Posted by Antonio
1 month, 2 weeks ago (July 16, 2010)
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Steve Jobs
Despite how easy it is to write the story of how this iPhone 4 antenna snafu has to do with the esthetes at Apple being obsessed with the look of the device, I suspect that the motivation for the design change is much deeper, and likely speaks to Apple's strategy for staying ahead of the rest of the smartphone players.
On the 3GS, 3G, and original iPhones, the antenna was coiled around the bottom of the back of the phone— where you now have a smooth glass surface that seems remarkably similar to the front one. In fact, outside of the hard edges, it is this symmetry that you first notice on the device after coming from the more rounded predecessors: the back feels exactly like the front, so much so that it is sometimes a pain to figure out what the front of the device is when you are fishing for it in your pocket.
Now why would a company that seldom sacrifices function for pure looks do this, both when it is less convenient for the user and when it resulted in this controversial antenna issue (especially if the rumors are true that Apple was aware of the likely problems)?
My brother was the person who suggested the right answer to me after hearing me complain about it: because Apple is getting us ready to introduce a multi-touch panel on the back of the device, likely for simple gestures at first (think Mighty/Magic mouse) to be followed by more complex interactions most of which we can't even conceive of at this point.
Think about it: every time any of the keyboards have to come up, you've automatically lost 45% of the screen (this was the last remaining benefit of hardware keyboards on mobile devices). More importantly, imagine all of the new types of on-the-go interactions that having a touch-sensitive back would enable. Try this: if you've got an iPhone 4, hold it in the death grip position and try some swipes over the back glass with your index and middle fingers. Pretty natural right?
It is precisely because this is a credible hypothesis that the smartphone platforms are so exciting. We are still so early in this type of fundamental interface/interaction innovation that there is no telling where this might go. As Steve Cheney wrote, at the hardware layer, mobile innovation is just blowing away anything that came before it in personal computing.
[One final note: despite the fact that it runs totally counter to the way Apple does things, this is exactly what I would highlight in this morning's "Antenna Gate" press release: by letting folks know why they had to suffer through an untested and novel antenna design, the company would earn back a lot of the goodwill they've lost over the past few weeks]
[Note: these are my thoughts and not those of my former employer. I had zero visibility into a potential Palm acquisition and was as surprised as everyone else on Wednesday when I read the news]
As the case with most of the large tech companies, there is a lot of Apple jealousy inside the halls of the product side of the HP house. I used to play a game of reverse Buzzword Bingo, collecting one point for every meeting during a given week when Apple wasn't mentioned in some capacity ("we need to be as elegant/integrated/creative as the iPhone... we want this to be the iPhone of X"). Most weeks my score was 0— 1 on the weeks when I had meetings with the facility manager.
From that perspective, buying Palm makes a ton of sense for the world's largest tech supermarket: it gets the chance to bring a line of products to market that are fully integrated, it controls the software experience, and from what I've been told (because I've never owned a webOS device myself), it gets a very good copy of the iPhone OS which can be ported with little effort up and down the product line.
This is why it makes sense that the company would cancel the slate rumor that was rushed to announcement in January and I suspect that it will also be just a matter of time before all of the released Android products— and worse still— any of the on-deck Android products— get canceled or replaced by ones with webOS in their plan of record.
In fact, the fate of Android inside of HP is likely the greatest casualty of this whole deal, and given the recent pressure exerted on HTC by Apple's lawyers, it doesn't come at a good time. While it it hardly the case that HP was single handedly moving Android forward with its engagement with the OS, I think as one of 3 "tier one" players who had begun to embrace it (albeit apprehensively) with partners and the supply chain, the signaling power of the company's retreat will be felt.
It was never easy for HP to get its head around Android— between the open development model and Google's inconsistent messaging around Android versus Chrome and the different classes of devices (which seemed at times poorly thought out and at times just downright flakey), it was a bumpy takeoff every step of the way. HP is a company used to dealing with "vendors" who meet RFPs and charge license/support costs to deliver predictable help, not a community guided by a single company whose core business wasn't serving HP's needs.
In the end, I'm not sure whether HP can make webOS a commercial success (it may be too late), but I applaud their boldness in trying it. There is a lot a stake here if the world continues to go the route of app stores and platform dictators and I'd hate to play without full control of the stack (not to mention the glee at HP legal on the patent trove they're about to own).
What I do think is true is that we consumers ought to fast forward and think through whether we'll be better served with Apple, Google, RIM, and now HP all running this same playbook, or with the seemingly fading promise of a post-PC world that is as open as the desktop/browser one has been for the last decade.
Posted by Antonio
4 months, 2 weeks ago (April 17, 2010)
Not enticed by the additional cores and upgraded memory bus on the i7 laptops, I opted instead to finally make the plunge to solid state for my main laptop disk drive.
Man what a difference it makes!
I don't think that I've felt such a noticeable difference in the performance of a personal computer since Apple switched from PPC to Intel a few years back. Where there was latency in applications before, there is just instant gratification now. And more surprisingly, the apps that seem to benefit the most are the ones I would have thought were CPU bound due to all of the layers of abstraction: VMWare and Chrome/Firefox/Safari. If I were Intel, I'd be more worried about SSD storage these days than cramming cores into fixed dies.
It's not cheap— in fact, it is still atrociously expensive: on the order of $2.80/GB versus about $0.20/GB for the fastest possible spinning platter in the same 2.5 inch form factor. And what is more, at least on OSX, the operating system is horrendously not optimized for the different read/write characteristics of an SSD— and still you get this crazy performance boost (if you do take the plunge, and you are on a Mac, I'd highly recommend this atime hack before you swap your solid state disk in).
I'm sure SSDs as mainstream components are coming though, and to the degree that Apple still cares about their one open OS, I hope they make the investment in SSD filesystem support (like the TRIM command which Windows 7 supports out of the box).
And in the meanwhile it is funny to think that between smartphone, PC, iPad, iPod, etc, nary a platter is spinning in my life. In fact, magnetic platters have become the new tape— useful for backups and not much else.
Even if the price seems too steep to replace your main drive, I'd highly recommend getting a smaller one for the system, and if necessary dropping the DVD player. Even partitioning your data is worth it, given how much newer your computer will feel.
Too many bytes being wasted on iPad reviews/impressions/complaints, so I am going to be brief and specific to people who care about the industries I've worked in. Just three simple initial observations:
First, it is a beautiful piece of hardware with amazing software, but my first impression upon holding it (and one which has just gotten more acute after a day of using it) was: man, this thing is heavy!
This almost doesn't bear mentioning, but it is nice to see that even Apple can not escape the laws of the physical world. If I had to guess, I'd say 40% of the weight is the battery, and an additional 30% is glass, which gives you an idea of what can come out of it in future versions (and what won't). And the weight is going to affect it negatively in two key ways: it won't be a device people can hold up over their heads lying down easily at all, and more importantly, it won't be a particularly rugged device, especially when dropped face down.
(Right now there is a very happy team at my former employer who couldn't for the life of them figure out how Apple might escape physics but were taken in enough by the Reality Distortion Field to believe they might have).
Second, I had written about how much I wanted the web browser to be first class, and it most certainly is. For some web pages it is as fast as anything on the desktop (which speaks to the fact that we're just about as there as we can be without more fiber when it comes to webpages and speed). But more importantly, the pinch and zoom is an absolute delight. And best of all, just about everything that doesn't rely on Flash or complex onDrag event handlers works. Yay open web!
Finally, and this will only be relevant to people in the photo space: photo sharing is about to change forever.
When I say photo sharing, I don't mean an online photo repository like Facebook's that just a feature of a bigger social app; I mean the full ecosystem in which the traditional photo sharing folks have existed. And what is key about this ecosystem is that output has proven to be the only scalable business model, be it the 4x6 prints of yesteryear or the photo books of today.
All of that revenue died today. Not in the going away immediately kind of dead, but in the Lotus Notes kind of way. There will be a generation of folks who will print photos and books for a little while longer, but for the bulk of people that have seen the power of a live slideshow on a bright IPS LED display of the iPad's size— one that can be passed around a living room or left rotating on a particular event— will never go back to keeping anything with ink and paper.
If I were still in that space, I'd be looking hard at the few players who have figured out how to make money with virtual-only products (which is really hard), because that is the only place where there is likely to be any significant growth.
Another way to put it: RIP photo book. You were awesome while you lasted and I'm sorry you never became truly mass market (only about 11% of the US population had made one last I checked), but there are just better ways to tell stories with pictures in a portable and human-scale way out there now.
More later after I work up the muscles to hold up the iPad better.
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 1 week ago (March 27, 2010)
In the last 2.5 years of heavy iPhone use, I've had a few cases where I've wanted to sit down to build an app that would make my life easier only to discover some iPhone SDK limitation that would make it impossible. The lack of background processing has been a chief culprit in a some of these cases, but in just about as many, the lack of true inter-app communication or even a decent plug-in system for the four most common apps (browser, messaging clients, camera, and maps application) has made writing multimodal glue impossible.
Multimodal glue? Let's take that mouthful in pieces.
Multimodal refers to the fact that the interface for computing should be able to move seamlessly throughout my day from my laptop at home to my mobile phone to my 24 inch desktop display at work, and even eventually, to my tablet of choice. This is one of two reasons for our collective move to clunkier web-based experiences instead of desktop apps (the other reason being the collaboration vector that is opened when the data is held on the server).
Some use cases have longstanding protocols that make this easy within the single application silo: IMAP for email being the best example. But others do not; for a great example of one app that is unnecessarily still stuck to the device, look no further than the SMS application on most phones (it's why I'll take the kludgey Google Voice solution to SMS (on any non Android device) any day over tapping out messages on a tiny screen while sitting at a huge monitor).
And glue refers to the interesting combinations that come out of being able to wire these applications together in new and unexpected ways. The web-as-platform is king here; a few years ago we called this class of interop "mashups" (thank God that term devolved into "smashups" before falling into cultural oblivion), but now we take it as given that you can plug your Twitter stream into your Facebook status, as a simple example, with a just a few clicks.
The glue apps are especially interesting in the context of a mobile device thanks to location information and the existence of a number of really interesting personal databases (call logs, addressbook, media library), and the fact that most platforms don't allow it (the iPhone is not alone here— RIM, Palm, and the forthcoming Windows 7 Mobile seem to be cargo culting their way to copying the wrong thing) is going be very good news for Android, and to a lesser extent Symbian Series 60.
But other than the platforms getting with the Android way of doing things, there is hope. Just as John Gilmore claimed that the Internet "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," it would seem that web-savvy developers are seeing SDK limitations in multimodal glue as damage to be routed around. Reading apps that can post to Twitter is a good first example, though in this case, the app developer is forced to write an entire Twitter client within his app. A more interesting example are websites that rely on cloud services to deposit data into other apps. For instance, I read HackerNews on Mobile Safari and can mark an article for download into my Instapaper app through a link that is served to me. It's kludgey that the data is sitting in my browser and has to roundtrip itself through the Instapaper servers to get to my application, but it is nice a pattern that other developers can use to inject a little cluefullness into broken platforms.
A good thing to consider as we sit here right before the release of the completely gorgeous but totally locked down Apple iPad.
Posted by Antonio
5 months, 4 weeks ago (March 7, 2010)
It is a mystery to me how the hobbyist hacker community can make Android so much better than the stock images that Google ships, but if you've got a Nexus one, Cyanogen has just made things much much better. As an iPhone owner from day 1, I can tell you that the simple fact of moving from the stock 2.1 image that comes with your Nexus to the latest Cyanogen creates about the same feeling of improvement that moving from an iPhone 3G to a 3GS provided— except that in this case, you aren't changing your hardware. It is software's true magic!
If you've got a Nexus One, and are interested, read on.
Unfortunately, the process is far from simple and the Android mod community has a lot of new jargon that you have to get used to. If you've ever jailbroken an iPhone or iPod Touch, I'd say this is about 30-50% more involved, so get ready to rumble.
Fortunately, I had the benefit of Eddie's amazingly good notes to guide me through it all. I am reproducing them below, along with a mini glossary at the front, and some comments in places that I found tricky. Your mileage may vary on these, and be aware that you could in theory brick (or destroy) your phone, though practically speaking, I've found this to be almost impossible to do with how well the boot loading sequence has been thought out on Android.
--
Some basic terms:
In Android land, the equivalent of jailbreaking is "rooting" which refers to getting access to the root directory of the phone's ROM (which is not really Read Only since both Google/HTC and you overwrite this with every update). In the steps below, you will be using a command line program called "fastboot" to do the unlocking on that root directory and install custom software. Fastboot is also the name of a mode in the Nexus when you first boot up (it is actually available to all Android phones) that gives you a sort of minimalist OS/boot loader thing to take actions that affect the OS in the phone. It's not quite like a PC BIOS menu, but it can be helpful to think of it that way. Below you'll see the key combination required to get the phone to that which can vary a little by model.
Also, there are three basic software bundles you will be applying after the phone is "rooted:" the recovery image which basically provides a more powerful fastboot environment (to do things like unlocking and backing up), the baseband update (which is just like the iPhone one is that it updates the separate system that runs the radio), and the Cyanogen custom ROM which is the magic that will make your Nexus instantly better.
There is an additional step required which has to do with the crappy licensing around the proprietary Google apps (that you will definitely want on: Market, Gmail, Maps, etc.). Because Google asked the Cyanogen guy to stop including those with his mods, you'll have to apply them as a sort of patch when you are done. This is ok and is actually the easiest part of the update.
We did all of this on a Mac and the instructions below are for that platform— however, I am sure the Android SDK is good enough that it will be a relatively simple exercise to transpose the instructions for Linux and Windows. We did assume however that you are comfortable with the command line.
Finally one important note: in doing this, you will lose all of the data on the phone. Because of Google's phenomenal sync, this won't affect email, contacts, or calendars, and because the media (pictures) are stored on the SD card, you will be fine there, but depending on which apps you've installed, you may lose some local data. You will also have to reinstall all of your apps. You have been warned.
Let's get started:
1. Take a deep breath. It is just software and you are going to master it!
2. Download and install the Mac OSX Android SDK. I am going to assume for the purposes of this list that you have put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/ but it doesn't matter.
3. Get fastboot-mac from here. Rename it 'fastboot' and put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/.
4. Get Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img, update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip AND gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip from here and put them in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/.
5. Get recovery-RA-nexus-v1.6.2.img from here and put it in /Applications/android-sdk-mac_86/tools/
6. Put Get Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img, update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip and gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip on the root of the SD card. You can do this by mounting the phone via a USB cable (this works just like any USB stick except you have to click a button on the phone's UI).
7. In your phone settings > applications > development, set usb debugging to enabled.
8. Turn off your phone and put the SD card with the 3 files on it into your phone.
9. Hook up the USB connection to your phone and your mac.
10. Reboot phone into fastboot: Hold down trackball, push the power button and hold both until you see the fastboot screen. (The fastboot screen is the one with the Androids on skateboards)
11. In Terminal on your mac, cd to /Applications/android-sdk_mac_86/tools
12. Type ‘./fastboot devices‘ to make sure your phone is recognized (it should list a device number rather than simply returning to command prompt with no feedback).
13. Type ‘./fastboot oem unlock‘ to unlock the bootloader (wohoo, your phone is now rooted!)
14. Use volume keys on the phone to navigate to yes and press the power button to confirm.
15. When the phone finishes booting, in your phone settings > applications > development, set usb debugging to enabled, then power it down.
16. Reboot phone into fastboot: Hold down trackball, push the power button and hold both until you see the fastboot screen. (The fastboot screen is the one with the Androids on skateboards)
17. (you're still in terminal in /Applications/android-sdk_mac_86/tools) Type ‘./fastboot flash recovery ./recovery-RA-nexus-v1.6.2.img‘. (Note filename will change as recovery image is updated)
18. Type './fastboot flash radio ./Radio_20100203_2_Signed_PASSION.img' to also update your radio at this point
19. Once the Recovery flash is complete (should be almost instant), press the Power Button. The highlighted blue text should now say HBOOT. Use the volume down button to highlight "Recovery" and hit the power button to reboot into recovery.
