I am not an economist. I am a software guy. A computer scientist. And while I have not spent my life thinking about economic trends, I have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about complexity. And I know it when I see it. Insane complexity.
We have a market that is driven by debt that no one understands, and by trading activity run by software programs that no one understands. We have created a hive. It operates with a collective mind, but a mind like that of an adolescent or teenager, that cannot be reasoned with. No, it is worse than that. The hive is not even a collection of just people, but also of very inhuman software programs that operate based on rules that are, when executed en masse, totally unpredictable.
It is truly HAL from A Space Odyssey. Our economy is on autopilot and no one knows where the plane is going. And when it gets there, we won’t know why. We will only be able to look back retrospectively to figure out the details using forensic techniques.
But while the details are unclear, the psychology driving the big pattern is obvious: we all want something for nothing.
The truth is our economy has been in trouble for a long time. It is the “too smart for the room” guys that, at some point in, I would imagine the 90’s, figured out how to make money without actually creating any value.
The boom in the financial community economy was always a sham because it produced absolutely nothing. The boom in the real estate market was a sham because it was based on nothing.
There is no reason that moving money from column A to column B should be so disproportionately valuable. In truth it really isn’t that valuable, but we have been willing to pay a lot of money to people who we thought understood what was going on and could protect us from that which we did not understand. But they didn’t understand either. Hence for example, the AIG collapse.
In truth we should be making things that add real value to people’s lives. But in this country we are making less and less as we export real production to countries like China.
But the chickens are coming home to roost.
Ironically, while we are still incredibly expert at producing intellectual property, there is a political and social movement led by wackos like Richard Stallman, and cheer led by wackos like Mike Masnick that want to entirely devalue one of this country’s last great exports by arguing against any protections for intellectual property, and by arguing that even the concept of intellectual property is unjust.
In the tech economy, in the last five years we have produced very little that actually makes any of our lives better. Twitter is cute, but economically unproductive. Ditto Friendfeed. Ditto (fill in the blank with your favorite social media platform). These products are economically neutral. And that is not a good thing. To those of you that would argue with me on this point, I defy you to explain the real world economic value/impact of the social media revolution. How does it help increase the real world GDP even one little tiny bit. I dare you. I double dare you. You can’t do it. Because if all of it went away, the world would be the same the next day. And I don’t want to hear any crap about how we are going to “figure it out”. The time for figuring out how to create value out of economically unproductive concepts has passed. We need to rethink some things.
Just for context, please remember that there is actual precedent for creating value for people with technology. Think of word processors, databases, spreadsheets, web browsers, web publishing, search engines, email, etc. Social media is the first major computing revolution that as far as I can tell, has produced essentially nothing.
But the social media craze is perfectly fitting in a society where producing nothing has been in fashion for years. Mortgages without credit. Profit without product. Riches without risk. Oops.
The truth is that as things have gotten more and more complex it has become easier to abdicate responsibility for understanding. And that has lead us to this incredibly insane place where we can actually believe that things that produce no real value are somehow valuable. Because even if *we* can’t understand it, we assume someone else must. But it just isn’t so. The truth is it is likely if you can’t understand it, no one else can either.
We need to take things back into our own hands. There is safety in really understanding what you are holding in your hand. We need to stop trying to trick each other into buying the pig in the poke. We need to simplify. We need to get back to producing sound products that really do matter. This is as important in the financial community as it is in the tech economy. Because its really all the same fundamental problem. We want to believe you can get something for nothing and it just ain’t so.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Monday, September 29, 2008
Anticipating the Next Generation of Search
Most of the world’s most important information has structure. To be clear, by structure I mean the data has separate fields for its component parts, like for example, a contact has separate fields for first name, last name, address city, country, etc.
This structured information is where most of the value from the Internet resides. For example, all e-commerce is centered around structured data like product information records which have fields like part numbers, prices, descriptions, etc. I would suggest that structured data, on the whole, has one or more orders of magnitude greater economic value than unstructured data.
And yet we currently have no centralized way to find structured information. Today the process is very ad-hoc. We must know where to look in order to find what we are looking for. When we want to buy a new TV perhaps we check Amazon, Best Buy, and Circuit City. If we want to find people to potentially hire, perhaps we go to LinkedIn. If we want to buy Beanie Babies we go to eBay.
But shouldn’t it be possible to find structured information from a centralized source like Google? Yes, we have vertical search engines, but that really is the entirely wrong concept. There is nothing at all vertical (i.e. narrow) about structured search, and creating separate types of engines for each type of data is really the wrong thing to do. Perhaps we think of this problem as “vertical” just because it happens to be hard. But this is indeed one of the broadest remaining problems on the Internet.
While the technical challenges are significant, the opportunity here is huge. This is because the direct economic value of structured data is, as I suggested above, *much* greater that that of raw text. And so the company that brings us structured search might have the potential to be *at least* as valuable as Google.
Understanding the Problem
The current form of the search engine makes lots of sense when the data you are searching is just a river of text, and all you are looking for is whether a set of words is present, or even with semantic search, whether a concept is present. But as the Internet becomes a web of structured data and you want to find records of a particular type with, for example, fields within a particular range, how will that work?
The first thing to consider is that the Web, despite what people would like to think, is not really a collection of millions of independent servers operated by different people and companies. The web is a collection of servers that are all hooked into the major search engines — forming a kind of singular hive. These search engines operate as the brain of the Internet. They mirror a copy of most every bit of data on the Internet and index it inside their own servers.
This mirroring is doable because the task is, at the most basic level, relatively simple: store text and build an inverted index of it. I don’t mean to minimize the implementation complexities of modern search, but the basic concept is very simple. Doing a web scale structured search engine is not nearly so conceptually simple.
We have many years of experience storing structured information in SQL databases. But there are no web scale SQL databases comparable to the hundreds of thousands of servers Google has under the hood for storing and indexing text. And even if such a beast did exist, the whole concept of the SQL/relational database doesn’t work at web scale because you have to know what types of records you are going to store up front. You cannot just have every new user adding new record types.
And yet this ability to search through and understand any kind of structure is *exactly* what you want a structured search engine to do. In the next generation of search, new structures must be as easy to add to the index as new web pages are to add to Google. Just as today’s search engines store any kind of text, tomorrows search engines must be able to grab structured information, understand it, and understand the relationships between structures. For example, you need to be able to ask your search engine, who are John Doe’s friends. You need to be able to tell it that John Doe is a person and to find all the people that are connected to John as friends. This will require a fundamental rethinking of what a search engine does.
The solution to this is really a database problem. You need an infinitely horizontally database that understands structure but is not limited by it. And then you need some new kind of crawler to extract data. Ideally you also have some sort of notification system that allows this new search engine to be notified when individual records change.
Getting There
A broad-based solution to this problem is what I would call Web 3.0 search, and it will be necessary for Web 3.0 to reach its full potential in the same way search engines are critical to the current Web universe. But despite its importance and obviousness, I think this problem will not be solved by one of the major players, but by a startup. The major’s have too much work on their plates already, and it just makes more sense to let a focused startup figure all of this stuff out and to acquire it later.
But once this nut is cracked, it will be possible to explore the world of information in a way that makes the current incarnation of Google seem almost silly. And I believe that creating such a search engine would provide the motivation for almost every holder of actionable, relevant data to make that data available in a form that is searchable by such an engine. I do believe this is an, “if you build it they will come” situation, because of the scale of problems that such a search engine solves, and because way before something like this got to be Google scale it would be invaluable.
As an example, imagine being able to search for all of the flights between New York and anywhere, available on American Airlines that are below $200. From each of the flights you could click to see the cities associated with each flight. From each city you could see the top rated restaurants with prices under $20 a piece. From there you could explore their neighborhoods, etc.
In many respects an interesting presage of this is Metaweb’s Freebase. Freebase allows you to explore data in much the way that I describe, but it is a database, and not a search engine. They present themselves as the structured version of Wikipedia and not the structured version of Google. In its present form, I think Freebase really needs to either become the next generation “structured data” search engine, or they need to hope that someone else invents it. Because without a good central search system users will just never think of Freebase.
There is no doubt that such a structured search engine will come to pass. The need is too obvious and important. The most interesting question is what is the smallest possible implementation of this that actually does something useful will look like. Because while the need is clear, the most capital efficient way to get there never is.
This structured information is where most of the value from the Internet resides. For example, all e-commerce is centered around structured data like product information records which have fields like part numbers, prices, descriptions, etc. I would suggest that structured data, on the whole, has one or more orders of magnitude greater economic value than unstructured data.
And yet we currently have no centralized way to find structured information. Today the process is very ad-hoc. We must know where to look in order to find what we are looking for. When we want to buy a new TV perhaps we check Amazon, Best Buy, and Circuit City. If we want to find people to potentially hire, perhaps we go to LinkedIn. If we want to buy Beanie Babies we go to eBay.
