Stuff from 2006
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
embahs
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
hackers
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 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." ]
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Posted by Antonio
4 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
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Posted by Antonio
4 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
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 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
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 12 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
Posted by Antonio
4 years 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
Posted by Antonio
4 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
Posted by Antonio
4 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
Posted by Antonio
4 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
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 3 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
Posted by Antonio
4 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!
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 3 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.
Posted by Antonio
4 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!
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 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.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 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.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
digerati
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 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.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 years ago (July 2, 2006)
Businessweek has a sensationalist piece, "So much fanfare so few hits," that argues that Google seems to just toss these half-finished products out there that don't do nearly as well as their core search product, and that as such competitors should stop worrying about them as the "new Microsoft/IBM." After the piece hit the blogopshere, others piled on with arguments about Google's poor marketing and even worse product management to second the opinion that the company really was a one-trick pony. Scoble has even jumped in and suggested that their lack of attendance at Gnomedex may be a sign of some bigger slip.
It takes time to build a new platform people, and we should all be as lucky as Google to be able to afford to have so many irons in the fire. The approach they have taken has two clear benefits that people involved in the discussion don't mention explicitly. First, it is clear that the world has changed, and that webapps running inside of the browser are the new platform. You don't have to look further than the amount of interest a small little startup like Tabblo has garnered in places like the Wall Street Journal (or fittingly enough alongside Google in the Washington Post a few days later) to see that it's suddenly interesting to regular folks when a company stands up and says: we believe we can do formerly desktop-bound activity X better, and we are betting you will think so too. All sorts of companies with products big and small are coming on to the map with online replacements for everything from IM to spreadsheets, and users are signing up. So in that sense, just having something out there in the field is a good idea even if the offering is not fully baked.
The second advantage of taking this approach is that the best hackers are always itching to work on the up-and-coming platform and right now the biggest nucleus of this activity is at Google. We engineers are just notorious about loving the conceptualization phase, the architecture phase, and that initial burst of hacking to get features done, and in that sense a company where you can be constantly launching new products that have in-built audiences in the millions is just like crack for the Google hackers. What we're not so good at is putting the finishing touches on things: triaging bugs, collecting customer feedback, and getting iterations in that don't move the feature set forward but make the product easier/better/faster (which incidentally is why I am proud that we made it out of beta in 45 days at Tabblo) but this is where good product management and discipline can really help.
And herein lies the piece of the discussion that I did agree with: it seems like Google could really benefit from better product management. It's not glamorous– and it certainly won't get the press– but at some point people will/will not switch from Yahoo Mail or MSN Messenger based on the feel of the app, and no amount of good PR will do that for you. Given Google's late entrance into a bunch of these categories: mail, news, finance, etc., they have to keep in mind that they do need to play a game of share-shifting instead of new market growth when it comes to users.
The analogy I was going to make in disagreeing with this piece was between Google now and Microsoft in the late 80s/90s, and around how Microsoft also had poor product management around some of its products (Access, Word, Encarta, etc.), and managed to win just by staking claims and plodding forward, but I'm not as sure of it now, mostly because in the case of a lot of Microsoft products, the game was not about share-shifting so much as giving users who had not been exposed a chance to play with new functionality (by contrast, I'm fairly sure that anyone on the Internet who wants web-based email has already tried at least one of the services).
Product management can be learned however, so it seems to me that this will just be a matter of time for Google. After all, they could raid one of their dinosaur neighbors (say Intuit) who has limited prospects but plenty of grade-A product managers. And when they get that under control, shareholders and pundits alike will be happy that Google staked all of these claims in categories where it did not seem like the clear and early winner.
In the meanwhile, just give them a little time to discover just where the boundaries to this new exciting platform really are.
Tags:
digerati
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (May 6, 2006)
So it would seem that Valleywag has outed Tabblo 10 days ahead of launch, and with somewhat good reason, blasted us for a less-than-perfectly thought-out press outreach. It's actually a fairly snarky and funny post that makes two points: first, does the world need yet another photo-sharing site (YAPS)? and second, just why would we, in a world where there are no secrets just information waiting to be discovered, try such a lame strategy for building up to our launch?
First, I would most definitely agree with Valleywag that the world most definitely does not need another photo-sharing site if by photo-sharing site what people mean is another copy of Flickr or a slightly updated version of the Generation-1 photo sites: OFoto, Shutterfly, and Snapfish. Our basic premise in starting Tabblo was that there was a functionality gap in the things one could easily do with photos online; that while Flickr defined a new mode of behavior around the photo stream constantly flowing past a community of interested users, there are still times when what one wants to do is put a bunch of photos in a context which helps to paint a picture, tell a story, or capture something particular about the subject of the photos.
If you think about it from that perspective, what you end up wanting as a user is a more of a general purpose publishing tool that lets you work with layout, text, styling elements, and pictures. You can conceive of it as a special-purpose Dreamweaver, or even more like Apple's new iWeb app, but 100% in the browser, paired with a web service, built to solve some of the collaborative problems presented by multiple photographers at the same event, and aimed at hiding the complexity of basic design, technical details, and most of all, the high threshold for participation that creative tools like Quark, InDesign, and even Dreamweaver have put in the path of regular folks.
Why go through all this trouble instead of just assuming that what people want is basic gallery-style or Flickr-style gobs of pictures with a slideshow option for viewing? Two reasons: one, when given a creative communications tool for self-expression, people show again and again an almost unlimited amount of creativity in what they do. And second, and to Valleywag snark about YAPS, we at Tabblo are most excited about competing not with Flickr, Smugmug, Yahoo Photos, and two dozen other new entrants, but with non-consumption. That is, if you look at the numbers, by far the biggest photo-sharing service out there is still email. For the most part, people find that what is out there does not add enough value to merit being used instead of just attaching a bunch of pictures to an email and hitting send (and this is despite all of the associated mailserver hell).
So, on to the second point: is it lame to send out a generic email to press that uses words like embargo, best reserved for dealing with naughty regimes? Probably, and David Parmet helped to take us to task for it. Here is our only excuse: when you are just seven people working around the clock to get a product launched, sometimes things can fall through the cracks. In the end, I'm pretty sure that our users will prefer that their credit cards get charged correctly, that their tabblos not get lost, and that the site is snappy enough. Meanwhile consider this whoops a bit of slop that we're going to work very hard to avoid in the future.
To that end, let me give you a scoop here: in a couple of days a press release is going to go out announcing a major funding event on the part of a tier-1 venture fund (Matrix Partners) who is as excited about the space and opportunity as we are. Along with the press release (as we should have done before), I'm going to write a post here describing why we went to Matrix and why they are excited about the investment.
One final thing: I'm actually glad to have made Valleywag– it might even be seen as a sort of badge of honor (though next time please use incriminating pictures of me ordering coffee behind one of those Google babes– this will make for better copy)– but I am not psyched that Kerry got singled-out for this by name. For the record, Kerry was largely responsible for why I choose Red Javelin in the first place; she's worked for some really clued-in web-native companies like Viaweb and TripAdvisor and her former clients rave about her. She is incredibly open, thoughtful, and happy to take comments and answer any questions you may have about Tabblo at: kerry@redjavelin.com. And, by the way, so am I: antonio@tabblo.com.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 12, 2006)
Note: this post will be of little interest to you unless its title grips you like a Richard Morgan novel (ok, John Grisham for the non sci-fi fans) and you are in the middle of tearing your hair out trying to get EVDO working on your MacBook Pro (MBP). Read on if appropriate...
I got addicted to Verizon's 3G EVDO network back when I was riding the Acela between New York and Boston twice weekly. With it, you can get real work done on a laptop, and it tends to be rock solid when you can get a connection. However after releasing very beta hardware in the form of the early MacBook Pros, Apple also nuked the PCMCIA slot in favor of an Express34 one which meant that my Novatel 5220 card was left a paperweight (an Express 34 EVDO card is "just around the corner" apparently).
Enter the Treo 700p to the rescue. It supports EVDO natively, doesn't run the slow-as-molasses mobile Windoze that its predecessor did (the 700w), and best of all can be configured to use DUN (dial up networking) via Bluetooth with the MBP. Now, folks have complained that it is not possible to get the MBP to work with the Treo as a USB EVDO modem because this is supposedly faster than Bluetooth while keeping the phone on trickle charge, but based on a few tests I ran (the MBP/Treo versus a Powerbook G4/Novatel 5220), the speed difference amounts to line noise around 25-75 kbps on download and 10-15kpbs on upload. And if fact, I find the notion of having to whip out a wire on a train/airplane/cab to "tether" the two devices sort of stupid (isn't "tethering" something we do to horses?).
Anyhow, without further ado, here are the instructions to get this done with minimal third party software getting installed on your computer, and the least amount of hunting through forum posts. I'm doing this because the first pairing of a cellphone and a Mac I did was greatly helped by a guy who took the time to do this with a v710 a couple of years ago, and I got many miles out of it. Oh, and I am also doing it because the Verizon support reps. are absolutely clueless about Macs, Broadband Access on EVDO, and just about anything you may want to get done that doesn't entail accessing voicemail. No joke, and no rant intended, though it does amaze me that they can be so bad at selling what is one of their highest margin and best offerings.
Before you start
As of 6/10/2006, Verizon has a couple of plans that provide unlimited data on top of some allotment of minutes. Go and sign up for this, but make sure that you also sign up for a $15/month "feature" to let you do this in the first place called something like "Broadband Tethered Access." Just check that a) it is $15/month incremental for nothing other than the privilege of using your Treo as a modem, and b) that when you log into your account and check your service, you see a line item that reads like so: "BBA CONNECT UNL." Without this enabled, you will not be able to authenticate. In my case, I asked for it at the store (didn't get it), and twice on the phone (didn't get it). The trick was getting to the data support people and using the magic words "BBA CONNECT UNL" which seemed to turn some lightbulb on.