20. if this step fails, power down the phone, and try this: hold down the VOLUME DOWN button and then hold the POWER button until you get to the skateboard screen; use volume down to highlight RECOVERY and hit the POWER button
21. You should now be in the Recovery screen after a reboot -- this screen has 9 green text options at the top and an android x in the center of the screen
22. Once in Recovery Mode, use the trackball to scroll down to "Backup/Restore" and press the trackball three times, and wait until the backup is complete.
23. Once backup is complete, wipe, since you're coming from stock (even fastboot oem unlock may not fully wipe, do it just in case) many users report the phone not booting properly without a wipe at this point.
24. Scroll down to "Flash zip from sdcard", and press the trackball.
25. Select the CyanogenMod update (update-cm-5.0.4.1-N1-signed.zip), and press the trackball again to confirm. Wait until the flash is complete. (Note: this will take a little while).
26. Once again, Scroll down to "Flash zip from sdcard", and press the trackball.
27. This time, select the Google Apps File (gapps-passion-ERE36B-2-signed.zip), and press the trackball again to confirm. Wait until the flash is complete.
28. Once you are back in the main menu, press the trackball select the first option (Reboot system now) and reboot the phone.
29. If everything was done correctly, the phone should boot into CyanogenMod!
Eddie's extra bonus section— only for the adventurous (I have not tried this!)
Follow the instructions here to download your kernel and associated .ko module, your overclocking tool, and go to town with undervolted and overclocked goodness!
Good luck. If it works correctly, it should take about 35-45 minutes to do it. And at the end of it, you will not only have one of the coolest hacker phones, but you will have done it! And trust me, it is worth it!
[A big thanks to Eddie, who both plied me with drinks last week to convince me that I should take this on, and then produced the first draft of this document so that I could not end up bricking my own iPhone]
Posted by Antonio
6 months, 3 weeks ago (Feb. 11, 2010)
For a while I loved Twitter. Not because it was realtime. Not because it was easier than blogging. And not because it was cool.
Mostly because it was a quick way to get a feel for the things that were going on in the lives of folks one level beyond those who I interacted with every day. In having invented a new format (140 characters) and brought into mainstream the asymmetric follow relationship, Twitter brought into the world something really interesting.
But then the marketing people got on it. Or if they were already on it, they got super aggressive about polluting the Twitterverse. Link velocity increased by orders of magnitude, and what started out the types of interesting articles that you might share on Delicious, quickly became links to people's companies, blogs, or special "deals" (thin affiliate scams).
Sure, you could always curate the list of your followers and keep only that 0.01% of folks who had not started using Twitter as a new form of direct marketing. But as Twitter climbed to a billion updates per month something happened to the way in which everyone uses the medium such that even folks who were funny or insightful one third of the time spent the other two thirds plugging their blogs or the new startup they'd just gotten involved with.
And this, it seems to me, is how a new medium gets "typed" by its early adopters. So that now, no matter how many people get on Twitter (and I suspect it won't be many more), it will forever remain the place where the marketing people should have STFU.
Which is why I am excited about Google Buzz. Though in many ways it seems like a copy of the most social/sharing parts of Twitter/Facebook/Friendfeed, I think its got a few key differences that may help it move adoption-wise beyond what these services pioneered. Chief among these attributes are the easy integration with existing communication patterns (Gmail), and the ability to create fine-grained groups and direct the stream of updates at say, just "family" or "college roommates" or whatever.
This last one is important and will be critical to Buzz's eventual success. During the first phase of the Internet, a lot of products struggled and crashed on the reef of privacy controls, and it wasn't until the 2004-2005 era of "default to public" that a lot of the same services started catching on in a meaningful way. The "default to public" era culminated with Facebook's claim that people needed to abandon the notion of privacy online and just get used to being public. For most of the non-tweeting, non-Silicon Valley crowd, this statement is about as alien as claiming that people needed to abandon breathing and get used to hypoxia.
If this right, and the Buzz team gets all of the small affordances right (no small feat despite an impressive 1.0 effort), this blend of email and status updates (in a controlled way) may create a new format— one which which I hope will not again be typed a new kind of weird direct marketing vehicle.
I wanted to wait a week to put down my preliminary thoughts on the iPad both because of the crazy outpouring of people venting some very real emotion on all sides of the debate, and because I've learned that when it comes to Apple and Steve Jobs, it often pays to let the reality distortion field fade a bit.
I am not a fan of netbooks— as I've written before, they are nothing but cheap laptops. Thus I was sort of excited to see Apple try to reinvent the category with the iPad. After a week of reading reviews though, I'm sad to say that this seems like a fairly incremental product— taking the best parts of the closed ecosystem of the iPhone/iPod touch and hitting the 4x magnify button on the form factor. It'll be a fun and possibly lucrative product— and in the end I could see Apple selling 1/3 to 1/2 as many of these as they have iPod touches (which is about 40MM to date). But here is where they fell short:
1. New formats: the Kindle sucks not because of its screen or hospital ID but because despite the connection to the Amazon web service and the persistent data connection, it fails to be as good as a paper book and doesn't reinvent any of the parts of the book that could use some social/cloud juice. From what I could see, Apple is doing nothing better here (at least with version 1). They haven't defined a new format that would allow publishers to take advantage of video and audio and they didn't do anything to make the experience of finding, reading, and sharing books any more social. Could be that the publishers weren't hip to it, but if anyone could crack that particular cartel, I thought Apple could.
2. Ergonomics: Ned wrote this one up, and frankly, I can't believe the Reality Distortion Field has kept other people from noticing that the idea of a non-tactile keyboard without a place to rest one's palms renders this a piss poor input device. This is ironic as Apple was the first company to do the palm rest design for laptops with the Powerbook 100/140/170 series that was even shown during the keynote.
3. Closed ecosystem: I'm less worried about this one than the people who feel that Apple is starting us on the road to being like the bio-sacks that pass as humans in the movie Walle, because it does seem as though the combination of HTML5 and the A4 CPU will make webapps really sing on this machine, but it would have been nice to have given people some sort of mechanism for side-loading applications (even as "untrusted" like Android and S60 do). Again, this is ironic coming from the company that had its first hit product (the Apple ][) succeed because some crazy hackers in Boston wrote a killer app and distributed it with little involvement from Apple. That said, I do think if the iPad becomes ubiquitous enough, Apple will have to open up (or be subject to aggressive jailbreaking as the FUD around "messing with the carrier settings") doesn't exist for this type of device.
Finally, perhaps the biggest disappointment for me is that because of 1-3 the iPad seems to be primarily a content consumption device, a sort of modern-day version of the portable TVs that Sony and others started selling in the 1980s. That may be what the market wants, but I find it hard to muster the same level of excitement as I would have had for a more general computing type of device. In the case of the latter, creativity really is the upper limit on what can be done. With a closed, content consuming device, we'll end up where we are with the iPhone: with small widgets that all basically do the similar types of information retrieval and display. If this is the new world of personal computing, it looks a little boring.
Posted by Antonio
7 months, 1 week ago (Jan. 25, 2010)
Chris Anderson has a piece in the latest issue of Wired, "Atoms Are the New Bits" (not yet online) which chronicles the emergence of DIY hardware development. Covering the basics of prototyping tools like 3D printers and CNC machines, he goes on to make a connection to the newly emerging short-run Chinese manufacturing supply chain to explain how a new industrial revolution might take place, even going so far as to quote from my favorite fiction book of 2009, Cory Doctorow's Makers:
The days of companies with names like "General Electric" and "General Mills" and "General Motors" are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.
As with his article on the Long Tail from five years ago, I think Anderson is on to something very big here even if he doesn't get all the causation correct. Short run manufacturing could be the basis for a whole new industrial base here, but not necessarily because of the democratization of prototyping tools (which as the story of Makerbot Industries shows is indeed happening along the same story arc as the PC revolution), but because of the powerful combination of the Internet as a collaboration channel (for ideas) and the Internet as a demand aggregation and distribution channel (for niche interests, passions, and ultimately sales).
This is the story of Threadless, a company which exists today because it is perfectly evolved to take advantage of these two forces in the apparel space. But increasingly it may also become the story of much more complex products. The Wired piece covers a local Boston startup called Local Motors which is trying the approach with cars— a complex multi-component electromechanical product that has all sorts of safety and regulatory challenges. If they can pull it off there is no reason not to wonder about other similarly complex products.
For instance, just the other day I was commenting to someone that I'd love to have a smartphone that had an internal 3000 mAh (they mostly have 1/2 of that) and a cheap low-power 7-segment display for most of the notifications that it would normally power up the battery for— "the longest lasting smartphone in the world." One can argue whether such a monster might end up being the Spruce Goose of the category, but with Android we've got the software to be able to do just that, and looking through any of the iSuppli teardowns, you quickly realize that most of the internal components of these devices are increasingly as "standard" as what goes into your typical PC.
How far are we from the day when someone can start the Threadless of smartphones? Then we could go from custom cases and wallpapers to devices truly tailored to our specific needs.
There are many wrecked ships that have fallen victim to the siren song of mass customization, but given enough relevant customization in a product category that has enough demand and you may just have something here.
Posted by Antonio
9 months, 2 weeks ago (Nov. 21, 2009)
I've not downloaded or attempted the early release of Chrome OS yet, but having read through the docs, I can't help but feel that Google attempting to launch two post-PC operating systems at the same time is only going to confuse partners, consumers, and even developers.
Unless Google gets into the hardware business, it's going to have to depend on large OEMs to ship Chrome OS preinstalled. These are the same folks that took their limited software resources (because even though you might ship billions of dollars of hardware, the razor thin margins mean that you just don't have that much money for software R&D) and bet "big" on Android for everything from phones to slates to netbooks. Now two years later along comes Google saying "Whoops, we didn't really mean that we were excited about you using Android, instead check out this shiny happy new toy!" That one is gonna sting.
Also, no matter how many cute videos Google puts out, consumers are going to be really confused by Chrome OS. Will it have an AppStore? Will it run iTunes? Can it see the shared printer? Share files with the other machines on the network? The smartphone doesn't have any of these affordances (it is, after all, the grandchild of the telephone) so it doesn't disappoint in the same way. And what of the connection to Chrome the browser? The first time someone sees a netbook that runs both Chrome the browser (a fantastic product) and iTunes and then makes the mistake of buying the "webtop only" Chrome OS version, I suspect the Google brand will suffer. Repeat a million times and Google may have to start worrying about its unassailable brand in search.
Finally, developers. The story here is simpler, but not obvious by any means. Chrome OS runs Chrome the browser which means that we're talking about HTML5 applications. But what if we want access to the camera on the bezel (and not through the flash plug-in)? Will the DOM API be extended? Supposedly this is how developers will get access to really important things like the power meter. So now we've got to test for a series of DOM elements that may or may not be present across Chrome runtimes? When you're talking about tens of millions of Chrome the browser instances, do we really want to do this? And the alternative, which is changing Chrome the browser to behave like Chrome the OS from an API perspective seems like a mistake in a world where Firefox, Safari, and IE are still relevant.
So I don't get it. To me it seems like a great example of the netbook distortion effect (NDE): netbooks are so cool looking to fans of Star Trek, Batman, and 24, that they completely obscure their essence as cheap laptops for those that can't afford better and paperweight toys for the rest of us. Meanwhile some IDC clown put out numbers saying that a gazillion netbooks will be sold and boom! You've got folks at Google scheming to kill Windows on this new dark horse.
Sort of like the guys with the cornseed engine for this new killer car called the Edsel.
He isn't motivated by money, says friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Rather, Jobs is understandably driven by a visceral ardor for Apple, his first love (to which he returned after being spurned -- proof that you can go home again) and the vehicle through which he can be both an arbiter of cool and a force for changing the world.
Lately, I've been wondering whether the rhetoric of "top and bottom line growth" that pervades almost all corporate discussions in large companies isn't not only misguided when it comes at the exclusion of all else in technology companies, instead bordering on the downright destructive of what made these tech titans giants in the first place.
Only time will tell whether these behemouths driven to delight fund managers the world over won't end up smoldering craters of indistinguishable products and services.
Recently though I've realized that in two such companies, it didn't always use to be this way. Having just finished "The HP Phenomenon," I finally discovered that the term "make a contribution," which we today use as a synonym for "revenue and profit" was first coined by David Packard to mean: employ great engineering to make products that no else can build and that make the world a better place. Similarly, Craig Barrett from Intel recently talked at Stanford about how continuous investment in great engineers solving hard technical problems (like say, doubling transistor density every 18 months) is the only proven way to build sustaining value.
For sure, making money is awesome. A healthy business and balance sheet affords a company great opportunities for investment in all sorts of cool new projects, it brings with it independence, and best of all, if used wisely, it can go a long way towards creating a fantastic working environment. But to have that as the sole end— the only meaningful mission that gets repeated and internalized (as opposed to the crap on the Powerpoint slide that gets shown once for 30 seconds at the beginning of the year)— that seems to me to be a bit short-sighted.
Boston's airport is run by a bunch of incompetent castoffs from all of the other state agencies that seem to relish applying maximum manpower to minimize anything decent about a modern airport. The other day upon returning to my car from a trip away, I found one of those baggage trolleys trying to eat the rear of my car, sort of like a big English wrench clamped between the undercarriage and the top of the trunk (how a cart like this can wedge in this way probably has something to do with Mayor Menino's third cousin twice removed who gave up a career in carburetor repair to design a better Smart Cart and ended up using the jacks at his garage for inspiration).
After a long wait for one of the 15 roving tow trucks which seem to prize cruising slowly around the parking lot above say, helping motorists, I decided to take my Skeletool to the cart in the hopes of disassembling enough of it to get out. As I got underneath the car I realized that a part of the cart (again designed after garage equipment) seemed to be poking into what I thought was the car's gas tank thus making for a much more fun evening at the airport.
In the end the puncture wasn't really deep enough (and further research has revealed that it was not in fact the gas tank), so off I went. But as I was driving home, I was reminded of how proud I had been that in the case of this particular car everything is "sealed," meaning that from the day I drove it off the lot two years ago, it's been to the dealer once, precisely when the car's computer told me to take it in, a stark contrast to every other car I've had where intimacy with the various parts of the drivetrain or heating system became a necessary survival skill.
The car experience is not unlike those I've had with several other "sealed" devices as of late: my Tivo HD's 2-year service recently expired, and when I realized I couldn't purchase another 2-year contract but had to instead go on a ghastly month-to-month plan that cost more for the EPG than I pay for cable, I decided to let it lapse. Except that now I've got a brick: I can't manually record, and every time I change the channel, I get a popup that tells me to go pay for the month-to-month to use my very own piece of hardware. Ditto for all of the old iPhones in my life— each of them is only mistaken firmware update away from the "Connect to iTunes" bricking that only a painful jailbreak process can fix (and thank God we have that option).
As consumers we love these set-and-forget seamless experiences— be they cars, Tivos, or cellphones. With these type of experiences being every product designer's foremost goal, and companies obsessed with service (or annuity) business models, we're trading something important for all of that convenience— the ability to control our own hardware beyond the life of the original service contract. Or more importantly, the ability to know anything more than the most elemental operating guidelines for the things that surround us, and may in time come to suffocate us.
I'm not looking forward to the increasing amounts of product detritus accumulating throughout my life because of this phenomenon and would prefer more open systems that give these things second lives beyond their initial service period. Sort of like the utopian vision laid out in Makers, where tinkering with old gadgets becomes second hand to the a whole bunch of people tired of this sealed product life.
And I may never again want to know where my car's gas tank is by the way, but I might want someone other than the dealer to be able to patch up the little hickie Boston airport gave it.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Dec. 6, 2008)
It turns out that the iPhone supports video-out, it just hasn't been exposed to developers. I guess this should come as no surprise given the device's iPod heritage and its full-on computer characteristics.
All Apple would have to do is expose a Bluetooth interface for traditional HID (keyboard & mouse) and it will be game over for the netbooks, small laptops, and even perhaps up to 50% of the regular laptop market.
Three thoughts related on this topic:
1. I've got a friend who is traveling for work to the Netherlands next week who told me that he was going to take the bold step of leaving his laptop at home and relying only on his iPhone. He's not a programmer or designer, but an ops guy who needs to be able to be constantly on top of his email and web dashboards. At first I was surprised when he told me, but then I realized that he may be on the leading edge of a trend.