But shouldn’t it be possible to find structured information from a centralized source like Google? Yes, we have vertical search engines, but that really is the entirely wrong concept. There is nothing at all vertical (i.e. narrow) about structured search, and creating separate types of engines for each type of data is really the wrong thing to do. Perhaps we think of this problem as “vertical” just because it happens to be hard. But this is indeed one of the broadest remaining problems on the Internet.
While the technical challenges are significant, the opportunity here is huge. This is because the direct economic value of structured data is, as I suggested above, *much* greater that that of raw text. And so the company that brings us structured search might have the potential to be *at least* as valuable as Google.
Understanding the Problem
The current form of the search engine makes lots of sense when the data you are searching is just a river of text, and all you are looking for is whether a set of words is present, or even with semantic search, whether a concept is present. But as the Internet becomes a web of structured data and you want to find records of a particular type with, for example, fields within a particular range, how will that work?
The first thing to consider is that the Web, despite what people would like to think, is not really a collection of millions of independent servers operated by different people and companies. The web is a collection of servers that are all hooked into the major search engines — forming a kind of singular hive. These search engines operate as the brain of the Internet. They mirror a copy of most every bit of data on the Internet and index it inside their own servers.
This mirroring is doable because the task is, at the most basic level, relatively simple: store text and build an inverted index of it. I don’t mean to minimize the implementation complexities of modern search, but the basic concept is very simple. Doing a web scale structured search engine is not nearly so conceptually simple.
We have many years of experience storing structured information in SQL databases. But there are no web scale SQL databases comparable to the hundreds of thousands of servers Google has under the hood for storing and indexing text. And even if such a beast did exist, the whole concept of the SQL/relational database doesn’t work at web scale because you have to know what types of records you are going to store up front. You cannot just have every new user adding new record types.
And yet this ability to search through and understand any kind of structure is *exactly* what you want a structured search engine to do. In the next generation of search, new structures must be as easy to add to the index as new web pages are to add to Google. Just as today’s search engines store any kind of text, tomorrows search engines must be able to grab structured information, understand it, and understand the relationships between structures. For example, you need to be able to ask your search engine, who are John Doe’s friends. You need to be able to tell it that John Doe is a person and to find all the people that are connected to John as friends. This will require a fundamental rethinking of what a search engine does.
The solution to this is really a database problem. You need an infinitely horizontally database that understands structure but is not limited by it. And then you need some new kind of crawler to extract data. Ideally you also have some sort of notification system that allows this new search engine to be notified when individual records change.
Getting There
A broad-based solution to this problem is what I would call Web 3.0 search, and it will be necessary for Web 3.0 to reach its full potential in the same way search engines are critical to the current Web universe. But despite its importance and obviousness, I think this problem will not be solved by one of the major players, but by a startup. The major’s have too much work on their plates already, and it just makes more sense to let a focused startup figure all of this stuff out and to acquire it later.
But once this nut is cracked, it will be possible to explore the world of information in a way that makes the current incarnation of Google seem almost silly. And I believe that creating such a search engine would provide the motivation for almost every holder of actionable, relevant data to make that data available in a form that is searchable by such an engine. I do believe this is an, “if you build it they will come” situation, because of the scale of problems that such a search engine solves, and because way before something like this got to be Google scale it would be invaluable.
As an example, imagine being able to search for all of the flights between New York and anywhere, available on American Airlines that are below $200. From each of the flights you could click to see the cities associated with each flight. From each city you could see the top rated restaurants with prices under $20 a piece. From there you could explore their neighborhoods, etc.
In many respects an interesting presage of this is Metaweb’s Freebase. Freebase allows you to explore data in much the way that I describe, but it is a database, and not a search engine. They present themselves as the structured version of Wikipedia and not the structured version of Google. In its present form, I think Freebase really needs to either become the next generation “structured data” search engine, or they need to hope that someone else invents it. Because without a good central search system users will just never think of Freebase.
There is no doubt that such a structured search engine will come to pass. The need is too obvious and important. The most interesting question is what is the smallest possible implementation of this that actually does something useful will look like. Because while the need is clear, the most capital efficient way to get there never is.
Friday, September 26, 2008
Apple Has Learned The Importance of Play. We Should Too
On Wednesday I attended the Sandbox Summit here in New York, which is a conference about the intersection between technology, toys, play, and learning. For someone deeply embedded in the software development world, but also deeply troubled by the state of education in America, the event seemed fascinating and also pregnant with possibility. And it did not disappoint.
And while many of the speakers had lots of really interesting stuff to say, one statement by Nancy Schulman, Director, 92nd Street Y Nursery School really got my attention. She said “kindergarten is becoming more like regular school, but I think regular school and life should become more like kindergarten.”
For those that may miss the nuance, what she was suggesting is that joyful playful exploration is critical to learning. Rote learning and memorization is less effective. As I sat, I realized how much the ideas I was hearing relate to how we make products. Much of this way of thinking I believe is already embedded in my thought processes, but there is something different and crucially important about codifying it, and expressing it concisely. What Schulman was saying got me immediately thinking about Apple.
I believe that a big part of the reason that Apple has been successful is that they figured out long ago that their products had to have the elements of joyful exploration that are the hallmarks of great toys. The concept of play is generally something associated with children, but I believe that that desire and that need never die. It is just muted by the expectations of adulthood.
The best example of this is my mother’s excitement about her new iPhone. My mother loves her iPhone because it is the best toy she has had since childhood. No, she has not said this to me, but I can see it clear as day. When she played her first YouTube video, she could not wait to tell me. For her, the iPhone is hard enough to still present challenges, and yet easy enough that she can overcome them. And the payoffs are joyous. The sound, the animation, the smooth virtual physics are incredibly compelling and toy-like. But of course it is not a “toy” it is a phone. It has a real function so she could never be accused of “playing.”
And so, the real question here is what does Apple, and what does the Sandbox Summit teach us about our way forward. First, I think that Apple sets a great example of what is possible, and it should inspire us to make our products more playful, accessible and exploratory.
But the second and more important lesson is that adulthood, and teen-hood are not demarcation points for a reduced interest in play – in fact the converse may be the case, meaning play may in fact become *more* important as we get older. And with our high school graduation rates at 50% in our 20 largest cities, something is obviously and seriously wrong with our current process. With that said I suggest that perhaps our educational system could use a serious injection of not so serious exploration and play. It seems to work for Apple.
And while many of the speakers had lots of really interesting stuff to say, one statement by Nancy Schulman, Director, 92nd Street Y Nursery School really got my attention. She said “kindergarten is becoming more like regular school, but I think regular school and life should become more like kindergarten.”
For those that may miss the nuance, what she was suggesting is that joyful playful exploration is critical to learning. Rote learning and memorization is less effective. As I sat, I realized how much the ideas I was hearing relate to how we make products. Much of this way of thinking I believe is already embedded in my thought processes, but there is something different and crucially important about codifying it, and expressing it concisely. What Schulman was saying got me immediately thinking about Apple.
I believe that a big part of the reason that Apple has been successful is that they figured out long ago that their products had to have the elements of joyful exploration that are the hallmarks of great toys. The concept of play is generally something associated with children, but I believe that that desire and that need never die. It is just muted by the expectations of adulthood.
The best example of this is my mother’s excitement about her new iPhone. My mother loves her iPhone because it is the best toy she has had since childhood. No, she has not said this to me, but I can see it clear as day. When she played her first YouTube video, she could not wait to tell me. For her, the iPhone is hard enough to still present challenges, and yet easy enough that she can overcome them. And the payoffs are joyous. The sound, the animation, the smooth virtual physics are incredibly compelling and toy-like. But of course it is not a “toy” it is a phone. It has a real function so she could never be accused of “playing.”
And so, the real question here is what does Apple, and what does the Sandbox Summit teach us about our way forward. First, I think that Apple sets a great example of what is possible, and it should inspire us to make our products more playful, accessible and exploratory.
But the second and more important lesson is that adulthood, and teen-hood are not demarcation points for a reduced interest in play – in fact the converse may be the case, meaning play may in fact become *more* important as we get older. And with our high school graduation rates at 50% in our 20 largest cities, something is obviously and seriously wrong with our current process. With that said I suggest that perhaps our educational system could use a serious injection of not so serious exploration and play. It seems to work for Apple.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
iPhone, Background Apps, and Android
Apple has claimed that the iPhone does not do background processing because supporting it would hurt the performance of the phone. Jobs has said Apple’s concern is that because the processor is limited, loading up the phone with background apps is likely to crash the machine or bring it to its knees.
I have discussed this issue in the past. I have also discussed Apple’s response to the issue, which is an improved way of handling notification of inbound events like instant messages, which would normally be implemented through a background task.