Also, you do not need to install the Verizon Access connect software that they put out for the Mac. I am not sure whether this software is good or bad- in fact I've only ever used it on my Thinkpad where the first thing it did was flash my otherwise very Mac-friendly 5220 so that it only worked just ok after that- but I prefer to keep as much of that third-party crap off of my computer, particularly when it comes to OS services like networking (and given that the MBP seems to have a few hiccups of it's own in this area, why add insult to injury?).
Getting the Treo and the Mac friendly with each other
I didn't install any of the Palm Desktop manager software, mostly because I was afraid that it would run in emulation and really clog the MBP up. Instead I got a $39 program called the Missing Sync which I'd heard was great and had an Intel binary. Either way though, pairing your MBP and your Treo should be a simple matter of going to the Bluetooth control panel in System Preferences and adding the Treo as a device. Make sure you turn Bluetooth on on the Treo itself (mine came off). You will go through a standard wizard on the computer where you have to enter some numbers the MBP gives you on the Treo and get stuff paired correctly. The key thing to realize is that the process is initiated from the MBP (not the Treo).
Once you finish the pairing (assuming it is successful), the wizard will ask you if you want to use your phone for Internet access. Choose yes, and enter the following bits of information:
Username: XXXXXXXXXX@vzw3g.com (where the Xs is your 10 digit Verizon phone)
Telephone Number: #777
Password: vzw
and click the box for "Show modem status in menu bar."
If you've done this all correctly, all you have after you've closed everything out is pull down on the little handset icon that appears in the menu bar and choose "Connect." The computer will display the various steps in the process and the Treo's screen will go on to indicate that the process is going.
When things go oops
First, make sure you've signed up for the "BBA CONNECT UNL" service option. Without it you are hosed (unless there is some modem init hack that you can do). If you see the service on your web-based Verizon portal, make sure that Bluetook pairing between the MBP and the Treo is solid, deleting other Bluetooth pairings if necessary.
Some things I've noticed
The connection speed is comparable to the old PCMIA setup (350/60 kbps on dslreports speedtest versus 400/70kbps) but from very early testing it seems to drop after a smaller interval of inactivity (I'm sure this is configurable but I haven't had enough time to explore). Apparently others have written that with this setup an incoming voice call will allow you to pause the EVDO connection without having to disconnect (a big improvement over the pre-EVDO days) but I haven't seen this first hand.
That's about it. I hope someone gets to save some time in reading this the way that I did a few years ago. After all it is only by doing write-ups like this that we customers are ever going to be able to build a decent support system around Verizon's great network. Now if we could only do this to build actual network infrastructure as well...
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 10, 2006)
Chris Anderson of Long Tail fame has a couple of posts on Lego Factory, a "CAD/CAM plus mass customization" product line that is fascinating to see, and even more enjoyable to actually use.
Basically
Lego Factory works like this: you download a free design tool from the Lego website and start building your own custom Lego model in what is clearly a simplified CAD tool. You work from a palette of standard Lego pieces but get to choose one-off from any of the available pieces (including those ones that annoyingly only include three to a kit when you need four). Since the app is available on both Windows and Mac, I was afraid it was going to be some kludgey Java thing that was frustrating and limited, but it's actually a native binary that is snappy, intuitive, and attains a great balance between power and simplicity (and this is on the Mac no less).
When you are done assembling your model, you can price it on the website and order it as a kit-of-one made especially for you. Anderson's second blog post covers how back at Lego HQ each kit gets picked, packed, and shipped by manually and talks about the seemingly unbecoming economics of this but based on my own experience, I think that this is something they will quickly sort out as demand ramps.
I'm an absolute Lego nut with a four year-old that serves as a terrific enabler when it comes to sinking time into things like Lego Factory but Factory is interesting to me from the perspective of understanding the coming phenomenon of mass customization in consumer products. Levi's took on the first great experiment in this a few years ago with "jeans that fit every butt" but since then I've been surprised by how few people have followed suit. Recently, someone sent me a link to an Beyond, outdoor clothing manufacturer that is taking a similar approach with clothing. For years I've been yapping to anyone who will listen about the need for a custom bag equivalent of Beyond clothing, and yet no one seems to be ready to answer the call even among a slew of innovative, high-cost producers of bags.
I think that folks who look into these markets are afraid of two things: 1. as Anderson points out, at first blush the economics smell really bad (especially when you think about competition from China) and 2. I think that folks are afraid that, as Levi's "discovered," the demand is simply not there at "mass market scales."
I think that bad economics is a bit of a red herring from a couple of reasons. First, again from my own experience, it's amazing to see how cheap these "high touch" custom products can really get if you apply even a basic amount of engineering to the manufacturing process for a few different reasons (to come in a latter blog post). And more importantly, a growing group of consumers have demonstrated a clear willingness to bear higher prices for customized goods.
And as far as demand goes, you need to look no further than Anderson's own forthcoming Long Tail book to see how the Internet can be used to aggregate enough niches to get to pretty significant numbers (I've been reading an ARC copy of the book and have to say that it is an awesome read even if you feel over-exposed to the all of the long tail hype). Besides, the Internet's enabling of peer production is the rocket fuel that mass customization needs to really explode as a far-reaching phenomenon. Lego Factory is beginning to hint at this through the community and contests, trying to encourage users to leverage each other's work, but I want it to get both smaller and bigger at the same time. Smaller because I want to learn how to assemble wings, claws, etc. from the lead users that can make New York skylines with full Statue of Liberty replicas- I may even want these gurus designing custom pieces that I can buy for my kits. And bigger because I also want the community around Factory to thrive in other ways: tutorials, videos, and perhaps even live seminars that allow those of us struggling to get what we want to be able to learn "guild-style" as we might have 500 years ago by apprenticing with an artisan.
It's clear that the computer, cheap tools, user-generated content, and the Internet have busted open the media landscape for good. Now I not only consume when I want to (a la Tivo), but also where I want to (iPod ecosystem), and most importantly what I want to (a la YouTube, podcasts, etc.). I want to see the same thing happen with physical products across all sorts of categories. We're trying to do it in story-telling products, but others, like Lego with Factory, need to get on the bandwagon and bring us closer to a world where atoms start behaving just like bits are starting to in media.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 4, 2006)
Caterina Fake comes back from her travels and writes an incredibly thought-provoking post attempting to categorize the types of social sites out there, especially with respect to user growth metrics. In the post she argues for three categories: primarily social (MySpace, Facebook), rich content (Flickr, YouTube), and person to person (Y Photos, Ofoto) with each type having different kinds of production/consumption behavior.
I think Caterina's three categories are great as archetypes to use when thinking through the character of sites, or key product management questions, but at the risk of going against the current Web2 grain of "keeping it simple," I was left wondering why we can't have a little bit of everything. In fact, I think this little bit of everything is what makes Flickr such a great success.
It wasn't until we launched a got a whole influx of Flickr folks that I realized that the Flickr social community is very vibrant. I've heard from more than one user now that Flickr is in fact their adult version of Facebook. They use the "Your contacts" page as their browser's home page and wake up every morning to the sight of new photos within their social network. One user even described Flickr as a "communal photo blog" that was "the best way to stay in touch with people that I care about but who I don't talk to regularly." Does this sound MySpacey to anyone? In fact, I think it's way better because of the way in which the photos provide an entertaining substrate for the types of social activity that are otherwise context-less on sites like MySpace (more on that in a future post).
On to the person-to-person type of site: in a totally unofficial survey of some of the Flickr pro users I know, I was surprised to see how many of them use the site as one would use Ofoto or Yahoo Photos to share pictures on an access controlled basis with people in their tight social circle (family and close friends). In fact, when we first built the Flickr-Tabblo bridge, we failed to respect photo ACLs form Flickr which was a clear mistake we had to rush to fix given the number of folks who had a substantial number of private photos. If I had to guess, I bet that Flickr photos and privacy resemble a sort of upside-down glacier with 40% or so of the content buried under the privacy waterline for just this reason.
Here is my reason for pointing out how well Flickr does in the other two types Caterina describes– I think most people are multi-modal in their online behavior. Sometimes you want to act like one of Bradley's content generators putting together stuff with your "publisher" hat on, sometimes you want to share the photos of the BBQ with little care for composition or editing with people you know really want to see them, and there are even times when you'll use the site to find people who you might want to know. It is the sites that do the best job of providing enough flexibility to accommodate the different modes of behavior that end up doing the best in the end. Doing anything else (at least until you've got many many users showing you otherwise) seems like premature optimization to me.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 7, 2006)
I have to say that I am really impressed with Google spreadsheets. It's the missing piece to moving entirely off of Office as a tool for coordinating work for us. In my world, the wiki killed Word but it's always had this horrible problem with tabular information (or any sort of structured information for that matter). Google Spreadsheets takes care of that AND adds realtime multi-author capabilities. Dan Bricklin spotted this need in presenting tabular information on the web months back which is why he got going with WikiCalc. And despite the fact that I'm not sure I'd want my company's product schedules living on some Google Labs server, I think most people won't care, and for the 80% of users who use Excel as a fancy table editor, this product is going to really hit the spot.
