounding a bit today.

I think there are two points worth making here. First, it's clear that there's a lot of sensitivity and concern around about how much fuel is left in the search ads business. The sky is clearly not the limit. The second point is more critical: Google has not sat around and twiddled its thumbs while search revenue came in. They've been very active (if not aggresive) at putting forth new initiatives in all sorts of areas. Some are very impressive. Some are not. But almost all of them don't bring a dime into the company.

If I owned Google stock (which I don't) I'd send an email to investor relations asking when they tie all of this stuff to an actual business plan. I've said it before, all these little efforts are amount to Google's very own bubble. The more relevant question I'd have in response to the CFO's comments is: what about the 30 or so initiatives you've put forth so far?

Posted by richz at 9:03 AM

Appraising Web 2.0

Russell Beatie has an excellent post today about how very little of the Web 2.0 hype actually deals with creating a real, viable business around the offerings people are putting out. I've mentioned this a couple of times in the past. I just don't see the dots connecting between some of the tools coming out and making money. Sure, you may get acquired, but that's not a business plan.

What's worse, I think a certain amount of Hubris has taken hold in the space - similar to the boom in the 90's. Applications are launching with very little explanation. Just dramatic tag lines and the often predictable, over-simplified cartoon-ish Web 2.0 aesthetic. Very often, I don't even know what I'm applying for. I happen to follow the industry, but most users would simply turn and walk away. You can't break barriers and establish value by being this presumptuous. If it's not clear within three minutes why my life is going to be better because of a product, it's going to have a hard time.

But let's go with the benefit of the doubt here and assume the pitch is good and the story is solid. Let's assume adoption is rampant. You're still not out of the woods. What you really need to see is strong adoption numbers against some sort of payment structure. Rapid adoption of free products is half the story. Shut'em off and ask for $10/mo. $5/mo. $3/mo. Let's see what happens then.

Another point worth mentioning is that this is not a purely "small company" trend. Google has set the tone by unloading a litany of services for free. They can afford to do it today because ads along search results provide the money. The smaller players out there don't have that machine behind them. Yet there's still an "if Google can do it" mindset that is pervasive and I don't think it's healthy.

Amidst all the doom and gloom, I think there are real opportunities out there. Much of the philosophy and innovation that is coming out of Web 2.0 hasn't even reached businesses and solving real enterprise problems. People just need to bring these great ideas across the bridge. The world doesn't need any more tagging software or mapping software. Hell, none of the ones out today charge a dime anyway. Instead, we need to raise the bar and challenge ourselves to find real opportunities and create value - value that people will pay for.

Posted by richz at 1:51 PM

EgoSurf

There's no doub that the popularity of blogging is fueled by the author's ego. We say what we say to attain validation from others. We are social animals after all. Every blog entry is a little broadcast and we crave the need to find out how our words landed. Who's reading? Are they talking about it? And so on. Tools like Mint, MeasureMap and Feedburner help quench our need to know how broadly and to what extent our voice is being heard.

EgoSurf sidesteps all the statistics and metrics and just scored your ego outright. It wades through search results from the popular search engines and follows links to determine an ego score of sorts. An digital pat on the back. Nice.

Who needs site statistics and referrer logs?

Posted by richz at 8:37 AM

Google Page Creator

Google has unleashed their latest offerng: Google Page Creator. It's a WYSIWYG-style page editor (anyone remember Homestead?) that lets you create your own pages (a bunch of pre-canned styles are available) and host them on Google's web site (up to 100MB).

Will something like this take off? Google has a few things going for it. It looks relatively easy. It's a Google-branded product. There's obviously not a lot new here. Geocities and AOL home pages of years ago told the world that, well, most people don't know a lick about design. All in all, it's pretty Web 1.0. With blogs you had the immediacy of simple publishing. With social apps like Myspace, you have the tools to connect with others and such. Google Page Creator may be the foundation for all sorts of neat features. Maybe we'll be able to host our own music or movies (not someone else's of course)? Searchenginewatch points out that stuff like this can often get hijacked by the porn industry (Google Base is flooded with adult material). We'll have to see how well the masses behave on this one.

Another angle is the resulting markup that's created. Drew McLellan sums it up: "Signup was painless, editing was painless, publishing was painless. The resultant markup? Painful."

Posted by richz at 8:45 AM

The Usability Of Peace Of Mind

As an interaction designer, I get excited about the possibilties that products like Google Desktop, Yahoo Widgets, Microsoft's XAML platform and Adobe's Apollo project bring. From a purely experience design perspective, it opens up a whole new world of possibilties. More specifically, we're able to build experiences that are not relegated to a browser. It allows designers to use a finer, more powerful set of tools to carve out applications that better fit how we think and work. The notion of a URL destination to do things is challenged.

However, there turns out to be another, hidden benefit of keeping things in the browser: peace of mind. Users have come to accept that what happens inside the browser's walls is inherently different from the rest of their desktop. It's a perceived window to things - applications, information, all sorts of assets - that live elsewhere. Inversely, an association between the desktop and the data on your machine as well as the physical hardware itself, is also reinforced. What users have come to expect (and software vendors strive towards) is maintaining a buffer of protection between your world and the rest of the Internet.

Yesterday, Google released their new version of the their Google Desktop. One of their features allows users to search their data from other machines. To do this, Google stores your data (in encrypted form) on their machines for up to 30 days. I went through the installation process and Google should be given credit for amply warning users of the implications of this feature (though I'd venture to guess that most won't read the warnings anyway). Neverhteless, the response from privacy advocates and bloggers generally has not been friendly at all. The Electronic Frontier Foundation voiced their concerns loud and clear.

I think there's a lesson learned here. If the user has a clear idea of what is going out and coming in, then I think users will be more comfortable. I store my to-do lists elsewhere on Netvibes (a web-based personal portal). I'm fully aware that they are housing that data. In Google Desktop's side bar, there's a to-do list as well. I have no idea where that data is getting stored. And yes, it matters to me.

The challenge here is communication and being as transparent as possible about which pieces are going elsewhere and which aren't. Icons. Colors. Something. Tell me when my data is going to your servers when it happens. Tell me when I'm pulling my data from your servers. Ask me before I put data on your servers for the first time. All of these things are unnecessary in a browser because it's already understood that you are on someone else's property. With a desktop, it's far less clear, and in many cases, confusing.

Along with nice design and good usability, peace of mind no doubt factors into a user's experience with a product. I don't think software providers can deliver peace of mind in a disclaimer during installation. As the Internet becomes more pervasive on the desktop, it's going to require more than that.

Posted by richz at 10:43 AM

New Google Desktop Debuts Thursday

Associated Press is reporting that Google has debuted a new version of Google Desktop that features a new search capability that allows users to remotely search the contents of computers that they allow Google to index. The Google Desktop blog also has details.

The only catch is that Google is going to hold onto that data - your documents, files, and such - for 30 days. This is no doubt useful and no doubt requires you to relinquish some of your privacy. Google's making all sorts of assurances (purging after 30 days, stored in encrypted form, etc.) and are actually pretty forward about the convenience-privacy exchange. It'll be interesting to see how successful this is. Most casual computer users fly right past the end-user agreement step and just go.

Then there's this twist:

Besides empowering computer-to-computer searches, the improved software allows users to set up an array of mini-applications, sometimes called "widgets," to monitor topical information such as weather, stock quotes or news stories.

A la Yahoo! Widgets, except you can share these guys with other people. That could potentially be very cool. The Internet is changing. The browser can't contain things anymore and content is leaking everywhere. It's all one big mish mosh. Our data is over there. Their content is over here. The end-user experience possibilities are very exciting but this new breach is going to test and re-test privacy issues.

The Shelf Life Of Web 2.0

I’m not going to lie. I genuinely enjoy playing with many of the Web 2.0 efforts that spring up (and they spring up just about every day these days). I think there’s a great vibe out there where good clean design is blended with some great (sometimes heroic) web application building. I’m a big fan of RSS, the elegant use of technologies like AJAX & Flash, and I think there’s a lot of potential in the whole “social” angle of software (e.g. Digg & del.icio.us).

But how much of the stuff I try do I keep using? And by “using,” I don’t mean for the purposes of trying out or checking out how someone else approached a thorny interaction design issue. I mean using as an actual tool in my everyday life.

I thought further about this after playing with 30boxes. It’s a new calendaring tool and I’ll readily admit: it’s about as good an execution of the Web 2.0 philosophy as I’ve seen. Good, judicious use of Ajax. Low barrier to entry and use. Elegant design. And so on.

It turns out I’ll probably never use it again. Ever. Of course, I may be the exception. I sincerely doubt it though. I can go into why I don’t need this tool in my life, but that’s not really the point of this post. Here’s the gist of it:

Web20_shelf

This chart lays out the web 2.0 applications that survive and actually end up a part of my regular usage. I’ve probably tried more than 70 but I think the chart gets the point across. In the end, I’ve got a portal (Netvibes), centralized bookmarking (del.icio.us), and a few other sites I just enjoy visiting frequently (e.g. Digg).

As technologists and people inside this world, we can lose sight of what really makes a difference such that people will shift their lives and habits to work with something. We can easily get caught up in how cool something is and lose sight of what we’re all really going after: something attaches itself to people’s lives. Has an application like del.icio.us, an unequivocal Web 2.0 success story, really “broken out?” I’d argue that, beyond our own world, it really hasn’t. Some of the barriers are conceptual. I often find myself scratching my head as I click around a new offering (this happened with Newsvine), trying to look past the cool factor and attempting to digest why I should personally invest in it.

I’m curious to see if others have had a similar experience. Are people out there using Rollyo and Squidoo on a regular basis? Or more generally, how does your chart look?

Posted by richz at 8:59 AM

Google's $1B Gamble

Google Internet Outsider (Henry Blodget) cites a WSJ article that reports that Google is willing to pay Dell up to $1 billion over three years to preinstall Google software (probably the Google Pack) on Dell boxes. For me, this highlights a serious challenge for Google’s growth plans: the cost for a user’s desktop is exponentially higher than a users eyes on a web page.

Google should be given credit for handily winning brand loyalty inside the browser. But let’s not forget the level of commitment required to install software - and use software – on a desktop versus typing a URL in and searching. For a major chunk of computer users, mainly ones that aren’t reading blogs like this, they use whatever Dell throws on those boxes before they ship them out. Google badly wants in on that usage. So badly, that they’re willing to pay a lot of money for it. I couldn’t guess at the cost/benefit of paying that much money to preinstall software.

But let’s assume that it’s a good move for a second. New Dell customers happily use the various Google Pack software products. Now what? Will they be hit up for a “Sign Up Now” after six months the same way McAfee & Symantec do it today on Dell installations? Will they start to sprinkle the desktop and the chat client and other installations with ads? How does Google recoup on such an investment?

People talk a lot about how it’s materializing into a Microsoft-Google battle. It still costs $100+ to purchase Windows XP Pro on a Dell desktop. You pre-pay for a Microsoft OS. They make their money before the hardware gets to your door. Google is being forced to attack from a completely different angle: paying off a hardware vendor to install software that users pay nothing for. It’s a frightening gamble. $1 billion in. What’s supposed to come out?

Posted by richz at 5:01 PM

The Naming Of Web 2.0 Initiatives Must Stop

This is an actual quote from Techcrunch:

Like Megite, Newroo is ultimately addressing the same market as Memeorandum. However, they have a number of squidoo-like features (this is meant as a compliment) to allow anyone to create their own topic-based version of the main service.

Somewhere along the way, it somehow became standard practice to name your products so they sound like an 8-year old's toys. I think it's now reached the threshold of ridiculous - and headed straight towards the next threshold: pretentious and annoying.

Applications sound like fluffy toys (Meebo, Zoozio & Loomba); gastro-intestinal medications (Fluxiom, Librivox, Zimbra); or just sites that refuse to end with the letters "er" (flickr, gTalkr and Wrickr).

The whole thing is a weird bastard descendent of the dot-com era and it's starting to freak me out. All of these names were obviously fathered by Google. There's no doubt that the GOOG has set the tone: convey a cute and fun image and everything else is going to be A-OK. The primary colors and simple interfaces. It's non-threatening and fun!

People have been giving Google a lot of flak of late with their earnings results and the whole China thing. The've even called into question their "Do No Evil" mantra. For me, everything else Google has done is up for debate...except this. This is evil, ladies and gentlemen. Pure, distilled evil.

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Posted by richz at 8:30 AM

I'm Tired Of Going To A Web Page To Search

I must do between 20 and 100 searches a day. Work-related. Fun-related. Everything-related. I'm tired of going to a web page to do my searches. I'm also tired of seeing a browser spawn and take up 70% of my desktop every time I get search results. The search results are just a pit stop. I usually move on very quickly.

How quickly I move in is testament to the quality and goodness of Google's search results. It's so good it's utility. I want to use it and keep it out of my way. It's a tool, not a destination. Like notepad or a command prompt, it's always there. You can make a strong argument that search technology has gotten so good and become so pervasive that it now needs to fade into the background of how we work and just be at the ready when we need it - and not dominate our field of vision with search results.

Posted by richz at 5:20 PM

Google Earnings Fall Short. News at 11.

So Google reported earnings today and came in well below guidance. I don't know a lot about the markets or the shady happenings of after hours trading, but as of this posting Google is trading at $68 less (15%) than at market close (according to Yahoo! Finance).