I understand Apple’s concern about background processing, but I personally think its pretty lame. As I have written, there are ways to handle Apple’s concern. But the interesting thing is that the first Android phone, The T-Mobile G1 has been announced and will be out in the wild available on October 22nd. Android has no restrictions at all on background processing, and the first Android handset, the G1 is pretty similar to the iPhone hardware.
The question is, will Android demonstrate that Steve was somehow disingenuous about this whole background processing thing, or will the Android team be shown to be foolhardy about this critical performance issue? Nokia’s Symbian-based phones seem to handle background tasks just fine, but admittedly I don’t think many people are motivated to load up a Nokia smartphone with software in the same way that people are doing with the iPhone. But Android is really a true test. There will be lots of software, an easy to use app exchange, and a sense of openness that will encourage experimentation.
I am personally very curious to see what happens in the Petri dish.
I have discussed this issue in the past. I have also discussed Apple’s response to the issue, which is an improved way of handling notification of inbound events like instant messages, which would normally be implemented through a background task.
I understand Apple’s concern about background processing, but I personally think its pretty lame. As I have written, there are ways to handle Apple’s concern. But the interesting thing is that the first Android phone, The T-Mobile G1 has been announced and will be out in the wild available on October 22nd. Android has no restrictions at all on background processing, and the first Android handset, the G1 is pretty similar to the iPhone hardware.
The question is, will Android demonstrate that Steve was somehow disingenuous about this whole background processing thing, or will the Android team be shown to be foolhardy about this critical performance issue? Nokia’s Symbian-based phones seem to handle background tasks just fine, but admittedly I don’t think many people are motivated to load up a Nokia smartphone with software in the same way that people are doing with the iPhone. But Android is really a true test. There will be lots of software, an easy to use app exchange, and a sense of openness that will encourage experimentation.
I am personally very curious to see what happens in the Petri dish.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Web 2.0: Making Friends / Web 3.0: Making Money
Web 2.0 is really at its core about user interface. Interface technologies such as Flash and AJAX have allowed web pages to be more active and engaging and to really become application-like. By and large, we have used this power to make social applications. Unfortunately while these social applications are entertaining, they are, for the most part, not making us money, and they are not providing any great enhancement to our productivity. In fact many would argue they are robbing us of our productivity.
But Web 3.0 is different. Web 3.0 is about the data. In a Web 3.0 world there are no silos between applications and data objects in application “A” can be connected to or related to items in application “B”. This is really just a natural extension of the concept of the mashup. Web 3.0 is about allowing for data across applications to be organized so that it becomes useful information.
Many people will refer to the Web 3.0 as the Semantic Web. I don’t use that term because it is tied to certain specific technologies from the W3C standards organization, but the concept of Web 3.0 is much bigger than one set of technologies or specifications. In fact the W3C Semantic Web specifications do not actually cover all of the requirements for making your application data open, and so companies are appropriately inventing their own solutions. One amazingly powerful example of this is Yahoo’s new Yahoo Query Language(YQL), which, through one language, gives access to huge parts of the yahoo data universe.
Ok, so how does open access to data and new organizations for data lead to making money?
It’s simple. When you properly organize data, you can extract actionable information that leads to profitable or productive decisions. There are two types of value that can be extracted from hyper connected data: direct value and indirect value.
If you want to participate in this discussion, we will be talking about how to profitably leverage Web 3.0 at the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA October 16th and 17th.
But Web 3.0 is different. Web 3.0 is about the data. In a Web 3.0 world there are no silos between applications and data objects in application “A” can be connected to or related to items in application “B”. This is really just a natural extension of the concept of the mashup. Web 3.0 is about allowing for data across applications to be organized so that it becomes useful information.
Many people will refer to the Web 3.0 as the Semantic Web. I don’t use that term because it is tied to certain specific technologies from the W3C standards organization, but the concept of Web 3.0 is much bigger than one set of technologies or specifications. In fact the W3C Semantic Web specifications do not actually cover all of the requirements for making your application data open, and so companies are appropriately inventing their own solutions. One amazingly powerful example of this is Yahoo’s new Yahoo Query Language(YQL), which, through one language, gives access to huge parts of the yahoo data universe.
Ok, so how does open access to data and new organizations for data lead to making money?
It’s simple. When you properly organize data, you can extract actionable information that leads to profitable or productive decisions. There are two types of value that can be extracted from hyper connected data: direct value and indirect value.
- Direct value is value that you get from realizing that there is a relationship between two items that your human mind would not have made. For example, imagine receiving a new email from a potential customer, and having the application be able to tell you (perhaps in a rollover) that this prospect is someone who you met at a get together last year (because it was on your calendar) and that you have several friends in common. That little bit of information might be enough to help you make that sale. In previous articles I have referred to this concept as serendipity.
- Indirect value is value that may be derived from *analyzing* the connections between objects in your data universe, typically using some kind of machine learning techniques. For example, imagine collaborative filtering, but applied not just to your book or movie purchases, but across your entire life. For an overly simple scenario, such a system might be able to suggest, based on the fact that you read a lot of books on Australia, that an airfare sale by Quantas might be of interest to you. This is only possible in a Web 3.0 world where activity stream data is accessible across all of your applications, and is not just locked into one service.
If you want to participate in this discussion, we will be talking about how to profitably leverage Web 3.0 at the Web 3.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA October 16th and 17th.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Versioning The Web
Last week I wrote about the conference I am co-chairing next month out in Santa Clara, CA called the Web 3.0 Conference. In discussing Web 3.0 I mentioned that I believed Facebook was a Web 3.0 company. One of the commenters asked for clarification, saying that he thought Facebook was a poster child for Web 2.0.
And indeed the answer is, of course they are.
As I see it, Web 3.0 services are almost by definition also Web 2.0 services. But it occurred to me that for many, this “Web 2.0” term might be somewhat nebulous. Of course the interesting thing about Web 2.0 is that while, as far as I know, there is no official definition, we do, I think, generally know it when we see it.
But despite the fact that we may “get it” on a gut level, I think it is useful to think about what Web 2.0 really means in more formal terms, and so I have decided to offer up my own definition.
While Web 1.0 was about basic linking of pages, Web 2.0 is about making web sites more like applications. So to be a web 2.0 apps almost by definition requires use of AJAX and/or Flash for real application style interactivity. I think if your application does not do either, it’s hard for me to imagine calling it web 2.0. One of the biggest areas in this regard is the ability to interact with audio and video, leading some to erroneously suggest that Web 2.0 is about user generated content. Of course if you disagree with my definition, I’d love to hear alternate definitions.
And so of course, Facebook is a Web 2.0 service, and a very sophisticated one at that. But it is also a Web 3.0 service. And what does that mean? It means that the application is really a universe of objects that can be viewed, accessed and interconnected across applications and within Facebook across users. In other words, as I discussed last week, Facebook is about connections between objects not connections between pages. Applications from the web 2.0 generation have objects (essentially meaning they have databases) but they do not allow other applications to point to those objects, and those objects cannot point each other.
In other words, pre-Web 3.0 applications are highly siloed, whereas Web 3.0 applications seek in some way or another to be part of the larger mesh of data objects.
Tomorrow, more on why Web 3.0 is so important. Hint: it’s about money!
And indeed the answer is, of course they are.
As I see it, Web 3.0 services are almost by definition also Web 2.0 services. But it occurred to me that for many, this “Web 2.0” term might be somewhat nebulous. Of course the interesting thing about Web 2.0 is that while, as far as I know, there is no official definition, we do, I think, generally know it when we see it.
But despite the fact that we may “get it” on a gut level, I think it is useful to think about what Web 2.0 really means in more formal terms, and so I have decided to offer up my own definition.
While Web 1.0 was about basic linking of pages, Web 2.0 is about making web sites more like applications. So to be a web 2.0 apps almost by definition requires use of AJAX and/or Flash for real application style interactivity. I think if your application does not do either, it’s hard for me to imagine calling it web 2.0. One of the biggest areas in this regard is the ability to interact with audio and video, leading some to erroneously suggest that Web 2.0 is about user generated content. Of course if you disagree with my definition, I’d love to hear alternate definitions.
And so of course, Facebook is a Web 2.0 service, and a very sophisticated one at that. But it is also a Web 3.0 service. And what does that mean? It means that the application is really a universe of objects that can be viewed, accessed and interconnected across applications and within Facebook across users. In other words, as I discussed last week, Facebook is about connections between objects not connections between pages. Applications from the web 2.0 generation have objects (essentially meaning they have databases) but they do not allow other applications to point to those objects, and those objects cannot point each other.
In other words, pre-Web 3.0 applications are highly siloed, whereas Web 3.0 applications seek in some way or another to be part of the larger mesh of data objects.
