Stuff from 2006
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 1, 2006)
Every new year I try to write down a few things I think might happen over the course of the year as an exercise . While I find that I am pretty good at seeing the broad patterns, I often get the timing wrong so this makes for good practice. This is the first year that I am putting the guesses down on the blog instead of just keeping them to myself though in the spirit of #6 below.
I've broken the six predictions down by category to make partial consumption of this post easier.
Product
1) Apple will finally clue in to the "All of the best electronics under 6lbs" mantra that should have been driving all product strategy for the company for years now. Everybody loves the iPod. Wall Street loves Apple because of the iPod. But I find Apple's real sub-6lb jewel to be their portable computers and not the iPod (even the Nano which I think was truly the product of the year for 2005). The laptop market is the hottest part of the PC market, and Apple laptops are just head and shoulders above the rest. They do power management better, they do wireless better, they do ergonomics better to say nothing about the far superior look-feel-flow of the product overall. I think that the impending switch to Intel is likely to let this little known secret about Apple's other "small" gadget clear and apparent to many dissatisfied VAIO and Lenovo users. If it is true that they have a low cost laptop on the way in January that runs on Intel, watch 2006 as the year Apple cleans up with laptops.
2) Google will make video work on the Internet. I first became aware of the fact that you could do video clips from pretty much any digital camera in 2000. iMovie and MovieMaker make it easy for anyone to edit a movie. And the vast number of Flickr copycats that focus on video clips (Revver, YouTube) show that people have an appetite for producing and consuming video on the Internet. Yet there are still tons of problems, chief among them: the lack of a JPEG equivalent for video (MPEG-1, MPEG-4, MJPEGA/B, DiVX, WMV, ??), the lack of adequate bandwidth for uploading/downloading, and most importantly the lack of a proper organizational tool for finding and subscribing to relevant sources of content.
I do not believe that the nascent startups taking the Flickr model to video are going to solve enough of the problems (just the codec stuff alone is more than any of them can handle) but I do think Google can; unlike Yahoo who is more polished and "Hollywood" in their video aspirations, Google is primed to take advantage of the user-generated content wave. They've got the infrastructure, DNA to organize it, and goodwill to create a JPEG of video for Internet distribution. Watch their big "Google Maps" moment in 2006-- I bet it's likely going to be around Voogle.
Business
3) Subscription models on the web are going to become more pervasive. The New York TImes launced NYtimes Select and it's working well for them. People dig Yahoo Music, and iTunes is not far behind with it's version of a subscription model (a mini prediction for 2006). But more importantly, people are paying for services like Flickr Pro, TypePad, and the raft of mini productivity applications like those from 37signals. All of these signs point to the possibility that the web may be emerging from the Ice Age of AdWords into a healthy ecosystem where different business models, and specifically the subscription business model, will work at all levels. After 2006 it will no longer be heresy for small companies to approach potential backers with references to business models that turn on subscription revenue in the same way that today it is no longer wacky to talk about Adwords-like business models for online ventures.
Technical
4) Firefox will be leveraged as a viable platform. The ActiveState guys tried it with Komodo and dev tools a few years ago but it was far too early, and rich IDEs were not a good place to start. But Firefox is here, it's credible, and it's extremely interesting to a whole bunch of alpha geeks that are experimenting with everything from GreaseMonkey scripts to full-on XPI extensions. What Andresen and gang promised with Netscape in 1997, the Mozilla guys may finally have with Firefox 1.5 (all while Microsoft appears asleep at the wheel). Think Flock but more appropriate and less "heavy". I don't know what the first breakout application on top of the Firefox platform will be (P2P file sharing, VOIP, publishing tool, collaborative editor?) but I think we'll see it in 2006.
5) Ruby on Rails loses momentum but dynamic languages thrive. I think RoR is going to get big and hairy this year and start to look a lot more like Zope but it won't matter all that much because it has already done it's job in memeland. Enterprise zealots have woken up (probably not for the first time) to the power of high-level, expressive, late-binding, OO languages like Ruby and Python and the 5-10x productivity boosts that come with using them for small to medium-sized teams. With Guido at Google I think 2006 will be a very good year for Python. And who knows, if Rite (Ruby 2.0) gets done, we may end the year with a number of really compelling dynamic languages (and libraries/frameworks) for stuff to get built with.
The Main Trend
6) The Year of the Casual Publisher. I'm borrowing from Ev's blog post about being a successful web company in the use of the word casual because it fits so well. Over the last two years, all of the people posting to a blog or building a website were painfully aware of the fact that they were in fact "publishing" to the world. There are definitely a large number of people who are interested in doing just this, but as with the proverbial iceberg, there are probably 100-1000x as many folks who in effect "publish" stuff online in a completely unwitting way. Today, this ranges all the way from the occasional forum poster or Amazon book reviewer to the person with 2-3 OFoto albums or 10-20 Flickr pictures. But over the course of this year, I think we will see new services emerge which encourage this type of casual publishing in the same unwitting manner but which centralize the "creative investment" users make in a way that allows folks who would never ever have considered themselves "bloggers" per se to develop a point of presence
online.
This last one will have the longest term consequences for how we work, socialize, and generally relate to each other on and off line. In much the same way that I would not hire an engineer today whose blog I couldn't read, whose open source contributions I couldn't see, or whose activity level in an online community I couldn't gauge, I think in 2-4 years people will just not know how to relate to new folks whose online presence they can not visit. From what I understand, this dynamic has already played out on University campuses across the country thanks to Facebook, so it is not too much navel gazing to see it coming for the rest of us.
I for one look forward to an exciting 2006 where I'll get a chance to write more on this coming trend. At the very least, as Alan Kay once supposedly said-- "the best way to predict the future is to invent it." We'll be taking our own crack at this in the coming months and I look forward to writing about it here.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 7, 2006)
This Wired article on the next generation of Lego Mindstorms (the NXT) is making the rounds as a testament to "embracing user innovation" or "long-tail" product development. I'd like to point out something that is less cool but more important: that this new toy could unleash an incredible amount of creativity in the kids who play with it.
Technically, I would have killed for something like this when I was nine years old-- in fact I would have killed for the first two Mindstorms, but with the NXT Lego seems to have addressed the most important short-coming of the other two kits-- the "time to pleasure." As an adult, I remember fiddling with the original Mindstorms for about 5 hours before managing to get a little car-with-feelers that would avoid driving off the table only to have a bug in its software cause it to back into a horrible death off the other end of the table.
Apparently this time around, an explicit design goal is "20 minutes to robot" which seems to me to be the right amount of time to get the right type of kid absolutely hooked on programming things that respond to the environment and which you can build with your own two hands.
Back in the late 70s, I got a toy from my dad for Christmas one year which set me on a course that ended up with me building software for a living-- a Milton Bradley "Big Track." It was a programmable tank which you could make go forward and backward, turn in-place, and flash a "laser light / noisemaker" on the tank's nose via a simple stored program you would enter into a keypad on the top of the tank. It took almost no time to grasp the concept (despite having to have the instructions translated for me into Spanish), made for hours and hours of fun, and most importantly, provided the first "platform" that I ever programmed for. It was an easy move from the Big Trak to the Timex Sinclair and then the the Apple ][. Each device had its own kind of magic-- for the Big Trak it was this crazy notion that there was something in the real world that you could make "do stuff" on command.
When I mentioned the new Mindstorms (and the possibility that it will launch the career of a whole slew of Roboticists) to a friend yesterday, he argued that in the age of the Xbox 360 with its ultra-realistic games, kids weren't interested in programming anymore. And to some degree this is true-- the days of typing pages worth of Applesoft Basic from the back of Byte magazine for a low-res game are certainly gone for good.
Before we lose all hope, let's go back to the Big Trak for a moment: years after it had failed to make the move with me to the US, I remember being introduced to Seymour Papert's Logo programming language in school. Like millions of other kids, I was encouraged to paint the screen with my turtle which was amusing for a little while. For me though, compared to the challenges of navigating the Big Trak between the chairs and the dining room table from 20 feet away, Logo felt constrained and limited-- perhaps in much the same way that the XBox-360 experience might feel to a kid capable of building a home version of RobotWars.
I can not wait for this toy to come out.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Jan. 22, 2006)
Bill Burnham, an ex-investment banker of Quatrone fame and one of the brightest business guys covering the technology space, has a very nice summary piece on the importance of syndication, microformats, and search for the development of online marketplaces. Nothing he states in the post is earth-shattering from the insight perspective but it is a nice synopsis and attempt to understand a scenario for how the semantic web could emerge.
Of particular significance to me is how he describes people behaving in order to create the necessary substrate for the evolution of the web. After introducing the central role that sites like MySpace and Facebook will play for users, he extrapolates:
Specifically, these sites (as well as sites such as MSN’s Spaces and Yahoo’s 360) are highly likely to evolve into an all encompassing digital identify for each user. People will use these sites not just as a way to socialize, but as a hub to manage their broader digital identify on the web. Part blog, part digital cubby hole, these sites will provide each human being with a digital homestead from which they can manage their entire digital identify on the web.
What your profile page becomes then is your point of presence online with the social interactions around that page serving to validate and qualify your online identity. I love this notion for two reasons.
First, it is true that people will increasingly need a point of presence online where they can root their digital selves both for online and offline purposes. As Burnham continues:
Today people with their own websites are regarded as either curious or vain, yet I feel quite confident saying that 10 years from now everyone in the developed world will have their own website and the few that don’t will likely be regarded as hopeless Luddites much like those without e-mails are today.