My only minor complaint is around the lack of Safari support. Safari sucks as a web development environment-- there is no doubt about that, but if even small companies can come out of the gate supporting it, why can't Google plan for a degraded experience in Safari from day 1? Otherwise, Spreadsheets does a really nice job of providing the basics around editing as well as an amazing job of Excel file import (haven't tested the export).
Now, it would seem in a predictable twist of fate that Google has run out of good graces in the blogosphere. Everyone seems to be piling on with respect to how ho-hum this is, or how non-core to the mission it is, or just how much Google sucks now. Then there are the people who claim that this will never be able to replace the richness of the Excel experience. Having recently seen a demo of Excel 2007, I'd have to say: yeah, but so what? Outside of some formatting goodness which Excel 2007 seemed to have in it (which could be done in an AJAX GUI), most of the other improvements didn't strike me as particularly useful.
Besides, I think that Nick Carr has it right when he writes about how Spreadsheets should be seen as complementary to Excel (and I don't usually agree with his shrill blogging). If you buy the complements argument, which seems to have a lot of legs when you think of iPhoto/Flickr or iTunes/LastFM where each of the online services complements the rich client application with publishing/sharing/collaboration featuresets, then Spreadsheets is an absolute no brainer. In fact, it could do a lot less than it already does and still be quite useful as a complement to Excel.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (May 24, 2006)
I don't usually get excited by the happenings in the iPod ecosystem but Apple's new collaboration with Nike is really cool. The plan is to build an RF pedometer that can feed telemetry to the iPod via an attached wireless receiver. As anyone who runs a lot can tell you, this is a very nice thing indeed.
But it also shows the kind of power and platform lock-in that Apple has gotten with the iPod. When people talk about that, it is usually in reference to Apple's music store and its proprietary DRM which is currently definitely a form of lock-in, but ultimately one that can't last. However, the lock-in that comes from the fact that the iPod is the only constantly semi network-connected portable device (on an open network, unlike the cellphones) might just last for quite a while, or at least until we finally get to the promise of cheap-enough networking for regular everyday devices (and that seems to be one of those classic situations where everyone is confusing a long view with a short distance).
As you get more digital music, the incentive exists to constantly be syncing your iPod to your PC to refresh your portable library. The podcasting folks saw this as an opportunity to push new content to the device for a sort of "time-shifted radio" experience, and they were right on. That said, no one is properly leveraging the back-channel yet (moving data from the iPod to the network) mostly because the software is not rich enough on the iPod to capture any data worth sending back (playcount and song ratings being the only exceptions).
But with this Nike collaboration, the possibilities are much richer due to the fact that the iPod is going to be collecting all sorts of data about your activity. And by the way, Nike is not just now waking up to this idea; for a while they (and others) have had non-networked devices that do this, and even associated websites for runners to compete on stats in virtual races. The problem has always been that the cost of participation has been too high both because those other companies were not software companies (remember the first Audible player software anyone?), and because it was just too much hassle for most people to spend all that time connecting a device just this purpose.
However if I am already going to be connecting the device to sync my music, the cost of of getting on the network is in effect subsidized by music listening desires, and everything else gets to ride along for free. One thing Steve and co. are well aware of is just how passionate people are about their music, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if this Nike thing is just the first step to truly leverage the iPod ecosystem in interesting ways (beyond colored socks and compact speakers) that point us in the direction of the world of networked devices.
I can't wait for people to start hacking on those data feeds to do more than whatever the Flash-encrusted Nike site will do. Recently I read a blog post (which I can not for the life of me find) about how the real reason Apple dropped PortalPlayer was because they were beefing up the hardware to run a scaled-down version of OS X on the devices. This is probably a complete fantasy, but how nice would it be to have a device that is that more general purpose (read: programmable), talking on an open network to services and perhaps sporadically even to other devices being synced by others?
Tags:
digerati
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (May 26, 2006)
Since there was all this hoopla about how MSN Spaces has crossed 100M spaces, I decided to go back and take a look at what has transpired there in the year and a half since I first signed up... and I was dissapointed. The site feels a lot snappier (which must mean that Microsoft has figured out how to scale .NET) but features-wise, MSN Spaces feels like a MySpace rev 1.1 and not much more.
Not that Yahoo 360 is much better. Both of these tools suffer from the same thing: they have a number of "widgets" but each of the widgets is far from being anywhere close to best-in-class. Blog widget? Blogger is still much better. Pictures? What's being offered on both of these properties at this point in terms of photos smells of Geocities circa 1999 (Y360's flickr integration being the only exception). Ditto for music, lists, profiles, and (where available) free-form pages.
My point isn't really that these big companies can't execute on the vision of a general-purpose personal publishing platform– but that they seem to be stuck with this bad hypothesis that an integrated set of mediocre tools is more valuable than just one or two really kick-ass components. It's the 1980s office suite mentality or the 1990s portal approach all over again. Except that today we're supposed to be living in the era of Web 2.0 where the Internet is the common substrate for IPC and best-of-breed tools should be integrated and remixed to provide one great service as opposed to just another "me too" in the blogs/photos/lists/social network soup.
Finally, what really gets me is that these guys: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and to a lesser extent AOL are the platform players which means that if anyone could really take a leadership role in this new way of building things, it is them. Google did it with maps (and the others have quickly followed) by providing a great, best-of-breed component that was easy to integrate just about anywhere and then letting a thousand flowers bloom. With a couple of more world-class components like these, Google may find itself much more able to do the "platform thing" than these ho-hum integrated attempts– and if they do these 100M spaces are going to end up nothing more than ghost towns left behind by the goldrush that MySpace started.
Tags:
embahs
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (May 15, 2006)
So we've officially launched the public beta for Tabblo amidst two storms. The first one was the state of emergency declared by the state of Massachusetts due to the flooding that has been brought about by the interminable rain here in the Bay State. The second storm is taking place in the blogosphere over Josh Kopelman's post on the value of the 53,651 geeks who read TechCrunch and jump from beta to beta as all of these Web 2.0 companies launch. Josh's argument is classic Crossing the Chasm: these users, being on the leading edge do not translate to meaningful traction in the mass market. Dave Winer takes issue and points to how valuable these early users can be, and I tend to agree (for a nice summary of the debate, see Om's post).
Probably only about 10% of those 50K users are passionate enough to qualify for what I am about to argue but the number is large enough. In the social software space (in which I would include virtually every webapp out there), software without lots of users of early users will necessarily be worse than software with early and passionate users. Take for example del.icio.us and Furl: when they started, Furl was actually quite a bit more usable but del.icio.us managed to resonate with some of the early adopter crowd relatively early and within a year there was no comparison between the sites.
The argument has also been made that this early crowd is just too different and distracting from the bread-and-butter folks who make up the "mass market" but I don't buy that for two reasons that both center on this vague notion of the "mass market." These are people too, right? People who get out there and use MySpace or Gmail, or send TXTs to American Idol once a week. How then can we assume that because they haven't heard of digg, or del.icio.us, they wouldn't grok it right away if they did? The second point is simply this: if as a startup you have good product management on board, it's just not that hard to keep two lists: the features that the really important people who are helping co-develop your product want and get excited about, and the features that the fast-followers and "mass market" types want. I all about laser focus in startups, but it seems to me that if there is one place where it pays to keep your ear to the ground and be willing to experiment, it is in early user co-development of your service.
Speaking selfishly from Tabblo's perspective, I welcome every one of those 53,651 power users into our public beta even if you want to pick up your stakes and move on to whatever the hot launch is next week. There are worse problems than having a bunch of smart, well-immersed folks tread all over you for the opportunity to capture the hearts and minds of just a few of them. As Scoble writes, "one snowflake at a time."
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 3, 2006)
So Barcamp Boston is off to a great start, at least from the energy level of the first day's crowd. It feels almost like a whole lot of folks here in Boston have been in a state of suspended animation while the dot-com fallout took place, and they are just now starting to re-emerge.
It's good to see contemporaries who started their careers during the first web coming back wiser and better than before. More patience, more humility, and a greater willingness to listen are amongst the qualities that I'm feeling in this crowd. Even the
kids just starting out seem more humble than we were the first time around.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (May 28, 2006)
Mike Arrington has a nice writeup of Dave Winer's new project, "Share Your OPML" which covers a really neat experiment in collecting what I think is invaluable profile data on RSS-powered people. OPML is the XML-format most commonly used by RSS aggregators to export a list of subscriptions in a single file. Though the format could be a lot richer (capturing metadata about items read, for example), it is good enough to get a real feeling for the type of subjects that a particular person is motivated enough to track. In fact, a relatively rich OPML file (>50 feeds) is so good at telling you about its owner that I now find myself asking for an OPML export as part of the interview process during hiring for any position, and find it to be (when available) at least as good as the candidate's resume.
That said, herein lies my concern with the viability of Share Your OPML: the system appears to have no inbuilt way of encouraging users to take the trouble to upload this type of valuable metadata in the first place. Though it is early still, I think this is why the data extracted from the OPML files collected reveals a blogging A-list distribution in the various aggregated stats (these are after all Dave's friends and fans who have the necessary incentive at this point). Arrington suggests that it will be cool to have "better recommendations," using the classic collaborative filter model, but this still is not good enough for me to have the system slurp my data, at least not until I've seen it work its magic with other people's data, and even then it's unclear that the collaborative filter could bring enough value by itself).
It strikes me though that there is more low hanging fruit in terms of encouraging active participation (and upload). Share Your OPML could quickly become a sort of delicious for feed lists if it grows a simple API quickly. Fortunately, this is something that Dave Winer has proven very adept at in the past, so I would find it hard to believe that he is not already about to release it. In the meanwhile, it's worth checking out what this neat experiment will bring.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 2, 2006)
Rafe Needleman covers the neatest device unveiled at this week's D4 conference in San Diego, a portable music player by Zing with Wifi and Bluetooth that can upload/download without a computer in the mix.
