I've never been a huge fan of the term "live web," often used to signify all of the quasi-realtime communications streams that let people swarm and collaborate around particular issues. But it is in fact the combination of these plus Google that have made hacking on things much more interesting. The great collaborative outboard brain makes everything easier and better.
I remember exactly 10 years ago this summer discovering Linux, and more importantly, how because of the tech savvy communities around various parts of it, Linux made UNIX not suck anymore. If some byzantine feature got you tripped up, no matter how arcade, there were always loads of places to turn to for help, without counting Alta Vista and Google which were themselves magical oracles on all of these topics.
If you want a reminder of what it was like to say, deal with Solaris or Windows NT, have a look at what iPhone development is. Outside of some high gloss Apple documentation, and one paltry mailing list, you're stuck figuring it all out for yourself (which I think helps to explain why the current crop of AppStore apps are so mediocre in quality).
Come on Apple, don't go against the grain of the web...
Apparently clouds dissipate because of two primary reasons: because the air temperature rises or because the moisture in the cloud falls. When it comes to the metaphorical cloud that is Internet-scale computing, this past week seems to have given us both.
The temperature of the air started rising with the much awaited launch of the iPhone 3G, and more importantly, Apple's foray into cloud services with its MobileMe productivity suite. Stumbling through scaling issues, synchronization problems, and general uptime challenges, the company started by two Steves under the "one man, one machine" mantra proved yet again that providing scalable server-based platforms is a whole different challenge from creating intuitive and edible interfaces and devices, and that maybe— just maybe— we ought to leave that work to the pros.
And just as all of us were turning MobileMe off, and reverting to our trusty old Gmail accounts, Google goes and shows us just how fast the moisture is dissipating with its most disappointing quarter to date. AdWords— the best model to date for subsidizing cloud infrastructure— does not appear immune to general economic woes. To add insult to injury, some people are out declaring that software-as-service businesses have to "slog it out" to build sustainable advantage, and predictable revenue streams.
To all of this I say: meh. While Apple may never be a truly credible purveyor of cloud services (along with a host of other big tech companies including the one I work for), some infrastructure players will figure it out— slog or no slog— and help us transition to this next phase of computing. And for the business model hiccups? This is a 10 year transition at the very least, and and such it is marathon and not the kind of sprint that has yielded such great speculative financial bubbles.
Posted by Antonio
1 week, 6 days ago (July 11, 2008)
Engadget's "International Launch Lineblog" reminds me of those hopelessly feel-good early 1970s/80s Coca-Cola commercials where the company would play that "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" song and show scenes of people from all over the world running in fields and smiling at babies. It's a pretty awesome cultural event when you think about it— around the world today, loads of people from all over the world are going to be getting in line to get their own piece of the Apple magic.
On the other hand, it kind of makes me wonder whether it is only through such a consumerist activity that we can have shared cultural events these days. I guess buying stuff has taken over the role of religion and even media as the great cultural shared substrate?
Hmm, well between that and the low battery life, I'm not sure the iPhone 3G is for me...
Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 2 days ago (July 7, 2008)
I've held off writing this post for a while, mostly because I was afraid it would seem like too much inside baseball for me to talk about how photo sites (which Tabblo attempted to be a superset of) basically still suck almost a decade after the first one launched. But the combination of recent usability testing I attended with my own frustrations using Tabblo and Flickr have overflowed the dam of self-restraint, so here goes.
Three Major ways in which photo sharing sites still suck
Most photo sites are still not geared towards pleasing the most important user, the person giving you their valuable time to see yet another album of your kids doing X, Y, or Z. Why is it that the predominant model for consuming photos online is a contact sheet interface (a grid of X by Y photos) along with a clickable "large" version that is often way too small? Sometimes you might get a half decent slideshow too, though these are very un-webby, and after you've seen 2 of any one theme, you've seen them all.
It is interesting that back in the day when Tabblo could freely call itself a photo site, this is the reaction I'd get from people when I'd talk about this consumption interface challenge: 20% of users would get it right away but 80% of people would give me this "huh?!?" look which was meant to make me feel loony. Here is the example I'd use to escape from Loontown: imagine that you bought a copy of National Geographic but instead of the beautifully art directed layouts of the articles, you'd have all the text of the piece followed by a number of contact sheets of all of the photography followed by a page per photo of all of the individual pictures. How many issues would you subject yourself to before canceling the subscription?
Most photo sites don't have fast enough interfaces for the author, especially around photo organization/selection: Try dealing with a collection of 25,000 images to get all of the pictures of a family member for a birthday. The best of the desktop applications can barely do this (and those are the GPU accelerated ones) to say nothing of how far behind the websites are. And manual tagging is only going to take us so far as it is in effect one of many kludges that enable batch operations (a poor substitute for snappy direct manipulation and search).
On this particular challenge, I would have thought that we would have made more progress by now, but as it turns out, I think most people see the assets stored/created on a photo site as a read-only projection of their photo library which tends to live on their home computer. This allows users to leverage the storage/CPU of the local machine for the heavy lifting, and use the web for sharing and output fulfillment. Apple's iPhoto is perhaps the best example of this: books, cards, and calendars can be assembled 100% on the client out of the entire photo library, and manufactured through a set of partner services. This makes activities like collaborative editing and composition more difficult (though not impossible), and sharing is at best very vanilla on dot mac these days, but it may just be something we have to live with, especially because...
Upload of photos is still horrendously broken, and getting more so as image resolution increases. This is what made me think of this topic in the first place again. Watch a novice user uploading photos and you will get all sorts of understandable errors at the boundary of the desktop and web metaphors. They will drag pictures into the browser window and have them open locally. The will go looking on the website for their C: drive. And perhaps most alarming, often times they will not know how to find their images on the local filesystem in the first place (which points to how expired the desktop metaphor is). Watch an advanced user and you will literally see the hair falling out of their head as they deal with the challenge of sucking a watermellon through a straw (the physical equivalent of uploading 12MP images via a 300kbps asymmetric cable connection). While there are solutions to this problem (a software agent running on your PC uploading everything, wi-fi camera cards, etc.), most of them fall short due to intermittent connections and the challenge of organizing/finding photos once they are living online (see above).
Until we as an industry (camera makers, browser vendors, OS vendors, output vendors, etc.) fix these problems, photo sites are going to remain relegated to the backwater of 4x6 production while the rich hybrid solutions (of which only iPhoto really works) continue to take output share while not really advancing the state of photo sharing. It's a shame too because of how inherently social story telling via photos could be.
Posted by Antonio
2 weeks, 3 days ago (July 6, 2008)
Good piece in a well-named InfoWorld blog, "Fatal Exception," on how all of this emphasis on richer UIs for web applications may be unwittingly forcing the web away from what made it great in the first place. Maybe it is the fact that I've been reading Zittrain's book this weekend about how our taste for glossy devices/experiences is causing us to unkonwingly eff up the generative (open) nature of the Internet (ironically, I am reading the book on my very closed Amazon Kindle), but with all of the Silverlight/Flex/GWT stuff landing inside our browsers these days, I tend to agree. Basta to the ever increasing richness of client applications inside the web browser.
Here is an example: there is a new web application called Flowgram that everyone keeps pointing to as the next twist on screencasting. Through a combination of Flash and URL refreshing, you can be taken on a tour of a set of "live" web pages that are clickable and whose embedded objects can be interacted with. Seems pretty cool right?
No, actually it is kind of annoying. Sometimes you just want to dive into the content at your own speed, in your own way and yet, from what I've seen of this seems all but impossible in Flowgram. Despite the fact that there is a timeline scubber thing you can use to jump around, the refreshes are far too slow— far slower than it would be to just load the underlying sites. For instance, I have been looking forward to seeing/watching/reading a presentation on Facebook's photo-related infrastructure, but because I've only found it on Flowgram, I've abandoned it twice, probably never to return again.
The web is great because it is so lightweight— let's try to make sure we don't throw that particular baby out with the bath water.
Tomorrow: why photo sharing sites still suck (including the one we built).
Posted by Antonio
3 weeks, 3 days ago (June 30, 2008)
This year at the D conference Michael Dell was asked whether he was worried that the shift towards cloud computing would affect his PC business. Despite not usually seeming like a visionary, Dell gave a great answer. He said that over the last 20 years, every time bandwidth increases, it was his observation that so did the need for processing power on both sides of the pipe, and that because of that, he felt pretty good about the future of his PC business.
Just look at the iPhone or the N95, two mobile phones that pack a tremendous amount of processing power per ounce of weight. Despite being even more suited a a class to offload work to servers in the cloud, smart phones as a category seem to be growing more powerful in their display technology (hardware accelerated video), processing technology (Intel Atom), and general peripherals (5MP cameras, GPSes). Not only are these devices being packed to the gills with more transistors than a mid 1990s PC, but developers are rushing to PC-like development environments like the iPhone's and Google's Android to take advantage of the additional horsepower instead of just writing web applications for the increasingly more powerful web browsers that come with these things.