I remember back in the 1990s when I moved to California and set up a website with the express purpose of providing directions to my house. It was such a novelty at the time even that in Silicon Valley, most people would just print out the email and then wonder how they were supposed to use the long link at the bottom to get to me. Nowadays it is hard to get invited to a wedding that doesn't already have a "wedding site" with all the related hotel, travel, and gift registry info.
The point of presence is absolutely necessary as more person-to-person transactions get done online which is why sites like eBay and Flickr (the latter is also about transactions albeit non-commerce related) push the profile page front and center.
This brings me to my second reason for liking Burnham's characterization of the point of presence through sites like MySpace and Facebook-- unlike the normally heavyweight process of using something like Geocities, or Homestead, or even TypePad or Blogger to "set up" a point of presence, most community-oriented presence creation happens as a by-product of other activity in the environment. This is back to the notion of being a casual publisher-- you start interacting with a site in a very task-directed way and before long, you've grown a whole little structure that becomes "you" as represented in that environment (to me, Furl did this the best way before the del.icio.us hype explosion by making a blog-like thing out of your public archive by default). After you've built up the profile, this bit of real estate becomes really valuable because it would talk an incredible amount of work (more than most normal people are willing to put in) to recreate it.
Burnham goes on to talk about the importance of microformats so that people can publish all sorts of structured information to allow search engines to create distributed marketplaces for goods and services. While this makes for a great read, I am not sure I see how we get there anytime soon. The main reason has to do with what makes a marketplace succeed: its value is proportional to the number of participants. People continue to go to the specialized auction sites (like Basehit for baseball cards) despite eBay's attempts to own the category because they perceive a deeper marketplace at these specialized sites. Ebay and Craig's List will always have this over any emergent effort on the part of people who load the contents of their basement on their blogs, at least until the latter get to some sort of meaningful scale.
It's a classic chicken and egg. The microformats guys understand this which is why there are all of these Movable Type and Wordpress plug-ins that process content into structured chunks of XML during the blog publishing process. I haven't tried these but suspect that they are at best as kludgey as the publishing interfaces on the blog tools they support. More importantly, it's not clear to me that even if you take all of the Movable Type users, add them to the TypePad userbase, and then sprinkle in Wordpress and Blogger, you get enough of a population to make even one worthwhile marketplace (10-15M blogs at most?).
Instead it's going to take a big social site (a la MySpace) developing enough expressiveness in the profile-building part of the application (which by some people's standards MySpace does already) in an accessible enough way for the regular folks not normally interested in the overt popularity contest that is the mainline attraction on sites like MySpace and Facebook. In my mind this means the tool should be task-centric (like furl was) and personal in scope (so that its excrement is meaningful in creating a personal point of presence).
The key is that people are encouraged to create a permanent presence as a by-product of the thing that they really want to do, that this presence be something that can be useful in its own right once created, appealing enough to its owner, and customizable so that any lingering expressive desires can be met. Whoever gets this equation right first could both subsume all of the current standalone features of the blogging/personal publishing apps out there today, and really jumpstart the vision laid out by Burnham in his post.
I, for one, welcome the age of the unwitting bloggers.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 10, 2006)
Plain and simple, MarsEdit is a program I will never use again. The following is my review of MarsEdit (are you listening Google?):
For those that don't know, it's a client side blog authoring program for OSX that let's you get a rich text editor for your blog posts. Its got a nice UI that deceptively fools you into thinking you are working on a nice client side word processor. At the end of your writing, you get two choices: "Save as Draft," or "Send to Weblog."
The issue is that if you "Send to Weblog" and send to a Typo weblog, you will lose all of your work in an error message that says "Can't get Post... couldn't get Article Id=." The text does not post and at the same time the window with your hard work just goes away.
Now this is clearly an issue between MarsEdit and Typo (which is clearly just not all that mature in its own right) but the fact that MarsEdit doesn't save a local copy of the post before posting to any blog engine is just stupid and sloppy. Did I mention that this is not a free program but rather one in an extinct class of software known as "for-pay clients?"
I can't believe it. I haven't lost data like this since I was an undegrad and my roommate pulled the plug on my 512KB Mac while I was finishing a term paper. It's really an embarrassment and a huge pain to someone like me that doesn't make enough time to blog in the first place.
The two-person company behind MarsEdit, Ranchero software, makes the only really good RSS reader for the Mac, NetNewsWire. It's generally a great piece of software. But losing data while authoring is just... not right.
Note: I will retract all of this if anyone can explain how I can recover the last hour of my life.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 10, 2006)
I've written before about how product rules and how it's really nice to see bosses from big cos. who get it. Last week while flying back from California I happened to read a great cover article in Businessweek on Steve Jobs and his role in setting the elements for success at Apple and Pixar. Not surprisingly there are lessons in what he does that go far beyond the success of a big company:
Product Matters more than anything
"The great thing about Steve is that he knows that great business comes from great product," says Peter Schneider, the former chairman of Disney's studio. "First you have to get the product right, whether it's the iPod or an animated movie."
When I was VP of Engineering at a photobook manufacturer in New York, we used to make the Apple iPhoto books. Every release, we'd have a fire drill around the "Steve meeting" where he'd supposedly want to get into everything: software, templates, printing, binding, service time, etc. After a couple of releases I began to think that the Steve thing was a ploy used by the Apple product managers to get their vendors to perform.
Imagine my surprise then, at a conference a couple of years later when I ran into Steve and decided to test my theory. I told him we were really happy about the way our partnership with Apple was working and expected him to answer with a typical executive platitude. I was just floored when he responded with a set of issues that convinced me he knew more about our product than a lot of our own people. As I was reeling from that it also occurred to me that Apple was a $10 billion business and our piece was-- well a tiny piece of that-- and yet he knew all sorts of important details about it. Oh yeah, product rules.
People Matter
Ever since the days when he marveled at Stephen G. Wozniak's engineering skill while building the first Apple computer, Jobs believed that a small team of top talent can run circles around far larger but less talented groups. He spends a lot of energy working the phones, trying to recruit people he has heard are the best at a certain job.
So I don't have any first-hand accounts of the recruiting tactics that have been implemented at Apple, but my favorite Steve story where this is concerned is from when he tried to convince Linus Torvalds to abandon the Linux kernel for the Mach microkernel that NEXT had brought back to Apple in 1998 (apparently Linus has corroborated this in his book about the story of Linux). I do know from my various visits to the Apple campus that Apple seems to have invented pampering the key employees and betting on their own talent to out-execute much bigger teams.
Strategy Matters but you've got to believe
So what is Jobs' secret? There are many, but it starts with focus and a near-religious faith in his strategy. For years, Jobs plugged away at Apple with his more proprietary approach, not worrying much about Wall Street's complaints. In fact, one of his first moves was to take an ax to Apple's product line, lopping off dozens of products to focus on just four.
You've got to believe even if it means being unpopular or seeming crazy. He did it with the Apple ][, he did it with the NEXT cube-- he even did it with the Mac cube. It's taken a while for the integrated approach to start to work again (some would argue that even a broken clock is right twice a day) and it's nice to see Apple consistently stick to their guns while other computer company brethren (say Sum) flip-flop like a fish on a boat deck.
I'm not trying to turn this post into a Steve love-fest but instead want to make the point that it's a really nice thing to see a big company "executive" who can still act like an entrepreneur. Product, people, and faith in the strategy. This stuff is hard enough to keep straight in a small company-- I can't even begin to imagine how hard it must be in a big company.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 12, 2006)
Marc Hedlund over at O'Reilly Radar had an interesting piece about how smart kids, when left to their own devices in a new environment, will independently come up with a set of good development practices for Web 2.0. Adam Green followed up with a post about how some of these practices aren't so new after all since he was using them almost a decade ago and Andover.net (both pre and post the Slashdot acquisition).
While I think Adam is right that the best of the Web 1 companies were implementing some of these practices back in the 1990s, it is much more the norm now than it used to be. Part of this comes from the maturing of the problem domain-- we are all that much more educated now than we were back then about how to think through building web applications. But the biggest contributor to this brave new way of doing things in my mind is transparency of commodity infrastructure.
Let me use an example: back in 1998 if you were building a web-based startup, you were probably running on Solaris/SPARC and using an Oracle database. You were also likely to be running on some sort of a Java servlet engine (though there were exceptions, this was again the leading edge). This huge apparatus usually required at least 1 of the following: DBA, sys-admin, release manager, and build manager-- nevermind all of the consultants and vendor people that it took to solve problems that arose from trying to get everything working together.
Fast forward to 2005. Anyone still using Solaris/SPARC for web apps is either a moron or a depressed Sun shareholder. MySQL and Postgres are now considered "enterprise-grade," and if you should be so masochistic as to still want to do Java development on the app-tier, you've got Tomcat, Jetty, and even JBOSS available to you on your platform of choice.
Now here is the key: every piece of infrastructure is free, has a thriving online community that can help you with issues better than the vendors ever did, and perhaps most importantly, can scale down to run on almost any type of laptop.
This last piece is what I found was missing from Marc's post: the fact that in the Brave New World, every developer can get to have the entire stack on his own machine. The value of this should not be underestimated. It allows for features to be prototyped and tested much more quickly. If you are running across different platforms on the dev machines (Linux, OSX, and Windows) it enforces good discipline in the build system and in the modularity of the code. The platform differences will also surface bugs which would not immediately show up in a more homogenous environment (for example, concurrency is a great thing to suss out by deploying your app across platforms).