Another attendee at D observed to me that while last year was all about the iPod and how it seemed to have no boundaries, this year's conference scarcely had any mention of Apple's beloved little device. Instead the session speakers and chatter in the hallways were all about the importance of content getting on the network (from both the media companies and regular folks) with a specific emphasis on video. I think that this may in part be due to the fact that Apple had little presence at the conference (Steve didn't even show), but another more important reason may be that Apple being Apple has stopped really having something worthy of the buzz in the portable player space. Sure Bose-clones are nice, and the iPod ID is still good enough to eat, but startups like Zing are showing that the important next step for these devices– a step which would excite the geeks that attend events like D– have to do with networking the devices together to do more interesting stuff.
The most interesting aspect of the Zing player was not its music-playing (ID-wise, the iPod has it beat hands down) but as Rafe writes, that it comes built-in with everything that one would need for a peer-to-peer communicator: wi-fi radio, speaker, and microphone. A friend of mine, Jordan Pollack, gave me an idea 5 years ago around a peer-to-peer Blackberry that would store small txt messages among the peers in a mesh-style LAN until one of them got Internet-connected and sent the messages out into the wild, and I've been in love with it ever since, mostly because of what a neat hack it would be. All you would need for a near-ubiquitous connection would be enough density of people carrying the devices and the occasional device passing through an open Wi-fi spot so that it could dump its stored payload out on the net.
With the Zing you could even add a sort of voicemail-like format to the mix so that people could have asynchronous voice communications with anyone anywhere on top of the synchronous voice calls available within the mesh formed by a pool of these devices.
One thing we couldn't figure out 5 years ago was how to start the process going because as with all networked gizmos, having just one or two wouldn't be any good at all. And that is where the passion that people feel about their music comes in. If you are already carrying the device around for another purpose, all the comms. stuff would just be a nice added bonus.
A term used by evolutionary biologists comes to mind to describe just how a network like this might roll out: as an exaptation.
Tags:
digerati
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 1 month ago (June 3, 2006)
There is an IBMer with a terrific blog post where he tells of describing all of this Web 2.0 hoopla to a friend as:
chmod 777 web
So in UNIX-speak this loosely means: allow anyone to read, write, and execute the web. Really cute, and really right on. Anyone who knows even a little bit of UNIX gets it right away.
Especially nice during this week of Web 2.0 trademark nonsense when people just decided to pile on poor Tim.
(via Infectious Greed)
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (May 30, 2006)
I love the Pew studies for their conclusions even if I don't entirely understand their methods. The latest (via ClickZ News) proclaims that nearly 50MM Americans are generating content on the web. Of course this includes all sorts of things from leaving comments to sharing pictures, but despite this, the really good thing here is that this many people are willing to engage in a participatory medium.
I've written before on the magic ratio of 1-10-100 as proposed by Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo, so I'll skip the description here and just say that we might be approaching a time when that ratio skews in favor of more people creating content. But we need a couple of things first:
Better tools that can be properly contextualized
Most "content creation" tools on the web today suck, plain and simple. I'd guess that ranked by popularity or use, our old friend TEXTAREA would win hands-down. So where are the MacDraws, the PageMakers, hell even the MS Words of the web? I think when dealing with text Gmail comes the closest to being good today, and it isn't even a tool for creating content that is going to be published. Imaging tools are weak, and layout tools all but non-existent (which is a big part of the reason why we started Tabblo). And this is to say nothing of better tools for audio, video, and a few other media types. Someone needs to push iLife to the web, and fast.
Except that the tools need to be mashable, in a good old Web2 style. I want to see my layout tool of choice for words and photos right there in on my MySpace profile. On Om's blog there is an interesting post today about how social network sites are the new media– if this is indeed the case, all the best creative tools in the world will be nothing but silos if the can't play well on both import and export for starters– nevermind the necessary deeper integrations that users are going to come to expect.
Better Repurpose-ability of Content
I'd write more Amazon reviews if Amazon would also publish a blog of all of my reviews for me, at my own URL, while providing me with some styling/editing controls. I'd make more iDVD slideshows of my photos if I could also get hyperlinked iWeb-like sites out of the effort. I'd even do more LinkedIn if I could get a "portfolio site" out the other end that was part-resume, part reference checking app. In all of these cases, the key is that the tools should be smart enough to allow me to easily repurpose my creative investment in any particular piece of "content." At my old company we made layout tools that allowed hundreds of thousands of people to assemble photo books that we would then manufacture. People would spend hours crafting stories out of their photos and captions but the only type of output we supported was the physical book. We were (and probably still are) the best tool for making photo books but it wouldn't have taken that much of an effort to be pretty good at a number of other forms of output.
I think I've said it before on this blog, but this I will repeat: we live in very interesting times indeed. Man, as Graham Swift wrote, has always been a story-telling animal, but it is just now that the combination of the Internet as a persistent publishing platform, and the PC (and PC-like devices) as creative tools, that we're getting to the really interesting stuff.
Tags:
digerati
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 14, 2006)
People have been telling me to try Netvibes for a while now and I've been reticent to do so because it just seemed so 1998 all over again to think of the personal home page as being the new black. Then I read this morning on TechCrunch that this little Parisian outfit had raised a $15MM round from real VCs and I decided that it was time to go and check it out for real.
Note that I went there full of skepticism for what the company could possibly do with AJAX that would make it worth cracking open a category that was so tired 8 years ago already. And the answer is a lot, not because of the AJAX per se (though this is the way we were meant to configure any sort of webpage) but because of the richness that comes from their module-based approach to developing content widgets. Want Flickr pictures? No problem, just stick in the RSS feed and you are off to the cool races. For that matter, anything that emits RSS is just a click away from being a permanent fixture in one of an infinite set of pages that you can create as are a whole host of other non-obvious data sources (Meebo for IM for example). The whole experience is done so well that before you realize it, you've sunk 15 minutes into setting up a few pages without having every registered or gone through any kind of cumbersome signup process. It is really slick.
That said I'm not sure that there is a real business here. Most of the content does not belong to Netvibes and most of the interesting stuff is likely to take place elsewhere (after you click away to gmail or flickr). However, I have to give it to these guys for putting together a really cool framework for building these little widgets and encouraging what I think is already a fairly rich third-party ecosystem of widgets.
But that is not all; I realized after playing with the site for a while what is the one meaningful thing that has changed since the personal home pages of 1998. Content now comes in micro-chunks and most smart sites can emit it through RSS in a way that makes it both easy and powerful to repurpose for a Netvibes-like experience. And Javascript lets us glue it both on the consumption side, and perhaps more importantly, on the collection/authoring side in a way that creates a much more compelling user experience.
I guess some seemingly bad ideas are just good ideas waiting for the right pieces to fall into place.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 17, 2006)
Sometimes a blogosphere meme is so good and on-point with what you've been thinking that it's hard to do anything other than agree vehemently with it. Such is what is going on today with the volley between Caterina and Fred about "Business Development 2.0." Basically, they argue that we're past the point of needing the big biz dev dances that we all did during web 1.0 with suits at long meetings and contracts and meetings and sushi bars and meetings, etc., etc.
Around the office I've been calling it "lightweight business development" because it feels much more agile than any of the other stuff I've ever done. Fred outlines a bunch of good examples on his blog so instead I'll try to give the geek's perspective: doing biz dev between unprofitable sites, or in the context of unexplored types of relationships (say Tabblo and a major photo retailer for example) the old way is the business people's equivalent of premature optimization and is therefore almost likely to lead to a bad outcome.
Now there are cases when partnerships need more than the lightweight approach– usually because there are CAPEX or marketing resources that need to be applied. But, as I was telling a prospective printing partner today, if he's going to have to make a significant investment and venture into unexplored waters because of us, it's probably not the best fit at this point in time. Sometimes it may be (though I am hard-pressed to think of a good example), but more often than not, this probably leads up to a situation where escalation of commitment becomes an obfuscating factor in figuring out that it probably wasn't meant to be in the first place.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 19, 2006)
I've always thought that Bob Metcalfe, who I've known and considered a mentor for the past six years, would make a fantastic addition to the blogosphere. He used to write a column for InfoWorld which was an absolute gas and often very insightful as well. However no matter how many times I pitched him on the notion of his starting a blog, his "old economy" notions of "getting paid" for work always got in the way.
Which is why it was such a pleasure to see him making his debut with a guest post on Mike Hirshland's blog to weigh in on the hoopla surrounding whether Metcalfe's law has overstated the value of a network in its formulation. Needless to say, it is too bad that his inaugural post had to be on such a fundamentally lame issue (but read on to see how he still pulls out a great post). I don't know what is more ridiculous: the fact that this debate was kicked off from an absurd article in IEEE Spectrum (a supposedly respectable magazine) or the fact that it has gotten such attention from the blogosphere. Bloggers everywhere have jumped on both sides of the debate and even some of Metcalfe's co-workers have piped in to defend "The Law" despite the fact that... well let's just say it is no F=MxA.