Tomorrow, more on why Web 3.0 is so important. Hint: it’s about money!
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Need Help With This Blog's Design
I am looking to improve the design of "Why does everything suck?" and so I am looking for help. Essentially there are two categories of things that need to be done.
First, I think I am going to move the blog to WordPress. I'd love to hear opinions on whether that is a good idea, but that is my current thinking. I want to be able to use Disqus, and generally to do things that Blogger makes more difficult.
Second, I want to improve the visual design. I'd like to add some kind of a logo to make WDES more of a brand, and I'd like to add a bit more structure to the design including adding a few sections.
Third, and this is the most open ended, I'd love suggestions on ideas for additional things to add here. I thought some kind of community based stuff might be good. For example a discussion group, or my own Digg type section for subjects that I am interested in. One thought I had was a reverse Digg which documents the stuff that really does suck. Essentially, though this site is really a very part time thing, if I can do it without too much effort I'd really like to, as Emeril would say, to kick it up a notch.
Anyway, please add comments on any of the above, or if you are skilled in helping move to WordPress or want to help with graphic design, please send me an email at whydoeseverythingsuck@gmail.com. I am also thinking of making the logo design a contest to 99designs.
First, I think I am going to move the blog to WordPress. I'd love to hear opinions on whether that is a good idea, but that is my current thinking. I want to be able to use Disqus, and generally to do things that Blogger makes more difficult.
Second, I want to improve the visual design. I'd like to add some kind of a logo to make WDES more of a brand, and I'd like to add a bit more structure to the design including adding a few sections.
Third, and this is the most open ended, I'd love suggestions on ideas for additional things to add here. I thought some kind of community based stuff might be good. For example a discussion group, or my own Digg type section for subjects that I am interested in. One thought I had was a reverse Digg which documents the stuff that really does suck. Essentially, though this site is really a very part time thing, if I can do it without too much effort I'd really like to, as Emeril would say, to kick it up a notch.
Anyway, please add comments on any of the above, or if you are skilled in helping move to WordPress or want to help with graphic design, please send me an email at whydoeseverythingsuck@gmail.com. I am also thinking of making the logo design a contest to 99designs.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Web 3.0: Object Orienting The Web
A big part of what I do professionally is focused on thinking about how to improve the usefulness of the web. Tied into that is the additional question of how to empower developers to create more useful applications.
Much of this exploration has lead me to believe that the most powerful “pregnant” web concept is the simple idea that the web should be a web of objects, and should become less a web of text or pages. Indeed the web has been moving in that direction, but the road map has not been entirely clear.
Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C have pioneered the broad outlines of the concept of objectifying the web with the ideas embodied in the W3C semantic web specifications for RDF, OWL, and SPARQL technologies. But in truth, most developers have no idea what the term the “semantic web” means and are totally unfamiliar with RDF, OWL and SPARQL.
Despite the fact that the officially proposed terminology and methodologies have not quite taken hold, the idea of “objects not pages” most definitely has. Application developers are creating APIs to allow people to access their data objects, and other application developers are using those APIs to consume data objects. And because the need is so great, when developers do not make their data objects easily accessible, other applications are going as far as scraping web pages, in effect manually objectifying source sites.
And so, while the most common term for the idea of “objects not pages” has been the “semantic web”, I would really like to get everyone around the lesser known but more encompassing term, Web 3.0.
I know the idea of glomming onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon rubs some people the wrong way, but we need a “big tent” term to describe stuff that is so important, and the truth is the word “semantic web” just doesn’t cut it. In fact, in my informal surveys, it almost universally turns people off.
But terminology aside, the concepts here are really important and are building momentum. We must, as a developer/entrepreneur community begin to focus on best practices for this object-oriented web, and to discuss its broader implications. The emerging mashups and semantic applications are compelling, but they are just the beginning. Facebook and its social graph is really the first major Web 3.0 application, so make no mistake, these ideas are powerful.
Because I believe this is such an important mission, and because I strongly believe it needs more shepherding, I have committed to doing my part to move these ideas forward. I am co-chairing the Jupiter Web 3.0 Conference Series, which launches in Santa Clara next month. My co-chair is Dan Grigorovici who writes lots of interesting stuff on this space at web3beat.
The Web 3.0 Conference is the first in what will be a regular series that we hope will become *the* gathering ground for talking about how we can, should, and will approach these next generation issues. And indeed since I have been thinking a lot about these issues I will be writing a lot about them in the next few weeks.
Particularly if you are in the Bay Area, but really no matter where you are, if you want to get a view into where the next generation of the web is going and how you can leverage it, this will be the place to be. But whether you come to the conference or not, I am hoping to spark a discussion about moving the ball forward. Needless to say I have my own ideas, which I will be sharing, both in person at the conference and on these pages in the next few weeks, but this should be a multi-way discussion. If you blog about this issue and let me know I will link to you in upcoming posts, and I will try to respond as well.
Let the Web 3.0 Era begin!
Web 3.0 Conference, October 16th & 17th, Santa Clara, CA
Much of this exploration has lead me to believe that the most powerful “pregnant” web concept is the simple idea that the web should be a web of objects, and should become less a web of text or pages. Indeed the web has been moving in that direction, but the road map has not been entirely clear.
Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the W3C have pioneered the broad outlines of the concept of objectifying the web with the ideas embodied in the W3C semantic web specifications for RDF, OWL, and SPARQL technologies. But in truth, most developers have no idea what the term the “semantic web” means and are totally unfamiliar with RDF, OWL and SPARQL.
Despite the fact that the officially proposed terminology and methodologies have not quite taken hold, the idea of “objects not pages” most definitely has. Application developers are creating APIs to allow people to access their data objects, and other application developers are using those APIs to consume data objects. And because the need is so great, when developers do not make their data objects easily accessible, other applications are going as far as scraping web pages, in effect manually objectifying source sites.
And so, while the most common term for the idea of “objects not pages” has been the “semantic web”, I would really like to get everyone around the lesser known but more encompassing term, Web 3.0.
I know the idea of glomming onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon rubs some people the wrong way, but we need a “big tent” term to describe stuff that is so important, and the truth is the word “semantic web” just doesn’t cut it. In fact, in my informal surveys, it almost universally turns people off.
But terminology aside, the concepts here are really important and are building momentum. We must, as a developer/entrepreneur community begin to focus on best practices for this object-oriented web, and to discuss its broader implications. The emerging mashups and semantic applications are compelling, but they are just the beginning. Facebook and its social graph is really the first major Web 3.0 application, so make no mistake, these ideas are powerful.
Because I believe this is such an important mission, and because I strongly believe it needs more shepherding, I have committed to doing my part to move these ideas forward. I am co-chairing the Jupiter Web 3.0 Conference Series, which launches in Santa Clara next month. My co-chair is Dan Grigorovici who writes lots of interesting stuff on this space at web3beat.
The Web 3.0 Conference is the first in what will be a regular series that we hope will become *the* gathering ground for talking about how we can, should, and will approach these next generation issues. And indeed since I have been thinking a lot about these issues I will be writing a lot about them in the next few weeks.
Particularly if you are in the Bay Area, but really no matter where you are, if you want to get a view into where the next generation of the web is going and how you can leverage it, this will be the place to be. But whether you come to the conference or not, I am hoping to spark a discussion about moving the ball forward. Needless to say I have my own ideas, which I will be sharing, both in person at the conference and on these pages in the next few weeks, but this should be a multi-way discussion. If you blog about this issue and let me know I will link to you in upcoming posts, and I will try to respond as well.
Let the Web 3.0 Era begin!
Web 3.0 Conference, October 16th & 17th, Santa Clara, CA
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Security Dangers For Macs at Web 2.0 Expo
I am sitting here at Web 2.0 Expo, and I have to admit I am a bit of a noob when it comes to using my computer in a public place like an expo. But I have just made a troubling discovery while sitting waiting for the keynotes to begin. There were several Macs that I had file level read access to, that were visible from the Finder.
Essentially, Mac users are able to configure their computers to discover and allow other people to have access to theic computers. I never really thought about how dangerous the feature can be. Perhaps Macs should warn you on boot up when your world is totally open to the public.
Essentially, Mac users are able to configure their computers to discover and allow other people to have access to theic computers. I never really thought about how dangerous the feature can be. Perhaps Macs should warn you on boot up when your world is totally open to the public.
Getting Seed Funding
On Thursday October 2nd, I am moderating a panel on seed funding at the Early Stage Summit here in New York. I am looking forward to the event because there are going to be a lot of really interesting companies pitching, some great keynotes, and a who’s who of VCs there (and if you are a NY area VC and you’re not going you should be.)