This ain't pretty, and after the Yahoo! whoopin' a few weeks ago, the overall picture of search/ad-based businesses like these isn't so great. Sure, there's a lot of money to be made, but from where I'm sitting, the search market - however large - is finite. Google spends an enormous amount of money on initiatives that don't generate money. Yahoo! has been buying up companies like Flickr and del.icio.us that also don't make money. The vice is going to continue to tighten. Eventually, you gotta pay the bill.

But wait, it gets even more interesting...

Google, Yahoo! and all the Web mini-players have to contend with one more wrinkle: their businesses live and thrive inside the browser's walls. And there's only so much you can deliver to keep putting eyeballs on those web ads. Microsoft is watching all this with a smirk. The desktop is about to be lit up through all sorts of remote services like we've never seen before. Yahoo! knows it, so they bought Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets). Google knows it, that's why they're on their way to building some sort of desktop.

It's going to be interesting to watch this play out. There's a lot of good thinking and innovation happening today, but very little of it is tied to real, accountable business (and no, dolling up a startup for a Yahoo! acquisition is not real). Hopefully this signal from Google won't put a damper on that innovation but rather encourages a tighter connection to real, tangible business goals.

Posted by richz at 12:25 PM

Microsoft Live Labs Debuts

Microsoft's own little playground for startup-like initiatives debuted a couple of days ago. It's called Live Labs. And the manifesto behind it is pretty interesting.

Microsoft has been forced to mobilize in response to drastic change before. They're competitive and paranoid enough to gather the energy to battle. They've got a ways to go. A visit to their various experiments reveals mostly a collection of things that are more reactions and re-brandings than innovations. Live.com was borne out of a response. Now the task is to actually debut stuff that isn't a Microsoft-branded del.icio.us or Gmail. They've done the right thing so far: they've institutionalized it made it something tangible (rather than groups of people nodding in agreement in hallways).

Posted by richz at 10:02 AM

Google : How Do Developers Use HTML

The freaks at Google went balistic and scanned over a billion web documents and gathered all sorts of data about them. This is all for the purpose of coming up with a new version of HTML (who knew?). Nothing really shochking here but worth a look.

Sparkle vs. Flash : Here We Go

Microsoft released public betas of its various “Sparkle” tools (publicly known as Microsoft Expression). This is the proverbial “Flash killer” and it should probably be taken seriously by graphic and front-end designers alike. I don’t know too much about this, but I think these are the tools that generate the XAML (Microsoft’s XML-based front-end markup language) and the scripting code that lives behind them. Publish.com has an excellent overview of the releases.

If you look at the screenshots in that article, you can’t help but note the eerie similarity between these tools and Adobe’s Flash (the timeline snapshot is a dead giveaway). The lines are being drawn folks. Both Adobe and Microsoft are shooting way past AJAX and such to deliver far richer interactive experiences that will not only live in your browser but on your dekstop as well. The engine to drive these tools on the Microsoft side will be built into Vista.

To counter, Adobe is working on a project called Apollo that seeks to integrate PDF and Flash. For me, that’s not the exciting part of Apollo. The exciting part is seeing Flash land on the desktop and tap into services over the wire. Couple this initiative with Adobe’s Flex Builder (now in alpha at Adobe Labs) and you’ve got Adobe’s and Microsoft’s guns aiming right for each other.

So who’s gonna win? In my oh-so-humble opinion it’s the player that:

delivers a toolset that is easy for developers to pick up and play with;
leverages pre-existing skills and knowledge;
doesn’t require a massive development environment and the stars to line up to whip something together and throw it out there;
allows others to see an app, view the source, poke around and learn on their own;
can somehow gradually integrate into existing experiences. It’s a lot harder for a software group to stomach a full migration to an entirely new platform than an incremental one that gains wins in small steps. AJAX allows that today.

Microsoft is notorious for unloading way too many levers and switches on people. The result is a higher barrier of adoption. Adobe has it’s own challenges. They have to work hard to reshape the perception of Flash as a real development platform.

In any respect, it’ll be a lot of fun to watch and hopefully we’ll see some great applications come out of all this.

Posted by richz at 11:25 AM

MacBook Pro...Umm OK?

So wait, help me understand this…

I thought we were at an exciting time in technology? I thought our thinking was being reset. New ideas. New inventions. If that’s the case, then why is the proverbial Bar (capital “B”) been set so woefully low by bloggers and the press alike?

Last week, Google had us all doing tricks for the next biscuit treat at last week’s CES keynote. So what do they give us? Well, they gave us…nothing really. Well, it is something. It’s a collection of trialware and shareware, bundled up with some of Google’s own stuff for download. It’s pretty much the same clutter most of us uninstall when we first boot up our Dell boxes. Regardless, we all got sort of excited. Maybe it’s just Pavlovian at this point.

So yesterday, the Cult of Apple gathered ‘round to the Altar of Steve Jobs to see what was next. And of course, they cheered and clapped for…a faster laptop. And the masses exalted. Hell, some of them even started crying. It’s, you know, faster. As if we aren’t perpetually bombarded with faster, more powerful hardware on a regular basis. I mean, it’s not even incidental. Moore’s Law practically requires us to keep going faster and faster. Mind you this thing is four to five times faster. That’s a lot faster. Of course, that’s comparing it to the previous generation that was introduced nearly four years ago. So if you do the math, 4X is exactly where we should be. Man, that Moore guy sure was smart.

Of course that’s not all. There’s one other feature that really got the crowd going.: The power supply. Well, not the power supply itself, just the plug end. That’s right. It’s not just any power supply. It has a magnet or something built into it so it elegantly unplugs if your drunk roommate rushes over to show you some new video that’s spreading around YouTube.

So yeh, welcome to this new kind of hype. It’s sort of like glorified infomercials. Maybe there just isn’t that much to say on the Web every single day. So we can’t help but just talk about and get excited about everything.

[Author’s Note: I’ll admit that part of the motivation behind this posting is the desire to get a rise out of, and thus garner scathing, hurtful commentary from the Apple zealots out there. So have at it.]

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Posted by richz at 2:21 PM

AJAX Desktops : A (Very) Quick Comparison

The Second Coming of personal portal pages has been fun to watch. I'm not a big fan of portals from an interaction design perspective. I find them to be too...generic (that's for another blog entry). Regardless, they can be very useful if designed correctly and with the right set of features.

Of course, the big players have their offerings:

Microsoft's incubation experiment Start.com (and it's sibling Live.com)
Google's Personalized Hompage
Yahoo's My Yahoo.

Then you've go some of the lesser-known upstarts:

Protopage (a sort of virtual desktop for the Web)
Netvibes
Goowy (a Flash-based desktop with an impressive email and calendaring piece).
Eskobo (which looks eerily similar to Microsoft's offering).

In my oh-so humble opinion, the hands-down winner is Netvibes. It's fast, straightforward, and constantly growing. It can pull in your email (POP or IMAP), supports sticky notes and to-do lists, along with your usual weather and RSS support. It handily took care of my 200+ OPML feed list import (many throw up on it or hang). What is really impressive is the speed with which the Netvibes team is improving upon and fixing Netvibes. Their blog provides insight into an impressively agile development process. Take a look at how many features were introduced in the last 20 days alone. Frightening. The big boys should stop and look at what these guys are doing. Very impressive.

Posted by richz at 10:17 AM

Making Software Pay Attention

When we use a piece of technology - whether a web browser, a portable music player, or a cable box - really anything that deals with content delivery and manipulation - we provide an invaluable amount of raw data about our behaviors, interests and habits. Almost all these devices today simply operate as workers - never doing more than what's asked of them: play that song, display that article, record that movie. Once the task is completed, these devices (for the most part) completely forget what was asked of them and simply wait for the next task request.

A relatively unimpressive exception to this rule is the common display of "Recent...whatever." Office applications remember the last few files you loaded for easier retrieval. Many mobile phones have a "Recent Activity" list of some sort (missed calls, outgoing calls, etc.). But beyond these basic conventions, there isn't much else. And that's too bad. I think there's enormous value in paying attention to and remembering information on a couple of levels:

Morphing Interfaces. Imagine an interface that paid close attention to how you worked, the assets you cared about, or even more impressively the patterns and habits of your usage. Over time, the interface would change in some subtle ways to better accomodate the way you work. The Microsoft Office applications have been doing this for awhile. Certain menu items hide away if they're rarely used. The down side of this approach is that people are accustomed to things staying in the same place. There's an appeal to the predictability of a rigid, yet carefully thought-out interface. I don't think I want my car's controls changing slightly anytime soon. That said, I still think there's more to explore here.

Learn. Connect. Share. The Internet and the progression towards cheaper and easier connectivity among and between computers and devices opens up all sorts of possibilities. Rather than your audio player being this isolated island of knowledge about your habits, it can go ahead and broadcast out to others (either by Wifi in real-time or when you sync up your player). Imagine Nielsen ratings based upon portable audio player usage. Or the ability to stumble on someone else's playlist in the same coffee shop because their musical interests somewhat overlap yours. This kind of thinking is already happening. An awesome evolution of RSS is the ability for software to track what we pay attention to and fold that into a larger repository. Hell, it's impressive enough if my feed reader could do this for me alone (an upcoming version of FeedDemon is slated to have this feature).

It's exciting stuff, but one step at a time I suppose. Let's first get software to start paying attention - close attention - to what we consume and how we work. Once software starts paying attention, all sorts of cool things are possbile.

Posted by richz at 7:10 PM

The Microsoft-Apple Soap Opera

Like a never-ending plotline, Microsoft and Apple have stolen ideas from one another, writting software for one another, and even invested in one another (a few years ago, Apple was in dire straits and Microsoft invested in them to keep them afloat). It's like a soap opera that goes on and on.

Many, many years ago, Bill Gates warned Apple that they should let go of the hardware and open it up - the same way IBM did - and focus on software and licensing. Apple never did and it's fate was mostly stagnant and (and often times nearly fatal) for many years. Nevertheless, they continue to design and sell software and hardware as a single experience.

Flash forward to today and you have the spectacular success of the iPod. Walking around Best Buy during the holiday's, it wasn't even a race anymore. The mindshare was all gone. If you really loved your girlfriend or boyfriend, you'd buy them nothing but an iPod. Part of the reason for iPod's success is iTunes and the elegant way Apple masked the often clumsy interplay between software and hardware into a more frictionless experience. So it turns out there was some silver lining in Apple's decision after all.

This week at CES, Bill Gates unveiled Microsoft's play into digital entertainment (both music and movies). It's called Urge and it's billed as a competitor to iTunes. Gates talks about the benefits of a seamless experience that spans across devices...except iPods.

Microsoft built it's empire by allowing hardware to get commoditized (for the most part) and leveraging the value of software. Dell's & HP's run Microsoft's operating system and applications. The interaction (via keyboard and mouse) is nearly identical regardless of hardware. But the iPod/iTunes experience is another species. I can't help but wonder how Microsoft can fight this battle when you have hundreds of devices designed and built by many manufacturers that all behave and interact differently. I don't think it's possible for them to compete with a platform that transcends software and hardware (if it isn't too late to begin with).

And so, Apple's nearly fatal decision to continue to market both hardware and software years ago is now their weapon in this battle. I'm sure Gates showed some cool things at CES. And I'm sure he shared the stage with some "partners." And I think that highlights the core question: can you divvy up the experience among a handful of "chefs in the kitchen." I don't think so.

Posted by richz at 2:28 PM

Google PC & The End Of The Web

The LA Times is reporting that Google is planning to put out cheap PC's that "run on an operating system created by Google" (most likely some Linux variant). Analysts are calling them "Google Cubes," a small hardware box that sells for a couple of hundred bucks. They're apparently in talks with Wal-Mart to sell such a device. The rest of the article lays out a whole slew of other rumors. I have no idea how credible it is and I haven't seen this news anywhere else (not on tech.meme for example).

The theory behind a "Google PC" has been around for awhile (along with the theory behind a "Google Browser"). It's all kind of exciting and kind of scary at the same time. I'm not sure what it will mean for developers in terms of what the platform is and how we'll have to conform to play in this "arena" that Google would be setting up.

Wearing the hat of an end-user, the prospects are even more frightenting. Google may well be targeting an audience that the tech community often ignores and Microsoft has enjoyed catering to: the less-than-savvy PC user. This user equates the Internet with "AOL" and often can't distinguish between malicious software and friendly software. They're your typical casual web user. At the risk of sounding paternalistic, I can't help but think about the risks of one entity not only controlling the device or platform that they use to access the Web, but the content that is delivered as well. Controlling both ends of that experience is a hell of a lot of power to put in one place. It isn't only about privacy and security. It's about the free flow of information.

In other words, is the Web (capital "W") - as this decentralized network of information sources that is woven together today - still a web (small "w") if you've got this single monolithic conduit "managing" the information that is delivered out to a population of users. As the search experience continues to evolve as the dominant method of information retrieval, Google morphs from a mere search engine to "provider of all information." Once that happens, the capital-W Web isn't a web anymore. It's all eminating from one place.

There's another blog post in here somewhere about the commoditziation of data and how Google can become the Wal-Mart of information. But I'll spare you the conspiracy theories. For now, a Google PC is frightening enough.

Update: This was apparently denied by both Google & Wal-Mart. You'd figure the L.A. Times was a little better than this.