The most impressive thing about Metcalfe's law is that George Gilder (who coined it) and Metcalfe himself (who promoted it) were able to embed it so deeply in the hearts and minds of analysts, MBAs, and engineers everywhere. At its core, all that Metcalfe's law states is that when the benefit of something grows non-linearly while its cost grows linearly, good things result. That is basically it (and you can see it from the original 35mm slide Bob presents). Economists have a name for this effect– it's called economies of scale, and while networking computers comes with the hard problem of understanding how to quantify the benefits, the underlying math is really straight forward. So let me have a go at it:
Because it's summer, I've spent some time on the beach and noticed that every drugstore within 50 miles has got these new space-age plastic shovels that are easier for little hands to use. The normal sized one (pictured here) is maybe 3 inches by 4 inches (12 square inches of shovel area) and costs $3.99. Recently I noticed that there is a bigger one that is maybe 2 inches bigger on each side but costs only $4.99. Can we call the added power of the shovel relative to the cost "Rodriguez's Law?" Now networked devices, unlike shovels, benefit from each other, but if we look at the entire network as the object that is benefiting from economies of scale, we're talking about pretty much the same thing.
Bob and George were geniuses not for their insight nor for their quantification of the observation, but for their uncanny ability to capture the zeitgeist of the era in it (explosive PC growth and an insatiable appetite to believe in the power that all of these networked computers were going to bring us). This, and the fact that Metcalfe is a genius salesman (just watch how he hawks his 5 year old book in his inaugural post), is why Metcalfe's law is up there with Moore's law and not in the dustbin of other such "laws" where my Rodriguez law would most likely end up.
Because he is a bright guy with a biting sense of humor, Bob gets right to this in his post and manages to lampoon everything from Al "Mr. Internet" Gore, to the hundreds of bloggers who tracked back without realizing that there is a lot more humor his defense than serious meaty analysis. The title of the post, "Metcalfe’s Law Recurses Down the Long Tail of Social Networks," pretty much says it all right there but you can read into to post for even more fun.
(Incidentally, I am sure that those IEEE guys are distant relatives of the dudes who spent their last few minutes rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to make access to the bar easier)
If you really want to understand something more valuable about the nature of social networks, there are a couple of wonderful books that treat the subject fairly rigorously (the value of social networks). In the meantime, here's to the possibility that Bob may enter the blogosphere on a more permanent basis!
Tags:
embahs
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Aug. 31, 2006)
Ned has jumped into the fray on web application frameworks and this reminded me that just about a year ago when we were getting Tabblo off the ground, my head was spinning (or more specifically my laptop was) with every web framework known to man to see which one we'd begin with. At the time my thought was that we would use one of the frameworks to get started and then abandon it as we needed to scale the site to something beyond a prototype/early alpha.
So it's been a pleasant surprise to see that we've been able to stick with Django for the last year and even through a couple of massive spikes in traffic (something I am fairly sure that we would not have been able to do with some of the other contenders I considered so kudos to the Django guys).
However, Ned's post brought back all the memories of reading reams of commentary on all sides of web frameworks and passionate arguments around how "game changing" this or that was, and how software development was never going to be the same again. He does a good job of debunking most of this as the crap, so instead I just wanted to mention one of the greatest benefits I think we've seen from using a "fringy" framework like Django.
If you get passionate about your tools– passionate enough to try new things, get into the fray on the discussion, and always be looking critically at everything that comes down the pike, you're probably the type of engineer who thinks hard about tradeoffs and the "whys" behind decisions which means you are most likely also to do very well coming up with the right answers to some of the harder (softer) questions that Ned has on his post. In other words, getting people who are passionate about their web frameworks, especially when these frameworks are not part of the mainstream "career advancing" canon, is a great way to pre-select for the types of people who will thrive and do really well in small team environments. This isn't always true– and interestingly enough, as the tool/framework gains acceptance (something which should be considered a "good thing"), it's value as a preselector rapidly decreases (what Java monkey doesn't "totally love Ruby on Rails" these days?).
It reminds me of a story that I've heard third-hand about the way that Steve Jobs did recruiting at NEXT. When asked what he was looking for in hardware engineers, he supposedly said "engineers that understand surface mounted board assembly," and we he was asked why that specifically, his response was "it's easy: the best hardware engineers all want to work with surface mounted components, so that is why we want them." When I first heard this story I thought, what an idiot! but working in the Django ecosystem has taught me that this type of self selection can be much more beneficial to a startup than URL dispatchers, ORMs or any of the other stuff that comes with a web framework.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Sept. 2, 2006)
In the context of recent blogposts about pageviews being a silly metric, Google trying to entice its users into doing work on their behalf, and social bookmarkers getting paid to do what they used to do for free, Doc Searls has an important post on the coming age of the individual-in-the-driver's-seat when it comes to various different spheres of computing. Specifically, he makes the case for all of the web service providers giving up on Roach Motel 2.0 (where Roach Motel 1.0 was about keeping your data hostage, 2.0 is about trapping your metadata) and even cites the Tabblo-Flickr ecosystem as an example of the way in which data/metadata sharing can benefit both the user and the companies building stuff.
I am definitely not smart enough to follow all of the intricacies of the Attention Trust model or the Gesture Bank (around how the user can keep control of his metadata) but I did want to add one observation to Doc's argument: the reason why metadata is so important to the "vendors" he describes is because they are all wed to an advertising model that implies monetizing eyeballs. Though this "media model" is often shrouded in all sorts of false complexities, the core levers behind it are very simple: you need increasing returns in the ability to get more eyeballs (which is why raising switching costs is so important) and a deeper understanding of those eyeballs than any of the competition who might also have access to them. With those two things you get more inventory and have the ability to charge more for it.
While this model continues to work, I find it pretty difficult to believe that anyone is going to make significant inroads putting the user in charge of anything that so core to it's continued success. In our case, our primary business is around two forms of value capture: converting bits to atoms (specialty print) and offering the user premium services (subscriptions). In both of these cases the value proposition gets made directly to the enduser and so it behooves us to make sure we make them as happy as we've made Doc with his creative investment of 11K photos on Flickr and his tabblos on Tabblo.
At the end of the day, companies, like people, are motivated by incentives and constrained by the rules of the game they choose to play and I don't think that even Doc would fault them for that. It's only when the advertising model starts to evolve to take account of this (and I mean more than just AdWords-like evolution though I am by no means a media expert) that things will really start to change for the user on a mass scale.
One other related note on lock-in: people (investors, partners, etc.) have been asking since day one of Tabblo: where is your lock-in? I used to have a lame answer about network effects and user-generated content that I would give, rattling off comparable efforts like eBay's and MySpace's. I don't do that anymore. And the reason is because I came to the conclusion that looking for this type of lock-in is similar to adopting a revenue model that has a high probability of putting you at odds with your users. Instead, we prefer to focus on execution, and specifically on locking product development to user demands. Better integration with Flickr? Full-res downloads? We're happy to oblige under the working hypothesis that the talented creative class on the Net responds well to companies that take care of their needs and that– to Doc's point– cycles spent there create a deeper relationship between company and users– which may be the only kind of lock-in we'll all be left with at the end of the day.
Tags:
embahs
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 11 months ago (Sept. 3, 2006)
Good computer science canon teaches you that the specifics of the computer language you are using are at best "implementation details" and that if you grasp the key core components of computation (indirection, recursion, modularity, etc.) and are a good "computer scientist," it's just a matter of time before you're up to speed in anything from COBOL to OCaml. If this is true though, it's curious to see how many people have turned language choice into a more heated issue that the Red Sox versus Yankees one and how often it keeps coming up in flames and debates.
At the end of the day, I too would like to believe the theory that we are all just huge brains floating in jars full of jelly wired with electrodes and that external stimuli like syntax, core language constructs, whether there is an explicit compile step, static typing, etc. can just be adapted to by moving a few of the electrodes around. Unfortunately, experience just doesn't bear it out.
Which is why I found Luke Plant's tongue-in-cheek piece about how learning languages like Python and Haskell are making him less of a productive programmer such an entertaining read. For some reason, reading his C# code example made me think of all of those heinous years of programming in Java when I would be left with really ugly constructs like anonymous-inner classes-as-adapters or a horrific introspection API for faking late-binding code (and the fact that early Java heads would talk about how "elegant" these solutions were did not help my confidence at the time either). It's been two years since I've had to do that, and I can honestly say that I will probably never use Java again in any kind of serious project, or C# or any of the other similarly inspired languages (unless forced to under threat of starvation).
The reason is simple: working full-time in Python (and Javascript to some degree) rewires those brain electrodes in a really positive way (if your goal is fast development and deferring design decisions as long as possible which it should be for any web application developer; perhaps not so true for avionics engineers) and it would be both painful and counterproductive to go back at this point. Others have written extensively about this but the basic argument is that with an highly expressive, consistent, low-overhead language, you get a ton more time to think through the real problem. Conversely, another way to put it that is more in tune with my particular circumstances these days is that you need a lot less time to experiment and prototype.
So I feel for you Luke– I think if I had to still be writing the cruft that they've got you coding at work, I would also be less productive, but probably mostly from chewing my fingers down to stubs out of frustration. And to all of you computer science bigots with the "I can program in abacus if I have to" mentality– you know, the guys who say the One True Language is LISP even though the only time they've typed more than two parentheses in a row was when they were dabbling in ASCII art or who talk really fast about Turing-complete languages assuming that there is a 1-to-1 exchange rate between insight and speed of talking– to those guys, I look forward to getting you jobs with some of our competitors.
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 11, 2006)
Marshall over at TechCrunch has an interesting post on people online getting paid to participate on social media sites. This is a timely debate now for a couple of reasons:
First, the whole Netscape/Digg thing (with Jason Calcanis from Netscape offering to pay the top social bookmarkers) kicked off a lively debate on whether this could be a viable means to build momentum online that surfaced a very intriguing possibility. Perhaps it is because social news is such a narrow application, but I think that Jason is right in assuming that a few people properly incented can suck the oxygen out of competitors' sites and create a lot of momentum quickly. The more interesting question in my mind is whether this same tactic can be used for deeper/richer applications– that is, could you build a YouTube by paying the top contributors? An eBay? I tend to be skeptical of this, but if it is indeed possible, it may give all of these hungry VCs with their trigger-happy capital fingers an opportunity to put a lot of money to work fast.