In thinking about what to talk about I have been thinking a bunch about the state of seed funding. More specifically, I have been thinking about the incredible difficulty of going from idea to implementation for non-trivial ideas. Seed funding is difficult everywhere, but is really difficult in New York where as compared to Silicon Valley, there are fewer cashed out entrepreneurs running around who have made money in a startup and so have a pre-disposition towards early stage investing.
This problem is exacerbated by the national later stage focus of the venture community. It used to be much easier to raise money at the seed level from professional investors. Or perhaps a better way to say it might be that series A was not defined by having a finished product and customers, and so series A really could *be* seed funding. As funds have gotten bigger they are no longer interested in these small time deals because when you are managing hundreds of millions of dollars, handing out money in $250,000 chunks is perceived as inefficient.
This state of affairs troubles me because it makes the markets more incremental and less innovative – a point which I have referenced before, and which has been recently documented in ex Cisco CTO Judy Estrin’s new book Closing The Information Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy.
That said, I am incredibly excited about Owen Davis’s new fund NYCSeed. NYCSeed is literally for two guys in a garage. The requirements are two techies that live in New York City, and a compelling idea. The terms are fairly simple: a convertible note for $200,000 that ultimately gives them around 10% of the company. The note converts to equity when the next round closes.
This is cool stuff, and is desperately needed by the market.
Last night I spoke to Owen, who is also giving a keynote at the Early Stage Summit, about his fund and the genesis of it. Owen, a long time New York entrepreneur, said he hopes that the fund will serve as an example of the need and the opportunity associated with early stage deals, and that his template will encourage others to create similar funds.
I certainly hope this is the case. I don’t think more money needs to go into silly me too deals but I do think that spreading more of it around into the early stage space is critical to pulling tech out of its innovation malaise, so I am very much hoping NYCSeed rocks.
In thinking about what to talk about I have been thinking a bunch about the state of seed funding. More specifically, I have been thinking about the incredible difficulty of going from idea to implementation for non-trivial ideas. Seed funding is difficult everywhere, but is really difficult in New York where as compared to Silicon Valley, there are fewer cashed out entrepreneurs running around who have made money in a startup and so have a pre-disposition towards early stage investing.
This problem is exacerbated by the national later stage focus of the venture community. It used to be much easier to raise money at the seed level from professional investors. Or perhaps a better way to say it might be that series A was not defined by having a finished product and customers, and so series A really could *be* seed funding. As funds have gotten bigger they are no longer interested in these small time deals because when you are managing hundreds of millions of dollars, handing out money in $250,000 chunks is perceived as inefficient.
This state of affairs troubles me because it makes the markets more incremental and less innovative – a point which I have referenced before, and which has been recently documented in ex Cisco CTO Judy Estrin’s new book Closing The Information Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy.
That said, I am incredibly excited about Owen Davis’s new fund NYCSeed. NYCSeed is literally for two guys in a garage. The requirements are two techies that live in New York City, and a compelling idea. The terms are fairly simple: a convertible note for $200,000 that ultimately gives them around 10% of the company. The note converts to equity when the next round closes.
This is cool stuff, and is desperately needed by the market.
Last night I spoke to Owen, who is also giving a keynote at the Early Stage Summit, about his fund and the genesis of it. Owen, a long time New York entrepreneur, said he hopes that the fund will serve as an example of the need and the opportunity associated with early stage deals, and that his template will encourage others to create similar funds.
I certainly hope this is the case. I don’t think more money needs to go into silly me too deals but I do think that spreading more of it around into the early stage space is critical to pulling tech out of its innovation malaise, so I am very much hoping NYCSeed rocks.
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Is There Any Reason for Desktop Apps Anymore?
Ok, I understand that today, you can’t do with an online app what you can do with Photoshop, or Word, or AutoCad. But think big picture for a minute. Imagine slightly faster computers, faster virtual machines, and the ability for web apps to, with appropriate permissions, access local resources like storage and notification services. Then imagine browser windows without all that browser chrome (buttons an such around the edges so the windows look like app windows). Yes I know it sounds a lot like Google Chrome.
Today, technically speaking, everything that Word or AutoCad does could be done with Flash 10 instead of the Win32 APIs. And less graphically demanding apps will work fine with just HTML and JavaScript.
It is true that *today* you can do more with desktop based APIs, but most apps don’t need that “more”, and within the next few years even that gap will totally disappear. At that point why would I ever want to download a desktop application?
This all brings me back to the whole, “is the browser an OS” argument, from last week.
The interesting thing is that back when windows was introduced it was *not* an OS. It was considered a kind of shell sitting on top of MS-DOS. Funny how things change. And then again not. I see the same thing happening with Web technologies on top of some Unix based OS underpinning, I don’t care whether you call that new thing an OS or not. It is the future.
The main point is that the top layer of the OS is about to change in the next few years. Soon no one will care about Win32, WPF or anything else at that level. And whatever you call it, that is a big deal.
Today, technically speaking, everything that Word or AutoCad does could be done with Flash 10 instead of the Win32 APIs. And less graphically demanding apps will work fine with just HTML and JavaScript.
It is true that *today* you can do more with desktop based APIs, but most apps don’t need that “more”, and within the next few years even that gap will totally disappear. At that point why would I ever want to download a desktop application?
This all brings me back to the whole, “is the browser an OS” argument, from last week.
The interesting thing is that back when windows was introduced it was *not* an OS. It was considered a kind of shell sitting on top of MS-DOS. Funny how things change. And then again not. I see the same thing happening with Web technologies on top of some Unix based OS underpinning, I don’t care whether you call that new thing an OS or not. It is the future.
The main point is that the top layer of the OS is about to change in the next few years. Soon no one will care about Win32, WPF or anything else at that level. And whatever you call it, that is a big deal.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Web Meets World (a.k.a. Web Meets Money)
Today Lehman is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and Merrill Lynch is being bought for chicken feed by Bank of America.
The Wall Street sky is falling. but what does that mean to tech companies, and particularly to startups?
The last five or six years have been all about community, "social media" and other related types of communications. That era has ended and the next phase of the Web will be about *real* productivity. That means products that make you more efficient, and more effective. It means software that saves you money or makes you money. And yes, we are really going to have to start paying for the good stuff.
One theme that has been emerging is being referred to as "web meets world". It's an idea that has been discussed by Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures, and also the folks at the Web 2.0 Summit. The concept is that the web needs to actually help you do things in the real world, and not just meet other folks on the web. I think this is all true but it is really just a fancy abstraction for helping people do things that matter, and things that they will pay for. As an example, Union Square just invested in Meetup -- a terrific investment. Meetup makes real money charging people for helping connect them to other people. They are providing real value and so people pay real money.
I find this "web meets world" concept particularly interesting because of a controversial piece I wrote back in April called "Free Is Killing Us, Blame The VCs." The core of my thesis in that piece is not that free is inherently bad, but that too much free was distorting the value of the market because the free is only supported by VC money and not real value being delivered to users.
As a result, I opined, it was way too hard to start a small business and to grow it because you need to "get to scale" since everything is expected to be free and monetized by advertising, which requires lots of users. Perhaps the idea people found most objectionable was when I said the following:
People really objected to the idea that "in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it." And of course there is room for debate here. But what is not debatable is that by and large, tech startups engaged in offering totally free services ( I am not talking about freemium here) are not making money, and they are not getting acquired. Its fine not to get acquired, but you can't do that very long if you're not making money. And now that "free" VC capital is drying up, sustaining such businesses will be really tough.
Interestingly, at the time, Brad, among many others, took me to task for having a dated view of the online world, and for not understanding how it really works.
But in my view, Brad's stated new thesis is exactly in line with my writing at the time. "web meets world" really might be better phrased "web meets money." There will be fewer and fewer companies getting funded by offering services that help online folks interact with other online folks, because cool as it is, people won't pay for it, and the bottom is going to fall out. Brad and Union Square's new investment thesis is the canary in the coalmine for that strategy.
Brad's rebuttal to my April piece talks a lot about new business models that are going to emerge that I am just missing. But five months later, I see no evidence of it, and "web meets world" to me, suggests that in their heart of hearts, they don't either.
In fact, I think companies like 37 Signals have had it right all along. They preach charging people for services, and staying small, and adding real productive value. Scale is irrelevant in this model because the software ads value to the individual without the network effect. In this model, scale is a benefit, not a requirement. I am not saying there will not be successful advertising based companies, but I am saying they will have to solve really serious issues like improving the value equation of online banner ads, in order to be successful.
As I see it, this is a fantastic shift in the marketplace, because it means if you have a company that adds real value, you are less likely to get thrown off course by a flood of capital creating unsustainable competition. I am very happy the venture markets are making this shift.
The Wall Street sky is falling. but what does that mean to tech companies, and particularly to startups?