2. I used to commute back and forth to work with a laptop in the event that I was going to be somewhere either before or after work where someone might ask me to log in to check on something. I almost never carry a laptop around now, instead leaving one at either place and using the iPhone for the rare moments when I do need to be connected while not at home or at the office.
3. Remember how all of the sudden it seemed that every business travel hotel replaced its alarm clock with one that has an iPod dock? I've been amazed at how far down market this trend has gone; even Comfort Inns have iClocks gracing their bedside tables. Additionally, this upgrade was concomitant with the replacement of tube TVs with flat panel ones—basically better monitors for computer display. How long after Apple officially opens HID for mouse and keyboard and video out before these same hotels start providing these two relatively cheap peripherals so that business travelers can leave the laptop at home?
Sure, the iPhone is underpowered relative to even the most anemic of laptops. But for how long? And in the meanwhile, how should we be thinking about the applications we write for this new infrastructure?
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Nov. 16, 2008)
While I am on the topic of 1970s technologies, I figure I'd mention a recent eBay purchase (eBay is fast becoming my Internet Archive for physical things), my very first computer, a Time Sinclair 1000. I've been afraid to open the box for the past few months because I was convinced that it would never live up to my memories of it, but 20 pages into the manual (I couldn't read English the first time around), I am hooked. Maybe they were just better at writing manuals back then, but here is how the Sinclair's starts:
Timex Sinclair 1000: Getting Started
Welcome to the world of computing. Before you plug in your new Timex/Sinclair 1000, please take a moment to think about this exciting new adventure. We want to assure you that:
1. You will enjoy computing. 2. You will find it easy as well as enjoyable. 3. You shouldn't be afraid of the computer. You are smarter than it is. So is your parakeet, for that matter. 4. You will make mistakes as you learn. The computer will not laugh at you. 5. Your mistakes will not do any harm to the computer. You can't break it by pushing the "wrong" button. 6. You are about to take a giant step into hte future. Everyone will soon be using computers in every part of their daily lives, and you will have a head start.
I found this such a charming introduction to a product that I went looking at the manuals of today's greats only to be horribly disappointed. The iPhone, my most recent Mac, the Kindleâ all of these devices contain manuals and getting started guides that are at best balloon help for gadget consuming users who can't be bothered to stop to read. I even looked at the manual for the coolest toy I've seen in years: the Lego Mindstorms NXT, only to see similar Powerpoint-like "power arrows" pointing to colorful pictures of half assembled lego projects and Batman-like "Program!" callouts.
Oh what times those were back at the beginning of the Personal Computer boom!
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Nov. 16, 2008)
If want the opposite of a Sunday pick-me-upper, go and read Barry Ritholtz on "The Shallowest Generation" about how the self-indulgence of the Baby Boom generation has gotten us into the economic pickle we are currently facing. Not just a rant, the piece has got a bunch of really interesting data, including CEO pay over the last 18 years compared to the stock indices and more importantly, the average worker (see below) as well as a breakdown on what today's biggest consumers spend most of their borrowed money on (hint: eating and drinking seem to be surprisingly high on the list).
I do wish the piece had been a bit more balanced however. After claiming this:
Past U.S. generations invented the airplane; invented the automobile; discovered penicillin; and built the Interstate highway system. The Baby Boom generation has invented credit default swaps; mortgage backed securities; the fast food drive thru window; discovered the cure for erectile dysfunction; and built bridges to nowhere. No wonder weâre in so much trouble.
the author fails to mention that this same Baby Boom Generation gave us the PC, commercialized the Internet, and the mobile phone upon which we're likely to be basing the next big tech boom. In fact, just the other night, David sent me the Wikipedia page on 1970s technologyin response to my complaining about how toys from then just seemed "better thought out." It is really something else to think about the fact that it was Boomers during this era that gave us the PC, the Apple ][, the software industry, and Star Wars!
Still, good to remember that we've got some excesses to undo.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 9 months ago (Nov. 8, 2008)
In trying to break a dad-inflected addiction to the Nintendo DS for my six year-old, I just came across the Scratch project from the Lifelong Kindergarden lab at MIT. If you've ever wanted to teach kids the basics of programming in an engaging way, get over there and pick up a free copy of the Scratch environment right now. Scratch is what Logo meant to be but couldn't afford due to the resource limits of those early PCs. And the hour and a half we spent playing with it this morning was more fun than Mindstorms, OLPC, or any other such endeavors.
There are a lot of good things to be said for Scratch. Essentially, it is a graphical environment for animating sprites (shapes you draw on the screen with a primitive Paint-like application) along with sounds and effects. Much like Lego Mindstorms, the programming is done by snapping blocks together, except that unlike Mindstorms, the Scratch blocks seem to be able to stretch better to encompass the full power of control structures, variable assignment and all of those other "pesky programming things" that often leave the toy environments feeling like just that— toys.
The editor is very intuitive and relatively bug-free. Which is amazing considering that it is built on top of Squeak— a Smalltalk environment that I've spent the last two years playing with without really being able to get my head completely around. I suspect that a lot more is possible than the simple stuff we did this morning— and even then we got basic keyboard-controlled sprites along with effects, collision-detection, and some basic sound effects— all without reading any documentation and with zero prior experience. I spent quite a bit of time playing with a previous Squeak-based environment that ships in the OLPC, eToys, which I found horribly unintuitive.
But it doesn't stop there. The Scratch team has apparently been paying close attention to the whole "Web 2.0" thing because along with the programming environment, they've built a community site which contains all of the best collaborative features of a user-generated content repository. From the one-click upload within the Scratch environment, the Java applet that lets anyone embed their "scratches" (as the programs are called) into any webpage, to a tagged and filtered site for people to leave comments or download each other's scratches, the end-to-end experience leaves you feeling like you are part of something much bigger than just another attempt to teach programming to kids.
The only thing that surprises me about Scratch is how little attention it seems to be getting, especially given that they are local to Boston. Why anyone writing about the real innovation coming out the ashes of Web 2.0 isn't featuring these eternal kindergardeners (see this video to see how much they really do look like happy kindergardeners) is beyond me.
One final note: I'm not sure that "Mario fights the Alien" (our first game) broke the DS addiction but it was really special to see how, after telling me that what we'd done was "lame" and "embarrassing," my six year-old's face lit up when his little brother decided that the game was the bee's knees and spent the next 25 minutes engrossed in it. Nothing like that creative high, and it's 100% thanks to the work of the Scratch folks that this is possible with such a shallow learning curve.
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 10 months ago (Oct. 26, 2008)
According to TechCrunch, YouTube has just released a URL extension that allows people to send around links not just to videos but to particular time codes within the video. This is a small feature but a big deal because it will allow for more fine-grained addressing into the relatively "un-webby" media format of video which I think of as the speed bump of modern web-based information consumption: click, scan, scroll, click, scan, videoâ crap! (five minutes later you realize you didn't really care to see that useless video review of the G1 because it never addressed the battery life issue you were researching).
Of course Jon Udell was writing about this stuff years ago; realizing that linearly consumed media needed finer addressability, he implemented a kludgey solution for audio transcripts that even worked. YouTube doing this though will hopefully set a new de-facto standard (are you listening Hulu?) and make video consumption online even more webby.
By the way, I think the next great contextualizing descendants of the recently popped Web 2.0 bubble may emerge from taking this notion of making traditionally un-bookmarkable objects bookmarkable in much the same way that YouTube did for television, and thinking along this access of finer and finer addressability is not a bad way to start. SMS bookmarking? Transaction bookmarking? Traffic bookmarking? It's all part of that wonderful emerging shared data cloud of ours!
Posted by Antonio
1 year, 10 months ago (Oct. 24, 2008)
Kevin Kelly's "The Technium" is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs for following the sociology of technology and his latest post on cloud culture does not disappoint. In it, he argues for some of the shifting social and cultural norms that the shift a web-native centralized model for computing (read: the cloud) are bringing about. My favorite— his observation that one of the basic cultural dynamics of the cloud is that we'll become "more smarter:"
Clouds don't have to be smarter than the web we have now, but they are likely to be. The web can be thought of hyperlinked documents. The clouds can be thought of as hyper-linked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply. Not just to have a convenient backup, or to have always on access, which the cloud WILL give, but to be able to weave together the data and interactivity of the parts, and thereby make all the pieces much smarter and more powerful than they could possibly be alone. It is not too much of an exaggeration to think of the cloud as the tool which allows us to share the elemental aspects of our data and activities in a way makes them smarter. The cloud is sort of a hivemind tool. (read the rest of the post)
Thinking about the platform shift from the perspective of the socio-cultural norms that will change with it moves us away from the geeky details of the browser-as-rich-runtime, 3G/4G/5G, and centralizing workloads at huge datacenters to the real game-changing opportunities that will come from threading everyone's activities and data into a natively interoperable set of 24x7 processes that can run semi-autonomously and reach their tentacles into ever-smarter and more portable access devices.
Now that is interesting.
Or certainly more interesting than the future I saw this week at CCA 08, a small conference on the emerging cloud computing architectures and their practical applications. Limited to about 70 folks from academia and business, the two day event convinced me of how early we are in this game— forget analogies about baseball and innings— we don't even seem to have gotten the players on to the field. Other than Amazon and Facebook and a handful of small open source projects, most of the rest of us still seem stuck in trying to bring our old and comfortable 3-tier applications into someone else's datacenter in an effort to cut costs and circumvent half-competent IT departments.
Sure we need cloud portability, sure the security story sucks right now. It'd be great to have better metrics for understanding the cost/cloud unit and I'm sure eventually we'll figure out whether it is 53% or 81% utilization that makes for the break-even point for building your own clusters.
These things seem to be implementation details to me however, and in the meanwhile it's good to see Kelly trying to provide us with some of that "vision thing."
Google is launching a new web browser that on the face of it seems more like a mini operating system than a traditional web browser. They believe the future of the web is applications and not pages and are thus trying to give us a better runtime for it.
As tech news go, the only surprising thing about it their de facto endorsement of Webkit over Gecko as browser guts. I have a feeling that this may be the beginning of the long slide for Firefox, but only time will tell. The only other thing worth noting is that Chrome is part browser and part rich runtime; that is, baking projects like Gears, and chromeless webapp containers (a la Fluid or Prism), along with a lightning fast Javascript VM is likely to make Chrome just as much of a Silverlight/AIR competitor as it is to make it an IE/Firefox one.
What is most fascinating about the announcement though is their hiring Scott McCloud (the guy behind Understanding Comics) to author the product literature as a comic bookâ an absolutely brilliant marketing move. The web experience of reading the comic book is absolutely horrendous and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why Google doesn't just provide a PDF that we could print out, but I can't say enough good stuff about the overall concept.
McCloud is a brilliant visual communicator, and this comic book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the web, or in technical writing of any kind. It reminded me of why Daniel Pink's experiment, Johnny Bunko, a career-advice book written as a manga, was so compelling.
Except that in this case McCloud has taken an even more boring subject, browsers, and has wrapped a lucid and entertaining story around it.
When we started Tabblo, my friend Jerry pointed me to Understanding Comics and said that if we were serious about visual storytelling, everyone we hired should become well acquainted with McCloud's work. Today thanks to Google, I think that a lot of people will.
If you are at all interested in how personal computing spent its toddler years, go and check out Gamasutra's history of Atari. It is not particularly well written, and is a bit disjointed, but it is the only complete story that I've seen of Atari, the casual gaming powerhouse that started it all. Among some of the great nuggets I got from the piece:
* even when you've got an insatiable appetite to serve (as was the case with early video games), it takes time to ramp up: Nolan Bushnell and team were both patient and very smart about iterating quickly. And this is despite the fact that they didn't "program" at all (not in the way we understand it), but instead wired transistors and worried about vertical and horizontal blanking to get their games to work. The next time I bitch about the iPhone's relatively weak documentation for development, I am going to remember how these guys had it— and yet, they were still agile.
* content companies suck, but you can route around them: corollary, when you are a young company, avoid lawyers and law suits— you may be legally correct, but the process will bleed you to death. When Atari couldn't license Jaws from Spielberg, they just made a shark game that looked like Jaws... and cleaned up in the market. When everyone started copying their TTL (transitor to transistor logic) arcade games thus violating their intellectual property, they sought to play a market-cornering strategy with suppliers instead of lawyering up. These guys had hair on their chests, balls, and probably hairy balls too!
* big companies are where startups go to die: something I didn't realize was that Atari sold relatively early to Warner, the media company, for much too little money ($28MM). I have always wondered why they seemed to have missed PCs altogether when they had the 8-bit 2600 in the market, and both Steves (from Apple) worked there. Turns out the suits at Warner were more interested in stuffing the channel and reaping rent from the gaming consoles than investing in the exploding personal computer market. When you stop thinking about product and market, and start thinking about the channel and the profit margins, hire the MBAs, call it a commodity business, and get the eff out!
I've never been a huge fan of the term "live web," often used to signify all of the quasi-realtime communications streams that let people swarm and collaborate around particular issues. But it is in fact the combination of these plus Google that have made hacking on things much more interesting. The great collaborative outboard brain makes everything easier and better.
I remember exactly 10 years ago this summer discovering Linux, and more importantly, how because of the tech savvy communities around various parts of it, Linux made UNIX not suck anymore. If some byzantine feature got you tripped up, no matter how arcade, there were always loads of places to turn to for help, without counting Alta Vista and Google which were themselves magical oracles on all of these topics.
If you want a reminder of what it was like to say, deal with Solaris or Windows NT, have a look at what iPhone development is. Outside of some high gloss Apple documentation, and one paltry mailing list, you're stuck figuring it all out for yourself (which I think helps to explain why the current crop of AppStore apps are so mediocre in quality).
Come on Apple, don't go against the grain of the web...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (July 19, 2008)
Apparently clouds dissipate because of two primary reasons: because the air temperature rises or because the moisture in the cloud falls. When it comes to the metaphorical cloud that is Internet-scale computing, this past week seems to have given us both.
The temperature of the air started rising with the much awaited launch of the iPhone 3G, and more importantly, Apple's foray into cloud services with its MobileMe productivity suite. Stumbling through scaling issues, synchronization problems, and general uptime challenges, the company started by two Steves under the "one man, one machine" mantra proved yet again that providing scalable server-based platforms is a whole different challenge from creating intuitive and edible interfaces and devices, and that maybeâ just maybeâ we ought to leave that work to the pros.
And just as all of us were turning MobileMe off, and reverting to our trusty old Gmail accounts, Google goes and shows us just how fast the moisture is dissipating with its most disappointing quarter to date. AdWordsâ the best model to date for subsidizing cloud infrastructureâ does not appear immune to general economic woes. To add insult to injury, some people are out declaring that software-as-service businesses have to "slog it out" to build sustainable advantage, and predictable revenue streams.
To all of this I say: meh. While Apple may never be a truly credible purveyor of cloud services (along with a host of other big tech companies including the one I work for), some infrastructure players will figure it outâ slog or no slogâ and help us transition to this next phase of computing. And for the business model hiccups? This is a 10 year transition at the very least, and and such it is marathon and not the kind of sprint that has yielded such great speculative financial bubbles.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (July 11, 2008)
Engadget's "International Launch Lineblog" reminds me of those hopelessly feel-good early 1970s/80s Coca-Cola commercials where the company would play that "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" song and show scenes of people from all over the world running in fields and smiling at babies. It's a pretty awesome cultural event when you think about itâ around the world today, loads of people from all over the world are going to be getting in line to get their own piece of the Apple magic.
On the other hand, it kind of makes me wonder whether it is only through such a consumerist activity that we can have shared cultural events these days. I guess buying stuff has taken over the role of religion and even media as the great cultural shared substrate?
Hmm, well between that and the low battery life, I'm not sure the iPhone 3G is for me...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (July 7, 2008)
I've held off writing this post for a while, mostly because I was afraid it would seem like too much inside baseball for me to talk about how photo sites (which Tabblo attempted to be a superset of) basically still suck almost a decade after the first one launched. But the combination of recent usability testing I attended with my own frustrations using Tabblo and Flickr have overflowed the dam of self-restraint, so here goes.