Second, the debate is especially timely because of how many great producers of content there are out there in the world these days. Chris Anderson beats this to death in his Long Tail, so I will just contain myself to one observation. Whenever I fly across the continent, I bring along my video iPod chock full of content. I've got bought episodes of The Office, Lost, etc. but I've also go a number of video podcasts. Last Saturday while flying back from SF, I was struck by how much I enjoyed two particular pieces of content: The Office, and Ze Frank's The Show (maybe it's all about the simple noun names). As I crammed in 10 3 minute episodes, I realized for the first time I was looking at content that I would pay a premium subscription for. Now, if I had started on Ze Frank by being asked to pay, I very much doubt I would have– but now that I am hooked, I should be able to pay for him to keep working.
Micro-payments and micro-content and the holy grail that people have been chasing probably since long before Web 1.0– but for some reason, it feels like we may be getting there now. Sure Anderson is right in pointing to the tools and the aggregators in his book, but I wonder if there isn't something else at work– some sort of major shift in how producers/makers actually do stuff. There have been echoes of this in recent bestsellers like Friedman's flat world book or Richard Florida's creative class work, but I don't think anyone has actually come out and spelled out the fact that we're in the middle of a huge transition in terms of defining what "work" is, how it gets done, and how one gets compensated for it. Even Om is getting in on the fun with a great new blog concept on what the "web worker" is about. Taken to it's limit case, one could imagine a much more immersive experience (a la Stephen Levy's new piece on WoW) where work gets done in much the same way that WoW is played, by loosely coupled but tightly-knit guilds that take things happen one project at a time, sometimes for immediate material gain and sometimes for fun.
We definitely do live in interesting times.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 19, 2006)
I like output based business models. It's no secret that there is something special and extra nice about being at that point where bits get turned into atoms and then charging for the experience. It's simple, it's clean, and it leverages all sort of good things about computers (customization), the Internet (a channel), and technology (mass customization). Whether it's custom clothing, books-on-demand, or some of the other interesting things we've got planned at Tabblo, the era of mass customization is definitely here to stay.
Which is why it's been a little depressing to make the rounds in Silicon Valley over the last 12 months– at the epicenter of the Google AdWords inspired haze– and see people look blankly at me when I get going about the pleasure of actually making things. The world there has turned into a hammer made of eyeballs and just about everything looks like ad inventory. Today it looks like Yahoo is proving that even in virtual goods, the laws of supply and demand take effect– and when there is not enough demand (and too much supply), the market corrects. Is it the beginning of the end for this new mini Web 2.0 bubble? Doubtful, mostly because advertising is not going anywhere but online (though it may be quite slimmed its life there). But it is nice to see that we may get some attention paid to two other types of business models in the coming months: those that are output based and those that are subscription based. There are a lot of talented folks at the big media companies that have spent far too much good brainpower "enhancing ad inventory" or "maximizing click-through rates" and it is going to be nice to see these guys get into another groove for a while.
Case in point: Moo.com and their mass-customized businesscards, launched just today. A really nice, really light-weight application for repurposing your Flickr stream for a simple (and compelling) product. Photo-like businesscards aren't for everyone, but the experience of leveraging the investment made into Flickr for something completely physical will only get better over time and it's good to see Moo taking this first step.
Also, kudos to Flickr/Yahoo for letting this type of creative experimentation bloom on their platform. Because it has been non-core to their ad business, they've let folks like Moo (and us) experiment on top of their APIs without the onerous requirement that a revenue-sharing infrastructure might impose at this early stage. In my mind, this will be the greatest legacy of the online advertising boom– it has seeded the fields for what comes after it in much the same way that the PC software boom (and its associated hardware advances/commoditization) laid the groundwork for the open source movement and for cheap scale-out datacenter infrastructure.
And when the time is right, I've no doubt that we'll be able to give back to the folks that let us into the playground in an economically meaningful way.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 10 months ago (Sept. 30, 2006)
Much has been made of Jeff Bezos's talk this week at some MIT conference on web services, and specifically S3 (the storage service) and E2C (CPU service). Wade Roush from MIT Tech Review interviewed him and everyone who saw the interview felt compelled to announce to the world that all of us little startups need to move all of our backend processing and storage to Amazon's cloud. Even the ever present canary in the coal mine, Nick Carr, seemed relatively positive about it.
This just doesn't pass the smell test for me. I know that other little companies that I respect like SmugMug have raved, especially about S3 the storage service, but I have very real concerns about the viability and scalability of this approach and I certainly feel like any commercial companies that put a key piece of infrastructure under S3 are a bit like the test pilots who fly the monster jets that have previously only "flown" in simulation. [Disclosure: for big compute applications (which I am not familiar with) E2C may actually make sense so the rest of this post is really about S3, and any other infrastructure tier services like SQS).
First, anyone who has worked on a big website that has grown organically over a period of years knows just how rickety and duck-tapey the whole infrastructure can get. This has got to be especially true for Amazon which got started before we learned about how to scale on the web. And it's actually a fine thing for most sites– because just like the pilot who still flies mail routes on a DC-3 with bolts popping out of it, most sysadmins/developers at these big sites learn to put their hand on the fuselage and just know where the bolts might be about to pop.
However, I'm not sure that this institutional knowledge will export well across SLAs and web service APIs. More importantly, at the end of the day Amazon is a retailer that makes its money from selling stuff which necessarily means that all of its best and brightest are probably working on that side of the fence. Even if there is a small and talented group pushing the infrastructure web services initiative, they've still got to deal with 11 years of bolts that have have come loose and been tightened under the pressure of having to keep Amazon's site and sales up.
Second, people seemed to make a big deal out of the fact that Amazon has built infrastructure that is often at less than 10% utilization which must mean that they have plenty of capacity for third parties. But they certainly didn't build a system intending it to stay at 10% utilization– they've instead built all of this infrastructure to handle peak load at certain times of the year (say Christmas). What happens if as a consumer of AWS, your business cycle also peaks during the holidays (as most output-based businesses do including ours). When it's about serving your files or that gif of the Davinci Code, how is the decision made? And even if it's evenly distributed, do you really want your traffic to be mushed in the stream with the 35M people trying to buy last minute Christmas presents going through the app is best tailored to use these services? How many optimizations have the developers at Amazon put in that you just won't know about when the load spikes on that compute grid?
I don't want to sound like one of those off-the-grid guys who wants to produce his own electricity– however, I'm not sure I'd want to buy my electricity from Costco just because they have big generators at the back of their store that sit idle right until the middle of summer.
Finally, what really gets me about the whole proposition is not that it's a bad idea– it certainly makes a lot of sense to have services provided by infrastructure providers up in the cloud– but that it seems misguided in design and then promoted under false assumptions. If I were Amazon and wanting to get hardcore about the web services space, I would look at my assets and start from either my payment processing capabilities or my huge content archive of product and sales data. When Amazon launched its web service API (the one that let you get products and prices) a few years ago, I thought for sure this is where they were going, and so it comes as a surprise to see them now recasting themselves as an infrastructure utility computing player. Even extending into identity management (as Yahoo did this week) would make more sense from a core competency perspective.
And to the folks that argue that most of us building software are writing 5-10% of software that is truly value-add and 90-95% that is just rote, I would absolutely agree. However the right solution for this problem is open source, not managed services. It really doesn't take that much to go out and buy a rack at a tier-1 datacenter, shove some whitebox 1Us into it and install Linux/Apache/MySQL/YourFavoriteAppStack on it. And if you make a half decent set of stack choices, you'll be able to scale in much the same way that AWS will let you. The challenges come when you have to start getting deep into your infrastructure to understand how your particular application's workload puts stress on it, how you can rework pieces of both the app and the infrastructure to meet your scaling/costs needs.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 7, 2006)
Tim O'Reilly is right to point out how much of the hacking/Make attitude we can now start to take towards our devices thanks to every embedded CPU's inexorable march towards Internet connectivity. One category that I've been especially interested in for a while now is digital cameras because no matter what proponents of the uber mobile communicator tell me, cellphone cameras are still too closed, too blurry, and too painfully slow to make most of us even remotely happy with their output.
For some time now, the big pocket camera vendors have been experimenting with Bluetooth and 802.11b/g on a few of their models but most of these approaches have either been brain-dead (like the Kodak Easyshare One which only connects to Ofoto) or too cumbersome (like the Nikon Coolpix P1) to be worth the effort and compromise one had to make on the camera side of the equation. Which is why I was so interested while reading Katie's recent review in the Wall Street Journal of Nikon's S7c Coolpix wi-fi 7MP camera, and in particular, seeing her conclude that the whole wi-fi piece was actually quite usable. So I finally decided to go ahead and take the plunge and get a S7c... and have thus far been pleasantly surprised.
I'm not going to go into a review of the camera (see below for my tabblo doing just that) but wanted instead to focus on a couple of things that Nikon has done which are really smart from the perspective of this whole hacking your devices meme in the hope that others (hello Apple? Sony?) take notice.