The last five or six years have been all about community, "social media" and other related types of communications. That era has ended and the next phase of the Web will be about *real* productivity. That means products that make you more efficient, and more effective. It means software that saves you money or makes you money. And yes, we are really going to have to start paying for the good stuff.
One theme that has been emerging is being referred to as "web meets world". It's an idea that has been discussed by Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures, and also the folks at the Web 2.0 Summit. The concept is that the web needs to actually help you do things in the real world, and not just meet other folks on the web. I think this is all true but it is really just a fancy abstraction for helping people do things that matter, and things that they will pay for. As an example, Union Square just invested in Meetup -- a terrific investment. Meetup makes real money charging people for helping connect them to other people. They are providing real value and so people pay real money.
I find this "web meets world" concept particularly interesting because of a controversial piece I wrote back in April called "Free Is Killing Us, Blame The VCs." The core of my thesis in that piece is not that free is inherently bad, but that too much free was distorting the value of the market because the free is only supported by VC money and not real value being delivered to users.
As a result, I opined, it was way too hard to start a small business and to grow it because you need to "get to scale" since everything is expected to be free and monetized by advertising, which requires lots of users. Perhaps the idea people found most objectionable was when I said the following:
In today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then small companies could succeed at a small scale and grow. But it is very hard to charge when your competition is free.
People really objected to the idea that "in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it." And of course there is room for debate here. But what is not debatable is that by and large, tech startups engaged in offering totally free services ( I am not talking about freemium here) are not making money, and they are not getting acquired. Its fine not to get acquired, but you can't do that very long if you're not making money. And now that "free" VC capital is drying up, sustaining such businesses will be really tough.
Interestingly, at the time, Brad, among many others, took me to task for having a dated view of the online world, and for not understanding how it really works.
But in my view, Brad's stated new thesis is exactly in line with my writing at the time. "web meets world" really might be better phrased "web meets money." There will be fewer and fewer companies getting funded by offering services that help online folks interact with other online folks, because cool as it is, people won't pay for it, and the bottom is going to fall out. Brad and Union Square's new investment thesis is the canary in the coalmine for that strategy.
Brad's rebuttal to my April piece talks a lot about new business models that are going to emerge that I am just missing. But five months later, I see no evidence of it, and "web meets world" to me, suggests that in their heart of hearts, they don't either.
In fact, I think companies like 37 Signals have had it right all along. They preach charging people for services, and staying small, and adding real productive value. Scale is irrelevant in this model because the software ads value to the individual without the network effect. In this model, scale is a benefit, not a requirement. I am not saying there will not be successful advertising based companies, but I am saying they will have to solve really serious issues like improving the value equation of online banner ads, in order to be successful.
As I see it, this is a fantastic shift in the marketplace, because it means if you have a company that adds real value, you are less likely to get thrown off course by a flood of capital creating unsustainable competition. I am very happy the venture markets are making this shift.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Chrome vs. Firefox: Fighting Over 20%
Last week I wrote about my view that it would be a long time before Google's new Chrome browser would be important to me as a developer, because few users would adopt it quickly. The day after launch people got quite excited about the market share numbers Chrome was achieving. But Chrome's usage, as anyone with a brain could have predicted, has fallen back, as the tire kickers go back to their regularly scheduled programming.
And so now its time to think about what Chrome really will mean to the marketplace. The first thing is that I don't see how Chrome makes much of a difference to Internet Explorer users. I am sure Google can get a few of them, but most Chrome users will be more pioneering Firefox users. This caps Chrome's upper number around 20%. Of course to achieve 20% almost all Firefox users would need to defect, which of course will never happen.
More importantly, competing with Firefox is going to be really, really difficult, just based on the merits.
Why? Extensions.
Apple, Adobe, Google, and others have chosen WebKit as their HTML display engine over FireFox's Gecko because it is smaller, easier to understand, and has been faster. But Gecko is purpose-built, from the ground up, to do extensions. No one else has'em. The competitors have traded flexibility for performance. But for much of the cutting edge Firefox using crowd, extensions are really, really important.
To be clear, I am not saying it is impossible to get extensions into WebKit. I have no familiarity at all with the WebKit source code or architecture. But I strongly suspect it ain't trivial, otherwise they would have done it already. And if they do get extensions into WebKit, will WebKit, and therefore Chrome retain any performance benefits over Firefox.
Of course, presuming that Chrome/WebKit does get a mechanism for extensions, it then has to compete with years of Gecko based extensions. Many people will not switch until *their* extensions are available. And in the intervening period, don't believe that Firefox won't continue to get better. Already Firefox is testing the insanely fast Javascript engine called TraceMonkey.
Indeed this raising of the bar is, I suspect, Google's real end goal with Chrome. World browser domination is a pipe dream, but if Chrome can move the market forward and introduce code and ideas that make the world a better place to run web applications, I suspect Google will very happily claim victory.
And so now its time to think about what Chrome really will mean to the marketplace. The first thing is that I don't see how Chrome makes much of a difference to Internet Explorer users. I am sure Google can get a few of them, but most Chrome users will be more pioneering Firefox users. This caps Chrome's upper number around 20%. Of course to achieve 20% almost all Firefox users would need to defect, which of course will never happen.
More importantly, competing with Firefox is going to be really, really difficult, just based on the merits.
Why? Extensions.
Apple, Adobe, Google, and others have chosen WebKit as their HTML display engine over FireFox's Gecko because it is smaller, easier to understand, and has been faster. But Gecko is purpose-built, from the ground up, to do extensions. No one else has'em. The competitors have traded flexibility for performance. But for much of the cutting edge Firefox using crowd, extensions are really, really important.
To be clear, I am not saying it is impossible to get extensions into WebKit. I have no familiarity at all with the WebKit source code or architecture. But I strongly suspect it ain't trivial, otherwise they would have done it already. And if they do get extensions into WebKit, will WebKit, and therefore Chrome retain any performance benefits over Firefox.
Of course, presuming that Chrome/WebKit does get a mechanism for extensions, it then has to compete with years of Gecko based extensions. Many people will not switch until *their* extensions are available. And in the intervening period, don't believe that Firefox won't continue to get better. Already Firefox is testing the insanely fast Javascript engine called TraceMonkey.
Indeed this raising of the bar is, I suspect, Google's real end goal with Chrome. World browser domination is a pipe dream, but if Chrome can move the market forward and introduce code and ideas that make the world a better place to run web applications, I suspect Google will very happily claim victory.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
A Modern Day Eliza Channeling Abraham Lincoln
I love this idea.
Many of you will know the *very* old concept of Eliza, the chat bot that responds to questions as if almost human. It seemed very cool in the 70's, but it has lost a bit of shine in the intervening 30 years or so.
But a new company called Virsona intends to bring it back, better and stronger. The idea of Virsona is that you can take the collective writings of a person and it will generate a chat bot that will respond as they would. This is a powerful and fun concept.
Today they only have one chat bot up, which is for Abraham Lincoln, but it performs very well.
This was a bit of my conversation with President Lincoln:
The one question I have is how good it will really be. Would it be able to really do a good job taking all of my blog posts and creating a Hank chat bot?! If so, I think there is a really broad market for this. Several months ago I interviewed the team at Hakia, and learned a bit about their natural language capabilities. It is my gut impression that Hakia could do something like this as well and I think it would be another really interesting market for them.
One thing that struck me is that Virsona is at the TechCrunch50 Demo Pit. They were, apparently, not good enough to make the main stage. So apparently, Ashton Kutcher's Blah Girls is more compelling.
Anyway, if Versona is as good as they seem to be, and their technology works beyond Abe Lincoln, I think they really have something and I look forward to seeing how their product unfolds.
Many of you will know the *very* old concept of Eliza, the chat bot that responds to questions as if almost human. It seemed very cool in the 70's, but it has lost a bit of shine in the intervening 30 years or so.
But a new company called Virsona intends to bring it back, better and stronger. The idea of Virsona is that you can take the collective writings of a person and it will generate a chat bot that will respond as they would. This is a powerful and fun concept.
Today they only have one chat bot up, which is for Abraham Lincoln, but it performs very well.
This was a bit of my conversation with President Lincoln:
Abraham Lincoln: Hello, let's talk.
You: how are you
Abraham Lincoln: How are you?
You: I am fine
Abraham Lincoln: Pleased to hear it.
You: How old are you?
Abraham Lincoln: I was 56 years old when I was assassinated.
You: why do you wear a beard
Abraham Lincoln: No not always , silly question.
You: What did you do for a living before you were president
Abraham Lincoln: Before entering politics I worked as a Clerk,in Military Service, a Lawyer and a Store Owner.