Three Major ways in which photo sharing sites still suck
Most photo sites are still not geared towards pleasing the most important user, the person giving you their valuable time to see yet another album of your kids doing X, Y, or Z. Why is it that the predominant model for consuming photos online is a contact sheet interface (a grid of X by Y photos) along with a clickable "large" version that is often way too small? Sometimes you might get a half decent slideshow too, though these are very un-webby, and after you've seen 2 of any one theme, you've seen them all.
It is interesting that back in the day when Tabblo could freely call itself a photo site, this is the reaction I'd get from people when I'd talk about this consumption interface challenge: 20% of users would get it right away but 80% of people would give me this "huh?!?" look which was meant to make me feel loony. Here is the example I'd use to escape from Loontown: imagine that you bought a copy of National Geographic but instead of the beautifully art directed layouts of the articles, you'd have all the text of the piece followed by a number of contact sheets of all of the photography followed by a page per photo of all of the individual pictures. How many issues would you subject yourself to before canceling the subscription?
Most photo sites don't have fast enough interfaces for the author, especially around photo organization/selection: Try dealing with a collection of 25,000 images to get all of the pictures of a family member for a birthday. The best of the desktop applications can barely do this (and those are the GPU accelerated ones) to say nothing of how far behind the websites are. And manual tagging is only going to take us so far as it is in effect one of many kludges that enable batch operations (a poor substitute for snappy direct manipulation and search).
On this particular challenge, I would have thought that we would have made more progress by now, but as it turns out, I think most people see the assets stored/created on a photo site as a read-only projection of their photo library which tends to live on their home computer. This allows users to leverage the storage/CPU of the local machine for the heavy lifting, and use the web for sharing and output fulfillment. Apple's iPhoto is perhaps the best example of this: books, cards, and calendars can be assembled 100% on the client out of the entire photo library, and manufactured through a set of partner services. This makes activities like collaborative editing and composition more difficult (though not impossible), and sharing is at best very vanilla on dot mac these days, but it may just be something we have to live with, especially because...
Upload of photos is still horrendously broken, and getting more so as image resolution increases. This is what made me think of this topic in the first place again. Watch a novice user uploading photos and you will get all sorts of understandable errors at the boundary of the desktop and web metaphors. They will drag pictures into the browser window and have them open locally. The will go looking on the website for their C: drive. And perhaps most alarming, often times they will not know how to find their images on the local filesystem in the first place (which points to how expired the desktop metaphor is). Watch an advanced user and you will literally see the hair falling out of their head as they deal with the challenge of sucking a watermellon through a straw (the physical equivalent of uploading 12MP images via a 300kbps asymmetric cable connection). While there are solutions to this problem (a software agent running on your PC uploading everything, wi-fi camera cards, etc.), most of them fall short due to intermittent connections and the challenge of organizing/finding photos once they are living online (see above).
Until we as an industry (camera makers, browser vendors, OS vendors, output vendors, etc.) fix these problems, photo sites are going to remain relegated to the backwater of 4x6 production while the rich hybrid solutions (of which only iPhoto really works) continue to take output share while not really advancing the state of photo sharing. It's a shame too because of how inherently social story telling via photos could be.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 1 month ago (July 6, 2008)
Good piece in a well-named InfoWorld blog, "Fatal Exception," on how all of this emphasis on richer UIs for web applications may be unwittingly forcing the web away from what made it great in the first place. Maybe it is the fact that I've been reading Zittrain's book this weekend about how our taste for glossy devices/experiences is causing us to unkonwingly eff up the generative (open) nature of the Internet (ironically, I am reading the book on my very closed Amazon Kindle), but with all of the Silverlight/Flex/GWT stuff landing inside our browsers these days, I tend to agree. Basta to the ever increasing richness of client applications inside the web browser.
Here is an example: there is a new web application called Flowgram that everyone keeps pointing to as the next twist on screencasting. Through a combination of Flash and URL refreshing, you can be taken on a tour of a set of "live" web pages that are clickable and whose embedded objects can be interacted with. Seems pretty cool right?
No, actually it is kind of annoying. Sometimes you just want to dive into the content at your own speed, in your own way and yet, from what I've seen of this seems all but impossible in Flowgram. Despite the fact that there is a timeline scubber thing you can use to jump around, the refreshes are far too slowâ far slower than it would be to just load the underlying sites. For instance, I have been looking forward to seeing/watching/reading a presentation on Facebook's photo-related infrastructure, but because I've only found it on Flowgram, I've abandoned it twice, probably never to return again.
The web is great because it is so lightweightâ let's try to make sure we don't throw that particular baby out with the bath water.
Tomorrow: why photo sharing sites still suck (including the one we built).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (June 30, 2008)
This year at the D conference Michael Dell was asked whether he was worried that the shift towards cloud computing would affect his PC business. Despite not usually seeming like a visionary, Dell gave a great answer. He said that over the last 20 years, every time bandwidth increases, it was his observation that so did the need for processing power on both sides of the pipe, and that because of that, he felt pretty good about the future of his PC business.
Just look at the iPhone or the N95, two mobile phones that pack a tremendous amount of processing power per ounce of weight. Despite being even more suited a a class to offload work to servers in the cloud, smart phones as a category seem to be growing more powerful in their display technology (hardware accelerated video), processing technology (Intel Atom), and general peripherals (5MP cameras, GPSes). Not only are these devices being packed to the gills with more transistors than a mid 1990s PC, but developers are rushing to PC-like development environments like the iPhone's and Google's Android to take advantage of the additional horsepower instead of just writing web applications for the increasingly more powerful web browsers that come with these things.
And it is not just about local processing power; the latest issue of Wired has what will no doubt become a classic piece by Kevin Kelly on the emergent distributed 12-million-teraflop computer that all of our gizmos are getting wired up to make. In the piece, there is a great chart that quantifies the shipped quantities of various different devices with CPUs at their core: from PCs to DVRs, from cellphones to cameras.
Now everyone knows that there are roughly 3 times more cellphones than PCs in the world today, but the stat that I found more interesting is that there are 44 times more PCs out in the wild than servers. Though I realize that it is probably difficult to define what a "server" is in today's world of quad-core x86 machines, the magnitude of that difference brought to mind the delta between storage at the client tier (in offices, in people's homes, at school), and the storage "in the cloud" (i.e., S3).
Even if you assume that the typical x86 server has 13x more storage than the typical PC (a terabyte of addressable storage versus a measly 80GB because you have to factor in the installed base more for the PCs), you are still talking about something on the order of about 100 million petabytes for the client tier and less than a third of that for the cloud tier.
Anyone who has tried to back up a photo collection to a cloud service like .Mac, to say nothing of a music or video collections, knows this at a gut level. The challenges with storage in the client tier have always been consistent addressability and reliability, but in a replicated and distributed world (a la Kelly's megacomputer), we might just be able to make better use of all of those petabytes.
Processing and storage made the PC revolution the juggernaut that it has been. It is why we've come to expect the interactivity native application developers running into the smart phone space are clamoring for, and it's why the dark matter of today's computing environment is composed of billions of hard drives, powered and accessed in a massively distributed way.
It is going to be a while before the cloud catches up with that (datacenter economics and bandwidth being what they are), and until it does, we might all be careful of falling elephants.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 2 months ago (June 8, 2008)
I am going out to California tomorrow and if all goes well, I'll be dropping by the keynote at WWDC to see what goodies Apple has in store for us. Last time I went to one of these, one of the most fun parts of the experience was trying to get the word out to friends and family back home in real timeâ the rabid Apple fansâ about what was being announced by Steve on stage. I quickly discovered that Wi-Fi is totally useless at these events (because everyone else is trying to do the same thing), and that the only truly reliable messaging layer was SMS which really meant that all I could do in terms of group broadcast was Twitter. However during Macworld back in January Twitter dropped 50-70% of my updates and duplicated a bunch of the ones that made it through, no doubt because everyone else sitting in Moscone was in the process of trying to do the same.
I am quickly discovering that Twitter just doesn't cut it, not only because of its scaling problems (especially around events like these), but because I've got a lot of people in my life that have no interest in joining Twitter, and even when they do, find it difficult to stay engaged. These folks do come to read this blog though, so tomorrow's experiment is going to be to use the Onda as a sort of Twitter stream.
To do this, I wired in a web service called Textmarks into this blog. Essentially Textmarks provides a neat gateway between SMS and http where you can send a text with a keyword that can fetch the contents of a URL for automated replies. My current plan is to text short messages that will then become blog post titles with no bodies. This should create a Twitter-like experience for anyone using an RSS reader, and for those that don't, a simple refresh of the main page of the blog ought to provide a running stream.
I thought about having each of the SMSes update just one blog entry to minimize the noise on my RSS feed, but it occurred to me that this would break the way that RSS is supposed to flow content around the network. Also, asking people to subscribe to an RSS feed tied to one blog post seems a little goofy.
Instead where I decided to get was in adding an email-to-post mechanism where I can send an email with a photo and some text to a particular Gmail account that then generates a blog entry with the picture parked at Amazon's S3 (I could have used Flickr but wanted to play around with S3). Most mainstream blogging platforms have email-to-blog so there is nothing really novel in this (we had a little-publicized feature at Tabblo that did something similar that I loved, however it didn't survive the move into HP's datacenter); what really struck me about the exercise though was how relatively simple it is to wire together all of these pieces. In a couple of hours it was easy to speak IMAP to Gmail to get my photo and text out, use S3's relatively straight-forward HTTP interface to deposit the image, get a fast and (hopefully) reliable Textmarks SMS-to-web bridge and composite the whole thing as an entry into my blog for general consumption. For distribution, RSS does the rest. As a nice bonus, I've also used the Twitter API to put pointers to the stuff that will go up here into my Twitter account, though in a non-blocking way as the service will most likely suffer another outage tomorrow.
In this great new world of the web, these experiments are relatively cheap. Most will fall way short of being useful, but I suspect that it is only by messing around with all of these pieces in a loosely coupled way that we'll bump into something really interesting.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 3 months ago (May 27, 2008)
It's easy to hate wireless carriers but in the world of Internet-connected smart devices, their investment in ubiquitous data networks is enviable, despite whatever the tree-hugging wifi-for-everyone folks might want to believe. Becauseâ as is always the case in the consumer spaceâ it comes back to user experience.
I wanted the wifi devices to win but mostly because I can't stand the notion of physical objects that we buy coming with a subscription. However, the Amazon Kindle (about which I will have loads more to say over the coming months) shows device manufacturers a potential path forward: lock down the user's ability to abuse the network and absorb the wholesale price the carrier must be charging in the price of the device. The Kindle benefits from an annuity business model of its own (as a user you have to keep buying books for it to remain useful) so Amazon is well positioned to take the risk of eating the subscription cost up front, but we are beginning to see other examples where device makers are willing to bundle the cost of the data subscription up front.
Take my favorite recent example as evidence that even a low bandwidth ubiquitous cell connection really makes all the difference. When the Chumby came out, I jumped at the chance to get one, mostly because it seemed like such a cool idea (open source hardware that was "Internet native" through its Wi-Fi radio). However, despite the promise of a blank screen that could be programmed with as many channels of content as I could imagine, there were product limitations that quickly reduced Wallace (you get to name your Chumby) to a screen about the local weather forecast sitting right above my bathroom mirror. Unfortunately, every couple of weeks, Wallace had a bad habit of falling off of the wireless network, partly because of the product's betaness (recent firmware upgrades have made this a little better), but indubitably also because my wireless network is just not that reliable.* And every time it did, I'd look up to see the weather only to be slapped by the Chumby equivalent of the BSOD, a message telling me that it had lost Internet connectivity.
When this happens to a laptop, it is a problem that gets fast attention due to the fact that there are often a bunch of other activities taking place that require a working Internet connection. Single purpose appliances don't have this luxury thoughâ they need to just work and when they don't, they are no longer appliances but IT hassles.
Enter the Brookstone Weather Wizard, made by a local company called Ambient Devices which has become an expert in low bandwidth Internet-connected devices. It is uglier, less capable, and much less cool than the Chumby, but at half the price, it does a brilliant job of serving its single function well. And best of all, it comes out of the box "networked" (the only change I had to make was to tell it that I was not in Providence but in Cambridge). In fact as a user, I don't even have to care how it gets its data which makes it such an easy replacement for all of the meteorological gizmos that came before it.
Interestingly enough, Ambient used to sell their devices along with a subscription, a model which ensured that an Ambient Orb that had been given to me at a conference became instantly dispensable the moment I wanted to display data I had to pay a recurring fee for.
If I was looking into getting into the MVNO business (the companies who buy wireless network access at wholesale to brand it for specific audiences, a la the now defunct Amp'd), I'd look into setting one up that could take some of this subscription risk out of the equation for manufacturers of devices by selling a embeddable radio with a given level of bandwidth for lifetime connectivity at one fixed fee. The economics of an MVNO might make this impossible, so perhaps it would have to be one of the core wireless providers that takes this approach. But as the mainstream consumer moves towards the higher speed 2.5G/3G wireless networks with their mobile phones, there might be an opportunity to flat price all of the old GPRS capacity that is being freed up. And for most appliances, this might be plenty of bandwidth.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 4 months ago (April 21, 2008)
While the embedded video clip has become as common as the animated GIF, littering webpages with colorful bits of video that help to make a point or add color to a blog post. Unlike text however, most rich media suffers from a the linear consumption problem; that is, if what you are doing is scanning quickly, the various bits of rich media become speedbumps in the path of grazing the underlying content. In some cases, the video is really worth stopping for, but in most you end up feeling like you want those 3 minutes back in your life.
For a while now I've thought that this proliferation of linearly consumed media would mean that rich recommendation systems were going to be making a comeback (hello collaborative filters!), but in order to do so, they'll actually have to work (a dubious proposition), and more importantly, we'll need to find a sub-URL way to indicate ratings in a open way that can be used as input by the various recommendation algorithms.
Another approach which I've recently seen used to great success is the mixing of the rich media with solid scannable navigation aids and pointers into timecodes in the video, so that the interested user can quickly skip around. Much to my surprise, it was the New York Times that first showed me the power of this approach with their "live transcript" of the Obama speech on race. Having a transcript that scrolls along in sync to the video is such a simple thing to do, but makes such a huge difference in lowering the impedance mismatch between the text-heavy web and various rich media formats.
Another great example is being built by a startup called Omnisio which allows for the annotation of presentations (a frequent subject of the embedded video clips I come across), along with the slides the presenter is using. They've currently got a bunch of annoying user-commenting features but once you shut those off (from the user control panel), the resulting experience makes watching presentations 100x more enjoyable and efficient.
Just another lesson in how sometimes the simple solution, well executed, can yield great results.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (March 18, 2008)
Steve Gillmor has a beautiful essay on the significance of Twitter which is well worth the read. In it, he explains the perfect storm situation that gave birth to the incredible success Twitter is experiencing. In his own words:
The key to this signalling network is the duality of Twitter posts - both personal and public in equal doses. Personal data such as what I'm reading or listening to conspire with public data such as what news is important to us and what news isn't to cut through the glut with surprising efficiency. Each of us has to perform an instant editorial calculation of the relative value of the data as divided by the nature of the cloud of followers into which the post is injected. Overlapping circles of influence and authority resonate like a pebble tossed in a smooth pond.
What results is an elastic and supple map of how to transit the information space, contoured by the relative effectiveness of the editorial agenda of each poster and its success at attracting the right audience. Just as the 140 character "limit" promotes clarity and focus, the decision to follow is not taken lightly for fear of upsetting the value of the aggregate flow by having it accelerate beyond the ability to absorb it. Each node must traverse a high wire between value and noise.