When we started building Tabblo, I insisted that we be able to build the full stack across different flavors of Linux (our deploy platform), OS X, and Windows. Given that we have a bunch of C code in the application, this proved particularly painful at the outset in the Makefiles and Linux/OSX differences. Moving it to Windows meant dealing with a bit of a Rube Goldberg that leveraged VMware for piece of the app and the portability of tools like MySQL and Python for another piece. Having taken that pain up front however, I do not think that there is anyone at work today who regrets the investment. We can all work completely independently even while completely offline despite the fact that our deploy infrastructure requires a dozen machines running together in a data center.
This was just not possible last decade. We owe it to the transparency of the open source infrastructure that we can do this now across a whole set of components that used to be the domain of experts and alchemists. Anyone who doesn't take advantage of it now is doomed to slow release cycles, the need for a full QA team on hand, and a staff-imposed level of overhead that is tough to build a business out from under.
What a great Brave New World.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 21, 2006)
Adam, who is out at Mashup Camp, has been trying to get me to think about mashups for a while now. I think more than anything it's been the fact that he was willing to get into a tin can and fly 3,000 miles to an ad-hoc "camp" that has me finally getting over my "yeah but we did this 10 years ago with Perl scripts" bigotry and really trying to suss this out.
Before I get to where mashups click for me though, I should mention that it's nice to see that even while inhaling that west coast vibe, Adam has stopped to think about the fact that with the exception of Amazon, source component providers like Google, Ebay, and Craig's List don't have a real clear economic incentive to continue providing their data and compute cycles for free beyond a certain yet-to-be-determined point. This is a very valid and important observation which Peter Rip picks up in a nice post on the challenges associated with building a mashup-based business.
Now one might argue that allowing for core functionality to be exported serves a real long tail purpose. People who mix up Google Maps with anything else are perhaps the best example of this-- after all, while one could argue that the Google Maps team may have seen apps like Housing Maps coming, there is certainly no way they saw the Jacktracker (an intensely enjoyable site for 24 fans). I think the long tail argument is good (as is Eric von Hippel's related user-led innovation argument) but I think that mashups provide these big source service providers an even bigger benefit: the ability to attract an audience for their core functionality that is way out of the swath inhabited by their average user: the geeks.
Geeks are amongst the more discerning and most marketing-proof people you can find out on the web today. They're also among the most passionate, and with the emergence of the blogosphere, they are definitely the most vocal. Businesses have been built on the hypothesis that understanding geeks really matters. And yet, trying to build an application that has high geek appeal and that also serves a large market of "regular" users can be a bad idea for one of two reasons: either the application already exists and has won their hearts and minds (think photos and Flickr, bookmarks and del.icio.us) or it is just too far out there to have any sort of "regular" person appeal.
Exposing core functionality in the form of an API that facilitates mashups cuts this Gordian Knot in a productive way. It makes a potential service provider focus on what's really important and differentiable with an influential and discerning crowd. And at the same time, it lets the product team focus a more tightly integrated web application on the core constituency.
And so, here's what's been most useful to me about trying to get my head around the impact of mashups: thinking through the hypothetical of when geeks might want to mash up parts of what we're working on. It encourages clarity (in terms of what it is that is unique) and enforces modularity (so that we can easily export this core functionality without going crazy). And most importantly, it gives us hope of finding a nice way to serve two equally important (but very different in terms of needs) audiences.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (Feb. 19, 2006)
As we struggle to get Tabblo into beta, Ned sent me a very relevant piece from Brad Horowitz-- "Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers"-- on social sites, participation, and the industry's move to embracing the unwitting blogger.
Horowitz starts the post with this chart to show that in fact very people people have to be "active" in order for a community site to be of significant value. His argument is that this 1-10x-100x ratio holds across different sites and he uses both Yahoo Groups (a great aggregation of many communities of all types and sizes) and Wikipedia as examples of the ratio holding. He argues that this winnowing we see as someone moves from lurker to creator actually helps to reduce noise in the community which I don't agree with (who hasn't been part of a group where the most vocal can end up being the most disruptive?) but then also argues that he is all for removing barriers that preclude more active participation.
The first example he gives is one where the production experience is so lightweight (posting individual pictures to flickr) that it's a very easy and seamless shift from consuming to producing. This is interesting but I'd argue that for many worthwhile activities that live naturally in a social software site, the production experience shouldn't (or couldn't) be sufficiently simplified to make the transition so easy (researching a wikipedia topic, remixing podcasts, contributing code to an open source project, etc.) and what becomes really interesting to me are attempts to break the 1-10-100 ratio in those cases, especially around the 1-10 lurker-> synthesizer transition where I think there is so much locked up communal value.
Brad then makes the case for properly instrumenting a social site such that it encourages "implict creation" and creates "public artifacts" as a byproducts of what the users are doing in the system. This is similar to Dan Bricklin's old Cornucopia of the Commons argument or Tim O'Reilly's Architecture of Participation and is dead on as a starting point for trying to harness the potential creative investment of all of those community lurkers.
I prefer using "unwitting blogger" because there is a bumbling and serendipitous tone to unwitting that I think fits better with how most people who engage with a site suddenly discover that they have undergone a state change up the pyramid. It's almost never a conscious decision on the part of the user but after it's done, you'll find it very hard to put that particular genie back in the bottle.
Unfortunately, this dynamic seems like a really hard thing to get right. It takes a really rare mix of tool-building, community management, and perhaps most importantly (and most obviously missing from most of today's social sites), a really deep understanding of how people learn and what kind of rewards are necessary to get them to invest one more incremental unit of effort in working their way up the pyramid. As we move from easy production experiences to richer ones where more creativity is encouraged, finding the right mix is the challenge that faces us all.
[ As an aside, it is so nice to see a bigwig from the largest social software experimenter out there blogging about this stuff openly. It speaks volumes to how good it is to be working in the consumer web today, especially when you compare it to say, another "consumer" industry: consumer electronics where I had an opportunity to play five years ago. No matter how hard I try, I just can't imagine one of the big cheeses at Philips posting on whether "this iPod thing is really gonna go anywhere." ]
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 11, 2006)
Just came back from Etech where I failed to have a single "wow" moment. The closest I think I came was during the demo of the multi-touch interface the first day of the show. Overall, I left San Diego feeling like something was lacking.
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty to like about Etech as a venue. I got to catch up with Doc (more on him later) which is always great fun. I had lunch with Dave Sifry, who I'd only known through the blogosphere, and found him to be quite an inspirational guy (and like Doc a very decent closet shutterbug). I attended a scaling webapps fast-and-cheap tutorial put together by Cal Henderson from flickr which was great geek porn and perhaps the most honest, well thought-out presentation on the architecture of a large website that I have ever attended. And, of course, Joel is always entertaining enough to be worth paying attention to even if he's only half-right most of the time.
As I thought about why I found the contents of the conference somewhat lacking, it occurred to me that the blogosphere may be in fact responsible for the lack of "wow" moments. After all, most of the presenters at the conference are prolific bloggers, so most of the big ideas get out well ahead of their talks and company announcements. Back in the late 1990s at a conference like PC Forum, you were hearing these things for the first time (perhaps this is what is driving the interest behind the un-conferences which seem to place all of the emphasis on the attendees).
But upon further reflection it struck me that there was something else missing. The big theme of the conference was supposed to be "The Attention Economy" and the presentations, company pitches, etc. were cast in that mold. And yet, despite the fact that I am an avid listener of the Gillmor Gang, I now have no idea what the attention economy is all about. For a while, I thought I did: I thought the attention economy was all about the stream of metadata that came from using web applications. From clickstreams to search terms, we spend virtually all of our time online generating this metadata, and it often seems frustrating that it gets trapped at whatever property we happen to create it on.
But it turns out that the attention economy is about more than this metadata. It's also about money, and time, and intelligence augmentation, and gestures. It's about Web 2.0 APIs, and mash-ups. It's about event calendars that you use to schedule events you wish could take place. It's about distributed identity management. And most of all, it seems to be a suspension of disbelief around the need for business models that deviate from the AdWords template.
On the plane back from San Diego I was thinking about how this was what really bothered me about the conference, the fact that attention seemed like a funky euphemism for eyeballs instead of a synonym for metadata when to my great delight I ran into this piece that Doc posted on the need for an Intention Economy instead of an Attention one. He just nails it, most of all because he puts the user at the center of the value proposition. I think that this is what was missing from most of the Etech company presentations-- good old product management that focuses on what the user gets out of all of this (I saw in this post a funny term for it "Etech gets Ninged").
An example: Adam has been trying to work on a better type of aggregator. He is starting from a clear customer pain and trying to define a product around it. It's really as much about attention as anything else from the conference but because he's started from the customer pain, it feels a lot more concrete and tangible.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 14, 2006)
Lots of people have been going ga-ga over the last few days about "Zooomr," a Flickr copy that supposedly adds a couple of more features and leaves Flickr "in need of catching up" according to Mike Arrington.
I don't even want to go into the comparison between an industrial strength app capable of handling 3 million users and 100 million photos, and a hack done by a single person (if you have any doubt look for a great presentation on how Flickr scales at Cal's site, or just try Zooomer now that TechCrunch and others have sent 30-50K visitors over there). What I will focus on is David Berlind's piece: "'Trapped data' raises switching barrier to newer, sometimes better services." In it he argues that as we use online services that require our data, we have to watch the hidden lock-in when a new, "better" service comes around the corner.