And it is not just about local processing power; the latest issue of Wired has what will no doubt become a classic piece by Kevin Kelly on the emergent distributed 12-million-teraflop computer that all of our gizmos are getting wired up to make. In the piece, there is a great chart that quantifies the shipped quantities of various different devices with CPUs at their core: from PCs to DVRs, from cellphones to cameras.
Now everyone knows that there are roughly 3 times more cellphones than PCs in the world today, but the stat that I found more interesting is that there are 44 times more PCs out in the wild than servers. Though I realize that it is probably difficult to define what a "server" is in today's world of quad-core x86 machines, the magnitude of that difference brought to mind the delta between storage at the client tier (in offices, in people's homes, at school), and the storage "in the cloud" (i.e., S3).
Even if you assume that the typical x86 server has 13x more storage than the typical PC (a terabyte of addressable storage versus a measly 80GB because you have to factor in the installed base more for the PCs), you are still talking about something on the order of about 100 million petabytes for the client tier and less than a third of that for the cloud tier.
Anyone who has tried to back up a photo collection to a cloud service like .Mac, to say nothing of a music or video collections, knows this at a gut level. The challenges with storage in the client tier have always been consistent addressability and reliability, but in a replicated and distributed world (a la Kelly's megacomputer), we might just be able to make better use of all of those petabytes.
Processing and storage made the PC revolution the juggernaut that it has been. It is why we've come to expect the interactivity native application developers running into the smart phone space are clamoring for, and it's why the dark matter of today's computing environment is composed of billions of hard drives, powered and accessed in a massively distributed way.
It is going to be a while before the cloud catches up with that (datacenter economics and bandwidth being what they are), and until it does, we might all be careful of falling elephants.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (June 8, 2008)
I am going out to California tomorrow and if all goes well, I'll be dropping by the keynote at WWDC to see what goodies Apple has in store for us. Last time I went to one of these, one of the most fun parts of the experience was trying to get the word out to friends and family back home in real time— the rabid Apple fans— about what was being announced by Steve on stage. I quickly discovered that Wi-Fi is totally useless at these events (because everyone else is trying to do the same thing), and that the only truly reliable messaging layer was SMS which really meant that all I could do in terms of group broadcast was Twitter. However during Macworld back in January Twitter dropped 50-70% of my updates and duplicated a bunch of the ones that made it through, no doubt because everyone else sitting in Moscone was in the process of trying to do the same.
I am quickly discovering that Twitter just doesn't cut it, not only because of its scaling problems (especially around events like these), but because I've got a lot of people in my life that have no interest in joining Twitter, and even when they do, find it difficult to stay engaged. These folks do come to read this blog though, so tomorrow's experiment is going to be to use the Onda as a sort of Twitter stream.
To do this, I wired in a web service called Textmarks into this blog. Essentially Textmarks provides a neat gateway between SMS and http where you can send a text with a keyword that can fetch the contents of a URL for automated replies. My current plan is to text short messages that will then become blog post titles with no bodies. This should create a Twitter-like experience for anyone using an RSS reader, and for those that don't, a simple refresh of the main page of the blog ought to provide a running stream.
I thought about having each of the SMSes update just one blog entry to minimize the noise on my RSS feed, but it occurred to me that this would break the way that RSS is supposed to flow content around the network. Also, asking people to subscribe to an RSS feed tied to one blog post seems a little goofy.
Instead where I decided to get was in adding an email-to-post mechanism where I can send an email with a photo and some text to a particular Gmail account that then generates a blog entry with the picture parked at Amazon's S3 (I could have used Flickr but wanted to play around with S3). Most mainstream blogging platforms have email-to-blog so there is nothing really novel in this (we had a little-publicized feature at Tabblo that did something similar that I loved, however it didn't survive the move into HP's datacenter); what really struck me about the exercise though was how relatively simple it is to wire together all of these pieces. In a couple of hours it was easy to speak IMAP to Gmail to get my photo and text out, use S3's relatively straight-forward HTTP interface to deposit the image, get a fast and (hopefully) reliable Textmarks SMS-to-web bridge and composite the whole thing as an entry into my blog for general consumption. For distribution, RSS does the rest. As a nice bonus, I've also used the Twitter API to put pointers to the stuff that will go up here into my Twitter account, though in a non-blocking way as the service will most likely suffer another outage tomorrow.
In this great new world of the web, these experiments are relatively cheap. Most will fall way short of being useful, but I suspect that it is only by messing around with all of these pieces in a loosely coupled way that we'll bump into something really interesting.
Posted by Antonio
1 month, 3 weeks ago (May 27, 2008)
It's easy to hate wireless carriers but in the world of Internet-connected smart devices, their investment in ubiquitous data networks is enviable, despite whatever the tree-hugging wifi-for-everyone folks might want to believe. Because— as is always the case in the consumer space— it comes back to user experience.
I wanted the wifi devices to win but mostly because I can't stand the notion of physical objects that we buy coming with a subscription. However, the Amazon Kindle (about which I will have loads more to say over the coming months) shows device manufacturers a potential path forward: lock down the user's ability to abuse the network and absorb the wholesale price the carrier must be charging in the price of the device. The Kindle benefits from an annuity business model of its own (as a user you have to keep buying books for it to remain useful) so Amazon is well positioned to take the risk of eating the subscription cost up front, but we are beginning to see other examples where device makers are willing to bundle the cost of the data subscription up front.
Take my favorite recent example as evidence that even a low bandwidth ubiquitous cell connection really makes all the difference. When the Chumby came out, I jumped at the chance to get one, mostly because it seemed like such a cool idea (open source hardware that was "Internet native" through its Wi-Fi radio). However, despite the promise of a blank screen that could be programmed with as many channels of content as I could imagine, there were product limitations that quickly reduced Wallace (you get to name your Chumby) to a screen about the local weather forecast sitting right above my bathroom mirror. Unfortunately, every couple of weeks, Wallace had a bad habit of falling off of the wireless network, partly because of the product's betaness (recent firmware upgrades have made this a little better), but indubitably also because my wireless network is just not that reliable.* And every time it did, I'd look up to see the weather only to be slapped by the Chumby equivalent of the BSOD, a message telling me that it had lost Internet connectivity.
When this happens to a laptop, it is a problem that gets fast attention due to the fact that there are often a bunch of other activities taking place that require a working Internet connection. Single purpose appliances don't have this luxury though— they need to just work and when they don't, they are no longer appliances but IT hassles.
Enter the Brookstone Weather Wizard, made by a local company called Ambient Devices which has become an expert in low bandwidth Internet-connected devices. It is uglier, less capable, and much less cool than the Chumby, but at half the price, it does a brilliant job of serving its single function well. And best of all, it comes out of the box "networked" (the only change I had to make was to tell it that I was not in Providence but in Cambridge). In fact as a user, I don't even have to care how it gets its data which makes it such an easy replacement for all of the meteorological gizmos that came before it.
Interestingly enough, Ambient used to sell their devices along with a subscription, a model which ensured that an Ambient Orb that had been given to me at a conference became instantly dispensable the moment I wanted to display data I had to pay a recurring fee for.
If I was looking into getting into the MVNO business (the companies who buy wireless network access at wholesale to brand it for specific audiences, a la the now defunct Amp'd), I'd look into setting one up that could take some of this subscription risk out of the equation for manufacturers of devices by selling a embeddable radio with a given level of bandwidth for lifetime connectivity at one fixed fee. The economics of an MVNO might make this impossible, so perhaps it would have to be one of the core wireless providers that takes this approach. But as the mainstream consumer moves towards the higher speed 2.5G/3G wireless networks with their mobile phones, there might be an opportunity to flat price all of the old GPRS capacity that is being freed up. And for most appliances, this might be plenty of bandwidth.
While the embedded video clip has become as common as the animated GIF, littering webpages with colorful bits of video that help to make a point or add color to a blog post. Unlike text however, most rich media suffers from a the linear consumption problem; that is, if what you are doing is scanning quickly, the various bits of rich media become speedbumps in the path of grazing the underlying content. In some cases, the video is really worth stopping for, but in most you end up feeling like you want those 3 minutes back in your life.
For a while now I've thought that this proliferation of linearly consumed media would mean that rich recommendation systems were going to be making a comeback (hello collaborative filters!), but in order to do so, they'll actually have to work (a dubious proposition), and more importantly, we'll need to find a sub-URL way to indicate ratings in a open way that can be used as input by the various recommendation algorithms.
Another approach which I've recently seen used to great success is the mixing of the rich media with solid scannable navigation aids and pointers into timecodes in the video, so that the interested user can quickly skip around. Much to my surprise, it was the New York Times that first showed me the power of this approach with their "live transcript" of the Obama speech on race. Having a transcript that scrolls along in sync to the video is such a simple thing to do, but makes such a huge difference in lowering the impedance mismatch between the text-heavy web and various rich media formats.
Another great example is being built by a startup called Omnisio which allows for the annotation of presentations (a frequent subject of the embedded video clips I come across), along with the slides the presenter is using. They've currently got a bunch of annoying user-commenting features but once you shut those off (from the user control panel), the resulting experience makes watching presentations 100x more enjoyable and efficient.