I've been looking at Twitter for the last two years trying to figure out why it is that despite its paltry featureset and it's extremely unreliable uptime there seems to be a core of something there that makes it more with "the grain of the (social) web" than anything else that's come along in the last 5 years. And it's great to see Steve nail it in his post (especially because so many other pundits have tried to feel this particular elephant in the dark to no avail).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 5 months ago (March 16, 2008)
Any self-respecting ManGeek ought to love a term I picked up from the Economist a couple of weeks in an article on cloud computing: data smelter. Apparently this is moniker used for the huge data centers that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others are building on the banks of the Columbia river in Oregon. Located in the middle of the cheapest power available in the US, the name data smelter is a play on the aluminum smelters that peppered the banks of the Columbia over the last hundred years, but it's also great because it hints at one of the most relevant facets of the cloud computing/web services revolution: the ability for new services to recombine data hosted by other services in novel and interesting ways. We haven't even begun to feel the true power of how transformative this loose coupling of data and processing is likely to be; today's "mash-ups" are barely at the crawl phase of development in what we are likely to see.
And yet, it's worth pausing for a second to think about the cost of the current smelting. The Economist piece cites the Google data center at the Dalles as requiring the power of a town of 200,000 people. Most of this wattage goes to power the compute cycles that Google requires to index the world's information, and in most cases these cycles are well spent by running hairy algorithms that apply the bleeding edge of computer science to extract order from chaos.
But this is not always the case. For instance, at Tabblo, a meaningful amount of our general web traffic comes from Google Bot or one of its competitors. This despite the fact that we have well-structured RSS equivalents that could be polled/processed in a much more efficient way. Ditto for all of the much bigger user-generated content sitesâ they too have a meaningful amount of traffic coming from indexing bots while at the same time providing feeds that might provide just as much information for searchers while using less bandwidth, fewer CPU cycles, and not as much overall smelting.
The few times I've read any luminaries from Google talking about the semantic web in any shape or form (RDF, microformats, etc.), they always pooh-pooh it with slights like "people don't want to deal in angle brackets all day." And until I started thinking about the energy implications of these data smelters, I was likely to agreeâ after all, we're all still suffering from the CORBA/DCOM hangover of the last decade where a few vendors bamboozled the entire industry into thinking that an overwrought solution for remote process data exchange was the answer to all of these coupling needs (watch the WS-* offspring for a modern-day equivalent).
But last week Yahoo played a potentially game-changing move with its pledge to support the semantic web standards (microformats, RDF, etc.) across all of its properties. As much I tend to write off Yahoo as roadkill on the Google highway, it's clear that a few folks there are still doing good things for the net and the planet.
If the other industry heavyweights are goaded into following through, we may end up running slightly cleaner data smelters in the near future.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (March 2, 2008)
So we've got Adobe Air that just went 1.0 this week. Microsoft is coming on from a copy-come-from-behind strategy with Silverlight. Mozilla has got something going on, and Apple has got Webkit at the center of their whole device strategy.
So who wins in the web development platform war for the next decade? Which of these rich runtimes suck the oxygen out of the rich client world and give a nice evolutionary twist to what's been going on with the AJAX spruced applications? Or are Win32 and Cocoa here to stay?
I'm not a betting man, but if I were, it'd be DHTML all the way.
Why? Because at the end of the day we've got to think in terms of access devices. At HP we're living as primary beneficiaries of the move to laptops these days, but just as we've moved there from the desktops, I'm sure we're going to move to the portable devices (iPhones and others) from laptops. And in the case of these portable devices, why would you care about a really rich runtime? What matters is the data and how quickly you can get to it. Sure Air and Silverlight can run in these mobile devices, but the real question is: at what battery cost? And to what benefit?
I'm guessing that the DHTML model has got long legs to itâ especially as the world comes to standardize on Webkit and all of the good stuff that comes with it. At Tabblo we've been totally biased towards it; at first because it was the only way to remain truly "platform neutral," and later because of the advantages it has given us in terms of embed-ability within other websites, other online experiences.
If I had to guess I'd say we've got a lot to squeeze from the web browser especially now that we've got a great canvas like Webkit. Even Firefox 3 with its much improved performance gives most of us room for pause as we think about the browser of the future and the world of mobile platforms.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (March 1, 2008)
ReadWriteWeb has an astonishing roundup of the multitude of sites playing in the "stream your life" spaceâ a category which essentially amounts to rolling the feeds from the various different sites you participate into one activity stream that your friends can then use to keep tabs on you. Since this is a specialized feed reader application, and since I've had feed readers on the brain lately, I spent some time checking a few of the services.
My conclusion: I remain unconvinced that these services can exist as standalone destinations, though I now see an important task they fulfill that a more general purpose feed reader (a la Google Reader) does not. The best of them provide a nice feature in managing distributed identity across a whole variety of sites. FriendFeed does this the best; you subscribe to individual people and then get all of their various different activities in one stream. Where this comes in most helpful is with people who have blogs but who also do a lot of twittering, flickering, and deliciousing (though it bears mention that in some cases those other activities are of a completely different modality). I realize that this seems like a sort of trivial feature that could easily be added on to a mainstream blogging engine (and probably should), but it is worth pointing out nonetheless.
Where I'm fairly sure these sites are not going to win is in providing yet another way to author a similar but distinct type of micro content. Back to FriendFeed for a moment: outside of aggregating my own content, I can also write quick posts (a la Tumblr) that live only inside of my FriendFeed feed for my FriendFeed friends to look at. Do we really need this in the age of blogger and Wordpress and Twitter and a whole bunch of other very similar content creation engines?
What I'd prefer to see is the folks from the 35 different startups profiled here picking up a copy of "Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaranâ O'Reilly's wonderful new book on the data processing algorithms that will power the next wave of social computing. It's taken me more than 10 years to get a much more superficial understanding of some of the core filtering, grouping, indexing, and ranking algorithms that Segaran covers with an extremely lucid style and concrete code samples in this book. More importantly however, this is the kind of experimentation we should be doing, instead of having people just jamming Wordpress and Twitter or Jaiku and Flickr in the transporter and hoping that what comes out the other end doesn't have a fly's head.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Feb. 16, 2008)
Everyone is aflutter today about the fact that Amazon's web services, including its indispensable Simple Storage Service, took one on the chin with a multi-hour outage. Apparently the entire productivity-sucking swath of the Web 2.0 economy sputtered along with the outage (no profile pictures on Twitterâ OMG!!) and folks started screaming bloody murder about the coming apocalypse.
Interesting that one of the first to report was Nick Carr, whose new book "The Big Switch" I just finished reading. The book's central argument is that there is a platform shift coming in computing that will be very similar to what happened with electrification, with computation and storage moving from a distributed model (loads of server racks managed by IT) to a centralized one (a la Amazon Web services) where a few vendors will run huge compute clouds that the rest of us will plug our applications/appliances into.
The book makes a great argument, though it could just have easily have been made in 50 pages instead of 233 (including all of the fab historical color around what happened during the big switch of electric power generation)â an argument which is no less compelling because of today's outage. The reality is that these types of glitches happen at all scales, and though they hurt a little more when its a big centralized provider (witness RIM's second big outage the other day), some economic forces are just too strong to fight.
But what the book doesn't cover well is the way in which opportunities for innovation move around when these big shifts happen. I was really looking forward to understanding how centralized, ubiquitous, and cheap electricity made it possible for a host of appliance vendors to invent whole new product categories around the home and office. And though Carr touches on just this, the extension of the analogy to the current computing shift falls flat with a lame discussion of consumer mashups, a brief tour of personal publishing tools available today, and some recycled speculation on how Google really is trying to build an omniscient AI.
I would have preferred a more nuanced parallel between the first mass-market electric gizmos and the new appliances of the centralized computing grid (i.e., the iPhone, the Tivo, the Chumby, even the bulk of today's laptops). After all, it is only when we start to think about how these new appliances that consume compute cycles from the cloud will change our lives in a permanent way that we can really pause and take measure of what outages like today's will really mean 2,5, and 10 years from now.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 6 months ago (Feb. 9, 2008)
I've been thinking a lot about intent lately. Or specifically, ever since Google reported their earnings and claimed that they were not as good as they might be because of the failure to monetize social networking inventory to expectations. Of course, this is a complicated way of saying: people just don't click on ads when they are on MySpace and so we don't make money despite having exclusive access to advertising on them!
I don't think it takes some kind of advertising genius to see why this is the case: on both MySpace and Facebook, the link density is quite high: it's often hard to click on the thing you want, never mind a piece of advertising. Additionally anything that is put on those pages is competing with "needs" that are of much higher priority on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, namely mating and socializing/gossiping (the modern day version of delousing).
But there is another piece around intent which all of us on the web ought to think about, especially if we really are moving to a 95% advertising-sponsored consumer Internet. When I type into a Google search box for some portion of the searches that I run, I am as close as I can be to wanting to buy something without actually being in a store (and I loathe stores). This is why it is much more likely that I'd be willing to click on an ad related to whatever it is that I am searching for. Sitting-forward with the intent to spend dollars is something that I don't see as a regular part of my Internet use anywhere else with two exceptions: eBay, and Amazon. And unsurprisingly, Amazon seems poised to capitalize on this behavior outside of the four walls of their own store with the recent launch of Product Ads.
Another related example: when we started Tabblo, our plan was to affect cost that it takes to acquire a user who wanted physical products from their photos by giving them a compelling creative and social experience around the sharing of their photos to "get them in the door" and thinking about making creative goods. This was in direct contrast to the big 3 photo-sharing sites (Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Ofoto) that spent all of their money driving people through a photo print experience. This past week Shutterfly released its 2007 results and as we crunched the numbers on the data available, we were surprised by how much higher their conversion rates are to printed products (not just prints) relative to the number of page views they see. Note that we never expected that we'd match them page for page— after all, they exist solely for the purposes of getting their users output— but the wide gap in conversion rates showed yet another example of intent rearing its ugly head.
Maybe I am being incredibly stumb on this one (the place where stupid and dumb collide), but I just don't see how over the long term inventing a new form of advertising— as Facebook claims it will to justify its $15B valuation— will get us past this intent hurdle. Even display ads, the bread-and-butter of all of the new media content sites, seem threatened by CPC ads which naturally implies that those sites too will have to worry about the following dynamic: when it comes to serving advertisers on the Internet, it would seem the name of the game is web-as-yellow-pages. As far as the media model goes, everything else might just be filler, or at best, content for the gatekeepers of intent (Google ins some instances).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Feb. 2, 2008)
Fabulous piece by Tim O'Reilly in Radar on why Yahoo deserves to get swallowed by Microsoft. To borrow from Paul Graham, Tim seems to be arguing that Yahoo just never got with the "grain" of the web despite having bought awesome grain assets (Flickr, Delicious). The money quote here:
The other important characteristic of the winners, of course, is that they tap into a data stream that really matters. Owning network effects around consumer photos, for instance, is much less powerful than owning network effects around paid search. So one of the key questions we have to ask ourselves going forward is this: what are the major data subsystems of the future Internet Operating System. Location, identity (and social graph), search (and not just web search but also product search, in which Amazon has a very strong position) come to mind. In a lot of ways, finding the data associated with the old vectors who, what, when, where, and how is a good place to start.
While the jury is still out on whether the "social graph" belongs in this primal set of key types of data that you can build huge businesses around, I completely agree with the others that he lays out. It would be interesting to explore how some of the big Internet trends tend to interesect these different types of data: mobile computing, virtual worlds, custom manufacturing, and emergent online marketplaces just to name four.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Feb. 1, 2008)
I lived through one dot-com crash and all of the associated aftereffects, so I'm not psyched about the fact that the day of reckoning has finally come for this cute little kumbaya we've come to call Web 2.0. Sure on the surface it's just Google being slightly off their spectacular growth trajectory, but deep down we all knew this moment was coming. The wonderfully intoxicating "build critical mass and the rest will follow" buoyancy that started with Flickr and ended with Facebook's ridiculous $15b valuation is about to come to a close, and not so much due to one bad quarter of ad revenues, but because it just couldn't last forever.
Small companies struggling with product risk are now going to have to answer the revenue model question as well, and for good reason. Selling to Google— or even selling to someone else who is afraid that Google might buy you first— has just run out of juice. And unfortunately it has done so right at the beginning of a pretty scary set of perfect storm factors in the consumer economy: depressed consumer confidence, tons of credit risk, looming creep of inflation, and an inscrutable political outlook.
But what to do in the middle of all of this? Get somewhere where you can work on something meaningful with a 3-4 year runway. If you are at a startup, either get cashflow positive or raise a buttload of money soon. If you are at a big company, get on the longest lead time (but critical) project that you can find. Put your head down and just shut out the crap that is about to start flying.
It's all going to be good again— it always is. The challenge is that it may take until 2011 for us to get there. Until then, we can all stop worrying about getting rich and get back to grinding it out. Good times.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Jan. 29, 2008)
David Beisel has done a great service for web ventures in the Boston area with his "Web Innovators Group" gatherings. Though this type of event is commonplace in the Valley, we are sorely missing it here and it's been a pleasure to watch it grow over the last year and a half from about 50 people to over 800.
One thing I continue to be struck by however, is the poor quality of the demos that are given at these events. It may be that David is explicitly selecting for non-venture backed companies (a little rougher around the edges), and it may just be the compressed format (though this being the week of the original demo conference, I'm not sure about the latter), but even when the companies on stage have cool and innovative products, the demos done WebInno generally leave a lot to be desired.
Since, giving a good demo should be secondhand to any startup employee (CEO, founder, hacker, product manager, etc.), here is my 3 step guide to coming up the learning curve quickly (though I don't claim to be an expert, I have given a lot of demos in all sorts of contexts and for all sorts of products in my career).
1. Write the story: before you start, open up your favorite text editor and write a one-pager on what you intend to show. Make it less laundry list and more murder mystery. If you don't know what progressive disclosure is, go read up on it, and use this technique to move your story line forward. The number one reason why I often want to put a stick in my eye during demos is because the presenter hasn't thought enough about telling a story and being entertaining. Make it relevant to the audience at every step— which often means skipping the techno-babble and contextualizing features for your audience.
2. Find your own Demo God(s) and study them incessantly:everyone loves Steve for this one, but there are many many others presenters worth watching (go look at all of the highly rated TED talks for inspiration). If you go to conferences, pay attention to presenters that can work with the crowd and watch how they keep cool and on message even when things are exploding. If you are lucky enough to know anyone whose demoing you respect, ask them for very critical feedback. I've been very lucky to have people like Adam Green to rely on for raw and uncut feedback. It hurts but makes you 10x more effective.
3. Practice, practice, practice: don't just think about what you're going to demo— go and sit in front of the mirror and do it. If you're going to be miked, learn how to use the AV system to your advantage. If you need the Internet for your demo, assume it will crawl and work around it. Practice it until you are so tired of hearing yourself that your ears start ringing. There is no such thing as too much practice. Trust me, even Steve does it.
One last thing: if you are not particularly good at this type of thing, try giving demos of products you haven't actually worked on. Textmate, OmniOutliner, Firefox, OneNote, whatever— just step through 1-3 for any one of those products assuming you'll have 5 minutes to convince someone that they absolutely need to start using whatever it is you are showing them. This trick helps to de-personalize your subject and lets you focus on your own performance.
There is a wise saying in raising venture funding: the demo seals the deal. Think about this next time it's your turn at WebInno.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Jan. 16, 2008)
After yesterday's poor performance live blogging the Steve keynote, I spent some time thinking about how frustrating it is to have a fundamentally communications-related service go down the way Twitter did for all of us who were trying to let the world know about what went on during the keynote.
I can't really blame Twitter. The pile-on that they are suffering from as everyone tells them they can't scale is something that any other startup would kill for, and the fact that they are taking egg on their face is to be completely expected. I don't think I know of a single small startup these days that wouldn't be similarly crushed by the load they experience during events like Macworld— in fact, I can almost guarantee that we at Tabblo would have been.
However, the big bummer about the way we use the Internet today is that we are breaking its fundamental architectural principle of loosely couple services that you don't count on for 100% reliability. This was the genius behind SMTP: if the receiving mail server was down for whatever reason, the sending one had a protocol for either finding a relaying service or for backing off and re-delivering later. Unfortunately web services aren't built like this (some of the bigger ones like Amazon and Google are built like this on the backend though which is why they scale, but it takes big bucks to get there).
And you know what? For most web services, this single point of failure design is ok. Just not messaging-based ones. When we use messaging-based services, we expect uptime (witness how annoying Gmail's recent glitches have been), and at the very least, reliability on the message delivery front.
We'd do well to think of this as we shift any time an attention to web services that have grown their own internal messaging systems, or even those that aim to replace them.