Posted by richz at 11:27 AM

Web 2.0 & My Data

Typepad, Bloglines, del.icio.us (poor del.icio.us). Even the mighty salesforce.com. They've all suffered outages in the past couple of months. Services that we've come to rely on, not just as luxuries but in many cases necessities, are susceptible to the whims of all these wires and cables and hadware strewn all over the continent. I'm not even talking about the frustrating slow-downs and lagging pages on other hosted services that don't crash per se, but just come to a painful crawl on occasion.

Which I think leads me to ask the question: Why are my measly 85 bookmarks dependent on all this...stuff? Yeh I know, I'm loving the convenience of having my bookmarks centrally hosted so I can access them from anywhere, but should they disappear if del.icio.us goes down? I don't think they should. And now people are extolling the virtues of using a word processor or a spreadsheet inside your browser. I can see the initial appeal of this. No installation. No worries. Etc. But there's a problem here.

As we think about Web 2.0, we should slice up the pieces that are getting delivered to us through the Internet. There's interface. There's logic. There's data:

Interface. This is what web applications are all about. You deliver the interface over the wire via markup (with some CSS mixed in) and you've got an application. For a long time, it was a very static, page-based interface, but an interface nonetheless. Now with AJAX, the interface is feeling a lot more dynamic and a lot more like a desktop app (when used properly). Good progress.

Logic. Historically, we've tried to keep the "brains" on the server as much as possible. Sure, Javascript could be used for validation, etc., but that was generally frowned upon. Again, used properly, AJAX can make this happen a lot more seamlessly. Server-side validation can elegantly inject itself into a user's experience without Javascript pop-ups or full page refreshes. Again, good progress.

Data. Now it gets cute. Another appealing quality of web applications is the ability to store your data centrally. I think the Web 2.0 hype has sort of lumped in this aspect of web applications with others. I think this has led to a gross over-simplification of how data should be stored centrally.

Of course I would like my bookmarks centrally stored. And yeh, it would be nice if my documents and spreadsheets were centrally stored somewhere (maybe). But why should that result in a full reliance on some other system's infrastructure for me to get to my information? If del.icio.us is down, then I can live without tagging for a day or two, but I can't live without my bookmarks.

There is a point of failure and what lies to the left and right of it. Make sure my data ends up on my side if the chain breaks. When it eventually reconnects, sync it back up. Now I'm fully aware that the web browsers can't sync locally stored data out of the box. That problem will get solved with rich applications that have the proper hooks to sync as needed (XAML, some Flash derivative, etc.).

We can still have collaborative software like Writely and others without forcing individuals to be left without their data when something goes wrong. The interfaces around word processing and spreadsheets don't change all that much. Beyond the "neat" factor of seeing a rich word processor in a browser, the functional value is limited and the risk of being left without my documents far outweigh any benefits.

I think there's a sweet spot here that marries the richness that we're coming to expect from zero-install applications and the reliance (and comfort) we have with knowing that our information is in our hands, yet synced centrally as-needed. I don't think we're there yet.

Posted by richz at 11:41 PM

2005 : A Look Back

Now that 2005 is coming to a close, I thought I'd sum up my own impressions into neat, tasty paragraphs. As an interaction designer and just general technology fan its been a really fun, interesting year.

Home-Grown Technology Trends. While 2005 isn't really the year of the Blog (that's probably...2004?), I think the viral power of the blog, especially in the tech community, really showed itself this year. Ideas, technical approaches and trends materialized organically and in some cases, really took off. This was great to watch. Before blogging and other social mechanisms for spreading ideas like tagging, the world waited for the big guys - your IBM's, Microsoft's and Sun's of the world - to hand us the Next Big Thing. Typically these "standards" were blessed by some standards body that was comprised of representatives of big technology companies and some academics. This changed in 2005. Loosely-defined trends like simple XML via REST and AJAX blindsided the big players. Ironically, now they're scrambling to legitimize themselves in this arena. "Hey! We want to play too!"

Simplicity. A theme I heard countless times this year, especially in the realm of design, is the value of simplicity. A hallmark of the current generation of 2.0 startups is a simple, almost toy-like design. As an interface designer, it's exciting to see the value of simplicity really start to get recognized. We can credit Google with paving the way by keeping clutter out of the experience as much as possible. Even their ads are simple and generic (at least for now).

The Year of AJAX. No doubt, a key shift in how applications get delivered over the Web is being fueled by AJAX. Again, it was really Google that reset the rules here. Before Google Maps, web designers were handed a common mandate: make it work on as many browsers as possible. So we followed directions and played it safe, frowning upon technologies like Javascript and XMLHTTP. Google had the guts to say "the hell with that. We're going to reset the bar here and make people want to update their hardware and software." AJAX has been there for years, we were just too scared to use it.

The Year Of The Tinkerer. I think in many ways, 2005 was a bit of a free-for-all. We got to play around and try new things. Tagging. RSS. Software as Service. All sorts of fun experiments and mash-ups came to be. It got a lot easier to play with simpler and more open API's. It's all been a lot of fun, but I think the costs of all this tinkering hasn't hit us just yet. I don't think we've been billed for the past year's accomodations just yet. I don't think I've run into a Web 2.0 company that is charging money just yet. True, we may see it materialize into an ad-driven model, but we'll have to see how much people are willing to tolerate with that. I would rather pay for software than see ads on my word processor. And this doesn't just go for the startups. Just about every intiative Google put forth in 2005 makes no money. They've got 99% of their revenue coming from the right-hand side of your browser, yet they fund and support all sorts of additional initiatives. The same goes for Yahoo. Maybe I'm missing something. I know the VC money is paying attention. Then again, they seem to be hyping these startups for acquistion.

I'm sure I'm missing some other key trends and whatnot. I know there are a few other "Best Of" postings out there. Overall, it's been a very exciting year. For me, it's a year marked by the shift away from standard, shrink-wrapped thinking into exploring and experimenting with ideas that may prove to be incredibly powerful. I don't think we've even come near the power of RSS for example. I'm just happy I get to listen in (and potentially contribute) to the community. Let's hope we can keep on tinkering in 2007.

As for basement.org, it's been around for almost a year now and it's readership and subscription numbers have increased pretty dramatically. Hmmm....maybe it's time for Google Adwords. I wonder sometimes how much money it would generate. But then again...

Posted by richz at 11:52 AM

5% Of AOL Going To Google

It must feel good to be the cutest girl at the dance. AOL, who's been courted by both Microsoft and Google for the past few months, is about to lop off 5% of itself for a cool billion dollars. Google, in a Microsoft-esque move, is investing in AOL to maintain the partnership that brings all those AOL users (and yes, there are still a ton of them) to Google's services.

So the players that dicate how we get on the Internet and what we see when we're finally there are becoming one and the same. As search results replace categorization and WiFi continues to swarm, it could become pretty scary. My cousin works in the Arab Gulf region of the world has to wait a few hours before he can read my postings because the information is monitored, filtered, cached and then...maybe...delivered.

This isn't about good or evil really. These are businesses that exist to survive and thrive. Google provides an incredibly powerful service for close to no cost - at least up front. We just have to be careful with how and what we pay for all this stuff down the road. Not just in terms of distracting ads, but in terms of privacy and the homogenization of information on the Internet.

Thank God for blogs. :)

Posted by richz at 12:49 PM

When Does The Party End?

So Yahoo released Yahoo Widgets yesterday. Very sweet stuff and a good example of how to nicely fold in and quickly leverage an acquisition (they bought Konfabulator a few months ago). They've done a nice job of lighting up their services straight onto your desktop. You can pull up your contact list, calendar, Flickr photos - all without using a browser. Mind you, the download is a fat 11 megs, but there is some nice stuff there.

So my question is this: if I can search Yahoo (web, images, etc.) from my desktop and tap into Yahoo's various personalized services - calendar, mail, contacts - from my desktop, where do the ads go? I think Google's in the same boat. There's this Great Application Giveaway going on right now (whether from the big boys or the Web 2.0 startups) and I think (I guess?) something has to give at some point. This reminds me a bit of the frenzy in the 90's where all these companies gave stuff away and eventually the business realities set in and they either folded or scaled down drastically.

Regardless, I'm enjoying it. It's a pretty satisfying experience to not have to hit a URL to get to the stuff I want. Heck, if the functionality is impressive enough, I might even pay for it. But please, for the love of God, keep the ads off my desktop.

Posted by richz at 8:14 AM

Mmmm Tasty : Yahoo! Buys Del.icio.us

I'm a bit late to the party on this bit of news, but nonetheless, Yahoo has acquired del.icio.us. I was actually just talking about this recently ("Did del.icio.us get bought yet?"). It will be really interesting to see how/what Yahoo does with these little gems. Between Flickr and del.icio.us, they're holding onto an immense amount of goodwill and community. Let's hope they continue to see the value in that and foster it.

Call me naive, but don't these things have to start making money at some point? There are no ads on del.icio.us (or Flick for that matter). Yahoo is a publicly traded company. Yeh, their brand gets enhanced a bit, but at some point you've got to start making this stuff pay off (I think). Do you just slap ads on everything? Do you start charging money? And over here, you've got the likes of Microsoft and Google building all sorts of free stuff without charging a nickel. 95% of Google's services have no ads (yet). Meanwhile, 98% of their money comes from basic search ads. I would love some enlightenment in all this. Maybe one of those venture capitalist bloggers can help me out.

Anyway, enough of my whining. Congratulations to del.icio.us and the people behind it. It's a great, innovative service.

Posted by richz at 9:55 AM

It's On! : Ajax vs. Flash

You gotta love the whole blogging, "we're all connected acrosst the World Wide Web" thing. Dotone, a neat little blog out of the United Arab Emirates, is the voice of Saleh, a web developer based there. He wrote a solid comparison of Ajax and Flash - pitting the two in a Battle Royale worthy of pay per view (or something like that).

My .02 on the whole thing: Ajax is useful and worthwhile - for now. It's still a pain to implement and prime for abuse and misuse. It's a hack job (despite some of the elegant wrappers/API's people have written for it). The big advantage? You can take an existing web site and light it up with some of that dynamic goodness in just the right places. In other words, it's a bolt-on that can happen pretty quickly.

Flash, on the other hand, is it's own platform. The learning curve is arguably steeper. It's a whole other world - a world that's been dominated by a visual design mindset. But the possibilities are that much wider. You can do things with graphics, sound and video that you're just not going to pull off with Ajax. Beyond the multimedia, the stuff just feels smoother in Flash. And let's not forget platform compatibility. You go to Ajax, you're asking for a world of hurt if you're planning on deploying to a wide array of browsers. Even Google Maps didn't support Safari at the outset. The Flash player is just about everywhere and runs things consistently.

More broadly speaking, these are just tools. They're a means to an end. I think the general lesson learned is to deliver better experiences - however way you get there. A static website can prove to be a bad experience. Denying someone an application because of a particular browser is a bad experience. Applying Ajax or Flash in a contrived way without thinking about how it will benefit the user can result in a bad experience.

In the end, this isn't about technology. It's about people.

Posted by richz at 5:17 PM

Who's Afraid of Google? Everyone

I'm all about the Google conspiracy theories. Never trust a company that uses primary colors, has a slogan like "Do No Evil," and it's market cap is north of $125 billion.

Wired has a nice little summary of the various Google initiatives (i.e. schemes) in play today.

Before we know it, Google will be indexing and generating revenue from things like Friendship and Understanding.

Posted by richz at 1:30 PM

Google Base And The Incidental Semantic Web

So the Web is all abuzz about Google Base so I figured I'd chime in (because you know, the world needs one more opinion on this thing).

Beyond my own (admittedly fun) conspiracy theories about Google in general, you have to give Google credit for trying to package up and introduce an extremely abstract idea - the Semantic Web - to the masses.

If we can take off our Techie hats for a second and step into the mind of the average web user, a first visit to Google Base would probably result in a "what the hell am I supposed to do with this?" Is it classifieds? Is it a place to store my lists? Is it some sort of publishing tool?

This ambiguity and lack of definition, or more importantly, lack of clear purpose for end users, will be Google Base's (or any attempt to create a semantically-centric platform) biggest challenge. They try to narrow your options by providing an initial set of categories, but that may well cause more confusion than provide clarity. "What do vehicles have to do with recipes?"

Now, this barrier to entry isn't just me bitching about adoption. I think what Google's trying to do here is in the spirit of social platforms like del.icio.us and Flickr, that is, creating incidentally valuable information by people's ordinary usage of a service.

We don't spend a lot of time thinking about how our tags will help the larger population. We just do it because it makes our own lives easier. The fact that a "greater good" evolves out of our collective behavior is a happy accident. The challenge for Google Base is making certain that a recognizable and narrow goal is there for users to see and that the actions users take will benefit this larger semantic picture that Google is trying to draw.

The real Holy Grail here is to build a rich semantic web that materializes as a byproduct of an experience that is cleary understood and reinforces and rewards ceratin behaviors. The semantic web is all about making signal out of noise. Google Base is ambitious in that it is an attempt to start taking us down some sort of path towards a semantic web. Now we'll have to see if the masses do their part.

Google & Flash : A Torrid Affair

I was playing with Google Analytics and I noticed that Google has decided to bed down with Flash yet again. A couple of months ago, Google took the plunge and switched over to Flash to deliver video. You can't fault Google for the decision. It's pretty slick stuff.

You have to think Google is just foaming at the mouth as we all recklessly head towards the "rich web as a platform" path. If you dig around Analytics with its visual charts and maps, you can quickly see that it would have been a nightmare to implement in AJAX. Good for Adobe. Potentially uncomfortable for the likes of Google.