You: what was your best speech
Abraham Lincoln: Short answer is for political reasons. To expand on that, in spite of the fact that the Battle of Gettysburg was a Union victory, it was also the bloodiest battle of the war and dealt a blow to my war efforts and the public''s ongoing support for the war. At the dedication of the Soldiers'' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on 19 November, in my now iconic speech, I referred to the events of the Civil War and described the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to dedicate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to consecrate the living in the struggle to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." I asked, what would these men who died for this cause want us to do--quit now or finish the job?
The one question I have is how good it will really be. Would it be able to really do a good job taking all of my blog posts and creating a Hank chat bot?! If so, I think there is a really broad market for this. Several months ago I interviewed the team at Hakia, and learned a bit about their natural language capabilities. It is my gut impression that Hakia could do something like this as well and I think it would be another really interesting market for them.
One thing that struck me is that Virsona is at the TechCrunch50 Demo Pit. They were, apparently, not good enough to make the main stage. So apparently, Ashton Kutcher's Blah Girls is more compelling.
Anyway, if Versona is as good as they seem to be, and their technology works beyond Abe Lincoln, I think they really have something and I look forward to seeing how their product unfolds.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Shortcut To Internet Millions!
I was feeling kinda crappy over the weekend, and so I was laying in bed bored. For the first time in many months I turned on the TV and channel surfed. I stumbled upon a guy by the name of Jeff Paul, who is hawking a product called “Shortcuts to Internet Millions”
Ok, some of you will think I am stealing a line from Ted Dziuba, but I don’t care.
Fuck Me.
We all must be real idiots over here in our little corners reading TechMeme, Hacker News, and such, looking for pearls of wisdom on how to do our business just a little bit better. How silly when all we really need to be doing is studying Jeff Paul's techniques. According to Jeff, if you spend $39.95 with him, all of the challenges of Internet entrepreneurship will melt away. Here are the highlights of Jeff’s system:
Ain’t that great! No computer skills necessary!
The amazing thing to me is that this guy is obviously making enough money to pay for a national TV campaign. Perhaps I shouldn’t be, but it really is viscerally shocking to me that there are enough people dumb enough to believe that you can really give some guy $39.95 and start making hundreds of thousands of dollars with no skills.
In many respects the Internet is indeed the great equalizer. It gives us all access to the same incredible pools of information. But what this kind of cynical campaign and product shows is that there are still plenty of people who really know nothing about even the basics of what the Internet is about. And among them there is a gullible group ripe for exploitation, that is responsive to this kind of insanity. Indeed Jeff Paul is capitalizing on the oft-quoted P.T. Barnum phrase that there is a sucker born every minute.
I know it is naïve but it is still disturbing to me.
Ok, some of you will think I am stealing a line from Ted Dziuba, but I don’t care.
Fuck Me.
We all must be real idiots over here in our little corners reading TechMeme, Hacker News, and such, looking for pearls of wisdom on how to do our business just a little bit better. How silly when all we really need to be doing is studying Jeff Paul's techniques. According to Jeff, if you spend $39.95 with him, all of the challenges of Internet entrepreneurship will melt away. Here are the highlights of Jeff’s system:
- Sign up today and be in business tomorrow
- Easy as sending email
- 10 Free web businesses
- No computer skills necessary
Ain’t that great! No computer skills necessary!
The amazing thing to me is that this guy is obviously making enough money to pay for a national TV campaign. Perhaps I shouldn’t be, but it really is viscerally shocking to me that there are enough people dumb enough to believe that you can really give some guy $39.95 and start making hundreds of thousands of dollars with no skills.
In many respects the Internet is indeed the great equalizer. It gives us all access to the same incredible pools of information. But what this kind of cynical campaign and product shows is that there are still plenty of people who really know nothing about even the basics of what the Internet is about. And among them there is a gullible group ripe for exploitation, that is responsive to this kind of insanity. Indeed Jeff Paul is capitalizing on the oft-quoted P.T. Barnum phrase that there is a sucker born every minute.
I know it is naïve but it is still disturbing to me.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Scoble Says "Everything Sucks". A Bit Over The Top But Not Untrue
Over the weekend, Robert Scoble got a bunch of people pissed off by suggesting that all the companies demoing at DemoFall 08, or at least all the companies' websites, suck. Now I do have at least some experience with analyzing suckage, and so I thought I would jump in here.
Now it is unlikely that I would say that every company at Demo or TechCrunch50 sucks. As others have correctly stated, entrepreneurship is hard, and my answer to things done by little guys sucking is generally (though not always) to ignore it rather than call it out. I figure calling out big or really well funded companies or really rich people is OK. Startups, and particularly smaller companies have it harder. Scoble didn't quite call out individual companies but it came pretty close given the small pool he pointed at.
That said, he makes a valid point about the websites.
Now I have not looked at all the websites, but I looked at quite a few. I specifically didn't look at all of them so that I would not be saying that all of them sucked. But most that I saw did. Unfortunately, this is a generic malady, and not a unique reflection on the Demo companies.
The purpose of this piece is not to talk about startups in particular, but to look at the larger issue of why so many websites, all the way from startups to larger companies do suck. Now to be clear I am not talking about the companies' products or services actually sucking. Though, just based on common sense and the basic odds of success, most things do suck, but that is not my point here. What I am talking about is the issue of getting the brochure-ware right. It seems to me that too many companies can't seem to describe even really compelling products or services effectively.
As I see it there are generally four categories of of web brochure suckage.
Now it is unlikely that I would say that every company at Demo or TechCrunch50 sucks. As others have correctly stated, entrepreneurship is hard, and my answer to things done by little guys sucking is generally (though not always) to ignore it rather than call it out. I figure calling out big or really well funded companies or really rich people is OK. Startups, and particularly smaller companies have it harder. Scoble didn't quite call out individual companies but it came pretty close given the small pool he pointed at.
That said, he makes a valid point about the websites.
Now I have not looked at all the websites, but I looked at quite a few. I specifically didn't look at all of them so that I would not be saying that all of them sucked. But most that I saw did. Unfortunately, this is a generic malady, and not a unique reflection on the Demo companies.
The purpose of this piece is not to talk about startups in particular, but to look at the larger issue of why so many websites, all the way from startups to larger companies do suck. Now to be clear I am not talking about the companies' products or services actually sucking. Though, just based on common sense and the basic odds of success, most things do suck, but that is not my point here. What I am talking about is the issue of getting the brochure-ware right. It seems to me that too many companies can't seem to describe even really compelling products or services effectively.
As I see it there are generally four categories of of web brochure suckage.
- MBA Speak - This is perhaps my greatest pet peeve. Its where the company tries to baffle me with a whole bunch of wonky b-school terms that end up meaning absolutely nothing. It is as if going to business school *reduces* one's ability to communicate.
- Geek Speak - This is geeks thinking they are talking to geeks. The problem is that even geeks don't generally want to hear geek speak when they are trying to understand the basics of why they should spend more than five seconds on a website.
- No Speak - Here, companies think their product is so cool they expect you to sit through a ten minute video, or try the product out to figure out what it is about. This company thinks their product is so cool that descriptions and salesmanship are not even necessary. I am not against videos, but before I am willing to commit to a video you need to sell me that it is worth my time. I will *never* try a demo unless I am already sold that the idea is cool.
- Weak Speak - This is where the person writing the copy has limited writing skills and just can't convey the essence of the product effectively. I am most sympathetic to this category because writing is hard, and describing a new concept effectively can be harder still. Still, if you have worked hard developing your product, it makes sense to work hard at describing it, or to at least to pay someone who can describe it.
Thursday, September 4, 2008
One Of The Coolest Homepages I've Seen
Last week my friend David Rose's company Angelsoft launched a new homepage for their website and I have to say it is one of the coolest homepages I have ever seen.
To summarize, Angelsoft is a platform that almost every angel investor group, and many VCs use to manage deal flow. It is an automated system that allows an entrepreneur to submit information to one or many early stage investors in one application process. Its a very cool idea that I think one day could make early stage private equity a much more fluid market.
But today I am not focusing on the company, but on the homepage. I hope to do a more in depth review of Angelsoft, but for today, my focus is just skin deep.
Go check out the page and then come back.
I'll wait here...
Welcome back.
The thing that is cool to me is the idea of seeing in real time, in a really visual way what is going on at the site.
I am reminded of a story I heard many years ago about the launch of Amazon. Jeff Bezos installed a bell in their office so that every time something was sold on the site the bell rung. As I recall the story, every time the bell rung was incredibly exciting. And of course we all know the sound of the bell became more and more frequent. Giving Amazon's employees a visceral sense of what is going on at the site must have been quite motivating.
I personally love the idea of feedback into what a service is doing. Exposing information in this kind of a way is like giving a site a pulse -- of bringing it to life. And so with the addition of the living map (if you haven't looked I you'll just have to guess at what I am talking about), Angelsoft really brings their site to life.
Congratulations David.