I am sure that with microformats, syndication and personal publishing platforms that we own ourselves and host on elastic computing clouds like Amazon's EC2, we can rebuild most of the messaging/publishing-based services that are currently appealing (Twitter, Jaiku, Flickr) but flakey. However, it is going to take time, standards, and the realization that we can in be in control of more reliable online experiences.
In the meantime, just be glad those evil phone companies spent billions building "carrier-grade systems" (well except for AT&T EDGE network which sucks).
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Jan. 10, 2008)
And for this month's best techno-porn, look no further than "The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry" in this month's Wired. In it, Fred Vogelstein tells the inside story of the development of the iPhone, from its guts to the crazy deal that Apple got from AT&T, to the bumps along the road. As with all great tech-porn there is a fair bit of dramatization in the piece, but it does make three really interesting observations:
1. Steve & co saw the coming crunch on their near-perfect monopoly on the iPod and decided that to get ahead of it by going to a media-playing phone well ahead of when their business was impacted by it. This is something that I've heard a few times from VJ, my boss here at HP over the last few months: you have to innovate the next big thing when you're on top and can still afford it, not when you're managing an empire in decline. That said, it is extremely difficult to get big companies to do this especially when they are as arrogant as Apple, so kudos to them.
2. I love the idea that even as it was going to market, Jobs knew that the Motorola Rockr was a camel (a horse designed by a committee). Senior executives that engage with their product— from how it comes out of the box to how it feels to how it breaks— are really really rare in my experience. It's why you often get such goofy products from big companies so I 100% buy that it is a big part of the secret to Apple's success.
[ One quick aside: in 2005 while at the WSJ D conference, I arrived late (as usual) and went to get my badge only to see that there was a technician working on one of the HP PCs that had been set up for registration. It was one of the first all-in-ones and he had flipped it on its side and was closely examining the bottom of the case in the empty registration hall. Before I had time to figure out what the hell could be wrong with the computer than would manifest on the outside of the case, two executive assistants straight out of Entourage came in and whisked the technician away. Imagine my surprise to figure out that it was Steve Jobs who had someone ended up alone in the registration room and had wandered over to one of these machines to inspect it.]
3. The piece only hints at this general point, but one of the most amazing things about the iPhone is how well the hardware engineers timed the development of the mobile components such that they hit a perfect balance between CPU speed, performance, and battery. It's been my experience that in other consumer products with long multi-year development cycles, the hardware folks either radically under-estimate Moore's law, or worse yet, over-estimate it and end up with pokey and over-priced devices.
Overall a great read for junkies of Cupertino's shenanigans.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 7 months ago (Jan. 9, 2008)
Both Matt Webb and the Economist this week are ruminating on the economics of the software industry. Matt has a interesting post which basically argues that there are other more compelling revenue models for building enduser software than the straight-up license (a lesson which I learned well while book-enabling the iPhoto application while the rest of the consumer image management space was cratering). He covers ads, subscription fees, and some other models, making a whole bunch of interesting observations along the way.
It was the piece in the Economist though that really made me laugh. Especially this juicy bit on why the SaaS (software as service) business model just isn't as good as its progenitor:
Vendors of conventional enterprise software made a killing by requiring customers to pay a high licensing fee upfront and then charging them for maintenance. Web-based firms, by contrast, have to make do with subscription fees.
We need to stop taking for granted that just because software vendors were able to maintain obscenely high margins for the last 30 years, it means that this should serve as a baseline for all software related businesses going forward. In the consumer space specifically, Microsoft's ability to extract rent for that layer of value seems to me to have been a historical accident— one that made Bill Gates very wealthy in the ensuing 30 years— but not necessarily one that can be relied on going forward. I know less about the enterprise space, but would be shocked if the same microeconomic force of marginal revenue trending towards zero wasn't in full swing in the age of the Internet, open source, and software-on-demand.
Instead we have to get used to saying that 22-30% margins are actually a great achievement, and that the era of crazy absurd software profits (though not growth, as Apple is showing), is now behind us. And the bonus is that in the process we get to repurpose old business models (atoms!) and invent new ones.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Jan. 6, 2008)
This is CES week which, ever since we were a struggling startup looking to stay alive in this space back at Memora, gives me the willies. Unlike most of the computer tradeshows, CES manages to feel polished and scummy at the same time— with vendors pimping their wares to a pulsating Las Vegas gluttony which never ceases.
This morning the New York Times had a piece which gives is me hope that consumer electronics may be getting some of that good old hacker ethic. The piece covers an open Tivo-like device from a company called Neuros that is "hacker friendly."
More significantly, companies like Chumby Industries and Bug Labs are going one step further by selling kits instead of finished products that can be used by folks to extend the reach of the net into the physical world.
I worry a little that the promise of hackability is a lot more powerful than what actually gets done. In the case of the PC for example, it was the shift from "kit computers" like the Apple I to the productized Apple ][, with its pre-assembled good looks and relative ease of use, that readied the entire industry for all of the software innovation that followed*. In my own case, I've dabbled with a number of Linux appliances over the years only to be disappointed by either too many bugs, or a lack of extensibility. My Chumby for instance, seems to be the net-connected version of a VCR clock, spending most of its days flashing the widget equivalent of 12:00AM (though I am hoping the official release will make this better).
That said, I'm still hoping that these kits will result in some useful devices that free us from thinking that the Internet is something we consume with a keyboard and a mouse.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Jan. 4, 2008)
I've started the year by trying to make a dent in my backlog of small (but useful) webapps to try, beginning with the "help organize your life" category. So in the last few days I've tried: Jott, Iwantsandy, and Remember the Milk, and already I'm feeling overloaded.
All three are all really well done mini-applications that do a single function well, play nice with other pieces of the web (a la Unix tools), and provide clever interfaces that span multiple devices, input mechanisms, and output formats. And yet, why is it that after only trying three of them, I'm already feeling app fatigue?
I think it must have to do with the small incremental cognitive load imposed by each new webapp. Because no matter how similar each of these applications is— after all they are each a way to manage a list of reminders— there are still small differences that impose a small barrier at every use. And despite each site's desire to simplify the interface as much as possible, I've still got to go link hunting across non-standard interfaces every time I want to do basic things like creating new categories or adding a new email address.
I used to think that the old "Office Suite" megaproduct was a function of distribution economics alone; that Microsoft beat out all of the best-of-breed standalone applications because they could bundle all of the products together into a cheaper overall offering and stuff it into the channel. But now I'm realizing that there are huge advantages to this type of integration when it comes to usability (and I don't mean power features like OLE, these new webapps already support their own forms of foreign object embedding). With MS Office, the user had more or less one mental model for how to perform a whole load of related tasks (a model which has been increasingly unified with each Office release)— a huge advantage for those of us just trying to get things done.
Do we need this unification for all of these little webapps to reach critical mass? Maybe. The counter argument would be that the web audience is so big that every application vendor will find his own niche audience, but in a world where sustainable economics depends on advertising (and therefore audience scale), I'm not sure this works. And if we do need this grand unification, will it be brought on by a vendor (Facebook, Google) or by a set of standards (microformats, Yahoo UI best practices)? Right now I'd put my money on the integrating vendor platform a la F8 or Google Gadgets, but maybe that is just because I am looking for the modern day Office-like player. Maybe the rules have really changed on the web...
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Jan. 2, 2008)
It's always good to start the first entry of every blog year with some predictions. Making accurate (and actionable) predictions is the chief currency of the entrepreneur in the technology industry (along with not confusing a long view for a short distance), so any practice in gazing into the crystal ball is a good thing.
The usefulness/pervasiveness of the web will really hit a tipping point this year: David Weinberger wrote a short piece for HBR called "The Year of Scale" which makes this point nicely. Everything from markets to expectations is now mediated by bits of information that we pluck from the ether on websites, social networks, blogs, tweets, etc.— whether we work and live in the medium or not. Of course Google plays a huge role in this augmentation of our own intelligence (as might Facebook and Twitter over the coming year), but so do web-enabled smartphones and the ever-increasing expectation that we can just "know" the answer to something.
Recently a friend told me that her 5-year old had defined Google as "where you go to find out what is true—" a sentiment that when expanded to the web itself, captures the zeitgeist of what is going on here. The next chapter in the story of the Flynn effect won't be written as the increasing ability to reason abstractly but by our ever-increasing ability to weave the information stream into making better decisions.
Smart, speedy, and portable interfaces frozen in hardware are now mass market: this is the iPhone effect, plain and simple. A couple of years ago I was writing that Apple should become the less-than-6lb. company ("if it weighs less than 6lbs and does computing, we rule it"). Last year they took the most important step in that transformation by launching the iPhone— but not because it's the sexiest product ever built, nor because it's a particularly good phone (let me tell you, it isn't!), but because it is the perfect embodiment of portable web consumption experience.
If the web browser itself could leap out of your computer and take the form of a piece of hardware that you could carry all the time, it could do no better than to look, feel, and behave just like an iPhone. From the huge screen to the multi-touch interface, every feature that makes it truly stand out boils down to delivering a killer web browsing experience (and the only real handicap, the pokey EDGE network is ameliorated by the Wi-Fi and will soon be crushed with a 3G rev).
Expect a lot more, and not just from Apple. Sure, Cupertino will ship the rest of the dev kit (which I still contend should be nothing more than an enhanced object model for mobile Safari that gives web developers access to the camera, the addressbook, any forthcoming GPS information, and the SMS message stream), as well as begin a whole load of experimentation with point-of-presence applications that mix the virtual world with the physical world. But everyone else will try their hand as well, starting with mobile giants like Nokia (where I am 100% sure some Finnish dude named Pekka is now tied to the bottom of a dogsled crossing the tundra for having missed the all-screen embodiment of a browser in a phone), and filtering down to all of the smaller venture backed startups crazy enough to do hardware (which I think should be all consumer-facing VC startups these days, but more on that in a later post).
And this mobile fever is not just about phones, but in fact about any small devices that help people better consume the web. For instance, I bet this is going to be a good year for MIT-spawned Ambient Devices which has always seemed like a glorified science project to me. Unlike digital photo frames or the utterly useless Chumby, Ambient has figured out that simple design, well-instrumented cues, and singularity of purpose can make the different between a gadget which suffers from the net-connected version of the alarm-clock flashing "12:00" (e.g., my Chumby), and a device that weaves itself into your everyday life. Physical computing is here to stay and 2008 is going to be a vintage year for it.
The Activity Stream will become hot as Hansel: I'm not sure whether it will be Twitter, Google's Jaiku, the Facebook minifeed, or something completely new from a random startup, but the notion that there will be streams of metadata that we'll share with each other in the same way that people share blog feeds today but on a much more massive scale is going to become a standard part of the way that people interact with the web, and with each other. I suspect Facebook has the lead today, mostly because its minifeed takes no effort to set up and is very nicely scrubbed in the application, but Facebook seems to be getting this walled-garden stench which may create an opportunity for a lighter-weight, more open alternative. Initial setup will remain the challenge for regular users (and may be why the platform vendors: Google, Amazon, Apple, and Nokia could win here, or at least do a bunch of cool M&A in 2008), but once people get used to living in each other's flows, they'll be no going back.
Those are my top 3 predictions for this year. A little more abstract than usual, but thinking at this level certainly beats wondering whether we're going to suffer from a global economic recession.
Finally, just to mark where I've gone wrong in this game in the past: I'm ready to throw in the towel on the unwitting blogger, the casual publisher, or whatever you call the regular person who does something akin to starting a blog. I've been looking for the mass market application that causes millions of people to sit forward and put the same level of effort that those of us that keep blogs do, believing that the right combination of ease-of-use and ego gratification could get people over all of the barriers, but I just don't see it. Micropublishing— a popular trend predicted for the mass market for 2008 by the pundits— may come the closest, but there is a point at which it's just not publishing anymore.
R.I.P, Mister Unwitting Blogger— you content creating bastard— we hardly knew ye!
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Dec. 15, 2007)
When one of my favorite tech blogs titles an article "The Evolution of Personal Publishing," I am most definitely going to bite on it (after all, this is a topic on which I like to noodle). As it turns out, the piece mostly adds color to a post by Fred Wilson who argues that "microblogging" (Twittering, social sharing, etc.) is actually not just blogging under a new guise but a new type of communications/publishing hybrid that not only deserves its own category, but may actually reach into the mainstream Internet userbase in a way that its progenitors (personal publishing and blogging specifically) have not been able to.
Why? Because according to Fred, micropublishing at its core is lightweight (low cognitive load), social, and interactive (which strikes me just social under a different name). In other words, it is easy to do and keeps you in touch with your friends and family as well as the world at large, when appropriate.
And in fact, it seems that this last bit is the critical piece. The relevant part of all of these lightweight tools is that they intercept a communications flow and create a permanent record of it that people who may not have been in the original dialog— people who you may not even know— can have access to it via the archive (the frozen flow).
A little over a year ago, I was eating lunch at Google with Jason Shellen who was the first person to pitch me Twitter. As I was arguing that this seemed just like SMS + groups he said something which has stuck with me ever since: that Twitter allowed every SMS to have its own permalink. I remember my initial reaction to his statement as though it had been yesterday; I thought: Silly Googler, not everything needs to be in your index.
He was absolutely right about the significance being the addressability and persistence of each SMS/tweet, but not because we might be turning up the fact that he had too much to drink for Thanksgiving in the Google index 3 months down the line. Instead what the permalink implies is that what was a disposable message is now a micropublishing event which can in effect become a vector for socializing with people who would otherwise not be in your regular communication stream.
Now the question still remains: how much do regular folks really care about the potential for this type of publishing-sourced social serendipity? Especially when the insertion of micropublishing into some communication channels can have unanticipated adverse effects? An example: I recently tried to give Twitter the good ol' college try by getting everyone at work to use it as well as a few key friends and family members. My older brother (who ironically in this small world was once one of Fred's entrepreneurs) puked on it because he decreed his SMS inbox to be a high-priority near-synchronous channel for communication with a select few. By overflowing his phone with tweets, he was convinced that Twitter was "breaking" the promise of SMS. The serendipity of social experiences on top of micropublishing was just not worth it.
(And before people write to me to tell me that you can turn SMS off on Twitter and just view the tweets on the website, think about this: why would a normal person want one more website to have to go check every day?)
I think that in fact Fred is right that micropublishing done right can go mainstream— but we have to look to models like Amazon reviews and not just the progeny of Blogger to see how we take it there. More on that tomorrow though.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 8 months ago (Dec. 14, 2007)
First they made it so that you didn't have to worry about disks with their S3 storage service. Then they took away the need to manage hardware and a colo with EC2. And now for the final piece: Amazon has just announced SimpleDB, a database hosted as a web service that application developers can plug into. Despite one curious choice, this is just brilliant strategy on their part.
Everyone who hosts a website that has any level of traffic spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to tune the database. And as with almost every infrastructure layer in the webapp cake, I'm fairly certain that 80% of this tuning work is just good RDBMS hygiene and adds preciously little "special sauce" to the core application. In fact this is why there are specialists in tuning MySQL or Postgres who bounce from project to project with the same basic bag of tricks.
If Amazon does it right, making a database scale is one time-consuming headache web application developers will never have to worry about again. But it goes beyond scaling too: backups, replication, failover— these are all common database chores that Amazon just makes go away.
On to the curious choice: no support for full (or even partial) SQL. I'm guessing that this may have had something to do with the complexity involved in supporting SQL on their super-scalable, super-distributed architecture as I'm fairly certain the Amazon folks realize just how much momentum SQL has in the web application space. And if anything holds people back from adopting SimpleDB (outside of potential uptime/performance issues), it will be the need to learn a new way to store and query data (albeit a very simple one).
A potential work around: open source libraries that substitute the back end of the most popular ORMs (Rails, Hibernate, Django) with the SimpleDB service. Now that could be a game changer.
Here's to never thinking about sharding databases again.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Nov. 28, 2007)
The article in Monday's WSJ outing that the rumored Google storage service, where all of your files are stored on Google servers, initially rubbed me me the wrong way. The implication that we'd get all of our data stored in exchange for our eyeballs and our privacy (in light of all of the recent Facebook hoopla) must have struck me as a Faustian bargain that seems hard to extend much beyond email (and even that has been bothering me lately as Google seems to be misreading my email in the ads it is choosing to put inline).