The Great Microsoft Decoy

I’m sure everyone’s heard about the now infamous, leaked (*cough*) Microsoft memos. At first glance, it’s a huge validation and a victory for grassroots, platform-agnostic development. Microsoft is actually worried about being perceived as irrelevent by this wave of application “services” that are rendering the buy/download/install/update model archaic.

Soon after Mark Lucovsky jumped ship from Microsoft to Google, he wrote a well known post about how Microsoft has forgotten how to ship software. It may not have resonated then, but it sure as hell is resonating now.

Are we really headed for an advertising-driven world where you just “visit” applications hosted on different URL’s? Are the days of shrink-wrapped CD-ROM software coming to an end? Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff seems to think so. The status quo, according to many, is about to face a very serious challenge.

Digging a bit deeper though, I can’t help but be a bit skeptical about the true sincerity of these memos. I do think Microsoft has work to do to re-establish themselves as a player in a newly-formed space. It’s a perception problem, and they can fix that. Just as they positioned themselves to battle Netscape years ago, they’re being asked to rally the troops yet again.

When Netscape posed a “threat” to Microsoft, they shifted a massive number of resources and relentlessly focused on Internet Explorer. Eventually, IE actually became a better browser. More importantly, it was free. It helped Microsoft re-establish itself as a viable player. But IE was just a means to an end. All the while, their real cash cows were making…cash: Office, SQL and other server products, and of course, their operating systems.

And now, the alarms have been sounded again. According to Gates and Ozzie, Microsoft is about to be challenged yet again and they need to reinvent themselves yet again.

Or do they?

Looking back on the Netscape battle, Microsoft didn’t reinvent itself at all. It simply responded to a perceived threat, crushed them, and then returned to business as usual: making licensed software. IE never showed up on their bottom line. It was a means to an end. It enhanced perception and provided upsell (sort of) to the real money makers.

The story today is that their actual core business, licensed platform and application software, is being threatened by this wave of ad-supported services sent over the wire.

I’m just not buying it. Here’s why:

“Who Said I Want To Download A Word Processor?” The real tangible value of delivering applications over the web, beyond the “wow” factor, is actually pretty limited. While it’s cool to play with a word processor-like application in a browser, it’s real value isn’t in how it was delivered. Once you “download” that applicaton, how often is it going to change? Not very often. While installing an Office suite is a bit annoying, you only do it once. The real value lies in where your data is stored - centrally. A rich application to consume that data, while cool to have delivered seamlessly over the web, isn’t that big of a deal. FeedDemon is a great example of this marriage. It’s a Windows application that syncs up with Newsgator services to keep your feeds’ status (read, unread, etc.) intact no matter where you are. The sweet spot is rich, client applications nicely wired to services. And rest assured, Microsoft is going to make sure it nails this one.

“My Desktop Looks Like Times Square.” Would you tolerate ads on your desktop? On your spreadsheet application? On your word processor? Even on your chat client? I wouldn’t. I’m ok with ads living in a browser and out of my life. As desktops and devices
become directly wired to services, the need to go to a URL in a browser to do things is going to diminish. The URL Destination as we know it is going to become less relevant. As it should. We can create more seamless experiences if we can inject data into the right places rather than just the browser. But where do the ads go?

“My Stuff Is Stored Where?” While few would doubt the convenience of having your data centrally stored, many will not tolerate it. For businesses that value their data, that option simply isn’t viable (and an enormous chunk of Microsoft’s revenue comes from those businesses). Beyond where it’s stored, the notion that this data will be combed over so a service provider can generate relevant ads is a bit…well…creepy.

“Um, enough with the maps mash-ups already” I like maps. I like how they zoom and stuff. Google Maps is great. Yahoo Maps is even better. And people are doing some pretty cool things with them. But let’s relax ourselves folks. Beyond the fun/geek factor, what are we supposed to do with all this? I commute from home to work in New York City. I can only stare at the bus schedule in Vancouver for so long before I conclude “Ok. Now what.” What other “mash-ups” are out there that don’t have anything to do with maps? Even more importantly, how are they useful to the general user population (and no, that doesn’t include people who go to Foo Camps and Bar Camps and Hyper Camps).

Looking back on the memos, I can’t help but feel that Microsoft is snickering at us as it joins this party. They know the difference between hype and making money. They also know the value of making sure they are never perceived as becoming irrelevent. One thing Microsoft knows how to do well is adapt.

Beyond Microsoft though, I think it’s important for the community in general to stay focused on what reallv matters: creating rich, intuitive experiences that are less about technology and more about delivering value. We’ve stumbled on a great set of tools in our hands to do some awesome things. Let’s not screw it up (and that goes for you too Microsoft).

Posted by richz at 3:52 PM

"Uh Oh. Your Browser Is Leaking"

I've blogged in the past about how the browser will become less and less relevant as your primary portal to information that is not stored on your computer. A whole slew of technologies are readying us for the ability to get information in a more targeted and painless fashion. From Mozilla's XUL which lights up the chrome on Firefox to products like Konfabulator and Dashboard that allow for smaller-sized "widgets," there's a concerted attempt to rely less and less on the browser.

I think the success of such a push relies on a few things, and one of them is how seamlessly these widgets get to your desktop. Right now, downloads like Konfabulator and Google Desktop require a download and install (8MB and 5MB respectively).

For this to happen on a large scale, the steps to getting there needs to get a lot easier. My mother may love my Konfabulator weather widget, but if I left her to rely on herself to get it on her desktop, it would never happen. Why? It requires the download and installation of Konfabulator first. Then the user is expected to go back to the Konfabulator site, find the desired Widget and finally download and install it. Just as the RSS experience is broken (it's jumble of XML to most), this process is completely non-sensical to the average user. This is partly why there is a lot of oohing and ahhing at AJAX these days. To experience it, all you had to do was visit a web page.

In my opinion, the player that eliminates or greatly reduces that barrier is the one who wins. There are two players that can totally nail this one: Microsoft and Adobe. Microsoft because they hold the cards on the buttons and levers that make the operating system work and are best positioned to light up your desktop in a frictionless way.

Adobe has the famously lightweight Flash player. Despite it's compactness, the Flash player is pitched and perceived as a browser add-on. That needs to go away. The step of getting functionality (or grouping of functionality) to your desktop should be simple and seamless. Of course, not all content and features make sense, but a lot does. Imagine visiting My Yahoo! and selectively dragging the widgets you value most right to your desktop. Very sweet.

With Flex, Adobe has a great starting point. The notion of containers and canvases can prove to be an ideal demarcation point for developers to allow the "detachment" of certain components from the larger canvas. I admit I don't know the technical challenges at play here, but I can't imagine them being insurmountable.

More broadly speaking, we're heading in a good direction from a user experience perspective. Today, information is relegated an siloed in your browser. You go someplace to get what you need and then come back to your workspace. Beyond weather widgets and headlines on your desktop, we need to shoot for intruding into real workflows with pertinent information. That's where a lot of untapped power lies. Now it's up to some of the big players to make that leap a more seamless one.

Posted by richz at 6:14 PM

Adobe: Bring Back Central (Sort Of)

There's clearly interest in tapping into data from within widgets that exist outside of the browser. Microsoft has Gadgets. Apple has Dashboard. Yahoo has Konfabulator.

I just installed Yahoo!'s Konfabulator. 8.8 Megs. Big and bloated compared to Flash. Central was an attempt to break Flash out of the browser, and for whatever reason, never took off. Adobe needs to revisit this. Make it light to install (a plugin for the Flash plugin?) and make it easy as hell to create toys via either Flash or Flex for the desktop.

Even better, give me a "Peel" icon on anything Flash. I click it, it peels right off the browser and lands on my desktop. Hell yeh.

Comments (3)

'Microsoft Live Folders' Anyone?

Microsoft is poised to tack on the word "Live" to anything that moves for awhile. Can we turn any folder into a "live" folder that syncs up centrally no matter where we go? Why the hell not. Microsoft just acquired FolderShare. Grab some technology, hand it over to the marketing/branding folks and, voila: Microsoft Product!

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Yahoo! Maps Beta Debuts - In Flash

This is probably the best validation of Flash as a serious alternative to AJAX to date. Yahoo! Maps Beta has debuted and it is in Flash. There is also an AJAX version for the .0001% of people who don’t have Flash installed.

But wait, it gets even better. If you’re a Flex freak (and we know you’re out there), there’s an API just for you. Very, very cool. Across the board, Yahoo! went ballistic, delivering five API’s in total. Three Flash variations, the old simple API and AJAX. You can mix it up any way you like. A lot of people already have.

Comments (5)

Posted by richz at 3:08 PM

Microsoft Comes Alive With Live

Man, Microsoft does not like to be left out of the party. In classic fashion, they have re-jigged, re-orged, and come back at the Web 2.0 story with what appears to be a vengeance.

A lot of stuff was announced yesterday. Some of it was hype, but you can't ignore the story. Some points:

Most of the announcements are really just rebrandings of current products. Hotmail is going to become Live Mail. MSN Messenger becomes Live IM. Start.com transforms into Live.com. And the list goes on. Google is riding some incredible brand buzz right now and much of it is just hype. This is a healthy refresh for Microsoft because it sort of reintroduces a lot of what is already there.
What do we really want out of the Web? I think the whole AJAX trend feels nice right now, but it's staying power is going to be tested. The browser is going to feel claustrophobic once Microsoft gets done with us. The real sweet spot is data everywhere (especially persoanlized data) and rich, dynamic applications to control them. Who cares that the interface came in over the wire or not?
Don't be fooled into thinking this is the end of Office. Office is, at it's core, a business platform. Large enterprises are not interested in having their intelligence hosted elsewhere. Microsoft is betting that hosted, rich applications are a niche market. I think they're right.
Microsoft is one of the few companies in the world that can earmark money just to wear you down. It is amazing to see how many initiatives are planned:
- Microsoft Sparkle (competitor to Flash)
- Microsoft Gadgets
- XAML (XML-based markup for Windows Vista)
- Microsoft Live
Will they all succeed? Most likely not. Many past Microsoft efforts fall through the cracks. Nevertheless, the damage they leave behind is often significant.
Microsoft knows that a key to their success is to draw users away from the browser and back to the desktop. We're going to see many traditionally desktop elements "lit up" with data coming over the wire. In my opinion, this is the real killer. It can drastically improve a user's experience (i.e. "I don't have to go over there to get a piece of information.") and at the same time diluting the value of the Web Destination. Over time, this will render traditional web destinations less relevant. If search becomes a desktop widget, where will Google (or anyone else for that matter) put their ads? "Why do I have to go to Google.com to search? I'd rather just do it here, in my application."

In the end, as others have pointed out, this is healthy. It's good for consumers and competition can usually breed some useful, innovative things (usually). Let's just hope that as Microsoft heads this way, they don't lose sight of why all this stuff happened in the first place: an open community where others were allowed to play.

Posted by richz at 12:11 PM

Del.icio.us Delivers A Seamless Listening Experience - With Flash

Del.icio.us brings an end to the silliness of playing linked/streamed MP3’s on the web by including an ultra-slick “play” icon to MP3 audio links. Very, very cool. To this day I couldn’t tell you why Quicktime hijacks MP3 links on the web and plays them on that dumb white screen in my browser (and don’t even try to undo it, it requires a Ph.D.).

And how are they pulling off this magic? You guessed it: Flash. It isn’t immediately obvious, but they’re using Javascript to construct the Flash calls. Very cool. As illustrated in the use of Flash for video (on Google Video and other sites), Flash is a great way to seamlessly deliver rich media into a user’s experience. There is simply no need for all sorts of stuff to launch on your desktop just to hear some music or see some video. Good stuff.

Posted by richz at 10:00 AM

Adam Smith 2.0?

A colleague made an excellent observation about yesterday's post (User 2.0). He noticed a parallel between what I was getting at and the theories of the economist and philosopher Adam Smith. From Wealth of Nations:

By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.

So there you have it, Adam Smith chimes in on the Web 2.0 silliness. It's too bad he's not around to blog about all this.

P.S. This is the last time (seriously) that I will put "2.0" into the headline of a blog. Ever.

Posted by richz at 4:04 PM

User 2.0

Before I get into the point of this posting, I'd first like to apologize for the blatant abuse of the whole "2.0" label. I think I've subconsciously translated "2.0" to "new perspective."

Now that we've gotten the disclaimers out of the way, I wanted to share some thoughts on technology today and how it reflects on our perception of users, and people in general.

One of the often heard tenets of Web 2.0 is that it brings a whole new social aspect to applications. Folksonomies (or social classifications) and wikis are two great examples of how we can leverage all that extra collective Good that we have laying around. In short, this stuff is good and doesn't break down because most people are, well...good.

Why isn't Wikipedia filled with junk and graffiti? Why aren't tags misleading and useless? It's because we're all mostly good people who mean well.

To this I say: bullshit.

Ok. I don't really mean "bullshit" per se. I'm not trying to insinuate that we are all in fact bad or selfish or anything of the sort. The counter-sentiment I'd like to put forth is the following:

The cumulative social benefits of Web 2.0 applications are simply a byproduct of useful software that meets their own selfish needs.

We tag sites on delicious because it's a useful way to keep bookmarks centralized and easily organized. We use Flickr for similar reasons. It stores our photos and allows us to tag them for quick and easy retrieval. Wikis are sort of a different beast. I think we just like to be heard and feel important (not a bad thing by the way).