Just another lesson in how sometimes the simple solution, well executed, can yield great results.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (March 18, 2008)
Steve Gillmor has a beautiful essay on the significance of Twitter which is well worth the read. In it, he explains the perfect storm situation that gave birth to the incredible success Twitter is experiencing. In his own words:
The key to this signalling network is the duality of Twitter posts - both personal and public in equal doses. Personal data such as what I'm reading or listening to conspire with public data such as what news is important to us and what news isn't to cut through the glut with surprising efficiency. Each of us has to perform an instant editorial calculation of the relative value of the data as divided by the nature of the cloud of followers into which the post is injected. Overlapping circles of influence and authority resonate like a pebble tossed in a smooth pond.
What results is an elastic and supple map of how to transit the information space, contoured by the relative effectiveness of the editorial agenda of each poster and its success at attracting the right audience. Just as the 140 character "limit" promotes clarity and focus, the decision to follow is not taken lightly for fear of upsetting the value of the aggregate flow by having it accelerate beyond the ability to absorb it. Each node must traverse a high wire between value and noise.
I've been looking at Twitter for the last two years trying to figure out why it is that despite its paltry featureset and it's extremely unreliable uptime there seems to be a core of something there that makes it more with "the grain of the (social) web" than anything else that's come along in the last 5 years. And it's great to see Steve nail it in his post (especially because so many other pundits have tried to feel this particular elephant in the dark to no avail).
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 1 week ago (March 16, 2008)
Any self-respecting ManGeek ought to love a term I picked up from the Economist a couple of weeks in an article on cloud computing: data smelter. Apparently this is moniker used for the huge data centers that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are building on the banks of the Columbia river in Oregon. Located in the middle of the cheapest power available in the US, the name data smelter is a play on the aluminum smelters that peppered the banks of the Columbia over the last hundred years, but it's also great because it hints at one of the most relevant facets of the cloud computing/web services revolution: the ability for new services to recombine data hosted by other services in novel and interesting ways. We haven't even begun to feel the true power of how transformative this loose coupling of data and processing is likely to be; today's "mash-ups" are barely at the crawl phase of development in what we are likely to see.
And yet, it's worth pausing for a second to think about the cost of the current smelting. The Economist piece cites the Google data center at the Dalles as requiring the power of a town of 200,000 people. Most of this wattage goes to power the compute cycles that Google requires to index the world's information, and in most cases these cycles are well spent by running hairy algorithms that apply the bleeding edge of computer science to extract order from chaos.
But this is not always the case. For instance, at Tabblo, a meaningful amount of our general web traffic comes from Google Bot or one of its competitors. This despite the fact that we have well-structured RSS equivalents that could be polled/processed in a much more efficient way. Ditto for all of the much bigger user-generated content sites— they too have a meaningful amount of traffic coming from indexing bots while at the same time providing feeds that might provide just as much information for searchers while using less bandwidth, fewer CPU cycles, and not as much overall smelting.
The few times I've read any luminaries from Google talking about the semantic web in any shape or form (RDF, microformats, etc.), they always pooh-pooh it with slights like "people don't want to deal in angle brackets all day." And until I started thinking about the energy implications of these data smelters, I was likely to agree— after all, we're all still suffering from the CORBA/DCOM hangover of the last decade where a few vendors bamboozled the entire industry into thinking that an overwrought solution for remote process data exchange was the answer to all of these coupling needs (watch the WS-* offspring for a modern-day equivalent).
But last week Yahoo played a potentially game-changing move with its pledge to support the semantic web standards (microformats, RDF, etc.) across all of its properties. As much I tend to write off Yahoo as roadkill on the Google highway, it's clear that a few folks there are still doing good things for the net and the planet.
If the other industry heavyweights are goaded into following through, we may end up running slightly cleaner data smelters in the near future.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 3 weeks ago (March 2, 2008)
So we've got Adobe Air that just went 1.0 this week. Microsoft is coming on from a copy-come-from-behind strategy with Silverlight. Mozilla has got something going on, and Apple has got Webkit at the center of their whole device strategy.
So who wins in the web development platform war for the next decade? Which of these rich runtimes suck the oxygen out of the rich client world and give a nice evolutionary twist to what's been going on with the AJAX spruced applications? Or are Win32 and Cocoa here to stay?
I'm not a betting man, but if I were, it'd be DHTML all the way.
Why? Because at the end of the day we've got to think in terms of access devices. At HP we're living as primary beneficiaries of the move to laptops these days, but just as we've moved there from the desktops, I'm sure we're going to move to the portable devices (iPhones and others) from laptops. And in the case of these portable devices, why would you care about a really rich runtime? What matters is the data and how quickly you can get to it. Sure Air and Silverlight can run in these mobile devices, but the real question is: at what battery cost? And to what benefit?
I'm guessing that the DHTML model has got long legs to it— especially as the world comes to standardize on Webkit and all of the good stuff that comes with it. At Tabblo we've been totally biased towards it; at first because it was the only way to remain truly "platform neutral," and later because of the advantages it has given us in terms of embed-ability within other websites, other online experiences.
If I had to guess I'd say we've got a lot to squeeze from the web browser especially now that we've got a great canvas like Webkit. Even Firefox 3 with its much improved performance gives most of us room for pause as we think about the browser of the future and the world of mobile platforms.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 3 weeks ago (March 1, 2008)
ReadWriteWeb has an astonishing roundup of the multitude of sites playing in the "stream your life" space— a category which essentially amounts to rolling the feeds from the various different sites you participate into one activity stream that your friends can then use to keep tabs on you. Since this is a specialized feed reader application, and since I've had feed readers on the brain lately, I spent some time checking a few of the services.
My conclusion: I remain unconvinced that these services can exist as standalone destinations, though I now see an important task they fulfill that a more general purpose feed reader (a la Google Reader) does not. The best of them provide a nice feature in managing distributed identity across a whole variety of sites. FriendFeed does this the best; you subscribe to individual people and then get all of their various different activities in one stream. Where this comes in most helpful is with people who have blogs but who also do a lot of twittering, flickering, and deliciousing (though it bears mention that in some cases those other activities are of a completely different modality). I realize that this seems like a sort of trivial feature that could easily be added on to a mainstream blogging engine (and probably should), but it is worth pointing out nonetheless.
Where I'm fairly sure these sites are not going to win is in providing yet another way to author a similar but distinct type of micro content. Back to FriendFeed for a moment: outside of aggregating my own content, I can also write quick posts (a la Tumblr) that live only inside of my FriendFeed feed for my FriendFeed friends to look at. Do we really need this in the age of blogger and Wordpress and Twitter and a whole bunch of other very similar content creation engines?
What I'd prefer to see is the folks from the 35 different startups profiled here picking up a copy of "Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran— O'Reilly's wonderful new book on the data processing algorithms that will power the next wave of social computing. It's taken me more than 10 years to get a much more superficial understanding of some of the core filtering, grouping, indexing, and ranking algorithms that Segaran covers with an extremely lucid style and concrete code samples in this book. More importantly however, this is the kind of experimentation we should be doing, instead of having people just jamming Wordpress and Twitter or Jaiku and Flickr in the transporter and hoping that what comes out the other end doesn't have a fly's head.
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week ago (Feb. 16, 2008)
Everyone is aflutter today about the fact that Amazon's web services, including its indispensable Simple Storage Service, took one on the chin with a multi-hour outage. Apparently the entire productivity-sucking swath of the Web 2.0 economy sputtered along with the outage (no profile pictures on Twitter— OMG!!) and folks started screaming bloody murder about the coming apocalypse.
Interesting that one of the first to report was Nick Carr, whose new book "The Big Switch" I just finished reading. The book's central argument is that there is a platform shift coming in computing that will be very similar to what happened with electrification, with computation and storage moving from a distributed model (loads of server racks managed by IT) to a centralized one (a la Amazon Web services) where a few vendors will run huge compute clouds that the rest of us will plug our applications/appliances into.
The book makes a great argument, though it could just have easily have been made in 50 pages instead of 233 (including all of the fab historical color around what happened during the big switch of electric power generation)— an argument which is no less compelling because of today's outage. The reality is that these types of glitches happen at all scales, and though they hurt a little more when its a big centralized provider (witness RIM's second big outage the other day), some economic forces are just too strong to fight.
But what the book doesn't cover well is the way in which opportunities for innovation move around when these big shifts happen. I was really looking forward to understanding how centralized, ubiquitous, and cheap electricity made it possible for a host of appliance vendors to invent whole new product categories around the home and office. And though Carr touches on just this, the extension of the analogy to the current computing shift falls flat with a lame discussion of consumer mashups, a brief tour of personal publishing tools available today, and some recycled speculation on how Google really is trying to build an omniscient AI.