But after thinking about it a little more, I realized that the irritation goes deeper than the business model to the dominant underlying assumption these days that all of personal computing is going to move to the server farm and that maybe, just maybe, we're finally getting ready to go back to the thin client model for computing. [If you see the irony in this given that I've just spent 3 years pushing content creation webapps as the end-all be-all, read on]
Let's review for a second why moving all of our personal computing to the cloud sucks:
1. Offline. Since HP bought us, I've upped the amount of time that I spend on planes crossing from east to west and it's beginning to really get to me that I can't use Gmail, Reader, or Tabblo during these six hour stretches. For instance, I have no problem keeping relatively current with my work email (thanks to the flying), but my personal Gmail account is usually 10 days behind. And even though the Reader team did a nice thing in integrating Google Gears for offline use, the offline experience still feels sort of bolted on with key command sequences not available.
2. CPUs are awesome and universally under-utilized these days. I've lost count of how many cores I have in my laptop but outside of spinning up for buggy Javascript goodness, they are only really ever taxed when I'm doing something to multimedia inside the rich client apps. Why does Flickr have to resize photos for me in a queue that takes 4 times the amount of time that iPhoto would? At Tabblo, we're offenders on this score as well; though the team has done a great job of making image transform operations tolerably fast, there are still operations that would benefit from a little CPU help, especially when the site is under load.
3. Uploading stuff over and over sucks. I've been obsessed with this one lately so here I'll only say that it's now not just about photos— on top of (re)uploading rich media, I've now also got profile picture-uploading fatigue and friend-finding ennui, and status-updating exasperation. And unless you're only going to ever use one company's "cloud," this is just a fact of life these days.
These are all good reasons why cloud-based services are probably not the only model for moving personal computing forward, but this morning while reading Tim O'Reilly's update on the definition of software above the level of a single device, I went back to being exasperated by this mottled relationship we have with our devices and data where everything that we care about seems to be spreading across more devices, more websites, and in most cases more PCs.
Tim writes about what a good model the iPhone/iPod+iTunes+iTMS is for this concept of of allowing software spanning multiple devices to play in delivering a solution. To me this seems to be an opportunity for stuff to get lost in more places. In fact, I've found that having the device tethered to the PC for the sake of connecting to data from the cloud a pretty horrendous proposition. RIM's Blackberry showed us the power of over-the-air sync a decade ago, and with WIFI on more and more of these devices, it's time to extend the model across all types of data. It is great to use the PC's richer interface to configure these more interface-constrained devices (a great example of this being the way that I can now program my Tivo from my PC instead of being deafened the bouncy Tivo noise every time I need to schedule a new recording). And frankly I'm not all that good at actually remembering to sync my iPhone thus exposing myself to all sorts of data loss/sync issues.
Which is of course another way of saying that this cloud thing really does have legs if Google and others can see their way to a good implementation for getting around problems 1-4 described above. As I was racking my brain wondering how they might do that, I thought of my earlier example of being able to answer email on the plane, and realized that we've got a pretty good real world example for what needs to happen in IMAP today (which is partly why I was so excited to see Gmail implement it). A good IMAP server lets me work offline, can more-or-less reconcile changes across devices that need access the mesage store, supports the server pushing status changes to the client, enables rich CPU-intensive activities to take place locally (indexing the cache of my account contents), and provides folders for aggregating items as well as a timeline view of when items are stored.
What if we had a cloud-based service that supported an IMAP-like protocol for read/write? Couldn't I then use iPhoto to begin organizing pictures, Flickr for adding some from friends, and Tabblo for creating a different "view" of the collection? What would it take to get a few of the broadly distributed clients to support this via plug-ins, and a few of the services to support it as a backend store API? Ditto for video, or any other type of multimedia.
Of course this model could also be applied to metadata (addressbook, buddy lists, etc.) The key would be that unlike RSS or even the bidrectional APP (Atom Publishing Protocol), an IMAP-like protocol would start from the assumption of many clients of different shapes and sizes needing rich read/write capabilities first and foremost (as I think about it, APP and a proper RESTful API might get you there, but I wonder if you couldn't simply start by actually using IMAP).
So who knows? Maybe the cloud is the right place to manage data and some of our computing tasks, assuming that we managed to get IMAP going for the rest of our electronic lives.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Nov. 24, 2007)
I've had occasion over the last week to use both Evite and eBay and I've got to say that no matter what all of the Internet pundits claim about how much fluff instead of stuff Web 2.0 is about, one thing we've learned is the last 10 years is how to make websites more usable. My god are these two sites horrendous to use! It is a true credit to Amazon and Yahoo that they managed to avoid the absolute stagnation that the eBays of the world seemed to have suffered from.
Ebay is a particular peeve of mine, both because it pioneered the world's best business model (as a market-maker for otherwise illiquid goods), and because it is still the greatest mainstream stealth success out there. When I ask people who I trust to be smart members of the mainstream what they love about their net-connected lives that they didn't have last decade, eBay is what most often comes up as the example of why the Internet is great. That the company has managed to remain in control of the auction market despite a truly horrendous user-experience speaks volumes to the power of positive feedback loops and network effects.
If I were in charge of one of these big winner-take-all Web 1.0 companies that hasn't yet understood that the web application space is going to be won and lost on usability over the next 5 years (and mobile platform support, though that is for a different post), I'd set up a Yahoo Brickhouse style R&D lab for innovating on user experience alone. Combined with proper A-B testing infrastructure (which I happen to know both of the companies mentioned here invested in heavily during the last decade), you'd have a real opportunity to bring user experiences forward to where they ought to be in this day and age.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Nov. 23, 2007)
Doc has a characteristically thoughtful piece over at Linux Journal on the need for web service creators to be good members of the ecosystem and support APIs that allow data to be federated across services. He uses the example of his Flickr stream being usable at Tabblo (which is a testament to how good and ground-breaking Flickr has been in this regard), making the point that it benefits him as a user when all of us "vendors" play nice and respect both his data— and more importantly, his time. It is just plain silly to make him waste time with the asymmetry in broadband today, having to upload all of his stuff again.
I've written before on how business models that are at odds with this fundamental respect for the user are likely to be doomed (see all of the stuff on the roach motel), so here I'm going to take another angle. Data acquisition, whether it is importing contacts in a social network or uploading assets in a photo site, is just not something that we need to keep on re-inventing over and over again. Let me stick with the latter example for a moment: outside of the Flickr API, at Tabblo we have 7 other methods for ingesting digital photos. Each of these requires constant maintenance as its client environment/runtime changes, something that I think is just too much of a support problem for any small team to take on. And in fact, these days each of our rich uploaders is in some less-than-optimal state: from "outright busted" to "works most of the time."
Contrast this to Flickr which managed to solve the uploader maintenance problem by crowdsourcing it and letting passionate community members maintain all sorts of different clients with varying degrees of success. Not everyone can be a Flickr, but we should all be able to leverage their success, and instead spend out own cycles thinking about how to build the next layer of value.
That said, what I'm having trouble reconciling is how to build simple user experiences in this new layered and federated world. Imagine if we asked the average mainstream user who comes to Tabblo to go and register at Flickr, upload their photos there, authenticate Tabblo as a trusted service, only to then be able to get into their story-telling process. Nightmare, plain and simple.
One potential solution: I'd like to see a white-label services that could be wrapped by webapp builders for core pieces of functionality. To continue the upload example: why doesn't Amazon, or some enterprising entrepreneur looking to build on the cloud computing infrastructure at Amazon, build out a full suite of well-supported file uploaders, along with an associated S3-backed storage infrastructure for everything from photos to videos. By focusing on just the upload experience, this effort could just nail it for all the rest of us— building plug-ins for our favorite apps, clients for our favorite platforms, and even specialized hardware for events and community activities. In Doc's VRM world, such a company might even be able to charge the enduser a nominal fee for pipe and storage, so long as its service integrated easily with enough of the interesting webapps.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 9 months ago (Nov. 22, 2007)
Jeffrey Zeldman has the essay to ponder during the after-meal coma this year, "Understanding Web Design," on how web design is not about fancy bevels and cinematic effects but instead about creating extensible structures that others can inhabit. More like architecture and typography and less like traditional graphic design. Here is his definition:
Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.
His definition finally made me get to closure on the ambivalence that I've been feeling around Flash-based web applications. They sure are snazzy, but Flash webapps have this feel to them that has always felt "non-native" when it comes to how we relate to the web which goes beyond their relative heavyness.
With most Flash-based websites these days, you get exactly what the developers and designers wanted to give you and get to take it or leave it wholesale. This can be ok for applications that you use infrequently such as shoe configurators or stationery makers, but often gets overly cumbersome as soon as you start to layer in community or workflows that rely on collaboration of any sort, or more significantly when the users are supposed to help extend the environment. In those cases, thinking through building web applications that ring true to the definition above seems like a better bet to me.
The piece reminded me of Christopher Alexander's definition of "living structures" in architecture— places that are designed from the very beginning to be extended as their occupants learn how the want to relate to the space. As with the best architects in Alexander's world, the most interesting challenge for web designers these days is to figure out how to design for this kind of habitability.
I think I am developing a man-crush for Ev as a product guy.
Though I suspect the ambling style portrayed in the piece may drive me nuts, I can't help but respect the way in which he seems to have pulled two infectious content/communication projects out of the ashes of mediocre ideas. This guy would be worth his weight in gold to any VC-backed company looking to restart its failed me-too consumer website.
My favorite quote in the piece:
Just like Blogger, Twitter was a simple communications product salvaged from the impending implosion of a more complex project. In both cases, Williams didn't really know what he was doing. With both ventures, his genius--if that is the word--derived from what the English poet John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, called "negative capability": "that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."
Rings so true to being an entrepreneur and making things out of nothing that it almost makes me want to start reading poetry.
On another note, part of my fascination with Twitter (and all of the clones that it has inspired) is how it seems to have— in sitting at the intersection of communication and publishing— nailed what Jeremy refers to as "lightweight self expression for the general public." At Tabblo, I tried very hard to instill this discipline into our content creation experience, and failed repeatedly in the process. On good days I tell myself that this had to do with the fact that we were after a much more complex authoring experience (we wanted to make your stories to look like magazine layouts so you'd buy them as physical products), but I think deep down I've often wondered about my own acumen when it comes to "negative capability" and making key product decisions.
OK, so what about all the business school stuff? I must tell you a bizarre thing about our company: I believe it's still true that not a single person with an MBA has ever succeeded with us. Probably that's because we're really not a formula-run kind of place. We insist on understanding things from first principles. Which is good if you're trying to do things for the first time. But a waste of time if you're just doing things that have been done lots of times before.
I've always thought that running companies is pretty much common sense. It's stuff that can be figured out just by thinking, practically, about things. And knowing a certain amount about the world.
Now, there are lots of smart people who are great at their specific areas. But somehow they don't seem to engage the thinking apparatus when it comes to other things. And that's fairly crippling in trying to run a company.
I love to see a scientist talking about first principles in describing the entrepreneurial challenge because it rings so true to a lot of the hard thinking you have to do in the process of creating something new. I was talking to a friend while out in California this week and mentioned something about those times at work when you have to sit down to do the hard thinking. She looked at me as though this was somehow an optional part of most jobs which, when I thought about it, is probably true.
But thinking from the ground up is definitely a must in new venture creation. An example: a lot of the VCs that I run into can often be classified as "momentum investors" in that they like to talk about funding the YouTube of X or the Facebook of Y (usually after these companies have had successful exits or massive valuations) without really thinking about whether the translation to X or Y actually fits from what Wolfram would call a "first-principles" analysis. In contrast, the thinking VCs, like my friend Nick Beim from Matrix Partners, think through the idea and the business model from the bottom up, starting from the individual motivations of the customers/users/etc. and building up a micro economic model that fits the behavior. This is usually a much better investment of time than reading "Momentum Weekly" on the crapper or looking through sector sizing reports to find the next high growth segment that the other 1000 investors doing the same haven't already found. And it is anathema to the top-down astronauts (often self-identifying as "pattern recognizers") who must have been the kids in kindergarden jamming the Fisher Price square pegs into the round openings.
Incidentally, I met Nick while doing Tabblo which borrowed its first office from extra Matrix space. While he was not our board member directly, we spent many an afternoon chatting about the fundamentals of the consumer Internet and I often came away thinking that I needed to do more hard thinking about some of our underlying "first principles." Nick also introduced me to a great mentor and now friend, Reid Hoffman, who is his entrepreneurial doppelganger— intellectually honest to a fault, analytical as hell, and never afraid to say "it might work but the concept sucks." Always refreshing, though sometimes painful.
If you're thinking about a startup, in a startup, or even in a big company in a group looking at a new product or market, go read the Wolfram piece— it might help keep you honest next time you get sloppy in a strategy session.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Nov. 5, 2007)
I read this weekend that in Japan consumers are slowing their PC purchases in a major way— eschewing them for the likes of iPod Touches, smartphones, and other portable devices that can bring the Internet to their pockets. So much so in fact that major web application vendors are targeting the small screens ahead of the big PC-connected LCDs.
This could just be about the death of the current PC form factor, which in space-constrained Japan might be coming on earlier. And in fact, it would seem that the Japanese love for small computers is extending down in the laptop-for-everyone sweet spot of $300 that OLPC and others are pioneering. But it could also be that the consumer computing platform has now been defined: web applications through the browser that let you do content-consumption things, buying things, social things, and in rare cases, authoring things. With gaming as the one big caveat, it seems that gone are the days where application developers talked about using the GPU to deliver amazing interfaces, or the raw processing power of the PC to do crazy magic around speech/gesture/video recognition, etc. And so cheap access devices are ruling the day, with the feature set being around how well they can support 3G/Wifi (for connectivity) and the web browser.
This is good for us but bad for Microsoft, Dell, HP, and even Apple. When the spec for an application or platform freezes from a features perspective, it's bye-bye hypergrowth and hello slogging it on price/quality/colors deathmarch. Apple gets to avoid this a little more than the others (though not much according to the article), but for all of PC folks it will be ugly. Especially given how much of a device form-factor renaissance we seem to be seeing (iPhone, Nokia N95, Nokia 810, Googlephone, etc.).
Fast forward to Open Social, this Google-led effort to freeze the spec of social networking core capabilities that everyone is going crazy about. For starters, I agree with all of the folks who say that consumers vote with their feet irrespective of standards and that these days they are all voting for Facebook, so I don't really see what the big game-changer is in putting out a standard for widget developers. More importantly though, it doesn't seem like the right time to do it, unless of course, it is an attempt to take some wind out of Facebook's momentum.
The most interesting thing about the "social network platform" is what Facebook calls the Minifeed (Open Social calls it the "Activity Stream"), an aggregation of all of the activity that is going on between connected members of a social network that seems ripe for data mining, advertising, and best of all, experimentation around how it can be used to help people find stuff that is highly relevant (including today's killer app, helping people find each other). Open Social's Activity Stream API seems pretty simplistic and maps directly to thinking of each person's stream as an RSS feed that you might want to read or potentially jam items into. And while this may cover most of today's use cases, I'd be surprised if the tightly integrated social network sites (like Facebook) don't find a whole load of more interesting uses over the next few years. One could argue that their continued dominance sort of depends on it, especially as they build out an advertising platform capable of supporting their crazy valuation.
Don't get me wrong, standardization is a good thing, even if it implies a sort of freezing that tends to kill product categories. I just wonder whether we're quite there in the social network space.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Nov. 4, 2007)
One of my favorite topics for fun discussion among technology entrepreneurs and investors is why the west took off while the east languished after the invention of the PC. Here on the east coast, we had the mini computer lock, were awash in people who had one foot in that world and the other in the emerging PC software industry, and still we managed to give up not only the PC boom but the subsequent Internet boom, and the most recent social web explosion as well.
Many many bytes are wasted on the blogosphere discussing a related topic— do you have to be in Silicon Valley to start a cool consumer Internet company?— so I won't belabor that here. In short, I think that you do not in fact have to be located there, though you have to work extra hard to stay connected if you are not.