What's so curiously cool about these applications is they piggyback our own selfish needs to create this larger collective consciousness - sort of.

For the product managers and interaction designers, the real trick is to build stuff that is wortwhile for users personally, but somehow creates something greater than the sum for everyone else. The bigger the personal payoff, the more we're willing to give to get it. The more we give, the more these systems can learn. The more they learn, the richer the body of knowledge for all to benefit from. All we, the technologists, need to do is keep the valuable software coming and, more importantly, pay closer attention to what users are doing.

If we were to believe the idealists, you'd think users wouldn't mind spending their valuable time contributing metadata to the Greater Knowledgebase of Mankind. Not so. Only within the confines of immediate and personal gratification lies the greater good.

Posted by richz at 12:40 PM

Marketing 2.0

Love'em or hate'em, you have to admit Google has our eyes and ears these days. Maybe this is a new way to create buzz: tempt & titilate the masses by putting a product out for five lousy minutes. Let the Flick flash bulbs go off in a momentary frenzy and then...poof. It's gone. Oh the mystique. Base.google.com made a quick cameo appearance some time yesterday and the resulting buzz has been deafening.

Did it work? How about mainstream press coverage and serious buzz in the blogosphere. Maybe this is the way to deploy product. Dangle it for a second then make it disappear. What's left is a weird, Loch Ness-sighting vibe that generates its own energy.

Contrast this with the ho-hum release of Google Reader two weeks ago. It came. It wasn't all that good. And now it just sort of sits there. A quick comparison. As of 12:41PM EST. Search results for each on Google's own Blog Search:

No. of Search Results for "Google Reader": 48,779
No. of Search Results for "Google Base": 42,033

They're neck and neck, despite the fact that Google Reader has been out for a couple of weeks now and Google Base doesn't even actually exist yet.

Marketing 2.0 anyone?

Posted by richz at 3:34 PM

Base.google.com : The End Is Near

Is Google about to index everything in sight? Should Ebay and every other merchant and middleman on the Web be worried? Happy? And of course, the proverbial question: what is Google scheming?

Someone snapped a quick screenshot of base.google.com before it was taken down. Lock your doors. Pull down your blinds. Hide the children. Google is coming.

Their plan? To index anything that sits still long enough. The result? A big, awful, frightening cached representation of each thing in existence and it's relative place to all other things. The semantic web is coming folks, and Google wants to build it and own it. August 2009 is nearing.

Comments (1)

Posted by richz at 12:29 PM

Flock Pre-Release Now Available

So Flock was unleashed to the masses a couple of days ago in the form of a pre-release of sorts. For the unfamiliar, Flock is built atop the popular Firefox browser engine. It adds a slew of new “Web 2.0” features to the typical set of browser features we’ve become accustomed to. You can find out about it’s features here.

Flock is arguably the darling of the whole Web 2.0 trend. If I’m not mistaken, they’ve gotten $2MM in funding already and are creating a fair amount of buzz out there.

After installing it yesterday and playing around for a bit, the first impression I got was that this thing was just one big patch job of feature add-ons that have little to do with one another. It integrates with delicious and Flickr (sort of). It has a feed reader (sort of). It has a clipping tool where you can cut & paste images and text snippets. In the end, it felt more like an disparate collection of Firefox plug-ins stitched together along with a new chrome skin (which looks real cool actually). Stepping back a bit, what was this thing trying to achieve? After a couple of hours, I uninstalled it.

I think what’s even more interesting than the Flock product itself is all the noise around it. I’m just not seeing how all this stuff really amounts to much value for the rest of the world – i.e. beyond the community that is enraptured in all things 2.0 these days. Even more fascinating is the fact that Flock garnered serious venture money. I’m no business guy, but how exactly does this thing end up making money (other than a buyout)?

Generally speaking, I don’t get it. If someone can help me see the light here, I’m all ears.

Comments (1)

Posted by richz at 4:45 PM

My Web 2.0 Cents

I’ve go to say, it is absolutely fascinating to watch the Web 2.0 hype accelerate and build. I was personally involved in the initial Internet bubble of the late 90s and it’s great to see people getting excited about technology again.

With that in mind, I’d like to just share some of my thoughts and observations about “Web 2.0”:

I hope we don’t quickly forget the failings of Web 1.0. While there is an optimistic sentiment to change the world with software, the world – especially one where economic realities exist – didn’t exactly embrace everything 1.0 put out. In fact, it threw 90% of it in the trash. The rest survived by being consolidated into a small handful of Web powerhouses (Amazon, Yahoo, etc.).
The trends over the past couple of years have been gradually building. Recently, the decibel level has gone up with O’Reilly elegantly summarizing these trends and placing them under the “Web 2.0” banner. While some of these trends intersect, many don’t. I think we’re going to see naive investors telling startups to make sure “tagging” gets into their products. Big mistake. All of these trends are useless in a vacuum and subject to inevitable abuse and misuse. Effective software uses technology as a means to deliver useful tools through compelling experiences. I just went through the Zimbra product demonstration. They spend a good two minutes trumpeting their use of AJAX. Who cares?
I’ve been reading a lot of chatter about how many of the conventional methods of building software – like specification drafting and quality assurance testing – are about to be steam rolled by this new, agile way of building software. This approach may very well work for small applications (and most of the 2.0 applications out there are small) that don’t have to integrate with much of anything. You cannot build Visio without documentation. If your team exceeds five people, you’d be “filling people in” all day long and your testers are left asking more questions than testing.
del.icio,us. Writeboard. Rollyo. Blogger. Not to mention Google’s menu of services and lab experiments. None of them make money. I hear things like “the data is the application” and “the architecture of participation.” Great. Beyond the hippie charm, how does all this love translate into real money? The Web 2.0 conference is not Woodstock (at least I don’t think it is). I guess we can figure out how to make money later, or just hope to be bought out by a bigger player. Sound familiar?
There are some undeniably exciting trends coming together in the past couple of years. The software development process is being challenged; software is getting smarter and easier to use; and we’re plugging into some really smart thinking (1.0 didn’t have the luxury of blogs). With all that said, there are still some features that didn’t make it into this release of the Web. The Enterprise has effectively been left out of this party. Issues like security, integration and deployment inside of an organization’s walls have not been addressed. Beyond the technical challenges, I’d like to see some of these trends and ideas applied to the business world. There are a lot of openings there.

Hopefully people won’t misread this post as contrarian. I think it’s important for us to learn the lessons of Web 1.0. There isn’t a sea of small, successful 1.0 companies doing wonderful work and making money today.

Instead, a sort of cleansing occurred at the tail end of the 90’s. Assets (either tangible or intellectual) either disintegrated or were sold as scraps to the big fish that survived. When the smoke cleared, all that remained were traditional businesses – the banks, the publishers, the media companies – standing there with a collective smirk.

For now, I think it’s important to take this stuff for what it’s worth: a neat set of tools that, if used intelligently, can result in some compelling product. No matter how giddy these toys make us tech heads, they’re of little value to the rest of the world until we create products and experiences that they can connect with.

In closing, I’ll share a conversation I recently had with a friend who is not in technology. I was attempting to explain this new “Web 2.0 trend” to him, only to be interrupted with: “There was a Web 1.0?”

Comments (2)

Posted by richz at 8:03 PM

Microsoft Should Buy Adobe

Why do all the other bloggers get to walk through pie-in-the-sky buy out scenarios?

With the world changing such that platforms and applications and data and services are getting all jumbled up, Microsoft should dip into it’s sock drawer and buy Adobe. Here’s why:

With all these goofball applications being delivered on the Web, Microsoft needs to focus on applications that leverage and emphasize hardware. Adobe’s product suite – driven by Photoshop – does just that. You can’t deliver Photoshop via AJAX.
Flash is a superior interface design platform than AJAX/DHTML. A well-designed rich internet application on Flash can run circles around anything done on AJAX – with a lot less work. Also, Flash continues to push the envelope as far as leveraging hardware – video, graphics, sound, etc. See #1.
The Adobe PDF format is the de facto standard for delivering electronic representations of paper assets. No matter how cute Web 2.0 gets, a significant percentage of business – from law to publishing – relies on PDF.
Video via Flash runs circles around Real or even Microsoft’s own media player.
Through the Macromedia acquisition, Adobe acquired the PAF (Portable Application Format) to go along with its PDF. Macromedia’s Flex product brings the power of Flash application development to traditional developers (i.e. non-designers).
Many have argued that Microsoft will struggle in the Web 2.0 world because they don’t know how to ship software. Flash as a platform is compact, unobtrusive and ubiquitous. It is possibly the most widely deployed platform in the world - across operating systems and devices.
Google Video uses Flash. See #4. :)

So there you have it. Hopefully someone at Microsoft gets wind of this, gathers the loose change from the glove compartment and goes to town before it’s too late.

Or maybe Google should…

Comments (9)

Posted by richz at 9:35 AM

Let's Waste a Few Days And Sit Around To Try To Define "Web 2.0"

The noise level on the “What is Web 2.0” discussion has, at least in my mind, officially passed the threshold into the purely academic and potentially ridiculous.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

“Depending on who’s using the term, you could be talking about the Web as a platform for applications, a philosophy in building and designing Web applications, a group of powerful Web technologies, and much more.”
“The Come To Me Web”
“Web 2.0 is ‘what I want the Web to become’”
“…a “collection of technologies - be it VoIP, Digital Media, XML, RSS, Google Maps… whatever …. that leverage the power of always on, high speed connections and treat broadband as a platform, and not just a pipe to connect.”

There are more (many more) but I’ll spare you. Today, Web 2.0 is a fun little label that the “technology thinkers” are enjoying these days. For me, all this discussion about what it really means leaves me with one true meaning: it means nothing. More importantly, it means nothing to anyone else.

None of these trends and technologies mean much of anything until they’re introduced to the world in a tangible and useful context. Good technology does not advertise itself. It simply makes things better without getting in the way. As technophiles, we tend to lose sight of this. The most popular tags on del.icio.us (a “Web 2.0” destination) are about technology. It’s great to see the tech community becoming richer, but let’s face reality – the old couple next door could care less about your Web 2.0.

Of course, once the technologists are done with “Web 2.0” and created enough buzz, the marketers, public relations people and their minions will take it and run – using it and abusing it to create a message that has little to do with whatever Web 2.0 was supposed to mean to begin with.

So let’s stop wasting our time on theory and philosophy and start thinking about how this stuff is going to change the world - the rest of the world that is.

Comments (5)

Posted by richz at 4:47 PM

Google Video Goes Flash

I just stumbled on this and don’t know how long this has been the case. It looks like Google Video is using Flash to deliver video (exclusively, from what I can gather).

This makes a lot of sense because Flash can deliver high quality video without any sort of media player download. When Google Video first debuted, Google chose some weird, open source platform that required a download.

As a lot of content providers are realizing Flash is probably the best way to deliver on-demand video over the web today. It’s nearly 100% install base, quick buffering and streamlined player results in a much simpler, more seamless experience.

As much as Google would hate to admit it, Flash is a great way to deliver rich content and applications to a multitude of platforms and devices. Google and Microsoft may be headed on a collision course, but the other viable “platform” out there is Adobe’s Flash.

Comments (4)

Posted by richz at 9:48 AM

News.com: Microsoft's Nightmare (or Google's?)

News.com has a solid article on the nightmare scenario that Microsoft may be facing as Google evolves from search engine to Internet application platform.

They cite Google's investments in fiber cables and Wifi as well as Microsoft's reorganization that brings together their Platforms division and MSN. The article rightly points out that Microsoft has seen this threat before. Netscape promised a "web platform" revolution way back when and Microsoft handily suppressed that revolt. This time around, the revolutionaries are much better funded and arguably more savvy than last.

This scenario has been expounded upon before and while I think there is merit to it, I think it's far easier said than done (sort of like...Communism).

In order for Google to make this happen, they need intimiate control of the landing pad - the user's desktop screen. To date, all of this AJAX-laden, Web 2.0 goodness is happening on a Microsoft screen near you (excluding the 5% or so on Macs and other platforms).

Google Talk. Google Desktop/Sidebar. Google Earth. Just about everything Google has put out that lives outside of your browser is running on Microsoft's operating systems. Google is anxious to begin the march out of your browser's four walls. Ultimately, the key question that arises is: if Microsoft & Google are about to go toe-to-toe, and Microsoft owns the platform (today), and Google is intent on breaking out of the browser and into your desktop/devices/etc., where will their applications land?

Put another way, can Google crush Microsoft in a battle that is effectively fought on Microsoft's own platform? If history has any say, the answer is no. Microsoft is building out a whole new arena as we speak, and their intimiate understanding of that arena will not be shared with its competitors (just as it wasn't shared with Netscape years ago).

Beyond relegating Google to another software vendor that plays on Microsoft's turf, Microsoft has its own plans for leveraging services-based software on their OS. Technologies like XAML, effectively HTML for the desktop, highlight a clear plan to speak to your hardware - graphics, sound, input devices - in a far more intimiate way through pure XML. Rich user interfaces will be delivered as needed to the desktop, or your side bar, or your Start menu, or really anywhere. And they won't just be Ajax. They will tap directly into the hardware capabilities that Vista will be enable right out of the box.