Now, there are a few things that you can criticize Flickr for. But the roach motel effect is not one of them. In fact, I would argue that of all of the data-centric sites out there, Flickr is the absolute best at having a great, great, open data policy. When we started building Tabblo, we spent 6 weeks using Flickr as our backend and outside of some sluggish API calls, it was just amazing to see how much richness Flickr provided in its API, and how well thought-out it was.
But it doesn't stop there. Months later, when we sat down to integrate Flickr into Tabblo, we were again surprised at how rich the facilities are for integrating metadata from Flickr (tags, contacts, privacy settings). We were also floored by how easy the Flickr guys make it, and quite frankly, because of this, anyone launching a photo-related site today that doesn't provide Flickr integration off the bat can't be such a prodigy.
Berlind is right to point out that Webshots has a piss-poor policy for exporting data (as in, you can't) but this is also true of Shutterfly, OFoto, and Snapfish. The fact is that too many of these Generation-1 photo sites still believe that holding the high-res images hostage will drive more business through the print engines. Given how painful it is to upload high-res assets through today's asymmetrical broadband pipes, this is a really bad thing to do to your users.
Recently at a conference, I asked an employee from one of these large photo sites why they didn't just clone some part of the Flickr API as a goodwill gesture and use it to position against their other Gen-1 competitors. She told me that "Emily from Des Moines doesn't care about APIs, or high-res images." And that may in fact be true of Emily, but it certainly isn't the case with all of those new services (like us) that think they can fill some needs not currently being addressed.
I'm all for picking on Webshots, and Ofoto on their lack of openness. But Flickr? Those guys should be given a medal where open data (and metadata) policies are concerned.
Tags:
digerati
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (March 19, 2006)
So Paul Graham finally got himself a blog which is a Very Good Thing (though he seems to be using a half-finished product to write it so its RSS feed is annoyingly borked).
Graham is a good essayist; in fact you could even call him a geek's Mark Twain. On his site he has a whole bunch of essays that range from just ok to absolutely great. The best ones are funny, insightful, and well written. Even the bad ones have a certain charm to them that makes them worth reading. What is clear from all of them though is that he puts in a good amount of time thinking, writing, and revising what he writes. Now that he has a blog, it is going to be interesting to see how the quality of the posts compares to the essays.
I can't decide if what I'd rather have from him is cleverness or perspective. His essays are clever, made even more so by the attention that he constantly pays to the power of analogy (i.e. "The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed"), and I think that these clever twists are hard to just whip out while blogging– not because you can't come up with them but because you don't spend the time editing the bad ones out so that the good ones shine through.
At the same time, if Graham does embrace blogging seriously, it will be good to see his perspective applied to some of the memes that make their way across the blogosphere. Given how much time he spends crafting his essays, it is just impossible for him to take part in any of the distributed conversations that you can see at places like Memeonrandum.
To date everyone seems obsessed with comparing newspapers and blogs which I guess implies that the analog of the blog post is the newspaper article. To me, this comparison is not all that interesting though given how different the means of production are for both. The more interesting question as the blogosphere grows to consume more and more of the time that people used to spend producing essays, do the gains outweigh the losses?
A thought experiment: let's say Paul only has 25 hours/week to dedicate to the general "bucket" of writing. Assuming you are a Graham fan, would you prefer that he craft essays to be delivered one every two months or that he dive right in to the topic of the day with his own unique point of view? I'm not sure which I'd choose but I think following his blog for a few weeks will tell us a bit about the blog post as a format particularly when compared to its distant cousin the essay.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 8, 2006)
As the first high-profile rich browser app, Google Maps unleashed an explosion of creativity in pushing the web-browser-as-application-runtime. It gave birth to the term AJAX, put drag-and-drop on the list of approved cross-browser features, and seemed to lift the ban on imaginative ways to use Javascript and DOM manipulation to give users a much richer experience.
Proponents of the browser-as-platform have been around since Andresen's famous snub at Microsoft ten years ago ("Windows is gonna be reduced to a buggy bag of device drivers"), but in recently years people have noticed that some apps (i.e., webmail) are making a real run at replacing their desktop cousins.
But what if instead of working on a task-by-task basis, someone came out with a full-blown application runtime for the browser? I'm not sure I buy it, but I was reminded of it yesterday when I saw this Mac OS 7 emulation in the browser. Now it turns out that this is actually very painstakingly constructed Flash movie with a bunch of interactive dead-ends, but it nonetheless got my wheels spinning on what would be required to go further and provide a full OS environment in the frame of the web browser. Are there ways in which this would be more useful than the current stand-alone "rich" browser-based apps, i.e. Gmail, or Writely?
From an implementation point-of-view, I think that the pseudo OS in browser is finally really possible now. In the office, everyone is really tired of my constant touting of the recently open sourced Yahoo User Interface Library which I find to be as well thought-out and documented as any rich GUI library that I've seen. It would not take too much work to wrap something like Amazon's Simple Storage Service, and a few web service APIs for richer interop with "application islands" out there on the Internet (EBay, Google Maps, etc.), and you've got a really rich runtime at your hands.
This morning I saw a glimmer of this in the Y-Combinator backed YouOS. They've got an application installer, cross-application interop, an API for people looking to write new applications for YouOS, and even a set of primitive data structures that can support concurrent network access and be persisted on the server. I think these guys deserve a lot of credit for trying this, and the remarkable thing is that it works almost as well as an early Linux X-Windows window manager.
However, it's just a glimmer because no matter how far the richness of the browser has come, my rich client has gone further. Right now OS X 10.4 on Intel is finally snappy enough to be a first class GUI with a rich UNIX core and there ain't no web-based OS that can come close to that level of productivity.
But there may be a compromise. Apple (to continue the example) provides a hosted-data service called Dot-Mac which supports webmail, calendar, and basic web publishing as well as a very limited backup service for data and metadata. Over the years the web side of Dot-Mac has gotten richer and richer in terms of the functionality exposed. Why couldn't Apple go the whole way and create an AJAX version of their Display PDF engine and Cocoa framework, sync the list of your installed applications, and allow you to run an entire Desktop in the web browser? They've already got key data and metadata stored on the server, and they own the real OS APis that everyone is already programming to. For sure the web experience would be slower and crummier, but for occasional use it would be just fine.
To repeat it for the third time, I am not sure that this whole OS-in-the-web-browser is a better model than finely tuned webapps that use their own native medium better- in fact, if I had to bet on it coming from a startup like YouOS, I'd bet against it. But I do think that if someone could pull off a valuable use-case, it would have to be one of the rich client platform vendors (Microsoft or Apple). Dashboard Widgets was an interesting step in that direction from the rich client out (as was Konfabulator), but the big guys could do much more.
[ As an aside, it is too bad that the guy with enough skill, experience, and muscle to pull it off seems now to be distracted by the kind of cute web hack that should be left to the rest of us not in control of a major platform. ]
As I often think when I finish one of these posts, it's nice to see that we live in interesting times.
Tags:
hackers
0
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (April 12, 2006)
I was very happy to see Martin Fowler rip XSLT a new one when talking about his use of it on his site not because it sucks but because XSLT was "the hot thing" for developers five years ago and has now become one of my favorite weed-out topics when interviewing new candidates. We usually get around to talking about supporting output for the web and I ask the age-old: how do you separate content from styling? And about 25% of candidates jump right into the XSLT hot water. Now of those, there are some who have just used it at work and when pushed will quickly get to the pain-in-the-ass that it is for doing anything more than simple transforms (and the overkill that it is for even those). And then there are the staunch defenders who are willing to go down in angle-bracket flames arguing for the "formality" and "performance" of XSL over simpler more elegant solutions.
I don't want to just knock XSLT given that I have never actually used it for any serious work (though I only know one good hacker who still uses it on his blog, and it's only because he's too lazy to dump it). Instead, I want to make a bigger point about taste and hackers, and I want to do it for self-serving reasons. If you're reading this because you're coming to a job interview at Tabblo, and you decided to see what Tabblo was about (and who the hell I was), you're probably inbound from Google. So let me help the self-selection process here along: when you show up, please do not check your taste at the door. We love people with clear and defined tastes, and believe that to work in the consumer internet you must have a sense of taste whether you're a QA guy, an infrastructure C hacker, or the person in charge of feeding Eddie.
A word for the hackers: fancy-pants computer science programs from places like my alma mater try to teach students that as a "computer scientist" you are supposed to be agnostic to your tools, and especially to the computer language du jour (LISP being the Great Exception). Somehow it gets ingrained in you that saying "oh it doesn't matter to me what language we use" makes you seem smarter. Not true. At worst it makes you like those other college intellectuals that talk fast, wear itchy-looking polyester pants two sizes too tight, and chain-smoke just to seem smarter, and at best you look like a hired gun.
So be ready to talk about your favorite languages, libraries, frameworks, typefaces, software apps, websites, and just about any other thing that helps us figure out who you are. And be ready to make your case. Because we do it all day every day with each other (it's a miracle we get anything else done). And remember, I'm still looking for that genius hacker who just loves XSLT and is ready to passionately argue for why it is the cat's meow.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Aug. 6, 2006)
While rich feedreaders like NetNewswire (and their fast-following web-based cousins like Bloglines and Google Reader) made reading lots of blogs possible, it still amazes me that no one has been able to make any kind of significant improvement in the discoverability of cool new content. To this day, with one notable exception (more on that below), the best way to find new blogs still remains the blogroll and direct link from respected source. From sites crafted around aggregating attention metadata (like Rojo) to user-generated directories, I've tried at least one of everything and left it for my homegrown list of 200-odd feeds after just days of experimentation.