I would have preferred a more nuanced parallel between the first mass-market electric gizmos and the new appliances of the centralized computing grid (i.e., the iPhone, the Tivo, the Chumby, even the bulk of today's laptops). After all, it is only when we start to think about how these new appliances that consume compute cycles from the cloud will change our lives in a permanent way that we can really pause and take measure of what outages like today's will really mean 2,5, and 10 years from now.
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 2 weeks ago (Feb. 9, 2008)
I've been thinking a lot about intent lately. Or specifically, ever since Google reported their earnings and claimed that they were not as good as they might be because of the failure to monetize social networking inventory to expectations. Of course, this is a complicated way of saying: people just don't click on ads when they are on MySpace and so we don't make money despite having exclusive access to advertising on them!
I don't think it takes some kind of advertising genius to see why this is the case: on both MySpace and Facebook, the link density is quite high: it's often hard to click on the thing you want, never mind a piece of advertising. Additionally anything that is put on those pages is competing with "needs" that are of much higher priority on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, namely mating and socializing/gossiping (the modern day version of delousing).
But there is another piece around intent which all of us on the web ought to think about, especially if we really are moving to a 95% advertising-sponsored consumer Internet. When I type into a Google search box for some portion of the searches that I run, I am as close as I can be to wanting to buy something without actually being in a store (and I loathe stores). This is why it is much more likely that I'd be willing to click on an ad related to whatever it is that I am searching for. Sitting-forward with the intent to spend dollars is something that I don't see as a regular part of my Internet use anywhere else with two exceptions: eBay, and Amazon. And unsurprisingly, Amazon seems poised to capitalize on this behavior outside of the four walls of their own store with the recent launch of Product Ads.
Another related example: when we started Tabblo, our plan was to affect cost that it takes to acquire a user who wanted physical products from their photos by giving them a compelling creative and social experience around the sharing of their photos to "get them in the door" and thinking about making creative goods. This was in direct contrast to the big 3 photo-sharing sites (Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Ofoto) that spent all of their money driving people through a photo print experience. This past week Shutterfly released its 2007 results and as we crunched the numbers on the data available, we were surprised by how much higher their conversion rates are to printed products (not just prints) relative to the number of page views they see. Note that we never expected that we'd match them page for page— after all, they exist solely for the purposes of getting their users output— but the wide gap in conversion rates showed yet another example of intent rearing its ugly head.
Maybe I am being incredibly stumb on this one (the place where stupid and dumb collide), but I just don't see how over the long term inventing a new form of advertising— as Facebook claims it will to justify its $15B valuation— will get us past this intent hurdle. Even display ads, the bread-and-butter of all of the new media content sites, seem threatened by CPC ads which naturally implies that those sites too will have to worry about the following dynamic: when it comes to serving advertisers on the Internet, it would seem the name of the game is web-as-yellow-pages. As far as the media model goes, everything else might just be filler, or at best, content for the gatekeepers of intent (Google ins some instances).
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 2, 2008)
Fabulous piece by Tim O'Reilly in Radar on why Yahoo deserves to get swallowed by Microsoft. To borrow from Paul Graham, Tim seems to be arguing that Yahoo just never got with the "grain" of the web despite having bought awesome grain assets (Flickr, Delicious). The money quote here:
The other important characteristic of the winners, of course, is that they tap into a data stream that really matters. Owning network effects around consumer photos, for instance, is much less powerful than owning network effects around paid search. So one of the key questions we have to ask ourselves going forward is this: what are the major data subsystems of the future Internet Operating System. Location, identity (and social graph), search (and not just web search but also product search, in which Amazon has a very strong position) come to mind. In a lot of ways, finding the data associated with the old vectors who, what, when, where, and how is a good place to start.
While the jury is still out on whether the "social graph" belongs in this primal set of key types of data that you can build huge businesses around, I completely agree with the others that he lays out. It would be interesting to explore how some of the big Internet trends tend to interesect these different types of data: mobile computing, virtual worlds, custom manufacturing, and emergent online marketplaces just to name four.
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 1, 2008)
I lived through one dot-com crash and all of the associated aftereffects, so I'm not psyched about the fact that the day of reckoning has finally come for this cute little kumbaya we've come to call Web 2.0. Sure on the surface it's just Google being slightly off their spectacular growth trajectory, but deep down we all knew this moment was coming. The wonderfully intoxicating "build critical mass and the rest will follow" buoyancy that started with Flickr and ended with Facebook's ridiculous $15b valuation is about to come to a close, and not so much due to one bad quarter of ad revenues, but because it just couldn't last forever.
Small companies struggling with product risk are now going to have to answer the revenue model question as well, and for good reason. Selling to Google— or even selling to someone else who is afraid that Google might buy you first— has just run out of juice. And unfortunately it has done so right at the beginning of a pretty scary set of perfect storm factors in the consumer economy: depressed consumer confidence, tons of credit risk, looming creep of inflation, and an inscrutable political outlook.
But what to do in the middle of all of this? Get somewhere where you can work on something meaningful with a 3-4 year runway. If you are at a startup, either get cashflow positive or raise a buttload of money soon. If you are at a big company, get on the longest lead time (but critical) project that you can find. Put your head down and just shut out the crap that is about to start flying.
It's all going to be good again— it always is. The challenge is that it may take until 2011 for us to get there. Until then, we can all stop worrying about getting rich and get back to grinding it out. Good times.
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 29, 2008)
David Beisel has done a great service for web ventures in the Boston area with his "Web Innovators Group" gatherings. Though this type of event is commonplace in the Valley, we are sorely missing it here and it's been a pleasure to watch it grow over the last year and a half from about 50 people to over 800.
One thing I continue to be struck by however, is the poor quality of the demos that are given at these events. It may be that David is explicitly selecting for non-venture backed companies (a little rougher around the edges), and it may just be the compressed format (though this being the week of the original demo conference, I'm not sure about the latter), but even when the companies on stage have cool and innovative products, the demos done WebInno generally leave a lot to be desired.
Since, giving a good demo should be secondhand to any startup employee (CEO, founder, hacker, product manager, etc.), here is my 3 step guide to coming up the learning curve quickly (though I don't claim to be an expert, I have given a lot of demos in all sorts of contexts and for all sorts of products in my career).
1. Write the story: before you start, open up your favorite text editor and write a one-pager on what you intend to show. Make it less laundry list and more murder mystery. If you don't know what progressive disclosure is, go read up on it, and use this technique to move your story line forward. The number one reason why I often want to put a stick in my eye during demos is because the presenter hasn't thought enough about telling a story and being entertaining. Make it relevant to the audience at every step— which often means skipping the techno-babble and contextualizing features for your audience.
2. Find your own Demo God(s) and study them incessantly:everyone loves Steve for this one, but there are many many others presenters worth watching (go look at all of the highly rated TED talks for inspiration). If you go to conferences, pay attention to presenters that can work with the crowd and watch how they keep cool and on message even when things are exploding. If you are lucky enough to know anyone whose demoing you respect, ask them for very critical feedback. I've been very lucky to have people like Adam Green to rely on for raw and uncut feedback. It hurts but makes you 10x more effective.
3. Practice, practice, practice: don't just think about what you're going to demo— go and sit in front of the mirror and do it. If you're going to be miked, learn how to use the AV system to your advantage. If you need the Internet for your demo, assume it will crawl and work around it. Practice it until you are so tired of hearing yourself that your ears start ringing. There is no such thing as too much practice. Trust me, even Steve does it.
One last thing: if you are not particularly good at this type of thing, try giving demos of products you haven't actually worked on. Textmate, OmniOutliner, Firefox, OneNote, whatever— just step through 1-3 for any one of those products assuming you'll have 5 minutes to convince someone that they absolutely need to start using whatever it is you are showing them. This trick helps to de-personalize your subject and lets you focus on your own performance.
There is a wise saying in raising venture funding: the demo seals the deal. Think about this next time it's your turn at WebInno.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 1 week ago (Jan. 16, 2008)
After yesterday's poor performance live blogging the Steve keynote, I spent some time thinking about how frustrating it is to have a fundamentally communications-related service go down the way Twitter did for all of us who were trying to let the world know about what went on during the keynote.
I can't really blame Twitter. The pile-on that they are suffering from as everyone tells them they can't scale is something that any other startup would kill for, and the fact that they are taking egg on their face is to be completely expected. I don't think I know of a single small startup these days that wouldn't be similarly crushed by the load they experience during events like Macworld— in fact, I can almost guarantee that we at Tabblo would have been.
However, the big bummer about the way we use the Internet today is that we are breaking its fundamental architectural principle of loosely couple services that you don't count on for 100% reliability. This was the genius behind SMTP: if the receiving mail server was down for whatever reason, the sending one had a protocol for either finding a relaying service or for backing off and re-delivering later. Unfortunately web services aren't built like this (some of the bigger ones like Amazon and Google are built like this on the backend though which is why they scale, but it takes big bucks to get there).
And you know what? For most web services, this single point of failure design is ok. Just not messaging-based ones. When we use messaging-based services, we expect uptime (witness how annoying Gmail's recent glitches have been), and at the very least, reliability on the message delivery front.