If its agreed that Google can't win this battle inside of Microsoft's own arena, then the only remaining option is to go outside - and that's where things get really interesting. Is Google planning on delivering a thin Internet appliance that does just about nothing except run Google applications? Is it based on Linux? Is custom hardware involved? If so, who are they partnering with? Does Google really want to tie software to hardware (a la Apple)?

In the end, no matter how many fiber lines and Wifi networks Google gets its hands on, the real beach head is the last three feet that lands them in the user's living room or office. Today, Microsoft owns that experience and it is far easier said than done to unseat them from that role.

All of this doesn't even address how Google plans to make money. Just about everything they offer today is free. I seriously doubt that users are going to tolerate advertisements on their word processors or spreadsheets. If that's the case, then at some point, Google's going to have to break the bad news to a lot of people: start paying for our services. Microsoft broke the bad news long ago. They sell software. Do users really want to subscribe to a "Word Processing Service?"

In the end, I think these theories are appealing because various facts seem to fit so snugly in relation to one another. Reality and the devilish details within may tell a very different story. If the theories are correct, Google is about to go to war, and it may prove to be it's Vietnam.

And let's not forget...Yahoo!

Posted by richz at 2:55 PM

Microsoft Is Broadening Avalon Support

Betanews has an article about Microsoft’s “Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere," or WPF/E initiative. It’s essentially XAML for other platforms besides Windows Vista. At the PDC conference, Microsoft showed examples of WPF/E on a PDA and smart phone. Support for Mac is planned as well.

This is an important shift for Microsoft. Rather than force everyone to their platform, they’re opening things up a bit. Of course, the native Avalon stuff will have a richer API.

Posted by richz at 9:20 AM

Google's Master Plan(?)

Recently, there’s been a whole lot of speculation about what Google’s master plan is. It’s sort of fun to play around with conspiracy theories and the Google roadmap is a juicy one.

In my opinion, Google is sort of a fishabowl example of what happened in the late 90’s with the whole dot-com debacle. If we liken Google itself to the Internet back then, then all of Google’s mini-projects (Talk, Desktop, Earth, etc.), are really attempts at backing in to the lofty growth expectations that have been imposed upon it by both investors and the public.

You see all these free services roll out, and they’re sort of neat and impressive, yet they don’t make any money. Google’s core revenue comes from search advertising. Almost all of the “toys” they’ve put out are free (as of today). Maybe Google actually has a plan that will one day turn all of these services into money makers. The startups back then also had a plan (or so they thought they did).

I was personally involved in one of these startups way back when. It was a strange time. Enormous amounts of money and energy were thrown at ideas that simply didn’t make money. There was a “we’ll figure that part out later” mindset that permeated. I’m assumng that Google is committing an impressive amount of talent and money to build and deploy these services. I’d also assume that these various efforts have to translate into money at some point.

A lot has been made of the “GoogleOS.” The theory goes that Google is actually working towards rendering your local desktop operating system irrelevant. Your information and the applications you use to manage it will all be on the web. While it’s part of Google’s strategy to inject itself into more and more of our computing experience, I think the leap to an “Internet OS” is outlandish.

I think part of Google’s strategy to survive and thrive is to end its relegation inside your browser. It wants in on your desktop experience. I think this transition, both critical and very dangerous for Google, will prove to be Google’s most difficult evolutionary step. First off, the arena they’re forced to head towards isn’t their own. It’s Microsoft’s. And while you can do some impressive things with executable installs that people can download, you’ll always be a step behind. Imagine a sport where the home team can change the rules of the game and understands the nuances of the arena better than any visiting team ever will.

Secondly, by leaving the browser, Google as "destination" starts to disintegrate. The destination is important for two reasons: (1) branding and (2) it's a place to put ads. As services start to get interspersed throughout the desktop experience, the brand relevancy of Google will diminish. More importantly, where do you put the ads – Google’s bread and butter revenue generator? Experience shows that once you breach the desktop, the tolerance level goes way down. The desktop is personal. It’s the user’s own private space.

Which I think leads to what may prove to be the fatal blow for the “GoogleOS.” While we’re all enjoying the increasing power of the Internet, we don’t want it overtaking our lives. The browser is a clear line of demarcation. ALso, from a business or enterprise perspective, any sort of Internet OS is not only intrusive but downright dangerous (or at least perceived as such).

In the end, I don’t think there is a master plan. Just as you had start-ups for just about any idea in the late 90’s, Google’s going to roll the dice on a wide array of efforts. They’ve got the cash and the brand to do it and the expectations are so high that they pretty much have to. Either way, it’ll be interesting to watch (and play) as all this unfolds.

Posted by richz at 11:35 AM

Gap Stores Shut Down to Ajaxify

This sort of blew my mind. The Gap Stores (which include the Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy) actually shut down to upgrade to a new AJAX-style interface. The New York Times has an article up about it.

I’m dumbfounded as to how (a) the business people would even allow that to happen, no matter the cost and (b) why they’d even have to shut down in the first place to get this done. As to (a), this is yet another classic example of hostage-taking by technology. The customers here (the Gap business itself) simply don’t have the prerequisite knowledge to question this kind of call. As to (b), the fact that the site even has to come down calls into question the architectural soundness of their whole e-commerce infrastructure. Mind you, I’m criticizing from miles away, but you can’t help but ask why.

If you visit the site through the front door, you’re turned away. However, you can actually play with the new interfaces here and here and here. Are they revolutionary? I don’t think so (despite the quotes in the Times article). I couldn’t help but notice how Flex-ish this all seems though. Anyone who doubted that AJAX isn’t a threat to Flex should compare the Gap sites to the Flex-powered TJ Maxx. In both cases, the application of next-gen technologies to improve the flow of the user experience is half-baked. TJ Maxx leans on Flex for the shopping cart experience while Gap focuses on the configuring the product and adding to cart portion. At this point, we’re still struggling with fitting this stuff into classic HTML-based e-commerce. Hopefully we’ll get to a day where we can look back and note how hoaky this all seems.

Posted by richz at 7:29 PM

Fitting Flash Into Web 2.0

Macromedia’s Mike Chambers posted a thoughtful commentary on how Flash is being perceived in the context of all this “Web 2.0” brouhaha. In sum, he talks about how in the midst of all these attempts to define Web 2.0, Flash in fact meets many of the requirements, yet is oddly missing from the story:

I think that the biggest secret on the web today is that Flash is an application platform with a virtual machine and a robust programming model and application development framework.

He goes on to hit some of the key points about why Flash isn’t in the mix: it’s history as a design (rather than development) platform; it’s lack of a programming environment that developers are comfortable with; etc.

One point he doesn’t mention is that Flash is a proprietary technology. It’s future depends on the whims of a large corporation. I personally don’t buy this argument. I think it’s more borne out of a self-anointed romanticism that the whole “Web 2.0” community fosters, rather than real limitations. PHP is a great example of a grass roots technology that gained traction over tag-based application servers simply because it’s free and open, regardless of whether it is superior or not.

The AJAX–Flash struggle is a bit different. AJAX is really just a mish-mosh of various web technologies. Regardless, it’s prime to garner that sort of community support. Personally, I think AJAX is a just a band aid to hold us over until the real next generation stuff takes hold.

Nevertheless, Flash has a challenge on it’s hands. I’ve actually blogged about this very topic before. I argued that the party was already over and that Macromedia had the answer with Flex but missed the boat by relegating exclusively to enterprise use. I urged Macromedia to open it up and let people play. Let it go toe-to-toe with this AJAX nonsense.

In a response, David Temkin, CTO of Laszlo Systems, pointed out that OpenLaszlo already existed and it was completely open source. I responded by asking why Laszlo didn’t take off then? The thread ended after that.

This entire scenario has me recalling Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. AJAX obviously “tipped” and took hold. Products like Open Laszlo (and others) didn’t. You could argue that Flash apps require a relatively new and somewhat foreign syntax and programming approach. Then again, AJAX is a nightmare to work with. Maybe it’s because AJAX belongs to no one and is a concept borne out of the community without the spectre of LargeCorp hanging over it. I’m not really sure.

In the end, I’m a huge fan of Flash as a rich experience delivery mechanism. It’s lightweight. It runs on an incredibly broad user base across platforms and it can run circles around the best of the AJAX apps (imagine a true vector mapping application in Flash).

Mike alluded to some new initiatives that may very well open the way for Flash to take hold. I’m looking forward to seeing them and I sincerely hope that Macromedia/Adobe steps back and let’s the community carry it forward. That seems to be a key part of the puzzle.

Posted by richz at 1:59 PM

MSN & Google Focus On Mobile

Both MSN Search and Google updated their mobile phone search capabilities They’re essentially paired down, very simplified web pages that are viewable on phones.

A few weeks ago, MSN Mobile opened up local search and maps thru mobile devices. MSN Search’s WebLog has info in it here.

Now Google has countered with the ability to find local stuff as well as driving directions through Google Mobile.

You can play with both interfaces in your desktop browser here and here.

Posted by richz at 8:07 PM

Business 2.0: How To Become The Next Microsoft

Business 2.0 has nice introductory write-up to the whole “Web 2.0” trend: How To Become The Next Microsoft.

In my oh-so-humble opinion, I think the whole “Web OS” concept is a bunch of hooey. It’s one of those ideas that fits so nicely in the brain, it’s got to be right, but in reality the world is a lot more complicated (sort of like…Communism).

Posted by richz at 8:06 AM

Fixing the Back Button and Enabling Bookmarking for AJAX Apps

Content With Style (an excellent resource for CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc.) published an article on reconciling the Back button and enabling bookmarking for AJAX applications. Not for the faint of heart (a lot of Javascript in there) but really well put together.

Posted by richz at 12:20 PM

Simeonov on the "Next Programming Models"

Macromedia’s Sim Simeonov talks about programming models in the context of RIA’s and composite applications.

Posted by richz at 11:08 AM

Wired Article On Ajax

Wired has a pretty good summary of the Ajax trend and where things can possibly go.

My .02 cents: Ajax is great from a user experience perspective, but let’s keep in mind that it’s still all happening inside the browser’s walls. The next leap is to start to tie more discrete services to interfaces that are not a part of a web page, but stand on their own. Ultimately, the browser needs to melt away and these richer experiences should land on the platform - whether it be a mobile phone, PDA or desktop.

Slashdot referenced the article, which of course spawned 50,000 comments.

Posted by richz at 11:08 AM

Flickr & Stealing Metadata

Flickr just announced some really interesting new features that gleans photos for what they call “interestingness.” In short, it essentially studies newly uploaded photos and determines which ones are somewhat…interesting.

Of course, the big question is: how can software determine what is “interesting”? We can of course ask people what is interesting with features like voting and the like, but that’s disruptive. What the boys and girls at Flickr have done is effectively watch how people use their services, and thoughtfully determine what is interesting based on the actions and behaviors of their users.

A while back, I posted an entry entitled Stealing Metadata. The idea behind that article is that, while tagging and the like are great for gathering metadata, from the perspective of a user’s experience, it is disruptive. What we can do, alternatively, is carefully watch what users do, crunch that information and draw some educated conclusions. Their actions and decisions often provide insight into their motivations. Flickr seems to have done exactly that.

As an experience designer, I think this is the far superior approach to gathering important metadata. Rather than asking users to stop, “check in” with some information, and then continue, the flow of their experience is not disrupted.

On the flip side, this presents new and interesting challenges to the world of data warehousing and usage monitoring. To attain this kind of information, systems will need to do more than just log information. I think the technical capabilities are clearly there. The task at hand is on the design side: what are we interested in? what actions hint towards a certain conclusion? how much weight do we give certain actions? This is a higher level of sophistication than the typical logging capabilities that we’re accustomed to today.

In the end, the payoff is huge. To the casual user, Flickr and other services that provide this kind of information take on an illusion of intelligence and awareness that is truly captivating. Come to think of it, most great technologies are shaped this way: a simple, intuitive solution that hides away the complex work behind it. “Show me some interesting photos.” Perfectly simple.

Posted by richz at 1:26 PM

The Great Browser Escape!

I’ve blogged in the past about how applications will eventually “break out” of the browser. While web apps are becoming richer and more interactive, they are still relegated to the boundaries of the browser window.

This is going to change. There are a host of technologies out there - available now or soon to be available - that will start to blur the line between the desktop and rich applications that still have the Internet’s reach. The result is a better more tailored experience that introduces interfaces that are more neatly tailored to the information we want nearby. The days of visiting a big, bulky portal page just to see today’s weather are numbered.

Today, Yahoo! announced that they’re acquiring Konfabulator, a maker of desktop “widgets.” This allows Yahoo! to deliver their vast menu of services a la carte, thus breaking out of the browser. From a design perspective, this is pretty exciting stuff. The “playground” is no longer the browser page, but rather the entire desktop. In my opinion, this is the first baby step in a trend that will not only deliver information to users, but strategically inject that information into key touch points of the entire desktop experience. The ability to tie information to workflow - to how people use computers - is very exciting.

Yahoo! is not alone in recognizing this trend:

Microsoft’s XAML/Avalon engine is a key foundation of their future operating system, Microsoft Vista.
Macromedia’s Central application allows Flash applications to exist outside the browser. Central has been out for over a year, but has failed to gain any sort of traction.
Apple introduced Dashboard Widgets with the latest upgrade of their operating system.
Mozilla’s XUL enables manipulation of the browser chrome and application functionality. A whole slew of extensions exist based on XUL.