I was excited for the big Technorati redesign mainly because so many bloggers swear by it, but after just a few days of looking at this page, I find myself dizzy and confused about which of these highlighted (and often duplicated) posts, I might want to click on to follow a particular thread in the blogosphere.
This weekend I came across Brad Feld and Fred Wilson's (two ex-abuzz investors) excited posts about FeedBurner's new content and advertising networks which are really aggregated feeds along topics with a "manager" deciding who is in and who is out (for example, they are both part of the VC network). I love Feedburner as a company, and am always surprised to see it left out of most industry conference discussions about "Web 2.0," particularly because of how much the company/concept/product seems to exemplify so many of the things that are exciting about Web 2.0, but I'm not sure I buy that Feedburner has got a winner in remixing feeds topically like this. Though they do build a "homepage" that shows some basic stats around who is in a network and what the posts are, you have only to look at the community section of any open source project page that aggregates bloggers (i.e., Rails bloggers or Django bloggers) to see what a mess this can quickly become without the careful attention of an editor. Basically, feed remixing is cool, but we need much finer and richer editorial control (sometimes at the sub-post level) if we're going to get a tool useful enough to keep using beyond the initial gee-wiz phase.
Now there is one tool which has become a part of my daily information consumption diet: Tech Memeorandum or Techmeme as it has now been rebranded. Essentially, Techmeme tries to be a front page for blogosphere using nothing but its algorithm for editorial control (think what Google News should be to news but for blogs). Techmeme is not without its flaws– the greatest one being that a lot of the most interesting parts of the discussion as often left out of the Techmeme rollup and has to be ferreted out of the blog posts that are mentioned, but overall I have been amazed at how often I've come back to Techmeme to try to get a "snapshot" view of what is going on, especially when I find myself backed up and looking at 8,000 unread posts in NetNewswire.
Can it be that this problem of blog discoverability is actually hard to crack? I don't believe it– but what I do think is that it is very hard to monetize, and as such, some of the people I think would be most likely to crack it aren't even thinking about it. Google AdWords are not enough, and it is not clear that a really amped up Techmeme can survive as a destination property on its own. In fact, the closest model I can think would work for something like this would be the Topix model where the core technology development is subsidized/owned by big media companies that are hoping to make it part of their overall offering.
In the meanwhile, I will keep drowning in posts while I try to poke my head about water for long enough to find the cool new stuff...
Tags:
buddies
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (July 30, 2006)
This was an interesting find on John Battelle's blog about the different amounts spent on R&D by companies like Microsoft, IBM, Google, and Apple. It's not the first time I've seen something like this where companies that get the lion's share of regular people's oohs and ahhs spend disproportionately little on R&D. In fact I remember when Steve came back to Apple and started hacking costs, one of the first things that went were a lot of these R&D project which caused some Wall Street Journal reporter to write a piece about how this was going to be short-term smart/ long-term stupid. Mind you this was before Apple did Wi-Fi, the iPod, the iTMS, video editing for everyone, or just about any of the incredible things they've done since then.
John argues that the data, being from Microsoft, is self-serving and under-reports Google's spend, but I think that there is something else going on here.Spending cash on R&D when there are no huge leaps to be made but instead incremental hops mostly punctuated by the commercialization of technology seems to be sort of a waste, and worse still, a distraction. The latter comes from the fact that the product groups at these big behemoths (MSFT, IBM) seem to be relieved of the responsibility of truly innovating because someone from the "R&D department" is supposed to be doing it. Maybe I am limited in my understanding of how much future-tense R&D shops can deliver, but when the engineering teams can come up with clever hacks like these, and when it's not clear what the last major R&D innovation Microsoft or IBM commercialized successfully, something certainly seems broken.
Then again, I've also just seen this new Photosynth project from Microsoft that seems really interesting and worth exploring further. That said, there is always an example afoot of how these new-fangled technologies can go awry as did the speech recognition in Vista just last week.
Tags:
buddies
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 12 months ago (July 29, 2006)
I'd be worried if I had any Microsoft stock, and not because Bill G. is retiring, but because the visionary he's left in charge has got this to say about the future strategy of the company.
Now, you know it's got to be a bad strategy for one reason: this speech could have been given 5 years ago (it probably was, at Groove) and it would still have been as platitude-filled and un-actionable back then as it is today. Sure, we're going to connect all devices together with the Internet, and sure we're going to move all of our data to services that synchronize it, back it up, and move it intelligently on our behalf. And to boot, we're going to "optimize" our lives by harnessing the collective intelligence of our group behavior. Rinse, repeat, rinse repeat.
I don't want to pick on one of Boston's own renown tech-heads because everyone I know in common with him claims that he is both really nice and really sharp, and because he's been building software for longer than I've been alive, but I am floored that we can't get something a little more original out of the world's biggest software company, especially one with such an incredible asset.
If I were Ozzie I would have tried to lay out a strategy that leverages the still-dominant PC client footprint in two ways: 1. to build the best peer-2-peer platform for compute intensive apps out there (including gaming, telepresence, group authoring, etc.), something he knows a lot about, and 2. to build the best web-authoring client tool out there (to replace Office) that uses all of the existing back-end services that have in effect already won, as its native document format. Microsoft can still make great client apps, especially now that all of the rest of the world of great client talent has moved on to AJAXy things, and it strikes me that if they don't wake up and recognize this, Adobe is going to eat their lunch. Finally, if I had any more cycles were I Microsoft after chasing #1 and #2, I would focus on making the mobile Windows OS actually usable, or at least competitive with the totally abandoned Palm OS in the Treos that still walks circles around it, but only because the phone is probably the thing that will most quickly erode the PC as the dominant client.
It is true that given how things are going now, the long term doesn't look good for client software, but many things may change. And if they do, it would be a shame to see Microsoft ill-prepared and spread too thin to take advantage of it.
Tags:
buddies
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Posted by Antonio
2 years ago (July 25, 2006)
Having just canceled my trip to OSCON due to work stuff, my consolation prize last night was getting to go to Boston Web Inno 7, a local networking event organized in the spirit of Silicon Valley gatherings for local folks working on cool new web technologies to present to the audience. There were three companies presenting (Ned covers it here so I don't have to). Here I'll just stick to two observations, both of which make me feel like we're about to start partying like it's 1998 again.
The first observation is a small one: it appears that the Web 2.0 design theme is here to stay. Pastels, big sans-serif fonts, and big chunky divs rounded at one edge were used, over-used, and then used some more across all three of the sites. Ned also commented that the sites were all very polished design-wise and they were, but I can't help but feel like we're all going to wake up real soon and have that acid-washed jeans moment where we realize that display-size headers in lime green weren't really all that cool and that not all top-nav has to be done as Amazon tabs.
The second observation was actually made by John (another one of the Tabbloites who was there): we seem to be in a recapitulation phase where all of the dot-com boom ideas are being recast in pastels and launched in the context of "social networks." I worry about this one for real because for a lot of these ideas, there are structural things that don't seem to have changed about behavior, complexity, and general usefulness.
One of the guys was asked this very question and his response was basically "there are more people online now" but this seems to me to be a weak rationalization at best. New opportunities are created by changes in technology or markets that are dramatic enough for new entrants to come in with a completely new approach and in the case of a lot of the new ventures today, people forget a very important fact: most of the things that didn't work due to scale in 1998 are unlikely to work again now, but if they do, any newcomer is going to have to fight a series of entrenched incumbents that simply didn't exist back during the first round.
If it were me, I would spend some time looking for true structural changes that create opportunity spaces where the current web incumbents can't go and focus there first. In a future post I may try to write about the Tabblo funding story, and about how we went through this very process.
In the meanwhile, I'd go read up on this.
Tags:
embahs
0
Comments
Posted by Antonio
2 years ago (July 16, 2006)
It's pretty clear now that looking for product information on the web is a Killer App that has no equal with general users (except for possibly email). Which is why I am astounded that we still don't have the equivalent of a Froogle for product reviews. Sure, there was Epinions back in the day and there are also a number of new Web 2.0 comparison shopping sites that claim they are going to extend their reach into reviews, but none of these quite work because they don't live inside of my search engine.
I just finished writing up a review of a pair of Mion Current outdoor sandals that I got (despite not being able to turn up any reviews on them in Google), and I'm fairly sure that because I wanted to include pictures and therefore used Tabblo, I'm not going to see this review popping to the top of any search engine anytime soon.
Here is all that I would like:
Google, instead of doing all of these Microsoft office-killing apps (some of which I like), create a separate entry point into "reviews" and give me a search engine for reviews. Crawl Amazon, crawl the blogs, crawl anything you want- hell you are already doing that- but just make sure to present me with an interface that lets me sort through reviews really quickly, to rate them, and if you're feeling Web 2.0 to add to them if the feeling moves me.
There is hardly a day that goes by that I don't find myself typing "XXX review" only to have to sort out a bunch of junk I don't care about from the general Google search. Solving this problem can't be any harder than Google News which seems to be working pretty well these days.
And no, I don't want to use some standalone site- frankly I don't think any startup would be able to get enough scale (hype around "vertical search engines" notwithstanding) to cover anything and everything. And I certainly don't want to have to go run multiple searches: i.e., Google, Amazon, Technorati, just to get decent coverage. I just want the most comprehensive list of reviews you can give me.