To summarize, Angelsoft is a platform that almost every angel investor group, and many VCs use to manage deal flow. It is an automated system that allows an entrepreneur to submit information to one or many early stage investors in one application process. Its a very cool idea that I think one day could make early stage private equity a much more fluid market.
But today I am not focusing on the company, but on the homepage. I hope to do a more in depth review of Angelsoft, but for today, my focus is just skin deep.
Go check out the page and then come back.
I'll wait here...
Welcome back.
The thing that is cool to me is the idea of seeing in real time, in a really visual way what is going on at the site.
I am reminded of a story I heard many years ago about the launch of Amazon. Jeff Bezos installed a bell in their office so that every time something was sold on the site the bell rung. As I recall the story, every time the bell rung was incredibly exciting. And of course we all know the sound of the bell became more and more frequent. Giving Amazon's employees a visceral sense of what is going on at the site must have been quite motivating.
I personally love the idea of feedback into what a service is doing. Exposing information in this kind of a way is like giving a site a pulse -- of bringing it to life. And so with the addition of the living map (if you haven't looked I you'll just have to guess at what I am talking about), Angelsoft really brings their site to life.
Congratulations David.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Redefining The Operating System
Several days ago, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch wrote an effusive article about the importance of The new Google Chrome browser. Specifically, Arrington made the claim that Chrome was the new Web operating system. Arrington was attacked by several people who not only disagreed with the notion, but attacked him for being an idiot because, in essence, an OS is something that has drivers and talks to hardware. The argument was that Arrington is not a techie and revealed his tech idiocy by making such a dumb statement.
Well I am a techie, and as I see it, Arrington is more right than wrong and his attackers are being pedantic, narrow, and silly.
Arrington’s critics are really making a language argument. It is a bit like saying you can’t call the file surface in a windowing operating systems a “desktop” because a desk is a thing that you sit at that is made out of wood, metal, or some such material. Clearly a computer does not have an actual “desktop”.
Silly, right?
Here’s the thing. The *meaning* of OS has changed from what it used to mean in the minds of users and even techies. Human language is a living thing, and terms grow, or shrink over time to match the needs and characteristics of the tools and the environment.
The term "operating system" long ago evolved beyond the narrow scope that is being defined by Arrington’s critics. Today most people think of an OS as being an environment that applications run in and that provides a bunch of end user services. In the early days of computing, operating systems were much more limited.
In fact in the early days application developers rarely even interacted with the OS. Programming languages had built-in functions for things like writing to disk, or to the printer or screen, and so it was the job of the programming language to support those functions by interfacing to the OS which provided access to the actual hardware through drivers. For the application writer, this was the unseen magic under the hood.
Today application writers write directly to the OS, and the programming language is just expected not to get in the way. And so a more intuitive definition of the operating system in today’s world would probably be the collection of services that an application sits on top of that enable that application.
And so, in the Internet age, the concept of a cloud OS or web OS being something that makes an emergent class of applications possible seems totally reasonable to me.
Now some of you will think I am reversing my position from yesterday. I am not. I do not think Chrome matters to me as a developer for the next year or two because it will have tiny market share and I don’t think supporting any of its special features will drive user adoption for my product in the near term.
But that said, the idea of something that does not operate at the driver level as being a new “OS” is a totally reasonable concept. In my mind the web browser has been heading this way for a long time, and so I am not so sure Chrome is the level of revelation that Michael is suggesting. But his basic framework is most certainly reasonable.
Well I am a techie, and as I see it, Arrington is more right than wrong and his attackers are being pedantic, narrow, and silly.
Arrington’s critics are really making a language argument. It is a bit like saying you can’t call the file surface in a windowing operating systems a “desktop” because a desk is a thing that you sit at that is made out of wood, metal, or some such material. Clearly a computer does not have an actual “desktop”.
Silly, right?
Here’s the thing. The *meaning* of OS has changed from what it used to mean in the minds of users and even techies. Human language is a living thing, and terms grow, or shrink over time to match the needs and characteristics of the tools and the environment.
The term "operating system" long ago evolved beyond the narrow scope that is being defined by Arrington’s critics. Today most people think of an OS as being an environment that applications run in and that provides a bunch of end user services. In the early days of computing, operating systems were much more limited.
In fact in the early days application developers rarely even interacted with the OS. Programming languages had built-in functions for things like writing to disk, or to the printer or screen, and so it was the job of the programming language to support those functions by interfacing to the OS which provided access to the actual hardware through drivers. For the application writer, this was the unseen magic under the hood.
Today application writers write directly to the OS, and the programming language is just expected not to get in the way. And so a more intuitive definition of the operating system in today’s world would probably be the collection of services that an application sits on top of that enable that application.
And so, in the Internet age, the concept of a cloud OS or web OS being something that makes an emergent class of applications possible seems totally reasonable to me.
Now some of you will think I am reversing my position from yesterday. I am not. I do not think Chrome matters to me as a developer for the next year or two because it will have tiny market share and I don’t think supporting any of its special features will drive user adoption for my product in the near term.
But that said, the idea of something that does not operate at the driver level as being a new “OS” is a totally reasonable concept. In my mind the web browser has been heading this way for a long time, and so I am not so sure Chrome is the level of revelation that Michael is suggesting. But his basic framework is most certainly reasonable.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Who cares about Chrome. IE6 Has 25% Market Share
At my company, Kloudshare, a big part of what we are developing involves pushing boundaries of what browsers are expected to do. Generally speaking this is the case industry wide as the web browser is becoming more and more a real application delivery system.
Google understands this issue and has apparently been focused on some of the more glaring weaknesses of the current crop of browsers. As such, they have decided to launch a new browser called Chrome, to try to bring browsers into the 21st century.
This has the blogosphere all excited. Everyone is writing about the features of the new browser, and its strategic significance. The product sounds great, but I can only get but so excited.
Why?
Because as a developer, Chrome seems to me to be little more than pissing in the wind.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer controls around 75% of the browser market, and that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that Internet Explorer version 6 has 25% of the market.
IE 6 launched in August of 2001.When IE 6 Launched the attacks of 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We were in the middle of the 1.0 tech bubble. In fact, if I had had kids when IE 6 was introduced they would be in second grade this year.
And yet 25% of the market is still using it. I’m not sure, but I believe it still comes on XP installation disks. In any case the fact that Microsoft has nothing in place to induce a higher upgrade rate is damn near criminal.
And so I must contrast all of the breathless excitement over chrome with the fact that the browser with #2 market share is so bad in 2008 terms it is just barely capable of delivering modern experiences. And even to do that, *lots* of engineering goes into supporting this trailing edge of the browser market.
I’d love to see a study of how much time is wasted developing special case crap for IE 6. I suspect if you added it all up we could solve world hunger or something.
All I know is that for me, as a writer, Chrome is a fun story -- as a developer, not so much. As a developer, Chrome is very much a story for the next decade and has nothing to do with my 2008 or even 2009 challenges. In fact it will be a cause for celebration if I care at all even in 2010.
The bottom line is Microsoft has been fighting the browser wars with spitballs and plastic knives and they are still beating Firefox handily. So Chrome, from a business perspective, for the foreseeable future, is totally irrelevant.
Google understands this issue and has apparently been focused on some of the more glaring weaknesses of the current crop of browsers. As such, they have decided to launch a new browser called Chrome, to try to bring browsers into the 21st century.
This has the blogosphere all excited. Everyone is writing about the features of the new browser, and its strategic significance. The product sounds great, but I can only get but so excited.
Why?
Because as a developer, Chrome seems to me to be little more than pissing in the wind.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer controls around 75% of the browser market, and that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that Internet Explorer version 6 has 25% of the market.
IE 6 launched in August of 2001.When IE 6 Launched the attacks of 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We were in the middle of the 1.0 tech bubble. In fact, if I had had kids when IE 6 was introduced they would be in second grade this year.
And yet 25% of the market is still using it. I’m not sure, but I believe it still comes on XP installation disks. In any case the fact that Microsoft has nothing in place to induce a higher upgrade rate is damn near criminal.
And so I must contrast all of the breathless excitement over chrome with the fact that the browser with #2 market share is so bad in 2008 terms it is just barely capable of delivering modern experiences. And even to do that, *lots* of engineering goes into supporting this trailing edge of the browser market.
I’d love to see a study of how much time is wasted developing special case crap for IE 6. I suspect if you added it all up we could solve world hunger or something.
All I know is that for me, as a writer, Chrome is a fun story -- as a developer, not so much. As a developer, Chrome is very much a story for the next decade and has nothing to do with my 2008 or even 2009 challenges. In fact it will be a cause for celebration if I care at all even in 2010.
The bottom line is Microsoft has been fighting the browser wars with spitballs and plastic knives and they are still beating Firefox handily. So Chrome, from a business perspective, for the foreseeable future, is totally irrelevant.
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