In my opinion, the real killer here is Microsoft’s XAML technology. Few would argue that while most other implementations are effectively “bolt-on”, XAML will stand out in how intimately it will be tied to the operating system’s capabilities. Let’s just hope that, unlike in the past, Microsoft doesn’t over engineer the thing such that the barrier of entry is too high and/or highly dependent on their own clunky IDE tools. Many of the implementations today piggyback technologies like CSS, XML and Javascript. This is smart because you’re leveraging what people already understand.

In any respect, the trend is clear and very exciting for technology designers like myself. The world of possibilities just got (and will continue to get) a lot bigger.

Posted by richz at 4:10 PM

RICO : An Open Source Library For Ajax

The bad boys at Sabre Airline Solutions’ User Experience Team have put out an open source javascript library that whips together some neat interface controls. Demos and explanations are all available at Openrico.org. Good stuff.

Posted by richz at 10:27 AM

RIA's On Wikipedia

The term “Rich Internet Application” (RIA) has graduated to the wonderful world of Wikipedia. There’s mention of the various techniques to make stuff Rich – Javascript, Flash. There’s even a plug for the new kid on the block – Backbase.

Posted by richz at 2:04 PM

Start.com - Microsoft's Own Little Garage Shop

Something interesting is going on at Microsoft. Or at least in their start.com group.

For the unfamiliar, start.com appears to be Microsoft’s quiet foray into the world of web-based RSS portals. What’s interesting about it is it seems to be the product of a more off-the-cuff style of building software. There’s no beta, no promised release dates. It’s just a few people screwing around with stuff and making some cool toys.

Of course, this is all theory, but take a look at the site. If you go to www.start.com you get a “page not found” error. But if you go to www.start.com/1 or www.start.com/2 you get a couple of variants of a web aggregator. www.start.com/3 is their latest stab at it (you have to do this lame little quiz before you gain access).

I’ve gotta say, with version 3, they’re coming close to something really nice. It still has some issues, but I like their approach: hack away and throw some stuff out there. Nothing they have makes me want to uninstall FeedDemon, but they can get there. I think the most interesting thing here is how Microsoft appears to be trying to counteract the Big Company sluggishness with some slick, nimble little efforts. If they can infuse that into their culture, they will put some hurt on all the little guys.

Macromedia Taking Aim At Microsoft

Information Week has an article out on how the Flash/Flex recipe (along with a tweaked-out version of the Eclipse IDE) will prove a serious development platform that rivals Microsoft.

There is merit to what they’re saying. Flash is literally everywhere (arguably on more machines than Windows) and it is lightweight.

Longhorn is Microsoft’s answer to delivering rich applications over the Web. We’ll see if they deliver. Knowing Microsoft, it will be bloated – thus defeating the purpose of going thin/rich client anyway.

On the other hand, you’ve got the challenges of a merger (Adobe/Macromedia) and all the soap opera that often comes with that.

Posted by richz at 4:01 PM

Flex / CSS App

The bad boys at Macromedia (I mean Adobe) put it a wicked little Flex application that illustrates the power of styling Flex apps with CSS. Very cool and a great way to learn Flex’s CSS implementation.

Posted by richz at 8:30 PM

Macromedia's (Adobe's) Dilemma

Let me preface this post by noting that I’ve always been a big fan of Macromedia’s (now Adobe’s) products – specifically their Coldfusion platform, and more recently their Flex presentation server (it compiles an XML syntax in Flash .swf files and delivers them to browsers ). I’ve always respected them because their products always fit into a larger vision. About a year and a half ago, they released a presentation called The Business Impact of Rich Internet Applications. As an interaction designer, I was inspired. These guys got it right. This is where things were headed. Of course, Macromedia presented all this as a backdrop for repositioning their Flash player as a powerful way to deliver rich applications over the Web.

Against that backdrop, enter two key milestones into the wacky world of web development:

Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path stuck a label on some technology that’s been laying around: Ajax – a relatively simple way to deliver richer experiences through a web browser with some Javascript and XML.
Google released Google Maps – probably the most compelling, widely-deployed rich Internet application. From both a usability as well as technical perspective, it is very impressive.

With Google’s help, Ajax is slowly taking over the world. Developers everywhere are playing with the stuff. The momentum is pretty obvious and the business case for it is compelling. Macromedia got it right, experience does matter. What they didn’t bet on was Google showing up and showcasing an application that used none of their technology but rather bits and pieces of things that have been laying around for years. Now we’re starting to see it applied in many different places.

How active is the community out there? Take a look at the ironically titled Ajax Matters. It’s filled with links, libraries and code samples.

And this isn’t some grass-roots trend. We already know Google’s done it. Ebay is doing it (very soon). Amazon is doing it. The proverbial cat is out of the bag. Yahoo! is doing it within their news articles as well as their My Yahoo! portal site.

So how does all this bode for Macromedia? Not very well. Their predictions were dead-on, but their goal to be a key player in the RIA space is severely threatened. Flickr, the popular photo management site (now owned by Yahoo!), has decided to move away from Flash to Ajax.

In my opinion, the race is already over. Macromedia chose to take the high road with Flex. It is a very nice piece of technology – but it is costly and as a result, the user base is very small (at least compared to Ajax). They’re trying to encourage users to play around with it, but the community is just not responding. In my opinion, Macromedia should open up the hood and give the thing away. They simply can’t compete with the community momentum that’s out there now. Take a page from Microsoft: arm the development community and adoption will follow.

I’ll admit that I haven’t thought much about the business implications of this. It will no doubt hurt the bottom line in the short term if they did open it up. But that’s the short term. As long as Macromedia keeps innovating (as they’ve done in the past), they’ll be OK. I’d bet the house that they’re not going to have much of an asset there in three years anyway if the current trends continue.

Throw on top of all this the pains and chaos often associated with a merger and you can’t help but wonder if these trends are even going to be addressed.

Of course, Flash will still have its niche. People will still test paint colors on houses and customize shoes with some cute marketing applications, but Macromedia was shooting for more than that. They wanted Flash (with the help of Flex) to be the RIA platform. That’s not going to happen if things remain status quo.

Posted by richz at 3:20 PM

Shea On XAML

Dave Shea gives his thoughts on Microsoft's XAML. Shea's a web standards guy and he's seeing XAML as a potential step back. I agree on some points here. The comment thread is interesting as well.

My thoughts: for better or worse, XAML is part of Microsoft's grand plan. We can't ignore the momentum they can generate with a new operating system (e.g. Dell is not going to pass on the next OS because they think XAML is lame). That said, Microsoft is notorious for caking on unnecessary layers of complexity just to cover everything under the sun. You have to assume that this will add up to a barrier of entry for many. In any case, love it or hate it, it can't be ignored.

Posted by richz at 6:51 PM

NY Times On The Latest Stuff

It’s always interesting to see how and when the mainstream media chimes in on emerging technology trends. The New York Times (everyone’s favorite tabloid) just put out an article called An Update On Stuff That’s Cool. It mostly showcases Google Maps (satellite imagery and all). There’s some other stuff in there, but I found this paragraph particularly telling:

The real importance of Google's map and satellite program, however, is not its impressive exterior but the novel technology, known as Ajax, that lies beneath. About that, and its implications for Google and other companies, there will be more to say in a future column.

Well, looks like Ajax – a harbinger of RIA’s, is finally penetrating the masses (if this article is any indication). Interesting.

Posted by richz at 8:40 AM

" Avalon is Pure Crap"

Ted at PowerSDK.com fiddled around with Avalon (Microsoft's graphics engine for Longhorn) and concluded that it is garbage.

His biggest gripe is the face that it requires 250MB of libraries to even run. Not exactly lightweght. Take it all with a grain of salt. Based on his prior postings, he's somewhat of a Flashophile (though his points are still valid regardless).

Posted by richz at 9:53 AM

Ajax Taking Off

The Ajax craziness is starting to ramp up (“craziness” being an entirely relative term). It’s interesting to see how some makeshift “branding” of a loosely tied set of technologies can really help a particular approach gain momentum.

Fiftyfoureleven gives some thoughts on the trend.

Posted by richz at 7:56 AM

The Value of Low Barrier Of Entry

As an information architect, I’m always trying to check my analysis with a simple but powerful mantra: keep it simple. In my opinion, simplicity without sacrificing power is the holy grail of interaction and information design. Why? Because if it’s simple, people will more easily understand it and interact with it. In other words, the “barrier to entry” is lower.

I think a lot of the same ideas applied to information design also apply to technologies that are introduced to the development world for adoption. A great example of this is web services. SOAP has got to be one of the most enthusiastically trumpeted technologies ever. The promise of web services is not a con job. The benefits are very real and tangible. Nevertheless, adoption has been slow. Why? I’d argue it’s because the barrier to entry is so high. For all its promised elegance, SOAP (along with WSDL) are not simple to learn and implement.

Then came REST. It’s hardly even a technology. It’s just pages of data that rely on URL’s for handling requests and parameters. Mind you, REST doesn’t work for everything, but it sure works for a lot of things. A couple of years ago, Tim O’Reilly pointed out that when Amazon’s web services introduced REST as an alternative API, it blew past SOAP as the preferred method for developers - such that 85% of their usage is on the REST interface.

Even beyond REST, you can lower the barrier even more by relying upon already understood schemas to deliver web services. Bloglines does a great job of this with their API. It’s REST, but it’s also using some very familiar XML structures. Pulling up someone’s feeds with folders? It’s just an OPML file. Pulling up an actual feed’s entries? It’s just an RSS file. The barrier can’t get much lower than that.

I think there’s a moral to all this silliness: keep it simple and accessible. Whether you’re dealing with users or developers, people don’t like the idea of cozying up to a 300 page manual to get some things done. They’d rather just hit the ground running.

Posted by richz at 9:26 AM

Microsoft & The Future Of Web Applications

Rob Rohan throws down some thoughts on interface delivery over the web. He makes an assertion that I think will probably hold true:

I think the winner is either going to be the format with the most implementors (XUL) or the best looking (MXML) - but if neither of those can gain any market share between now and 2006, guess what... you're going to be crushed by Microsoft.

Let's face it folks, Microsoft owns the arena, and if they deliver on their promise, they will be very tough to beat.

Posted by richz at 1:06 PM

RIA's and Web Services

In thinking about the emerging trends that are starting to penetrate the Internet, especially the trend towards richer experiences, it’s interesting to watch how various technologies that would otherwise have little do with each other are aligning.

For example, the desire to deliver richer experiences is starting to gain some serious traction. People are starting to really push the limits of delivering interface over the web. AJAX, Flex and later on XAML are introducing a whole new breed of applications. This trend is forcing information architects and front-end developers to rethink how their applications are designed. But beyond the people on the interface end, some pretty dramatic things are going to start happening on the server-side as well.

Here’s the general process that occurs today:

User clicks on a link or button in a web browser.
The server receives the request.
It grabs whatever data is needed from some data source.
It grabs some templates or interface elements (HTML, CSS, images, etc.).
It takes the data and the markup (i.e. the “interface”) and effectively “assembles” the page for delivery.
It sends the stitched-together interface - data and all - back to the client.

This is fine and good for traditional web applications, but RIA’s like Flex & AJAX require a more granular delivery mechanism. Let’s look at the same process in the context of an RIA:

User visits a web application.
Persistent interface elements are delivered to the client (some data may come along with them).
User interacts with the application in some way (notice here it can really be anything – not just clicking on links – clicking, typing, dragging, etc.).
The user action (or event) fires off a request for some data (not an entire page).
The server gets the request.
It grabs the data and sends it back to the client.
The client now does the work of “assembling” the data with the interface.

As to the preferred method of interface assembly - pick your poison – XUL, XAML, AJAX, MXML, etc. What’s interesting about all this is that the changes coming down not only affect front-end designers but those that architect back-ends as well. Application servers aren’t really application servers anymore. A nice chunk of the application is sitting on the client – where it belongs. The servers are now more focused on delivering data as needed. A very different proposition.

All of this sheds a whole new light on web services (whether SOAP or REST, it doesn’t really matter). In the past, the key selling point for web services has been the hope of easing integration with disparate systems. This is, of course, a key benefit. However, beyond the more conventional arguments for web services, these new interfaces further underscore the need for more granular, event-driven delivery of data. These new applications don’t want fully rendered pages anymore. They’ve already covered that. They want data.

So in light of all this, you have to wonder if organizations that have invested heavily in web application infrastructures are going to be ready for this shift. My guess is some will be but many won’t. It just takes a little planning and foresight to be properly positioned for the changes to come.

Posted by richz at 2:16 PM

AJAX Is For Tubs

I'm finding all this hype about AJAX (the name that represents a hodge-podge of technology - javascript, xmlhttprequest, DOM) beginning to border on ridiculous.

Google is partly to blame for elevating AJAX to the forefront with Google Maps and Google Suggest. They're both impressive examples of how interactive experiences make us absolutely giddy. Come to think of it, the hype arond AJAX in general is proof of how absolutely experience-deprived we've become using the Web. Microsoft Streets, a client-side mapping tool, is far richer and more impressive than Google Maps.

"But you've gotta download and install that. Google Maps is just on the Web!"

My response to that is: big whoop. The days of delivering the application, along with the information we want, are fast approaching. I've mentioned technologies like Macromedia's Flex, Microsoft's Longhorn platform and Mozilla's XUL in the past. These platforms - designed from the ground up to deliver rich, interactive controls through the Web and onto your deskop - are the real deal.