We'd do well to think of this as we shift any time an attention to web services that have grown their own internal messaging systems, or even those that aim to replace them.
I am sure that with microformats, syndication and personal publishing platforms that we own ourselves and host on elastic computing clouds like Amazon's EC2, we can rebuild most of the messaging/publishing-based services that are currently appealing (Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr) but flakey. However, it is going to take time, standards, and the realization that we can in be in control of more reliable online experiences.
In the meantime, just be glad those evil phone companies spent billions building "carrier-grade systems" (well except for AT&T EDGE network which sucks).
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 10, 2008)
And for this month's best techno-porn, look no further than "The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry" in this month's Wired. In it, Fred Vogelstein tells the inside story of the development of the iPhone, from its guts to the crazy deal that Apple got from AT&T, to the bumps along the road. As with all great tech-porn there is a fair bit of dramatization in the piece, but it does make three really interesting observations:
1. Steve & co saw the coming crunch on their near-perfect monopoly on the iPod and decided that to get ahead of it by going to a media-playing phone well ahead of when their business was impacted by it. This is something that I've heard a few times from VJ, my boss here at HP over the last few months: you have to innovate the next big thing when you're on top and can still afford it, not when you're managing an empire in decline. That said, it is extremely difficult to get big companies to do this especially when they are as arrogant as Apple, so kudos to them.
2. I love the idea that even as it was going to market, Jobs knew that the Motorola Rockr was a camel (a horse designed by a committee). Senior executives that engage with their product— from how it comes out of the box to how it feels to how it breaks— are really really rare in my experience. It's why you often get such goofy products from big companies so I 100% buy that it is a big part of the secret to Apple's success.
[ One quick aside: in 2005 while at the WSJ D conference, I arrived late (as usual) and went to get my badge only to see that there was a technician working on one of the HP PCs that had been set up for registration. It was one of the first all-in-ones and he had flipped it on its side and was closely examining the bottom of the case in the empty registration hall. Before I had time to figure out what the hell could be wrong with the computer than would manifest on the outside of the case, two executive assistants straight out of Entourage came in and whisked the technician away. Imagine my surprise to figure out that it was Steve Jobs who had someone ended up alone in the registration room and had wandered over to one of these machines to inspect it.]
3. The piece only hints at this general point, but one of the most amazing things about the iPhone is how well the hardware engineers timed the development of the mobile components such that they hit a perfect balance between CPU speed, performance, and battery. It's been my experience that in other consumer products with long multi-year development cycles, the hardware folks either radically under-estimate Moore's law, or worse yet, over-estimate it and end up with pokey and over-priced devices.
Overall a great read for junkies of Cupertino's shenanigans.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 9, 2008)
Both Matt Webb and the Economist this week are ruminating on the economics of the software industry. Matt has a interesting post which basically argues that there are other more compelling revenue models for building enduser software than the straight-up license (a lesson which I learned well while book-enabling the iPhoto application while the rest of the consumer image management space was cratering). He covers ads, subscription fees, and some other models, making a whole bunch of interesting observations along the way.
It was the piece in the Economist though that really made me laugh. Especially this juicy bit on why the SaaS (software as service) business model just isn't as good as its progenitor:
Vendors of conventional enterprise software made a killing by requiring customers to pay a high licensing fee upfront and then charging them for maintenance. Web-based firms, by contrast, have to make do with subscription fees.
We need to stop taking for granted that just because software vendors were able to maintain obscenely high margins for the last 30 years, it means that this should serve as a baseline for all software related businesses going forward. In the consumer space specifically, Microsoft's ability to extract rent for that layer of value seems to me to have been a historical accident— one that made Bill Gates very wealthy in the ensuing 30 years— but not necessarily one that can be relied on going forward. I know less about the enterprise space, but would be shocked if the same microeconomic force of marginal revenue trending towards zero wasn't in full swing in the age of the Internet, open source, and software-on-demand.
Instead we have to get used to saying that 22-30% margins are actually a great achievement, and that the era of crazy absurd software profits (though not growth, as Apple is showing), is now behind us. And the bonus is that in the process we get to repurpose old business models (atoms!) and invent new ones.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 2 weeks ago (Jan. 6, 2008)
This is CES week which, ever since we were a struggling startup looking to stay alive in this space back at Memora, gives me the willies. Unlike most of the computer tradeshows, CES manages to feel polished and scummy at the same time— with vendors pimping their wares to a pulsating Las Vegas gluttony which never ceases.
This morning the New York Times had a piece which gives is me hope that consumer electronics may be getting some of that good old hacker ethic. The piece covers an open Tivo-like device from a company called Neuros that is "hacker friendly."
More significantly, companies like Chumby Industries and Bug Labs are going one step further by selling kits instead of finished products that can be used by folks to extend the reach of the net into the physical world.
I worry a little that the promise of hackability is a lot more powerful than what actually gets done. In the case of the PC for example, it was the shift from "kit computers" like the Apple I to the productized Apple ][, with its pre-assembled good looks and relative ease of use, that readied the entire industry for all of the software innovation that followed*. In my own case, I've dabbled with a number of Linux appliances over the years only to be disappointed by either too many bugs, or a lack of extensibility. My Chumby for instance, seems to be the net-connected version of a VCR clock, spending most of its days flashing the widget equivalent of 12:00AM (though I am hoping the official release will make this better).
That said, I'm still hoping that these kits will result in some useful devices that free us from thinking that the Internet is something we consume with a keyboard and a mouse.
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 4, 2008)
I've started the year by trying to make a dent in my backlog of small (but useful) webapps to try, beginning with the "help organize your life" category. So in the last few days I've tried: Jott, Iwantsandy, and Remember the Milk, and already I'm feeling overloaded.
All three are all really well done mini-applications that do a single function well, play nice with other pieces of the web (a la Unix tools), and provide clever interfaces that span multiple devices, input mechanisms, and output formats. And yet, why is it that after only trying three of them, I'm already feeling app fatigue?
I think it must have to do with the small incremental cognitive load imposed by each new webapp. Because no matter how similar each of these applications is— after all they are each a way to manage a list of reminders— there are still small differences that impose a small barrier at every use. And despite each site's desire to simplify the interface as much as possible, I've still got to go link hunting across non-standard interfaces every time I want to do basic things like creating new categories or adding a new email address.
I used to think that the old "Office Suite" megaproduct was a function of distribution economics alone; that Microsoft beat out all of the best-of-breed standalone applications because they could bundle all of the products together into a cheaper overall offering and stuff it into the channel. But now I'm realizing that there are huge advantages to this type of integration when it comes to usability (and I don't mean power features like OLE, these new webapps already support their own forms of foreign object embedding). With MS Office, the user had more or less one mental model for how to perform a whole load of related tasks (a model which has been increasingly unified with each Office release)— a huge advantage for those of us just trying to get things done.
Do we need this unification for all of these little webapps to reach critical mass? Maybe. The counter argument would be that the web audience is so big that every application vendor will find his own niche audience, but in a world where sustainable economics depends on advertising (and therefore audience scale), I'm not sure this works. And if we do need this grand unification, will it be brought on by a vendor (Facebook, Google) or by a set of standards (microformats, Yahoo UI best practices)? Right now I'd put my money on the integrating vendor platform a la F8 or Google Gadgets, but maybe that is just because I am looking for the modern day Office-like player. Maybe the rules have really changed on the web...
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 3 weeks ago (Jan. 2, 2008)
It's always good to start the first entry of every blog year with some predictions. Making accurate (and actionable) predictions is the chief currency of the entrepreneur in the technology industry (along with not confusing a long view for a short distance), so any practice in gazing into the crystal ball is a good thing.
The usefulness/pervasiveness of the web will really hit a tipping point this year: David Weinberger wrote a short piece for HBR called "The Year of Scale" which makes this point nicely. Everything from markets to expectations is now mediated by bits of information that we pluck from the ether on websites, social networks, blogs, tweets, etc.— whether we work and live in the medium or not. Of course Google plays a huge role in this augmentation of our own intelligence (as might Facebook and Twitter over the coming year), but so do web-enabled smartphones and the ever-increasing expectation that we can just "know" the answer to something.
Recently a friend told me that her 5-year old had defined Google as "where you go to find out what is true—" a sentiment that when expanded to the web itself, captures the zeitgeist of what is going on here. The next chapter in the story of the Flynn effect won't be written as the increasing ability to reason abstractly but by our ever-increasing ability to weave the information stream into making better decisions.
Smart, speedy, and portable interfaces frozen in hardware are now mass market: this is the iPhone effect, plain and simple. A couple of years ago I was writing that Apple should become the less-than-6lb. company ("if it weighs less than 6lbs and does computing, we rule it"). Last year they took the most important step in that transformation by launching the iPhone— but not because it's the sexiest product ever built, nor because it's a particularly good phone (let me tell you, it isn't!), but because it is the perfect embodiment of portable web consumption experience.