First off, you should think of the camera as an open access point sniffer with a lens. Instead of forcing you to have a computer running a software client, or to pre-program a set of access points you want to use ahead of time, the S7c's wi-fi mode is set to start scanning for any access point that it can associate with. This is fabulous and exactly how every wi-fi device should work– instead of futzing around with WEP keys or preferred access points, the S7c just claws its way to a TCP connection and starts sending its pictures out into the ether. Another very nice touch that I am sure some Nikon biz dev guy deserves a steak dinner for is a deal with T-Mobile which gives you a free ride on their Starbucks network for 1 year. This costs T-Mobile nothing and adds a tremendous amount of value to the "platform" that Nikon is building here.
The second great thing Nikon has done is perhaps more important still– it has all but invited hackers into the image stream that the camera can emit. Officially, your pictures are uploaded to a site run by Nikon called nikonipcss.com (though its marketing name seems to be "Coolpix Connect") and an email is sent automatically to whoever you want that contains a link back to the Nikon site with an authentication token that automatically shows your guests the pictures you've uploaded through the camera. To say that the Coolpix site is spare is an understatement but what it lacks in flash it more than makes up in usability. First, no passwords required (the token takes care of that), and second (unlike most photo sites operated by output vendors or mobile phone operators) there is no clutter dedicated to selling you other junk or reminding you that you are trapped in some Sony/Verizon silo where the price of entry entails roach-moteling your data.
But the best part of the whole Nikon experience for me was how easy it was to hack the site and wrap an API around getting my photos out. Having spent a good many hours writing screen scrapers to fight the roach-motel model across different types of sites, I sat down this morning to figure out how to marry the S7c's cool new wi-fi features to our own auto-tabblos (basically a tabblo with an email address that can receive pictures and/or text for automatic inclusion) armed with Firebug and the desire to set my data free. Forty-five minutes later I was done and pushing a plug-in into our email processing infrastructure that can take the Nikon Coolpix emails in one side and end up with the actual assets in your tabblo on the other. Now it's just a few hours later and everyone using Tabblo gets S7c import for free– just create an auto-tabblo and send your Coolpix email to the auto-tabblo's address. [ If you are interested in this for yourself, email me– depending on interest level, I may go through the effort of factoring out the Tabblo dependencies to release it as a stand-alone Python module ]
I haven't talked to Nikon formally about this whole effort but given that the Coolpix site erases your pictures after two weeks (and given that I don't think they are in the business of building advanced AJAX multi-format layout engines), I suspect that they will be ok with my efforts to build on the platform they've put out there. After all, I am now excited by new camera and its possibilities and will recommend it to all of the folks who've asked me in the past about getting one of these w-ifi cameras to route around the issues with cellphones and photos.
Notice that Nikon doesn't have to spend the time and energy developing a nice Flickr-like API in order for folks like us to do this– they just have to make a device/platform that provides enough value (which their camera + access point sniffer + T-Mobile subscription certainly does) and then simply not make stupid decisions that would foreclose experiments like this on the part of hackers. Because the truth is that it wouldn't have been too hard for them to make this a much more involved project (for a good example of this, try hacking on Shutterfly or Ofoto).
Doc Searls (who is a friend and advisor to Tabblo) has recently begun talking and blogging about the need to create photography 2.0 out of an ecosystem of players who all add value around the user's data– with new formats, products, services, etc. He often uses Flickr's open data API and our integration as an example of such a model but the part of his speech that I like the best– and which also scares me the most– is when he starts talking about how the big photo 1.0 players like Eastman Kodak don't see it this way because of their need to maintain "silos of control." For me, this Nikon thing is a good example of a big player who gets it– or at least is willing to let others experiment while they sit back and try to sort it all out.
By the way, if you want my thoughts on the S7c as a camera:
Tags:
geeks
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 9 months ago (Oct. 26, 2006)
Ev, who I find to be as intellectually honest as anyone I've ever met in the Internet sphere, has decided that the venture model is not right for Odeo and bought out his investors to create a more experimental, nimbler company. Or perhaps he saw that the podcast runway wasn't quite long enough for the big old airplane his VCs had saddled him to reach V2 and not crash. Either way, it takes balls to do what he is doing and I bet there is more than one funded entrepreneur out there right now scratching his head and saying, wow wouldn't it be nice to try that?
And in some ways it would. But I am a little struck by the fact that what he's doing with the new company (Obvious) is turning it into something that looks a lot like 37Signals. I can understand why 37signals wanted to do this— as a consulting shop without outside capital, they had little other choice. But for a company with no consulting clients to disengage and enough capital in the bank, setting up a "lab-like" structure with the general mandate "build webapps" seems to be a strange choice.
There is great benefit to come from focus, especially for those projects that require more than 2 engineers and 3 days. And external constraints are a good thing for creativity— even the best artists tell you that the clashes between the limitations of their medium and their intent is where most of the good stuff happens. Without deadlines and ship dates (the website kind not the packaged software kind), or external dependencies to other parts of a company (marketing/biz dev./the BOD), it's hard to see how any constraints can be enforced. The lab thing smells of the R&D labs of places like Microsoft and Yahoo (though supposedly Google has cracked the code on how to do this right) and it makes me wonder whether the outcome might not be similar— lots of smoke and no fire.
In looking for the why? behind this new structure, I found this part of his blog post:
Nearly everyone I know in the Internet business is either at one of the giants, wishing they were at a startup, or at a startup that hopes get bought by a giant.
...and later...
The consumer web is increasingly hits-driven and increasingly crowded, which makes it more difficult to predict what's going to work.
to be most telling.
Ev is describing the Hollywood model where a studio backs two dozen movies in the hopes that one will hit it big and cover all of the flops. The way I see it, he's basically saying: no one can tell what the difference between a Star Wars and an Ishtar is but we know we want a hit with the consumers, so we've got to try a lot of stuff. I sort of agree with his statement that it's hard to know ahead of time what the megahits are going to be— but I am bummed to see that in this day and age of cheap innovation on the web, we're all stuck with the hits-driven model.
Why? Because, first of all, getting to 10MM users should not be the only path to success. And secondly, a web service is not like a studio movie in one critical way: if it sucks at launch, the web as a medium allows you to rip it apart and put it back together so that it does work for its natural audience. A movie is a piece of media you finish and ship— a website is a process of learning from your users and the limits of your medium.
I think this unfortunate mindset comes back to business models. We're back in the eyeballs game except that now the world is dominated AdWords which means that it's even less profitable than it used to not to be at some large enough scale where you can afford to own (or be owned by someone who owns) the ad network. And without the opportunity for other types of business models that work at lesser scales, everyone is going to be stuck going for the next MySpace or hoping to fool some big megacorp into thinking that there might be a small chance that they will someday become the next MySpace.
An example of the opportunities this mentality squelches: I liked Odeo a lot— I thought there were a lot of things that they did which were much better than what iTunes did. As a paying member of Audible (a much worse website for finding and acquiring audio), I would have gladly switched over to pay for an Odeo premium subscription if they had just added some more types of licensed content. Now I realize that people don't generally like to think of subscriptions as a viable business model on the web today but one good thing about charging for a service is that revenue grows linearly with the user base which means that the business doesn't have to get to 10 million actives before it can make some nice money. Ditto for e-commerce models, or mass-customized output models.
Good luck to the Obvious guys— but let's hope that as part of the experimentation, the play around with some of the businessmodel constraints that got them there in the first place.
Tags:
buddies
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 13, 2006)
Markoff had the scoop on the next tidalwave of innovation on the Internet with front page puff piece in sunday's New York Times on the coming Web 3.0— a vast interconnected fabric of machines that understand each other and do our bidding so that we can schedule vacations, buy cars, and do all sorts of neat things with preciously little input on our part. Good times.
If you suspend disbelief for a moment on the possibility that you would want to ever have a machine buy me a car or book me a vacation without the level of time that you normally invest in doing those things today, I think the best way to tell that the piece is lightweight— and more importantly that it probably has the predictive power of lottery ticket— is to go into the time machine and look at Apple's Knowledge Navigator concept video from the 1980s and see how much of this Web 3.0 vision is just rehashing a very sexy idea that people trot out (like Sculley did then) when they are lacking a real actionable vision.
To be fair, it probably going to happen someday (along with flying cars and matter replicators) but so far in the future that it seems silly to be writing now about how this is what's coming after Web 2.0. Of all of the discussion that followed the article, my favorite take on it was Ross Mayfield's which simply stated: it's about the people stupid, and not about the super smart computers that reason.
While everyone else was busy working on all sorts of flux capacitor-like algorithms for processing the vast array of data on the web, Google proved that a conceptually simple algorithm for intelligently using key metadata could build enough value to unseat huge incumbents. Even today, the blogosphere gets all abuzz about startups that try to take on ridiculously hard computer science projects and productize them in the short time usually allowed by the venture model (even when it doesn't seem to work) and instead ignore incremental efforts to make what we have better and more usable.
It's easy to understand the power of "the story" around machines that truly reason— after all science fiction has trained us for the last 60 years that this eventuality is going to bring with a whole universe of interesting possibilities— so it's understandable that Markoff would know the Times readers would eat this up. What is not so great is when the air is sucked out of the discussion because of fluffy proclamations about "Web 3.0" and the ensuing raging debate about whether we are there yet or not. It's overload and has three direct casualties that I can see:
There are people out there doing very interesting things around a lot of what could eventually really help the coming of this future that science fiction writers have been writing about, most notably anyone involved in microformats work. These guys are doing great stuff but it's going to be very incremental, and as such, it's important that we neither rush them nor discourage them.
If you pull the bread out of the oven too soon, it simply will not have risen enough and you'll get a gooey mess. Tim O'Reilly's brilliance in coining Web 2.0 wasn't in the what but in the when. For a variety of reasons, he just nailed the timing at exactly the right moment. Peter Rip talks about Noah Spivak's company being "outed" too early which I am sure is not an isolated incident.