I sincerely hope that the AJAX momentum doesn't keep us in bed with web browsers for anymore than we have to. As far as I'm concerned, AJAX is little more than a band aid.

Posted by richz at 12:54 PM

Berners Lee & The Semantic Web

C|Net has a neat little article from the Semantic Technology Conference on the Semantic Web and why it's so super (according to Berners Lee) and why it hasn't taken off.

The Semantic Web has always interested me. In theory, it's an amazing way to really connect all this "stuff" that's floating around on the Internet. Paul Ford wrote an excellent article from a couple of years ago that nicely highlights the possibilities of the Semantic Web. If you have any interest in this sort of stuff, you should check it out.

Posted by richz at 5:41 PM

Stealing Metadata

There's been some buzz of late about enriching data that is submitted into systems with tags. The social bookmarking site Deli.cio.us and the photo management site Flickr are some of the best examples of gathering and utilizing metadata (in other words, data about data). They both provide view of which topics (or "tags") are hot at any given time. This is great because it's a glimpse into how viral a topic or link is based on their respective users' use of the application. Unfortunately, the information-gathering aspect of phenomena is pretty archaic, if not badly flawed.

The task of gleaning and making sense of collected metadata, while a challenge, is more or less solved. If a particular topic is hot, it's simply referenced by a lot by people. The challenge is less about what to do with metadata and more about how to get it. The problem, as far as I can see it, is that the collection of metadata is far too disruptive in its current incarnation. Sure, you can ask users to enter some tags or descriptive text about a piece of information, but from an end-user's perspective this is little more than a nuisance. Any part of the experience that is not tied to the user's end-goals diminishes the user's experience.

In my opinion, the holy grail here is to somehow steal metadata from the user's interaction without disrupting that experience if possible. We rely heavily on technology today, and so we're constantly "talking" to machines. Beyond our own interactions, technology already exists that allows us to gather a lot of metadata without asking the user a single question. Consider the following examples:

A digital camera equipped with a GPS notices that, after some travelling, it has arrived at a relatively popular destination (e.g. an amusement park). It subsequently lights up and asks the user if, for the next few hours, he'll be using the camera to take pictures of friends or family. It asks for some more information, but the user doesn't have to provide it. Photos taken during that timespan are tagged with "June 26, 2005", "Hershey Park" and "Pennsylvania"
The next time you sync up your MP3 player, your PC asks if you'd like to find out some more about Wilco. It's asking because it noticed you've played the latest Wilco album religiously for the last few weeks (because it's keeping a hit count of which songs you play). It could also ask you if you'd like to volunteer this information for public polling.
After a nurse enters some drug and patient information into her tablet PC while making her rounds, the information is sent to a centralized repository that seeks out causal relationships between combinations of drugs and certain physical reactions. This information, in its isolated form, is relatively useless, but in aggregate it can provide an early indicator of potential dangers - all without disrupting the normal work experience.

Of course, questions can be asked of users - and will be tolerated - so long as there is some immediate or near-immediate perceived value to the user. In addition, users may be willing to sacrifice some of their time and effort for a larger cause (sort of the same way some users install screensavers that steal CPU cycles for cancer research).

Privacy is another potential issue. Before you steal metadata, you should ask the user if it's ok to do so - especially if that information is being taken back to a centralized place for public consumption.

It's becoming more and more difficult to make sense of the massive oceans of information and ideas that are flowing through the Internet. One way to elevate the information worth elevating is to ask users to categorize it - a clear violation of user-centered design. I think we should be focusing more on devising systems that pay attention to metadata around our experiences with them. Much can be learned if the systems simply chose to listen.

Posted by richz at 9:15 AM

Dump The World Web

I think I'm bordering on redundant at this point, but it's good to see some other observers pointing out the near-fatal flaws with the World Wide Web. Bill Thompson chimes in at Opendemocracy.net.

Posted by richz at 10:27 AM

Is The Google Browser Coming?

By way of Waxy's links (consistently one of the best link rolls on the Web):

Ben Goodger, lead engineer for the Mozilla Firefox effort, has been hired by Google. Let the big (and potentially dumb) conspiracy theories begin. Is a Google Browser on the way?

(Insert suspenseful, foreboding music here.)

Posted by richz at 11:27 PM

Business 2.0 : How To Become The Next Microsoft

Business 2.0 has a pretty good article on How To Become The Next Microsoft.

It's a pretty good read. It touches on how XML will become the language of the Internet. This is the stuff that, for me as an interface designer, gets me excited. I'm looking forward to the day when presentation is no longer mangled together with information. Instead, presentation layers are where they belong - on the client - with all the richness and interactivity that the Web has made us forget about.

This is an inevitable trend. It's less a matter of "if," than it is a matter of "when."

Posted by richz at 2:27 PM

Visual Google?

Why the hell should we type what we want from Google when we can just give them a picture?

After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. A google search query is worth what...three or four?

An interview with Hartmut Neven, head of the Laboratory for Human-Machine Interfaces at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, tells all.

Posted by richz at 12:28 PM

Tech Predictions for 2005

Robert Cringely gets the old crystal ball out to give us his tech predictions for 2005.

Posted by richz at 9:52 AM

C|Net All Over CES 2005

The lucky bastards at C|Net are like children in the proverbial candy store - brining the less fortunate tons of videos from the CES 2005 show in Vegas. Check them out. It's the next best thing.

Posted by richz at 8:17 AM

Dump the World Wide Web!

Bill Thompson rightly pleads for us to push the World Wide Web as we know it today right into the river. Amen to that.

Posted by richz at 11:56 PM

Slick Dictionary

Taking a page from Google Suggest, here's a very slick (dare I say - sexy?) dictionary that spits back definitions as you type. Very nice.

Posted by richz at 4:49 PM

RIA's In Action

Anyone who follows this blog knows that I'm a big fan of Rich Internet Applications (RIA's). It's finally good to see some real-world implementations of the technology.

TJ Maxx's online store uses Macromedia's Flex technology to create a far more seamless and enjoyable shopping experience. It's great to see this stuff in action. Even in ecommerce - a relatively simple experience - it improves things. I'm looking forward to see it go on more involved applications.

InternetWeek has more on this.

Posted by richz at 12:32 PM

The Google Lovefest

Dave Winer put forth some thoughts about trusting Google on his blog. Another article by ZDNet includes some additional thoughts and some background.

It is absolutely fascinating to watch a company like Google craft an image that is founded upon goodwill and hugs and kisses. As far as I'm concerned, I just don't buy it. Here's why...

First off, Google is a company, not a charitable organization. While it would be great and wonderful if they could make tons of money and be altruistic, the real world is a bit of another story. I remember reading an interview with Craig from Craigslist where he talked about doing good and making money at the same time. I mean, if you can pull that off, great.

Google reminds me of the dot.com free-for-all that infected so many start-ups in the late 90's. The ingredients: a lot of cash, an idealistic view of the world, no accountability to investors (at least for a while). The result? "We're gonna change the world and make a difference, and oh yeh, eventually, we're going to make some money."

Now Google today is unique in some ways. It's already making money. As to whether the money it makes (and promises to make) justifies it's share price? I'll leave that for others to debate.

I think Google's strategy today is similar to the Internet start-ups of the 90's in that they're trying everything and are more interested in usage, adoption and brand-building over tangible returns.

Just yesterday, Google announced they're gonna swallow whole and make searchable the libraries of some major universities. No doubt a potentially great public service that we're all assuming is going to be free. Index and search your desktop? Free. News alerts as they happen in your email? Free. Search Google with your cell phone? Free. Email account with 1GB of space? Free.

Let's face it folks, this stuff ain't free because Google wants to turn the world into one big hippie festival. It's free because (a) Google makes money through a solid ad-based model and (b) they're using that money to build their brand in other areas that today don't make money at all.

I don't think a Master Plan is in place at Google HQ. I think there's a "We'll figure it out later" mindset. For now, just try to innovate and put out some neat, free stuff.

As to their altruism, I try to be optimistic when it comes to people, and cynical when it comes to businesses. They are a public, widely-held company and their master is not some idealistic charter. It is those shareholders.

A few months ago, Google tried to drop support for RSS on their Blogger application in an attempt to position ATOM, an alternative and lesser-known syndication standard. There was all sorts of wrangling, and eventually Blogger brought back support for RSS. That doesn't sound so altruistic to me.

In the end, I think it's really early in the Story of Google book. There's a ways to go before it becomes clear that Google can succeed and do no evil at the same time.

Posted by richz at 11:07 AM

Outsourcing Creativity

I was rummaging through the Web today looking for a good presentation tool and came upon these weird template sites that sell web site and Flash templates for ridiculously cheap prices. Here are a few:

I'd blow this stuff off if the templates were lousy, but they're not. In fact, some are very slick looking. This stuff isn't just web pages either. There are Flash intros and presentations, print stuff, etc.

So all this raises a few questions: Can you commoditize creativity? Or is it no longer creativity once you're selling it for $58 a pop. Beyond the basic philosophical questions, you have to wonder how globalization and cheap(er) labor is going to have an impact not only on obviously commoditize-able goods and services, but the less obviosu - like creative work, branding and the like.

I think we'll know the world has truly changed when it isn't only cheap goods that are coming out of the other side of the world but a credible brand that we'll value and trust.

Posted by richz at 11:29 AM

The Richer Web App: A Patch Job

Some of the bigger players are starting to use some pretty nifty tricks to make the web experience a lot richer for users. Sites like Gmail, My Yahoo, Amazon's A9 and others are relying on a mixture of Javascript/DHTML, XML over HTTP and the like.

It's great to see technology finally start to catch up with the train-wreck of an application platform that is the World Wide Web. Nevertheless, I don't think this is a phenomena that is going to catch for a couple of reasons. First, the mixture of talent necessary to make this stuff a reality is relatively hard to find (and most smaller companies/shops won't bother to spend it anyway). Secondly, I think the web browser's days as a application delivery mechanism are numbered anyway. It is admittedly years, not months, away. It's not 10 years though. It's looking like 2-4.

The biggest jolt will undoubtedly be the release of Microsoft's Longhorn operating system. Organizations should seriously think about their existing archtectures and how easily they'll plug into this new platform of application delivery and presentation.

Until then, we live with what we've got - both as users and developers.

Posted by richz at 4:34 PM

Onjava Article: Integrating Macromedia Flex With Java

Onjava has put out an informative article on integrating/migrating your existing web applications to Macromedia Flex. The article considers the architectural implications of moving to Rich Internet Applications and raises points that are salient beyond the particular platforms discussed.

It nicely outlines the shortcomings of the current web application experience and the benefits of RIA's. As an interaction designer, I am very interested with the powerful toolset RIA's provide. This is a worthy read even if you're not committed to the platforms discussed.

Posted by richz at 8:05 PM

Rich Internet Applications

As an interface/product designer, one trend I've been watching pretty closely is that of Rich Internet Applications (RIA's). Mind you, this genre of software is hardly a trend yet, but I think its one of the most exciting areas to watch closely as an interaction designer.

The web, and HTML specifically, have long been poor platforms for delivering rich, interactive applications to end-users. Today, a lot of progress has been made through the effective use of Javascript and other client-side technologies, but we're still a long ways off from delivering the richness of desktop software through the Internet.

As computers and the Internet became more powerful, and in turn, more pervasive, management of information has become nearly as important as creating it. In many ways, the information is the application. Amazon and Ebay are compelling not because of their functionality, but because of the information they harbor. The "application" used to access this information is kludgy and often makes for a poor user experience. Yet we tolerate it because of the vast amounts of information available to us.

Google is executing a strategy whereby, slowly but surely, they are blurring the line between this vast wealth of information and your desktop. Today, Google still lives inside your browser's box (though they've made some attempts to break out). For Google to truly realize its strategy, they're going to need to break out of the browser and deliver a far richer experience.

In my opinion, a marriage between the rich interactivity of desktop applications and the rich information of the web is inevitable. The same way we use HTML as a markup language to define content today, we'll use markup languages to define these transient applications tomorrow.

We're already seeing evidence of this. Mozilla breached the browser box with XUL. Macromedia is looking to leverage its near-ubiquitous Flash platform with Flash applications. One of the cornerstone's of Microsoft's future operating system (Longhorn) is XAML. The writing is on the wall: the browser's days as an application delivery mechanism are numbered.

As an interaction designer, this is very exciting stuff. My work rarely involves static/marketing sites but rather richer, more complex applications that I'm forced to "fit" into the web world. The browser's page paradigm is inherently flawed from an interface design perspective. A fluid user experience is nearly impossible.

While we've made the best of the circumstances handed to us, interaction design, in my opinion, has become too web-centric. Numerous books have been written about "web usability." Yes, a number of customs have arisen which serve our users well because they've become accustomed to them (e.g. blue underlined text are links), but I think its important for us - as designers - to continue to challenge the notion that the web is an adequate delivery mechanism for applications. I don't believe it is and I think there's going to be room for enormous design innovation once the tools are in our hands.

Posted by richz at 7:44 PM

The Google OS

Nick Bradbury chimes in on the future of the Internet, your desktop and the Google onslaught. An interesting comment thread ensued.

I like Google and I like what they stand for, but I can't help but think they have a "let's just do cool useful stuff and figure out how this all folds into a business model later." Unless of course, they're sitting on a Master Plan that they aren't sharing with the rest of the world (beyond ads on everything).

Then again, they're valued at $50B as of today. With that much cash, do you really need a plan?