If the web browser itself could leap out of your computer and take the form of a piece of hardware that you could carry all the time, it could do no better than to look, feel, and behave just like an iPhone. From the huge screen to the multi-touch interface, every feature that makes it truly stand out boils down to delivering a killer web browsing experience (and the only real handicap, the pokey EDGE network is ameliorated by the Wi-Fi and will soon be crushed with a 3G rev).
Expect a lot more, and not just from Apple. Sure, Cupertino will ship the rest of the dev kit (which I still contend should be nothing more than an enhanced object model for mobile Safari that gives web developers access to the camera, the addressbook, any forthcoming GPS information, and the SMS message stream), as well as begin a whole load of experimentation with point-of-presence applications that mix the virtual world with the physical world. But everyone else will try their hand as well, starting with mobile giants like Nokia (where I am 100% sure some Finnish dude named Pekka is now tied to the bottom of a dogsled crossing the tundra for having missed the all-screen embodiment of a browser in a phone), and filtering down to all of the smaller venture backed startups crazy enough to do hardware (which I think should be all consumer-facing VC startups these days, but more on that in a later post).
And this mobile fever is not just about phones, but in fact about any small devices that help people better consume the web. For instance, I bet this is going to be a good year for MIT-spawned Ambient Devices which has always seemed like a glorified science project to me. Unlike digital photo frames or the utterly useless Chumby, Ambient has figured out that simple design, well-instrumented cues, and singularity of purpose can make the different between a gadget which suffers from the net-connected version of the alarm-clock flashing "12:00" (e.g., my Chumby), and a device that weaves itself into your everyday life. Physical computing is here to stay and 2008 is going to be a vintage year for it.
The Activity Stream will become hot as Hansel: I'm not sure whether it will be Twitter, Google's Jaiku, the Facebook minifeed, or something completely new from a random startup, but the notion that there will be streams of metadata that we'll share with each other in the same way that people share blog feeds today but on a much more massive scale is going to become a standard part of the way that people interact with the web, and with each other. I suspect Facebook has the lead today, mostly because its minifeed takes no effort to set up and is very nicely scrubbed in the application, but Facebook seems to be getting this walled-garden stench which may create an opportunity for a lighter-weight, more open alternative. Initial setup will remain the challenge for regular users (and may be why the platform vendors: Google, Amazon, Apple, and Nokia could win here, or at least do a bunch of cool M&A in 2008), but once people get used to living in each other's flows, they'll be no going back.
Those are my top 3 predictions for this year. A little more abstract than usual, but thinking at this level certainly beats wondering whether we're going to suffer from a global economic recession.
Finally, just to mark where I've gone wrong in this game in the past: I'm ready to throw in the towel on the unwitting blogger, the casual publisher, or whatever you call the regular person who does something akin to starting a blog. I've been looking for the mass market application that causes millions of people to sit forward and put the same level of effort that those of us that keep blogs do, believing that the right combination of ease-of-use and ego gratification could get people over all of the barriers, but I just don't see it. Micropublishing— a popular trend predicted for the mass market for 2008 by the pundits— may come the closest, but there is a point at which it's just not publishing anymore.
R.I.P, Mister Unwitting Blogger— you content creating bastard— we hardly knew ye!
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 15, 2007)
When one of my favorite tech blogs titles an article "The Evolution of Personal Publishing," I am most definitely going to bite on it (after all, this is a topic on which I like to noodle). As it turns out, the piece mostly adds color to a post by Fred Wilson who argues that "microblogging" (Twittering, social sharing, etc.) is actually not just blogging under a new guise but a new type of communications/publishing hybrid that not only deserves its own category, but may actually reach into the mainstream Internet userbase in a way that its progenitors (personal publishing and blogging specifically) have not been able to.
Why? Because according to Fred, micropublishing at its core is lightweight (low cognitive load), social, and interactive (which strikes me just social under a different name). In other words, it is easy to do and keeps you in touch with your friends and family as well as the world at large, when appropriate.
And in fact, it seems that this last bit is the critical piece. The relevant part of all of these lightweight tools is that they intercept a communications flow and create a permanent record of it that people who may not have been in the original dialog— people who you may not even know— can have access to it via the archive (the frozen flow).
A little over a year ago, I was eating lunch at Google with Jason Shellen who was the first person to pitch me Twitter. As I was arguing that this seemed just like SMS + groups he said something which has stuck with me ever since: that Twitter allowed every SMS to have its own permalink. I remember my initial reaction to his statement as though it had been yesterday; I thought: Silly Googler, not everything needs to be in your index.
He was absolutely right about the significance being the addressability and persistence of each SMS/tweet, but not because we might be turning up the fact that he had too much to drink for Thanksgiving in the Google index 3 months down the line. Instead what the permalink implies is that what was a disposable message is now a micropublishing event which can in effect become a vector for socializing with people who would otherwise not be in your regular communication stream.
Now the question still remains: how much do regular folks really care about the potential for this type of publishing-sourced social serendipity? Especially when the insertion of micropublishing into some communication channels can have unanticipated adverse effects? An example: I recently tried to give Twitter the good ol' college try by getting everyone at work to use it as well as a few key friends and family members. My older brother (who ironically in this small world was once one of Fred's entrepreneurs) puked on it because he decreed his SMS inbox to be a high-priority near-synchronous channel for communication with a select few. By overflowing his phone with tweets, he was convinced that Twitter was "breaking" the promise of SMS. The serendipity of social experiences on top of micropublishing was just not worth it.
(And before people write to me to tell me that you can turn SMS off on Twitter and just view the tweets on the website, think about this: why would a normal person want one more website to have to go check every day?)
I think that in fact Fred is right that micropublishing done right can go mainstream— but we have to look to models like Amazon reviews and not just the progeny of Blogger to see how we take it there. More on that tomorrow though.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Dec. 14, 2007)
First they made it so that you didn't have to worry about disks with their S3 storage service. Then they took away the need to manage hardware and a colo with EC2. And now for the final piece: Amazon has just announced SimpleDB, a database hosted as a web service that application developers can plug into. Despite one curious choice, this is just brilliant strategy on their part.
Everyone who hosts a website that has any level of traffic spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to tune the database. And as with almost every infrastructure layer in the webapp cake, I'm fairly certain that 80% of this tuning work is just good RDBMS hygiene and adds preciously little "special sauce" to the core application. In fact this is why there are specialists in tuning MySQL or Postgres who bounce from project to project with the same basic bag of tricks.
If Amazon does it right, making a database scale is one time-consuming headache web application developers will never have to worry about again. But it goes beyond scaling too: backups, replication, failover— these are all common database chores that Amazon just makes go away.
On to the curious choice: no support for full (or even partial) SQL. I'm guessing that this may have had something to do with the complexity involved in supporting SQL on their super-scalable, super-distributed architecture as I'm fairly certain the Amazon folks realize just how much momentum SQL has in the web application space. And if anything holds people back from adopting SimpleDB (outside of potential uptime/performance issues), it will be the need to learn a new way to store and query data (albeit a very simple one).
A potential work around: open source libraries that substitute the back end of the most popular ORMs (Rails, Hibernate, Django) with the SimpleDB service. Now that could be a game changer.
Here's to never thinking about sharding databases again.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 4 weeks ago (Nov. 28, 2007)
The article in Monday's WSJ outing that the rumored Google storage service, where all of your files are stored on Google servers, initially rubbed me me the wrong way. The implication that we'd get all of our data stored in exchange for our eyeballs and our privacy (in light of all of the recent Facebook hoopla) must have struck me as a Faustian bargain that seems hard to extend much beyond email (and even that has been bothering me lately as Google seems to be misreading my email in the ads it is choosing to put inline).
But after thinking about it a little more, I realized that the irritation goes deeper than the business model to the dominant underlying assumption these days that all of personal computing is going to move to the server farm and that maybe, just maybe, we're finally getting ready to go back to the thin client model for computing. [If you see the irony in this given that I've just spent 3 years pushing content creation webapps as the end-all be-all, read on]
Let's review for a second why moving all of our personal computing to the cloud sucks:
1. Offline. Since HP bought us, I've upped the amount of time that I spend on planes crossing from east to west and it's beginning to really get to me that I can't use Gmail, Reader, or Tabblo during these six hour stretches. For instance, I have no problem keeping relatively current with my work email (thanks to the flying), but my personal Gmail account is usually 10 days behind. And even though the Reader team did a nice thing in integrating Google Gears for offline use, the offline experience still feels sort of bolted on with key command sequences not available.
2. CPUs are awesome and universally under-utilized these days. I've lost count of how many cores I have in my laptop but outside of spinning up for buggy Javascript goodness, they are only really ever taxed when I'm doing something to multimedia inside the rich client apps. Why does Flickr have to resize photos for me in a queue that takes 4 times the amount of time that iPhoto would? At Tabblo, we're offenders on this score as well; though the team has done a great job of making image transform operations tolerably fast, there are still operations that would benefit from a little CPU help, especially when the site is under load.
3. Uploading stuff over and over sucks. I've been obsessed with this one lately so here I'll only say that it's now not just about photos— on top of (re)uploading rich media, I've now also got profile picture-uploading fatigue and friend-finding ennui, and status-updating exasperation. And unless you're only going to ever use one company's "cloud," this is just a fact of life these days.