C'mon, Google, how cool would "Google Reviews" be? And if not you, then maybe Yahoo, the "social search" company can jump on this one.
Tags:
buddies
0
Comments
Posted by Antonio
2 years ago (July 15, 2006)
Chris Mesinna (who I don't know but who I gather spent some time at social browser company Flock) had a thought-provoking piece on content-creation tools for the web and the future of rich browsers. I suspect Flock folks are none too pleased that he disses their efforts but I was much more interested in his conclusion that there might really be a future in innovative rich Internet applications built with Webkit which is Apple's equivalent of Microsoft's 8 year-old embedable IE browser control. Using it, a developer can write a rich client application that functions largely like a web-browser but with hooks into the OS for key actions that browsers have traditionally sucked at.
I am all for making better tools for content creators, but this seems like a risky approach to take mostly because of the fact that I don't think it's a tenable strategy to expect a regular user to take an 18.2MB download of a custom web-browser in this day and age (I am in fact trying to write this blog post on the OSX machine in the time that it takes me to download Flock and might just make it). Plus even if the Flocks of the world were to get past the download hurdle, people just don't want more clients– if RSS readers couldn't make it as standalone applications in large numbers given how much value they add over all of the web-based experiences I have seen for consuming RSS, I seriously doubt that custom browsers will.
However 10 years into this web thing, it's not too much to ask that the existing browser vendors address a couple of critical things, namely better upload, rich text editing, and some sort of canvas for drawing (that actually works). That would be a great start, and notice that it doesn't include fancy things like offline use or drag-and-drop across applications. Given their client-side thick-headedness I very much doubt that Microsoft will address this, but I have great hopes that at least some of these issues will be tackled by the forthcoming Firefox 2.0 release.
And when that happens, if Apple has any sense whatsoever, they'll get WebKit in shape to support these things as well. In a future post I am going to write about all of the "dirty little Safari secrets" that we've learned about while developing Tabblo (there really are a couple of gems especially around performance that no one seems either aware of or willing to blog about). And if they Apple doesn't get its act together, well then we'll just continue to be glad to see all of those Mac users at conferences running the Fox on OSX despite its heinous widgets and it's fat footprint.
In the meanwhile, I'm not ready to give up on how far we've come in just about a year's time with interactivity in the browser and the kludge of technologies now known as AJAX. The Javascript libraries are getting quite good (you might even call them platformy) and there are a whole bunch of people coming at the problem from interactive design, engineering, QA, and a whole host of other perspectives which really do help to make a platform.
[As an aside, custom browsers as development tools are a great thing. I've used this trick in the past, and from Greasemonkey fittingly enough, the new Webkit Javascript debugger, there is a whole ton of sense in being able to instrument the browser when you're trying to make it to fancy tricks for users.]
Tags:
hackers
0
Comments
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (April 26, 2006)
The Economist (my absolute favorite) has a wonderful special report this week on "New Media" by Andreas Kluth that is absolutely worth its weight in dead trees. It is thorough, substantive, and manages to hit all the high notes while getting quotes and insight from all of the key players driving the transition into the era of Personal Media (Kluth calls it "personal or participatory media," however I like the word personal better because it has the same ring as Personal Computer).
The intro piece(if you read only one piece, read this one) starts with the now-venerable debate on quality versus quantity in content brought on by the new media explosion, framed between quotes from Barry Diller and my friend Jerry Michalski (who follows up on why he's not getting invited to Barry's next Christmas party) with a great blog post (and getting Jerry to put fingers to keyboard on his blog is about as hard as mating a flamingo with a plunger so kudos to the report for that as well). The quality-versus-quantity argument is almost not worth having at this point; we're all aware that on average an amateur is going to produce a less "finished" product (just compare this post to the depth and insight of the aforementioned survey). Like Jerry says in his follow up post, the wonderful thing about the new media explosion is just how much content is out there for us to consume.
Example: at the office everyone is obsessed with Lost which means that, despite the fact that it's gone steadily downhill during the second season, we all have to watch it. This week I found it especially funny that while putting up with a bad excuse for a new episode (hello, recap episodes went out with MacGuyver treading water for 60 minutes 20 years ago), I was able to surf from an email to YouTube and see a much more entertaining bit of video content. Now this 24 spoof is definitely much lower quality in terms of production value (it's not even that good), and it qualifies as what Steven Johnson calls parasitic content, but since I am a huge fan of 24 anyone who can pull off such a good Jack Bauer impersonation will get my attention.
The final thing I will say about the Economist report was how great it was to have David Weinberger (another Boston local) quoted as saying this new media thing was more of a social phenomenon than a publishing one. So true, and yet so often missed in all of the "blogs will take down the New York Times" articles that usually appear on paper.
It is about small audiences that find the content you produce as new media maker incredibly relevant- much more so than rehashed Lost episodes. And even if it takes 10 years to find the business models (assuming we even need to) it's great to be around during a time of so much choice is how we spend our time communicating, consuming, and even making, new media.
Tags:
buddies
0
Comments
Posted by Antonio
2 years ago (July 11, 2006)
I really dig digg. I remember being at our VC's offices the day that the deal came in and thinking only one thing: wow this is going to be the end of Slashdot. But Seth Godin has recently written a brief but interesting piece about the challenges facing everyone's new media darling these days. In short, he argues that Digg is about the diggers and not so much about the larger community of readers that Kevin & co. like to talk about when the cite 900K uniques per day.
The problem with the diggers according to Seth? They are a "legion," an elite, and as such you have to treat them with kid gloves and manage them like talent. In my opinion, the real problem is that Digg as a site is built around too few publishers doing too little work to build the "media experience." To take an extreme on the other end, compare the diggers to your average World of Warcraft player and think for a moment: who is more likely to move elsewhere in the event that the guy running the hosting platform pulls a fast one? If I'm a digger, all I've invested in learning is the old thumbs-up/thumbs-down deal. How hard can this be to port to Reddit? If I'm a WoW player though, I know about my guild, I know about the 5 second rule, and most of all, I know a lot about the creative investment that I've made in my character(s).
If you're going to make a new media property, and if you're going to call it sticky, it seems to me that it makes sense to understand the nature of the creative investment you expect your users to make. Now, digg that!
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Posted by Antonio
2 years ago (July 9, 2006)
A long time ago in a faraway blog, I spent some time arguing that providing really cheap computers would have a really positive impact on society. Fast forward a year when at the Wall Street Journal's D4 conference Nicholas Negroponte got up and talked about the $100 PC for poor countries and I wrote that it seemed silly that he was spending all of this alpha geek energy designing something from scratch when there were plenty of cheap components that could be used to get mighty close to the price target. Well it's been a year, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative has made good progress, and I guess it's time to color me wrong.
What I had not realized was how brainwashed I was by existing form factors in PCs/laptops, and how much innovation could truly be achieved by starting from scratch and designing the hardware so that it hit the right price/features/performance point. And to boot, getting luminaries like Alan Kay (and even Python's very own GvR because as it turns out a bunch of the GUI has been wrapped for quick dev. with Python) involved has definitely been good for the project, and I didn't realize just how many would jump on board.
But actually, outside of the progress that they've made in one short year, the thing that has most convinced me that going with a brand new hardware platform was the key was getting a Nintendo DS Lite, essentially a portable game player with a lot of clever design in it and the unbelievable price tag of $129 (for a computer with two displays, enough processing power to run a number of fun games and a wireless radio in it). Now I know we're supposed to think that all game manufacturers do the "blades and razors" thing and give away the console in order to make it up with the games, but I seriously doubt that Nintendo is really losing much money on every DS-Lite. And seeing it run for hours on a charge, dropping it several times on hard surfaces with no serious effect, and most significantly seeing how the most clever of games uses innovative input methods to enable gameplay (a graffiti-like character recognizer and even better, a microphone), that made me think of the $100 laptop again, and the promise that it could bring.
I still have my doubts as far as OLPC goes. Despite a seemingly well thought-out process for building software, and the aforementioned software gurus, I worry that the apps on it may stink. I worry that there may be hardware/software integration issues that require the concentration and effort of a single product management organization making trade-offs and compromises in the right direction. Perhpas now that these guys have been outed as being a world-class hardware manufacturer, maybe they could jump in and try to help?
But I do have to give it to Negroponte for thinking big, and getting out there to sell it big as well.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (April 29, 2006)
If it had been April Fool's day, I would have assumed that today's big New York Times/Microsoft announcement of some type of eReader software to replicate the look and feel of the print newspaper on your laptop/tablet was a joke. How could two big companies filled with clued-in people think that this was worth doing at all?
Jeff Jarvis beat me to the punch with his assessment of why this is being done (basically either out of ego or to try and pull a fast one on advertisers) so I am not going to belabor it. But it does seem fitting that this should happen this week, the same week that Smilebox launched its product with a bunch of the same underlying assumptions baked into it about how people want to consume their digital media online.
For those that don't know Smilebox is a "new way to share photos" online according to this week's WSJ Personal Technology column. I do not know them personally but from what I have heard, they are a bunch of smart ex-Microsoft guys who've built a Flash-based downloadable tool to easily compose montages of your photos and canned soundtracks which are then turned into Flash movies that can be shared. After reading the Journal piece I decided to give the app a try despite my general distaste for semi-canned Flash movies and was generally pleased with the results. In a few minutes I was able to create a couple of compelling slideshows with a cool "carousel" effect that feels almost as though it belongs in an online game world.