While understandable, the shoot-for-the-moon science project approach to big stories can sometimes cause all of us little people who work hard for our coverage to take our eye off the ball (A social photo site that doesn't implement groups for 3 months because there are "cooler" things to do?!?).
We as entrepreneurs, makers, power users, and gadflies need to stay focused on what is achievable and what actually brings value to users in measurable increments of time. From that perspective it might be better if John would stick to covering research labs in universities (which he does mention), or better still, covering something like the transport of matter through information streams.
Tags:
digerati
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 19, 2006)
As I was looking at Techmeme today in order to refresh our sponsorship link, I noticed that the absolute rage this weekend is the "leaked" memo by Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinhouse about how the company has no focus, is too fat, and most importantly, is trying to do too many things at once (and is thus spread "thin like peanut butter"). There must be hundreds of bloggers linking to the 2-3 main threads playing out over this public mea culpa, and for the most part there seems to be consensus around this notion that there are far too many redundancies in the projects that the company is pursuing.
I don't buy it. It's particularly interesting to see this piece come out just two weeks after everyone applauded Ev for relaunching Odeo as a sort of modern-day incubator because of his belief that it was just too hard to predict the hits a priori. Why can't this same reasoning be used to justify the co-existence of Yahoo Photos and Flickr, Delicious and MyWeb? After all, if Ev is right, and the home runs are too hard too spot up front, what a company like Yahoo needs to do is adopt a portfolio model where each property becomes an investment buying for the eyeballs and hours of potential users— to say nothing of the fact that it is not clear that there are not distinct non-overlapping audiences for some of the "competing" properties. They may be too slow to kill off the losers, and the company may in fact be over-run by middle management embahs that lack the cojones required to make big strategic bets, but if the Odeo learning is right, the fundamental portfolio plan for big hits seems pretty sound to me.
Except that I think that part of what is killing Yahoo is that they've gotten themselves cross-wise to the grain of the web. That term comes from Paul Graham's essay defining Web 2.0 when he applied it to describe why success seems so friction-free for Google while other similarly-sized companies (Yahoo) seem to struggle in the brave new Web 2.0 world. Because of their roots, because of this huge Damocles sword hanging over their heads every night at 12:00AM (just one billion page views to go before the clock rolls again!), and maybe even because it is staffed by Hollywood types, Yahoo can't escape this "hits-based" approach to building destinations on the web.
And yet, if there is one thing we can say about Web 2.0 is that to truly add value, people building applications, communities, etc. need to think less like bricks and more like mortar. When the web was new, getting big was all that mattered, and even with the recent MySpace-inspired frenzy, misguided M&A folks have felt that building the biggest pile of bricks was the only path to winning. This notion more than anything else is what is guiding Yahoo's current portfolio model— buying companies and hoping that a few of them can turn out to be big bricks with little in the way of direct investment post-merger and alignment within an overall strategic vision.
Meanwhile Google, with its syndicatable AdWords service and bottomless appetite for crawling even the most miniscule of sites, is showing us again and again that mortar really pays the bills (not necessarily though that they are any better at acquiring companies). Someone recently told me that 40% of requests for YouTube streams are requested from a non-YouTube site (thanks to the embeddable YouTube widget)— a statistic which, if true, is the ultimate affirmation of the services-as-mortar model that Google seems so good at pursuing.
Interestingly, a couple of Yahoo's more popular recent acquisitions have been great mortar plays— Flickr and delicious. The unfortunate thing seems to be that as soon as these little mortar players get under the purple umbrella their mandate seems to change to building big bricks in order to justify the eventual "monetization strategy."
I am sure there are many things currently plaguing Yahoo that have nothing to do with this brick-and-mortar metaphor— I mention it only because it seems to be a decent way to think through a more coherent (and timely) strategy for making something out of the sticky mess that Yahoo is currently facing.
Tags:
digerati
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 8 months ago (Nov. 26, 2006)
Web 2.0 as a concept many flaws in it, but one of these is not the "the dictatorship of the presentation layer" as described by Bill Thompson in his post on Web 2.0 and Tim O'Reilly as Marshall Tito. A nice turn of phrase perhaps— but as we say in Spanish: "mas flojo que un mojon mojado" as far as the argument goes.
The whole fallacy starts when Thompson characterizes AJAX (one of the cornerstones of Web 2.0) as the:
answer for developers who want to offer users a richer client experience without having to go the trouble of writing a real application.
Not true. Having just spent the last year and a half building a content creation tool that is 100% browser-based and "AJAX powered," and having just this weekend* matched the level of functionality that I spent the 2.5 years before that building into "real applications," I can attest to the fact that the AJAX version is easily an order of magnitude harder to write than a native Win32/Mac OS application. You've got to deal with runtimes that are all a little bit different, you've got to deal with server roundtrips, network latency, and a protocol that is (despite the best intent of XmlHttpRequest) straw-thin and dumb simple. You've got scalability, concurrency, memory footprint, and a badly baked-in set of user affordances (hello, Back button?). And when you're done with all of that, you've got a ADD-inspired user that will spend about 5 seconds trying to figure out what you app is about before riding a hyperlink out never to return again. If mitigating risk in the face of complexity were the main goal, I would take scaling algorithms and Thompson's "message passing between distributed objects" any day over the primordial soup that all of us working to build rich Internet applications in open and extensible ways swim in every day. Hands down.
Put simply, AJAX is not about easier GUIs and cool effects. What makes the suite of associated bits known as AJAX (and specifically DOM manipulation and asynchronous server calls) so important is that it is mashable, transparent, and most importantly, late-binding in the way that it can be recombined post-facto to build value the original application designer never intended. Witness the huge explosion in innovation that Google Maps brought to the world after it was launched.
If it was just about easier GUIs, we'd all be using Flash— much more controlled runtimes and much easier debugging. But Flash is terrible for what makes Web 2.0 special because it lacks the two great enabling attributes of AJAX: "View source" (and all of the associated shallow ramp that comes with it) and IPC (Inter Process Communication) facilitated via the webpage. I'm sure the Adobe guys are not stupid and are working hard to fix this— but with AJAX as it now stands, we've already got it, and it makes the absolute pain in the ass that it is to build rich interactive applications out of what was fundamentally conceived of as a display render worth it.
Thompson's piece is fairly light-weight and so I found myself wondering why it irked me so. And then I realized why— because I've spent too much time in lecture halls and at conferences listening to the architecture astronauts talk about the "real computer science—" time I would gladly trade for more time with guys like the hackers at Tabblo who work very hard to make less than ideal technologies like AJAX sing.
Tags:
embahs
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 8 months ago (Dec. 2, 2006)
James Surowiecki, who wrote 2004's fascinating book, The Wisdom of the Crowds, has a great piece in this week's New Yorker on Nintendo's strategy with their new Wii game console where they are clearly ceding the #1 and #2 positions (by volume) to Sony and Microsoft but still managing to squeeze out a nice place/profit despite being #3. It's a great read for anyone interested in the dynamics of marketshare but especially good for the lemming investors/entrepreneurs/analysts who cover the web space and talk about the importance of "being the biggest," or "being at scale relative to the competitors."
This whole #1 or #2 thing started when Jack Welch, head alpha business monkey and super chief executive from GE, declared that if his company wasn't #1 or #2 in every market segment they competed in, he was pulling the team and exiting the business (covered in Surowiecki's piece). General managers in all sorts of industries then took to this notion in droves and started applying it broadly. What most people missed however, was that Welch was referring mainly to industrial goods businesses where there are huge up front capital costs that have to be amortized over a limited number of purchases very quickly. When you build a turbine factory for example, there are about 18 buyers in the world for your stuff and if you can't get decent marketshare in the segment, you fixed costs quickly become the death of you.
Not so in just about every other industry, and especially, service or content businesses. A few years ago at the D conference, Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs what the difference was between being the CEO of a computer company and being CEO of a movie company. I expected a total puff answer but was surprised to hear Jobs talk pointedly about the difference between zero sum market places and non-zero sum ones, and specifically talk about the different industry dynamics when you're out choosing an Apple over a Dell (either/or) as opposed to seeing Antz and A Bug's Life. According to him, managing a non-zero sum business (including people, projects, strategy, and tactics) was a disaster waiting to happen— which is why this piece in the New Yorker should be required reading for the take-the-market embahs looking for the next eBay opportunity.
Notwithstanding the rallying cries of the attention folks, most of the businesses we are in are far from zero-sum. I would argue that the closer a purchase of a good or service gets to emotion as an underlying driver, the further away it gets from Welch's #1/#2 model of survival because by definition is is far from zero sum.
While Surowiecki does not make this same zero-sum argument for why the Nintendo is in a great place with its Wii strategy (he prefers to focus on the classic serving an unserved segment argument), it is nice to see that implicitly the company's strategy is an affirmation of the Jobs statement on competitive dynamics. I'm no console gamer (I think I was more in the Apple ][ generation) but I do love talking to them and fantasizing about how someday a modern-day console may win me over like Myst/Zelda/Castle Wolfenstein did in years past (the only 3 computer games that have ever sucked me in deep), and what I've been gathering about the Wii is that even the most die-hard Xbox/PS3 folks are eager to get one both because it is cheap and because it provides a whole new axis for game play despite its underpowered hardware and lack of cutting edge features.
Go rising tide that lifts all boats!
Tags:
digerati
I'm a VC at Matrix Partners living in the Boston area. I've started some stuff, worked at some
places, and I love making things.