These are all good reasons why cloud-based services are probably not the only model for moving personal computing forward, but this morning while reading Tim O'Reilly's update on the definition of software above the level of a single device, I went back to being exasperated by this mottled relationship we have with our devices and data where everything that we care about seems to be spreading across more devices, more websites, and in most cases more PCs.
Tim writes about what a good model the iPhone/iPod+iTunes+iTMS is for this concept of of allowing software spanning multiple devices to play in delivering a solution. To me this seems to be an opportunity for stuff to get lost in more places. In fact, I've found that having the device tethered to the PC for the sake of connecting to data from the cloud a pretty horrendous proposition. RIM's Blackberry showed us the power of over-the-air sync a decade ago, and with WIFI on more and more of these devices, it's time to extend the model across all types of data. It is great to use the PC's richer interface to configure these more interface-constrained devices (a great example of this being the way that I can now program my Tivo from my PC instead of being deafened the bouncy Tivo noise every time I need to schedule a new recording). And frankly I'm not all that good at actually remembering to sync my iPhone thus exposing myself to all sorts of data loss/sync issues.
Which is of course another way of saying that this cloud thing really does have legs if Google and others can see their way to a good implementation for getting around problems 1-4 described above. As I was racking my brain wondering how they might do that, I thought of my earlier example of being able to answer email on the plane, and realized that we've got a pretty good real world example for what needs to happen in IMAP today (which is partly why I was so excited to see Gmail implement it). A good IMAP server lets me work offline, can more-or-less reconcile changes across devices that need access the mesage store, supports the server pushing status changes to the client, enables rich CPU-intensive activities to take place locally (indexing the cache of my account contents), and provides folders for aggregating items as well as a timeline view of when items are stored.
What if we had a cloud-based service that supported an IMAP-like protocol for read/write? Couldn't I then use iPhoto to begin organizing pictures, Flickr for adding some from friends, and Tabblo for creating a different "view" of the collection? What would it take to get a few of the broadly distributed clients to support this via plug-ins, and a few of the services to support it as a backend store API? Ditto for video, or any other type of multimedia.
Of course this model could also be applied to metadata (addressbook, buddy lists, etc.) The key would be that unlike RSS or even the bidrectional APP (Atom Publishing Protocol), an IMAP-like protocol would start from the assumption of many clients of different shapes and sizes needing rich read/write capabilities first and foremost (as I think about it, APP and a proper RESTful API might get you there, but I wonder if you couldn't simply start by actually using IMAP).
So who knows? Maybe the cloud is the right place to manage data and some of our computing tasks, assuming that we managed to get IMAP going for the rest of our electronic lives.
I've had occasion over the last week to use both Evite and eBay and I've got to say that no matter what all of the Internet pundits claim about how much fluff instead of stuff Web 2.0 is about, one thing we've learned is the last 10 years is how to make websites more usable. My god are these two sites horrendous to use! It is a true credit to Amazon and Yahoo that they managed to avoid the absolute stagnation that the eBays of the world seemed to have suffered from.
Ebay is a particular peeve of mine, both because it pioneered the world's best business model (as a market-maker for otherwise illiquid goods), and because it is still the greatest mainstream stealth success out there. When I ask people who I trust to be smart members of the mainstream what they love about their net-connected lives that they didn't have last decade, eBay is what most often comes up as the example of why the Internet is great. That the company has managed to remain in control of the auction market despite a truly horrendous user-experience speaks volumes to the power of positive feedback loops and network effects.
If I were in charge of one of these big winner-take-all Web 1.0 companies that hasn't yet understood that the web application space is going to be won and lost on usability over the next 5 years (and mobile platform support, though that is for a different post), I'd set up a Yahoo Brickhouse style R&D lab for innovating on user experience alone. Combined with proper A-B testing infrastructure (which I happen to know both of the companies mentioned here invested in heavily during the last decade), you'd have a real opportunity to bring user experiences forward to where they ought to be in this day and age.
Doc has a characteristically thoughtful piece over at Linux Journal on the need for web service creators to be good members of the ecosystem and support APIs that allow data to be federated across services. He uses the example of his Flickr stream being usable at Tabblo (which is a testament to how good and ground-breaking Flickr has been in this regard), making the point that it benefits him as a user when all of us "vendors" play nice and respect both his data— and more importantly, his time. It is just plain silly to make him waste time with the asymmetry in broadband today, having to upload all of his stuff again.
I've written before on how business models that are at odds with this fundamental respect for the user are likely to be doomed (see all of the stuff on the roach motel), so here I'm going to take another angle. Data acquisition, whether it is importing contacts in a social network or uploading assets in a photo site, is just not something that we need to keep on re-inventing over and over again. Let me stick with the latter example for a moment: outside of the Flickr API, at Tabblo we have 7 other methods for ingesting digital photos. Each of these requires constant maintenance as its client environment/runtime changes, something that I think is just too much of a support problem for any small team to take on. And in fact, these days each of our rich uploaders is in some less-than-optimal state: from "outright busted" to "works most of the time."
Contrast this to Flickr which managed to solve the uploader maintenance problem by crowdsourcing it and letting passionate community members maintain all sorts of different clients with varying degrees of success. Not everyone can be a Flickr, but we should all be able to leverage their success, and instead spend out own cycles thinking about how to build the next layer of value.
That said, what I'm having trouble reconciling is how to build simple user experiences in this new layered and federated world. Imagine if we asked the average mainstream user who comes to Tabblo to go and register at Flickr, upload their photos there, authenticate Tabblo as a trusted service, only to then be able to get into their story-telling process. Nightmare, plain and simple.
One potential solution: I'd like to see a white-label services that could be wrapped by webapp builders for core pieces of functionality. To continue the upload example: why doesn't Amazon, or some enterprising entrepreneur looking to build on the cloud computing infrastructure at Amazon, build out a full suite of well-supported file uploaders, along with an associated S3-backed storage infrastructure for everything from photos to videos. By focusing on just the upload experience, this effort could just nail it for all the rest of us— building plug-ins for our favorite apps, clients for our favorite platforms, and even specialized hardware for events and community activities. In Doc's VRM world, such a company might even be able to charge the enduser a nominal fee for pipe and storage, so long as its service integrated easily with enough of the interesting webapps.
Jeffrey Zeldman has the essay to ponder during the after-meal coma this year, "Understanding Web Design," on how web design is not about fancy bevels and cinematic effects but instead about creating extensible structures that others can inhabit. More like architecture and typography and less like traditional graphic design. Here is his definition:
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
His definition finally made me get to closure on the ambivalence that I've been feeling around Flash-based web applications. They sure are snazzy, but Flash webapps have this feel to them that has always felt "non-native" when it comes to how we relate to the web which goes beyond their relative heavyness.
With most Flash-based websites these days, you get exactly what the developers and designers wanted to give you and get to take it or leave it wholesale. This can be ok for applications that you use infrequently such as shoe configurators or stationery makers, but often gets overly cumbersome as soon as you start to layer in community or workflows that rely on collaboration of any sort, or more significantly when the users are supposed to help extend the environment. In those cases, thinking through building web applications that ring true to the definition above seems like a better bet to me.
The piece reminded me of Christopher Alexander's definition of "living structures" in architecture— places that are designed from the very beginning to be extended as their occupants learn how the want to relate to the space. As with the best architects in Alexander's world, the most interesting challenge for web designers these days is to figure out how to design for this kind of habitability.
I think I am developing a man-crush for Ev as a product guy.
Though I suspect the ambling style portrayed in the piece may drive me nuts, I can't help but respect the way in which he seems to have pulled two infectious content/communication projects out of the ashes of mediocre ideas. This guy would be worth his weight in gold to any VC-backed company looking to restart its failed me-too consumer website.
My favorite quote in the piece:
Just like Blogger, Twitter was a simple communications product salvaged from the impending implosion of a more complex project. In both cases, Williams didn't really know what he was doing. With both ventures, his genius--if that is the word--derived from what the English poet John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, called "negative capability": "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Rings so true to being an entrepreneur and making things out of nothing that it almost makes me want to start reading poetry.
On another note, part of my fascination with Twitter (and all of the clones that it has inspired) is how it seems to have— in sitting at the intersection of communication and publishing— nailed what Jeremy refers to as "lightweight self expression for the general public." At Tabblo, I tried very hard to instill this discipline into our content creation experience, and failed repeatedly in the process. On good days I tell myself that this had to do with the fact that we were after a much more complex authoring experience (we wanted to make your stories to look like magazine layouts so you'd buy them as physical products), but I think deep down I've often wondered about my own acumen when it comes to "negative capability" and making key product decisions.
OK, so what about all the business school stuff? I must tell you a bizarre thing about our company: I believe it's still true that not a single person with an MBA has ever succeeded with us. Probably that's because we're really not a formula-run kind of place. We insist on understanding things from first principles. Which is good if you're trying to do things for the first time. But a waste of time if you're just doing things that have been done lots of times before.