However, I was amazed at how far into the interface you had to dig to get at this particular type of output mostly because it was buried between "photo book" and "scrapbook" (don't ask me the difference) and a zillion template elements that all mimic the real world of glitter, deckled photo edges, paper, scissors and glue but for 100% online output. Now there are probably a lot of people that will spend hours creating these virtual books whose pages really do "turn" on-screen and whose photos appear pasted in, but as I looked at the options, all I could think of was: boy this feels like using a buggywhip as a steering wheel.
The web is a really cool new medium; it introduces a fundamentally new primitive (the hyperlink) and a whole bunch of formats that are optimized around computer displays and spotty bandwidth. Scrolling is now second nature to anyone who uses the Internet as is clicking a link, using the back button, and a whole host of other actions that don't quite have analogs in the UIs built around aping the real world objects. After all, the real genius of the Mac interface was not in putting a trash can on the Desktop but in making it behave in expected ways given the new medium of the bitmap display (imagine having to "open" the trash can every time you wanted to delete a document).
So maybe the folks at the New York Times, Microsoft, and Smilebox know something I don't about the mental model of the typical web user today– maybe they are keenly aware of a latent desire to return to a familiar pre-computer world for interfacing with data.
I hope not though because at Tabblo we're taking a whole different approach: our soon-to-be-released 1.0 product currently has one kind of thing you build, a tabblo. We went so far as to name it something new, despite it being similar to an online gallery, a photo album, a slideshow, etc. because we want to cue our users to the fact that what they are creating is something that is not quite what they've been used to doing with their photos and text before. If we've done our job right it will fill the needs fulfilled by making scrapbooks and assembling photo albums in the physical world, but in the context of the web as a medium.
Of course this doesn't mean that we don't believe in the value of the objects being directly mimicked by the "real object" interface folks– after all I just came from a place where all we did was use software to make fancy paper-and-ink photo albums so I've seen first-hand how compelling these can be– it is just that I'm not sure that what is emotionally engaging about them carries over well in the atoms-to-bits transition.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years ago (July 4, 2006)
I've been following the raging debate around the alpha geeks who are dumping OSX for Ubuntu (and the beta geeks who are making a stink about following them) with some of the same detached interest that I save for the Ruby-Python debate or the emacs-vi throwdown of yesteryear. Mostly because there are only two good points being made over and over again, with the rest of the chatter being just line noise.
The whole thing started when Mark Pilgrim (who writes as well as he thinks and thinks very well) wrote about how he was switching to Linux from OSX due to Apple's braindead proprietary data formats in their iLife suite. And herein is great point #1: proprietary data formats suck, especially as more and more of your critical information (photos, movies, music) migrates on to your computer. You will always run into some kind of artificial roadblock that the vendor (in this case Apple) cares little about helping you with because when you're running into the problem, it is either because you want to leave their "ecosystem" or too far in the future for it to be worth their worry.
The important thing to keep in mind though is that Mark is talking about metadata that is being locked up in a propietary way, not actual data. Yes it would suck to lose your iTunes playlists, and your iPhoto albums/tags/comments, but it definitely would suck a lot more to lose all of your data due to lock-in (hello Outlook at PST fans!?!), and at least thus far, Apple has been good about keeping that data visible and transparent to common filesystem tools. While they keep that up, I think they've still got the best platform out there.
Why? Because of point #2: running Linux on a desktop/laptop blows, plain and simple. The debate raging in the blogosphere would be a lot more information-rich if Technorati provided a filter that let you remove posts from anyone who has never actually run Linux on a laptop before, and by running it, I mean using it as their main OS in day to day activity. I did it for two years (about three years ago) and I can honestly say that the only way you could talk about it favorably is if you were suffering from Stockholm syndrome. It's just no fun to deal with power management (especially around suspend/resume), video issues, font issues, and wireless networking issues. True, Ubuntu has made great strides, but having recently installed it on an IBM T43, I can still see all of the same holes that have always existed around "user-centered Linux distros," the main one being around the way that GUI configurators and the textfiles they twiddle can get out of state and send you right into a commandline/manpage hell. This is ok for ifconfig (because you should know this anyway) but for X? for apm? C'mon, almost anyone has better things to do with their time. (Rob Flickenger has the best blogpost outlining the issues as to why Linux is just not viable and he touches on a number of things that I don't mention here for those who are curious).
So, what to do? Get ready to lose your metadata (read: don't invest a lot of energy in it) and make sure you practice good platform independence hygene for the possible moment when Apple drives us all off the cliff. Learn how the iApps store your data, and get really cozy with rsync and ssh (investing time in these two tools will pay off for far longer than investing energy into configuring X fonts or Alsa sound drivers). I used to think that good platform independence hygene meant not using applications that weren't available on all platforms which is the main reason why I kept running all those buggy versions of Aqua Emacs but after years of pain I finally said basta! and got on the Cocoa groove train. Now I live in TextMate and NetNewsWire and am fully expecting the coming withdrawal that may come someday. I'm not sure it's worth punishing yourself now for true platform independence.
Anyhow, I realize this debate has probably been spent (for now anyway, as it seems to come back every six months) but I figured it would make a good Independence day post, so happy 4th!
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 11 months ago (Aug. 12, 2006)
I didn't get a chance to read about Apple's World Wide Developers Conference as this was a crazy week but lots of people did nice write-ups of the whole event, sounding mostly disappointed that Apple didn't introduce an iPhone (which by the way is sorely needed as I've discovered that the Treo 700p, "smartest of the smartphones," is very much at the Windows 3.11 level though that is a different story). My favorite part of WWWDC had little to do with snazzy hardware though, and was instead around a feature of the OS called "Time Machine" that let's you restore your entire hard disk to some previous timestamp.
This is a really good idea. In fact, it's so good that over a decade ago David Gelernter and a bunch of Yale computer scientists came up with a whole system for managing information on a computer called "Lifestreams" that basically worked as a time-indexed set of events (emails, IMs, files written, files edited, files deleted). Lifestreams was cool because it argued for something other than the stamdard WIMP desktop metaphor, and because it seemed to come at a time when the Internet was giving computing a whole new vector which most regular users had not anticipated (email? IM? web search history?)
But Lifestreama was a commercial failure and a meme failure because it was just too different. The brilliant thing that Apple has done with Time Machine is to fit the whole paradigm into the standard desktop metaphor: you go backwards and forwards on a timeline in order to restore the state of the entire desktop at a certain moment in time– with a snazzy interface. This is something that regular non-propellerheads can get their heads around.
Another way to look at this may be to think of it as source control for the masses. Imagine that every app you ran on your desktop was wired through Subversion (in fact I think in some O'Reilly Hacks book this was exactly what is recommended). Then with a simple svn command you could easily get back to any previous state in your workspace. The challenge would be to make sure things like app-specific metadata got into the svn repository– but here again, the Mac shines since it does such a good job of avoiding the PST hell that most Windows apps have (one mega file with a proprietary binary format that makes it impossible to diff). In the meanwhile, I've got to give it to Apple for bringing good (if old) ideas to the masses in a nice package.
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Posted by Antonio
1 year, 7 months ago (Dec. 17, 2006)
Apparently, the reason why US telephone numbers have seven digits in them is because a psychologist from Harvard University named George Miller did some research in 1956 that concluded that most people can remember at most seven chunks of information, plus or minus two.
As convergence in the digital age sneaks up on us, it would be interesting to see the same study replicated for the things we carry around with us. In my own case, it feels like the most I can remember to keep with me is two things plus-or-minus one. And unfortunately most days I end up leaving the house with 5 things (mobile, camera, media player, wallet, and id/keys). Every morning I go through the same routine: hunting for the various pieces which I've naturally deposited in different places before giving up and leaving for work with a part or two missing (a trend which is only exacerbated as we get into the cold months and I have to go searching through various jacket pockets). Just yesterday morning, I made the unfortunate mistake of leaving for breakfast without my wallet. While I was driving back home to retrieve currency to pay the bill, I was running the calculation in my head about how much time this whole ordeal is going to cost me in time over the next ten years (21 days out of 10 years spent hunting for gizmos).
Then I thought, while each of these devices serves a different function, with the exception of the very physical tokens (wallet, id) which could be better represented as data files anyway, on the inside they have the same guts (they are all basically miniaturized computers). As you look at them, they are even starting to look the same— probably because it's the same Flextronics factories churning them all out by the millions. Is it still too much to ask that they all get mushed into one device that I can carry around with me?
Power, form factor, cost, expected lifetime of use— there are plenty of reasons why the uberdevice has not worked thus far. However, we've finally got really compelling reasons for having each of these things with us at all time. Ubiquitous Internet access and a whole bunch on interesting web services existing in the cloud (iTunes, Twitter, Google Maps, etc.) I think make the general purpose smart device really compelling both for not only communication but content consumption, and perhaps more importantly, content creation.
There will always be a need for specialized devices (you can't beat the quality of a digital SLR or the screen on a video player) but in a sense, their existence will allow for sacrifices to be maade that would make the uber communicator workable. Here is the list of things, I would gladly sacrifice for the convenience of an integrated solution:
- camera
- flash
- super zoom lens
- resolutions higher than 3MP
- phone
- the "handset" form factor (headset talking is just fine)
- multi-frequency radio (including AMPs support for ubiquity of signal)
- wallet
- cash (you can carry this separately)
- media player
The one thing that is absolutely non-negotiable is simple software that works quickly without crashing. I use a Treo 700p on a daily basis which is supposed to be the fastest and most stable of the smartphones and yet, I find its software to be complete crap. This device would have to work more like an iPod in terms of reliability and speed which may in the end mean separate processors, OSes, and even power sources. This ok— so long we still get a form factor that is all-in-one.
Since I am a software person, this is mainly my Jetsons view of the world (totally imaginable but not necessarily feasible). However, with all of this crazy speculation about Apple doing an iPhone and Google getting into the business as well, I figure I'd put it out there— my Christmas wishlist if you will.
In the meanwhile, I'm off to find a very low tech system so that I stop leaving things behind.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 22, 2006)
Pete blogs some interesting HitWise stats released into the blogosphere today by LeeAnn Prescott about how Photobucket is the #1 photo site by traffic, and poor "little" Flickr is only #6.
Comparing Photobucket to Flickr is like comparing one of those cheesy $5.95/month hosting packages you can buy from a zillion different hosting companies to MySpace. In both places you can create a profile and post it, and you can even use all the same funky styles. But no one would ever look at your page on XYZ-Cheaphost and confuse it with MySpace even though they both contain just about the same content.
On the web, there are two things that make up an "application:" a relatively robust set of tools that are provided for the user to "do something" (socializing, photo-sharing, etc.), and the community that grows up around these tools. In the desktop days you just needed the former, but in the web days it seems to me that if you don't have the latter, you're just a piece of infrastructure that can get sucked into some other webapp. In this case, Photobucket seems like a piece of infrastructure that is used by MySpace users to plug a clear hole in functionality.
Not that I have anything against Photobucket– after all they are the clear leader in their infrastructure category. They've managed to turn the crappy business of webhosting into something that seems to make money with just a teeny functionality twist and a new business model. But when Om writes that they won because of "simplicity" or giving the users what they want, I'm left wondering what it is exactly that they've won. MySpace (or CNET for that matter with their new All you can upload) could probably seriously put a dent in their growth curve by simply implementing that little bit of functionality. And if they get too intrusive with their collection of demographic data or their ads, some new entrant may decide that there is just room for the free-and-anonymous version of Photobucket.
It's interesting to think back to when Flickr first launched. I remember thinking: well this is ok, but I'm missing albums and photo effects, and invites, just for starters– there is no way I'm going to use this given how many other places I can go post a photo. But since then they've grown tags, a community, and a whole bunch of new stuff to entice, encourage, and otherwise entertain their loyal users. Will Photobucket have the same opportunity the grow functionality with its community the way Flickr did? Maybe. A look at their frontpage seems to show that they are moving in that direction. The challenge though is any app work they now do they have to undertake with a datacenter full of servers that is being pounded with request for photos on MySpace, and sometimes the weight of this makes you slow. It's why we don't worry too much about places like Kodak gallery coming after us at Tabblo– even with hundreds of engineers, they've got to deal with 3 billion photos and over 10 million users while we deal with... a whole lot less.
In the meantime, this whole Photobucket vs. Flickr discussion seems to me to be a good place to drop the old adage about how comparisons are odious.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 17, 2006)
As usual our friends over at TechCrunch have ignited a debate around web services, data, and the openness of APIs. This one centers around the fact that Zoomr, a Flickr clone, has been denied access to a commercial API key to export people's photos/metadata out of Flickr and into Zoomr. Since we've been mentioned a few times, and since the issue at the core of the debate (should Flickr allow a direct clone access to the data it has built up despite the clone's desire to "replace" Flickr) is a tricky one, I thought I'd give some quick impressions.
First, to the importance of official "openness" in an API: when we were doing early alpha testing, there were two applications that our lead users told us we had to integrate with: Flickr and Picasa. Flickr was no problem: they have a process for applying for a developer key, a clean and well-documented API, and a bunch of third-party libraries/apps that you can use as examples. Picasa? Well, that was a bit trickier. No documentation, no API, and no seeming desire to do anything about it. Fortunately for us, we have someone at Tabblo who relishes these kinds of challenges, and so with a couple of days work, he had it reversed-engineered and we were off and importing photos from Picasa.
So my first point is this: if it's important enough to your product/service to get at some of this stuff, you will find a way whether the company or service you are dealing with is "open," "a model Web 2.0 citizen," or not. Sure they may be a little more friction involved, but one of the great things about networked services is that at some point you have to get on the wire and push bytes, and when you do, it is not that hard for someone else to come along and learn how to speak your language.
Second, and this is the tricky bit to grok, when you use an API like Flickr's, the goal should always be to benefit the user and not to "jumpstart your userbase" or "blow out the metrics." In our case, we wanted to be able to integrate with Flickr for two clear reasons: 1. the avoid the user the hassle of re-uploading photos that they wanted to use in their tabblos, and 2. to avoid the user the hassle of re-organizing the photos with tags, dates, etc. But as far as where the data lived, the stickiness of the app, etc., we really didn't care (in fact, at first we wanted just to use thumbnails and metadata and leave all of the original file-serving on Flickr, something which we had to give up on only because it impacted the user experience.
And since this is a clear enough goal, I think that it should be ok for the person doling out the keys to the API to make a judgement call about whether you are in fact trying to do something that truly is going to benefit their users with the API. I realize that defining this is tough but just because the line in the sand in hard to draw, doesn't mean we shouldn't try. In my mind it has something to do with the nature of the features/functionality being offered by the API requestor, and whether there is a clear and demonstrated need on the part of the community of users for that sort of thing. At Tabblo, we talked to quite a few Flickr users who said things like "well I'd never leave Flickr as my primary place for photo uploading/storage, but what I'd really like to be able to do is ..." and it was the "..." that we listened to really closely.
Now the Zoomr guy may actually have a pretty good "..." to offer Flickr users, and if he does it may be the wrong thing to deny him the API key. But here is where I fall back to my first point– if it's really all that critical to get those Flickr folks in, just do what we did with Picasa and figure out how to get a minimal export working. If enough people start doing it, and given how well Flickr listens to its community, it won't be long before you get the keys to the data. Generally speaking the great thing about clued in companies born of the web (Yahoo, Google) unlike those born of the PC era (Apple, Microsoft) is that they listen and adapt quickly.
Of course this doesn't answer a lot of the hard questions that people are asking with respect to data storage on the cloud in this brave new world but unfortunately we are all ankle-biters when it comes to the really big questions here, and only the big guys can help make the right policy decisions about what should happen in the grand scheme. As more people from the clued-in companies climb the ladder at those places though, I have faith they will influence things in the right direction. Until then, we should all cut them a little slack.
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Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (June 14, 2006)
Rafe, who I am seeing today at the Under the Radar conference, broke the news this morning that Google has finally launched their first foray into online photo sharing, Picasa Web Albums.
The implementation looks to be a really nice version of a clean photo-gallery plus a "photo-cast" capability that allows other Picasa users to download the photos that you publish. It's clear that what Google is hoping to do is leverage their gorgeous Picasa client to give people a way to begin sharing their photos online in a simple and basic process that doesn't allow more much beyond basic sharing (this is probably made obvious by the their own blog post titled: "It’s all about the photos.")
I'd be worried though, that without more advanced features specifically around privacy, presentation, and collaboration, the product may fail to attract the increasingly more sophisticated publishers of photos online (then again, the product may be geared towards the 30% of folks who have never shared a photo online). For instance, most of us have loads of different groups that we communicate with online and a simple two-state privacy system (private/public)– while better than the all-public model of most blogging engines– doesn't really begin to address the ways in which we'd like to represent ourselves to others via our photographs.
More importantly, I want much more creative control than the standard grid of photos plus zoom-in view that Picasa Web Albums provides. It's interesting to me that most of the online photo sites copied their interface for display (the standard grid) from desktop photo management software even though that interface was built mainly for organization/editing and not consumption. It's almost like if magazines from the newsstand were laid out like the Quark or InDesign interface. The grid is easy for sure– it requires very little creative investment on the part of the user sharing the pictures– but as anyone who has ever been the recipient of a "weddingstorm" or "babystorm" can tell you (this is what happens when your friends start getting married/having babies and discover how easy it is to spam everyone repeatedly with huge online gallery links), after the first 9 grids, it starts to get old. With all of Google's AJAX goodness, I was sort of hoping we'd get a lot more of the cinematic effects that Picasa became famous for around the composition and story-telling aspects of photo presentation and display.
Finally, I wanted Picasa web albums to be more like Google Spreadsheets in the way that the latter breaks new ground around collaboration. As one would expect, the blogosphere is already abuzz with posts about how this is the first volley in a showdown between Picasa Web Albums (Google) and Flickr (Yahoo), but I couldn't disagree more. Flickr is the world's best collaborative digital shoebox with a few people throwing stuff in, and many many more sifting through the box for the best photos, helping to reorganize them, and writing small comments on the back of the pictures for others to read. It works so well, the experience is downright entertaining. But Flickr is not a photo editing tool, a photo organizing tool, or (as mentioned above) a photo compositing and layout tool. Picasa Web Albums, on the other hand, is an online extension of a rich client tool that does do some of those things. Nick Starr wrote a few days ago that Google was trying to build the new Dot Mac with tools that allow for easily publishing content that resides on your PC, and to this end, Picasa Web Albums is a very nice first step. But to me, collaboration around photos could be a lot richer than that, and we'll have to see whether it gets there as the team evolves the product.
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