I've always thought that running companies is pretty much common sense. It's stuff that can be figured out just by thinking, practically, about things. And knowing a certain amount about the world.
Now, there are lots of smart people who are great at their specific areas. But somehow they don't seem to engage the thinking apparatus when it comes to other things. And that's fairly crippling in trying to run a company.
I love to see a scientist talking about first principles in describing the entrepreneurial challenge because it rings so true to a lot of the hard thinking you have to do in the process of creating something new. I was talking to a friend while out in California this week and mentioned something about those times at work when you have to sit down to do the hard thinking. She looked at me as though this was somehow an optional part of most jobs which, when I thought about it, is probably true.
But thinking from the ground up is definitely a must in new venture creation. An example: a lot of the VCs that I run into can often be classified as "momentum investors" in that they like to talk about funding the YouTube of X or the Facebook of Y (usually after these companies have had successful exits or massive valuations) without really thinking about whether the translation to X or Y actually fits from what Wolfram would call a "first-principles" analysis. In contrast, the thinking VCs, like my friend Nick Beim from Matrix Partners, think through the idea and the business model from the bottom up, starting from the individual motivations of the customers/users/etc. and building up a micro economic model that fits the behavior. This is usually a much better investment of time than reading "Momentum Weekly" on the crapper or looking through sector sizing reports to find the next high growth segment that the other 1000 investors doing the same haven't already found. And it is anathema to the top-down astronauts (often self-identifying as "pattern recognizers") who must have been the kids in kindergarden jamming the Fisher Price square pegs into the round openings.
Incidentally, I met Nick while doing Tabblo which borrowed its first office from extra Matrix space. While he was not our board member directly, we spent many an afternoon chatting about the fundamentals of the consumer Internet and I often came away thinking that I needed to do more hard thinking about some of our underlying "first principles." Nick also introduced me to a great mentor and now friend, Reid Hoffman, who is his entrepreneurial doppelganger— intellectually honest to a fault, analytical as hell, and never afraid to say "it might work but the concept sucks." Always refreshing, though sometimes painful.
If you're thinking about a startup, in a startup, or even in a big company in a group looking at a new product or market, go read the Wolfram piece— it might help keep you honest next time you get sloppy in a strategy session.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 3 weeks ago (Nov. 5, 2007)
I read this weekend that in Japan consumers are slowing their PC purchases in a major way— eschewing them for the likes of iPod Touches, smartphones, and other portable devices that can bring the Internet to their pockets. So much so in fact that major web application vendors are targeting the small screens ahead of the big PC-connected LCDs.
This could just be about the death of the current PC form factor, which in space-constrained Japan might be coming on earlier. And in fact, it would seem that the Japanese love for small computers is extending down in the laptop-for-everyone sweet spot of $300 that OLPC and others are pioneering. But it could also be that the consumer computing platform has now been defined: web applications through the browser that let you do content-consumption things, buying things, social things, and in rare cases, authoring things. With gaming as the one big caveat, it seems that gone are the days where application developers talked about using the GPU to deliver amazing interfaces, or the raw processing power of the PC to do crazy magic around speech/gesture/video recognition, etc. And so cheap access devices are ruling the day, with the feature set being around how well they can support 3G/Wifi (for connectivity) and the web browser.
This is good for us but bad for Microsoft, Dell, HP, and even Apple. When the spec for an application or platform freezes from a features perspective, it's bye-bye hypergrowth and hello slogging it on price/quality/colors deathmarch. Apple gets to avoid this a little more than the others (though not much according to the article), but for all of PC folks it will be ugly. Especially given how much of a device form-factor renaissance we seem to be seeing (iPhone, Nokia N95, Nokia 810, Googlephone, etc.).
Fast forward to Open Social, this Google-led effort to freeze the spec of social networking core capabilities that everyone is going crazy about. For starters, I agree with all of the folks who say that consumers vote with their feet irrespective of standards and that these days they are all voting for Facebook, so I don't really see what the big game-changer is in putting out a standard for widget developers. More importantly though, it doesn't seem like the right time to do it, unless of course, it is an attempt to take some wind out of Facebook's momentum.
The most interesting thing about the "social network platform" is what Facebook calls the Minifeed (Open Social calls it the "Activity Stream"), an aggregation of all of the activity that is going on between connected members of a social network that seems ripe for data mining, advertising, and best of all, experimentation around how it can be used to help people find stuff that is highly relevant (including today's killer app, helping people find each other). Open Social's Activity Stream API seems pretty simplistic and maps directly to thinking of each person's stream as an RSS feed that you might want to read or potentially jam items into. And while this may cover most of today's use cases, I'd be surprised if the tightly integrated social network sites (like Facebook) don't find a whole load of more interesting uses over the next few years. One could argue that their continued dominance sort of depends on it, especially as they build out an advertising platform capable of supporting their crazy valuation.
Don't get me wrong, standardization is a good thing, even if it implies a sort of freezing that tends to kill product categories. I just wonder whether we're quite there in the social network space.
Posted by Antonio
8 months, 3 weeks ago (Nov. 4, 2007)
One of my favorite topics for fun discussion among technology entrepreneurs and investors is why the west took off while the east languished after the invention of the PC. Here on the east coast, we had the mini computer lock, were awash in people who had one foot in that world and the other in the emerging PC software industry, and still we managed to give up not only the PC boom but the subsequent Internet boom, and the most recent social web explosion as well.
Many many bytes are wasted on the blogosphere discussing a related topic— do you have to be in Silicon Valley to start a cool consumer Internet company?— so I won't belabor that here. In short, I think that you do not in fact have to be located there, though you have to work extra hard to stay connected if you are not.
That said, my favorite entrepreneur-blogger, Ev, had a post this week about people just starting their careers in technology that I wish I'd read 12 years ago, "Going west, as a young man." In it he covers his early career in getting out from Bumbletown Nebraska and out to the Valley (and fortunately for him into the hands of the O'Reilly folk) for his formative years.
Ev is a very special guy— in fact every time I hear him speak or read his stuff, I am impressed with his underspoken wisdom (for instance, I thought he had the most insightful 10 minute slot at the recent Web 2.0 conference). That said, after reading his post, it would seem to me that had he not found his way out there, he may have wasted 10 or 15 years of his career working on some insurance company intranet app in Connecticut or writing Spam copy for one of NY's finer spam companies, only finding out too late that the degrees of freedom life gives you when you are young and independent were gone.
This morning's NYT had a fun piece by John Markoff about Andy Rubin, an engineer-entrepreneur behind some of the most interesting consumer gadgets of the last couple of decades (and the supposed "father of the Google phone"), which also reminded me of how important it is to be around interesting people and bleeding edge big companies when you are bumbling around with the first decade of your career. And bumble we all certainly do— though some of us just hide it better.
The Village People had it right I guess— at least early on in your career.
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 2 weeks ago (Oct. 11, 2007)
In the office, 2007 is going to go down as the Year of the Smartphone as everyone seems to have decided to simultaneously update their cellphones to smart ones. At the high end, the classic Jets versus Sharks face-off seems to be brewing between Apple's iPhone and Nokia's N95-3. Both are amazing devices, which clearly herald the era of very powerful things in your pocket. At the same time, they each seem to express such fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings that this promises to be a much more interesting fight than the old Mac-vs-PC spat of the last decade.
I have to admit that until very recently I was deeply ensconced in the iPhone camp. Having gotten used to the crappy quality of the device as a phone, I went about gleefully evangelizing the whole "it's not a phone, it's a computer in your pocket" until Apple pushed its 1.1.1 upgrade. The locked down firmware, the continued lack of 3rd party development support, and most significantly, the sudden appearance of the "iTunes Wifi store" (ahead of say, IM or MMS), has made me start to see my iPhone as a big pipe Apple (and maybe AT&T) is intending to use to sell me stuff (what my friend Jerry might call the ultimate consumer leash, encouraging me to "gulp products and crap cash").
Anyway, after having played with an N95 in the office yesterday, realizing yet again that Symbian is still unusable as hell, I was nevertheless left with the impression that there is something more to this N95 than the iPhone. The combination of really solid still and video capture, integrated GPS, and a rich and open API for third party development makes it almost possible to overlook one of the most byzantine UIs a phone could have. Then this morning I came across Jonathan Greene's excellent head-to-head review of exactly these two phones and realized what that tickling sense of possibility was all about:
The iPhone is for consuming content, while the N95 is for creating it.
—via Steve Litchfield
(to be fair, I think Eddie and Pitkin were trying to tell me this last night but I was just fried)
How true, how true. The iPhone (today) is a great locked pipe for consuming your media, and as of 1.1.1, for buying some too. You don't have to look further than the re-monetization of your own songs as ringtones to see where Apple wants to go. Whereas the N95 feels a lot more like a swiss-army knife for content creation— perhaps not as good as dedicated device for any one of its tasks— but good-enough... and just so handy.
Now we know how this movie ends, at least here in the US. When given the choice between creating and consuming co