That said, my favorite entrepreneur-blogger, Ev, had a post this week about people just starting their careers in technology that I wish I'd read 12 years ago, "Going west, as a young man." In it he covers his early career in getting out from Bumbletown Nebraska and out to the Valley (and fortunately for him into the hands of the O'Reilly folk) for his formative years.
Ev is a very special guy— in fact every time I hear him speak or read his stuff, I am impressed with his underspoken wisdom (for instance, I thought he had the most insightful 10 minute slot at the recent Web 2.0 conference). That said, after reading his post, it would seem to me that had he not found his way out there, he may have wasted 10 or 15 years of his career working on some insurance company intranet app in Connecticut or writing Spam copy for one of NY's finer spam companies, only finding out too late that the degrees of freedom life gives you when you are young and independent were gone.
This morning's NYT had a fun piece by John Markoff about Andy Rubin, an engineer-entrepreneur behind some of the most interesting consumer gadgets of the last couple of decades (and the supposed "father of the Google phone"), which also reminded me of how important it is to be around interesting people and bleeding edge big companies when you are bumbling around with the first decade of your career. And bumble we all certainly do— though some of us just hide it better.
The Village People had it right I guess— at least early on in your career.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 10 months ago (Oct. 11, 2007)
In the office, 2007 is going to go down as the Year of the Smartphone as everyone seems to have decided to simultaneously update their cellphones to smart ones. At the high end, the classic Jets versus Sharks face-off seems to be brewing between Apple's iPhone and Nokia's N95-3. Both are amazing devices, which clearly herald the era of very powerful things in your pocket. At the same time, they each seem to express such fundamentally different philosophical underpinnings that this promises to be a much more interesting fight than the old Mac-vs-PC spat of the last decade.
I have to admit that until very recently I was deeply ensconced in the iPhone camp. Having gotten used to the crappy quality of the device as a phone, I went about gleefully evangelizing the whole "it's not a phone, it's a computer in your pocket" until Apple pushed its 1.1.1 upgrade. The locked down firmware, the continued lack of 3rd party development support, and most significantly, the sudden appearance of the "iTunes Wifi store" (ahead of say, IM or MMS), has made me start to see my iPhone as a big pipe Apple (and maybe AT&T) is intending to use to sell me stuff (what my friend Jerry might call the ultimate consumer leash, encouraging me to "gulp products and crap cash").
Anyway, after having played with an N95 in the office yesterday, realizing yet again that Symbian is still unusable as hell, I was nevertheless left with the impression that there is something more to this N95 than the iPhone. The combination of really solid still and video capture, integrated GPS, and a rich and open API for third party development makes it almost possible to overlook one of the most byzantine UIs a phone could have. Then this morning I came across Jonathan Greene's excellent head-to-head review of exactly these two phones and realized what that tickling sense of possibility was all about:
The iPhone is for consuming content, while the N95 is for creating it.
—via Steve Litchfield
(to be fair, I think Eddie and Pitkin were trying to tell me this last night but I was just fried)
How true, how true. The iPhone (today) is a great locked pipe for consuming your media, and as of 1.1.1, for buying some too. You don't have to look further than the re-monetization of your own songs as ringtones to see where Apple wants to go. Whereas the N95 feels a lot more like a swiss-army knife for content creation— perhaps not as good as dedicated device for any one of its tasks— but good-enough... and just so handy.
Now we know how this movie ends, at least here in the US. When given the choice between creating and consuming content, most people would rather just sit back and consume. This is why YouTube won when many other more producer-friendly video sites floundered. It's why TV still commands the kind of audience that most "huge" online properties would kill for. And it's why, as a mass market product, I'd be willing to bet that the iPhone will spank the N95.
But there is something potentially different about this particular twist on consuming versus creating. For a long time now, I've been hot and bothered by the idea of the "unwitting blogger," or the regular user who, in the process of doing stuff, becomes a creator of content without really thinking about it. On the PC/Internet, the trick is most successfully implemented by the proper harvesting of either metadata or messaging data. Digg is today's king of metadata, and Facebook the king of messaging. Both sites turn their "consumers" into creators during the very process of consuming the services.
What I would argue in the case of the N95 is that a phone equipped with a really good camera, a GPS, and an open API could become rocket fuel for the explosion of unwitting bloggers. Geotagged automatic upload to Shozu is just the beginning (though a very powerful one), as is Jaiku's twist on presence. We've surely got more to come as developers begin to explore how we bring location, multimedia, mobility, presence, messaging, and the cloud together in new and creative ways.
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 11 months ago (Sept. 26, 2007)
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." —Alan Kay
It was the moment I read that quote a few years ago that I decided that Alan Kay was one of my absolute top software heroes. Of course it also had to do with his pioneering work at Xerox PARC (read all about it in Dealers of Lightning), around object oriented programming, conceiving the first laptop, and a general adherence to both elegance and execution in software design that make him truly stand out among an already pretty impressive class of peers at PARC.
Yesterday I attended a TTI Vanguard conference on behalf of HP and had the chance not only to meet Alan, but to spend 90 minutes talking with him about software design and the state of engineering, as well as a whole bunch of related topics. I've been unwinding the conversation for most of the past twelve hours, and if I have one regret, it's that I don't have a transcript of it so that I could spend some time really digesting what he was getting across to me. He has a way of using very concise terms that carry a tremendous amount of meaning and then backing them up with references to work done by colleagues across a broad range of disciplines that is incredibly dense. If Alan himself were a Smalltalk object, I think he might need a little refactoring on the messages he sends; they are compact for sure, but depend on such a rich shared context of meaning that it can be hard for the rest of us to follow.
And speaking of compactness, I really dig his latest project. He's gotten funding from the NSF (and some other folks) to rebuild an entire personal computing system in 20,000 lines of code. And by personal computing system he doesn't mean a VM like the JVM or .NET, but in fact the "whole stack—" from the interface the user sees to the instruction set on the processor. Yeah, crazy right? When he first said it to me, I wasted the first 10 minutes trying to understand what kind of "whole system" definition he was going to use to cheat his way to the 20K LOC constraint, but it soon became clear that he was deadly serious about doing this soup-to-nuts.
Why? Because according to Alan, the edifice that is any major computing "stack" (Windows, Linux, OSX + drivers + frameworks + applications) can easily run into 100-300M lines of code— far too much for any one person to even hope to begin to understand (20K lines is by comparison, about the equivalent of a 400 page book). And if we can't understand it, there is no way that we could ever hope to begin to fix the entropy that is slowly eating these systems from the inside out, or to innovate enough in software development practices to allow software to experience its own Moore's law-like exponential increase in power per line of code written.
I'm torn over whether I think that working the sort of alchemy that Alan & team are going to have to undertake to pull off this Herculean task so that one person can truly understand the entire computing environment is going unleash the type of revolution that he hopes it will. On the one hand, I love the notion that building this type of system will usher in new tools and ways of thinking about software development that will allow us to keep teams small and productive. I've always been very proud of the small size of our team at Tabblo (especially relative to what we are able to do), and have been a little shocked since joining HP about how many other "lab managers" scoff when I tell them that our team is fewer than 10 people, following it with some statement of size about their own multi-hundred person team. It shouldn't be this way— on this front both Alan and Google are absolutely correct. Small teams make the magic happen; in fact, I can not remember the last piece of software that I was blown away by that had more than 25 people working on the core of it (one of my favorite analogies that he used while we chatted yesterday was that of the pyramids, "hunks of rubble covered with limestone," that took thousands of people years to build and could not stand up to the simple Roman arch built by 2-3 masons).
On the other hand, one of my favorite things about working in software is how well abstractions work to isolate me from the stuff that I don't care to know about. As I type this, I have a vague idea of what the CPU and GPU are doing together to make the characters appear on the screen, but most of the time I don't want to have to think about it. And if I wanted to build a new kind of word processor, I'm not sure I'd really want to think about it either. Furthermore, there is a whole generation of people just like me who probably don't have the training and experience to think that deeply about the low levels of what the OS and the hardware are doing to provide us with our computing environments— and each generation of kids coming out of school knows less and less about this arcane stuff. Today's PHP hacker wants to build the next Facebook, but he is likely to know very little about how PHP executes, how a webserver is built, or even how TCP works to send bytes all over the Internet. Should he have to worry about this if his goal is to build social applications?
Obviously, I am simplifying his argument as I think that what he would argue is that in a properly self-describing, self-bootstrapping system, it's turtles all the way down which would make it a lot easier for our PHP-hacker friend to understand the system to its core.
In fact, it is the pursuit of this elegance that is the most inspiring part of Alan's new project— and of his whole life's work. The fact that he is always looking to make things more logical and concise, to find a new kind of science (and art) in the way that most of us will build software in the future is a very good thing indeed.
And in the meanwhile, the rest of us still working on the pyramids should take a pause to think a bit about how we could move towards that arch.
[Postnote: After writing this, I went and read his NSF proposal. I'm not an expert in grant writing, but this proposal is so good that anyone looking to write any sort of pitch should read it (especially people writing business plans for risky new ventures). It's grand while remaining incredible humble in what is known and what is really hard to do. It covers the depth of experience the team has concisely, and gives a great history of "water under the bridge." But most of all, it inspires with its broad vision of what computing could be for everyone, and why it's so important that we be commissioning this type of work. I don't know who you are NSF person who approved this, but you have definitely spent my tax dollars well here!]
Posted by Antonio
2 years, 12 months ago (Sept. 8, 2007)
Blackberry Internet Mail service seems to have borked this morning, leaving millions of Crackberry addicts without an excuse to avoid their children. I'm sure in the end it will have been some silly admin error that caused it, but as we grow more and more used to (and addicted) the gigantic signaling fabric that the Internet has become, it is going to be harder and harder to cope with these kind of outages. Why just last week, we were just getting over the Skype outage during which I heard podcasters claim they were going to be "put out of business" by bad Skype capacity planning.
What is especially rough about the Blackberry outage is that it is endemic of the types of outages we can expect to see if we continue switching to proprietary (and thus centralized) messaging platforms. For instance, all sorts of web services have sprung up to replace email with varying degrees of success. On some sites, the internal messaging is peripheral to the experience (Flickr), but on others, it is either central (Facebook), or the experience (Twitter). Unfortunately, these systems were designed as centralized web services. And even well implemented web services can go down, mostly because the redundancy is added after the initial design. For instance, I'm sure that Facebook's database layer is sharded and replicated, its assets are on multiple CDNs, and its application servers are geographically distributed— but because the application was never designed to be distributed, these solutions will only take robustness thus far (especially after you add in the potential for human error at each of these layers).
Contrast this to decades-old email, or rather email + DNS. The combination of a very simple protocol for message exchange (SMTP) with a very flexible address resolution system (MX records in DNS) means that is is pretty hard to make all of email "go down." Sure the big centralized services like Gmail and Hotmail can have outages, but all of those law firms running Exchange, schools running Sendmail, and startups running Postfix will keep right on chugging. And even when these small poorly managed mail servers fail, there is usually some marginally better server at the ISP queueing up email just for the occasion.
Ray Tomlinson and his colleagues at BBN deserve a ton of credit for having put together a system in the 1970s that could grow to the scale and scope that it has while remaining more robust than a lot of what has come after. All of the rest of us should take a page out of their book in working towards improving the fabric of the Internet.
One of the best things that I've learned to do in order to improve my "game-changing technologies predictive power" is to look back in 2,3, and 5 year chunks at what the things were back then that I thought were for sure the up-and-coming winners. It is a sobering exercise for understanding how in technology it is so very easy to confuse a long view for a short distance.
For instance, take web services. Back in 01-02 they were all of the rage. Websites were going to syndicate functionality to everyone, and companies big and small were going to reap huge rewards from weaving all of these new-found APIs together. And sure, 5 years later we've got a collection of interesting services from Amazon/eBay/Google, a bevy of Web 2.0 companies with half-baked APIs (mostly following in the lead of Flickr), and the built in expectation that if you're building a website today, you are a nobody until you can offer an API to your web service.
In the meantime though, only one ubiquitous API has truly emerged: RSS. As Steve Rubel pointed out in the blog post that started me thinking about this again, RSS is now the common glue by which developers can weave blog posts, pictures, tweets, and whatever else into one uniform stream of data to be consumed, remixed, and shared as needed.
And indeed, this is pretty awesome, despite the fact that we're just now scratching the surface. Adam Green (who in my mind is one of Boston's best software minds, a guy that really can span generations with his thinking) told me almost two years ago that right about now developers would be waking up to a "feed management" problem. What is more, he then set out to build the tools needed for addressing some of these challenges. I haven't stayed close enough to what he's done thus far, but I do agree with the notion that most of the interesting opportunities out there today for people working in the consumer Internet revolve around orchestration of different services through "feed management," though not quite in the publish-it-all-this-is-who-I-am-hear-me-roar style that is so prevalent among the Web 2.0 set.
Most "regular folks" don't care to be emitting digital excrement about every part of their lives for all to see, all of the time. And unfortunately, the privacy model for sharing items from feed selectively is either not there (most blogging tools), too cumbersome (Vox), or too coarsely grained (Twitter). Of all of the existing services, I've seen, Facebook's Mini Feed comes the closest to representing real life use cases, but only because Facebook is itself a closed system with a nice natural mechanism for representing friends and colleagues (though we'll see if this scales as the company moves beyond its traditional college demographic).
In order to be able to remix feeds in an interesting way, we need not only a service that sucks up RSS output from all of one's online publishing/communication platforms and normalizes it all, but also one which can then provide the right level of access control to the people and services that are likely to want to consume that amalgam of information. Now, who is working on that part of the feed management problem? Who has the scale and scope to pull it off in a way that both users and developers trust? Or can we pull it off with some combination of OpenId and RSS extensions?
It seems to me that cracking this identity/authentication/access problem is going to open up a whole world of interesting opportunities for syndicated content and services that will go well beyond publishing for most regular folks, but only if it is done in an open and distributed way. Let's just hope it doesn't take another 5 years to get there.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 1 month ago (Aug. 5, 2007)
While traveling this week, I discovered a really amazing radio show called "Radio Lab" from New York Public Radio (more specifically, I discovered its podcast). The first episode I listened to, on the ephemeral nature of memories, blew me away both from the quality of the content, and the way in which it was brought together by the show's producers.
The basic premise of the episode is that the old analogy that memories in the brain are stored like pages in a book (or more currently speaking, files on a hard drive) is actually flawed, and that memories are in fact stored in such a way that we re-create them every time we recall them (there is a better code + data analogy which I won't make here but is how I currently understand it). The piece really got me thinking about memory, identity, and what may come from all of us web who seem so obsessed with chronicling life in pictures, blog posts, and just about every form of digital excrement.
An example: right after listening to the piece, I found myself giving a toast at a wedding and trying to recall a story about the groom and I from sixteen years ago. As I felt my brain struggling to reform the memories, it occurred to me that this whole process would have been a whole lot easier in today's Facebook-enhanced world. The episode (and I won't go into it here) was exactly the kind of embarrassing thing that someone would now have caught with a digital camera; it would have made its way to Facebook, and ended up tagged with both of our names by all of our friends. And sixteen years from now it would be a trivial exercise for anyone preparing a toast to pull all of the interactions they've ever had with the person being celebrated— assuming of course that Facebook is still around. And not just pictures but comments, wall posts, blog posts— in short a whole lot of data that would go very far in helping assisting a more accurate reformation of those exact memories.
Progress, right? I've always thought so, for two reasons: because the act of chronicling is itself engages and rewards the author, and for the sake of history (even when you yourself are the historian coming back later to see how you've changed). It is after all exactly like Cory Doctorow wrote when he claimed that his blog served as his outboard brain. And in the Facebook example, the collective nature of the chronicling makes this outboard brain proposition even more compelling.
But the folks on the podcast made me think about whether this is in fact absolute progress. Apparently, every time you do the work of recalling a memory, you change it a little, according to the particular way in which your brain processes it at that given time. It is as though the process of bringing it to the surface bumps it against all of the stuff that has accumulated in your brain since the last time you thought about that particular memory. And in the process, the memory itself changes ever so slightly. Then when you put it away again, it goes back changed just a teeny tiny little bit. Less like what may have "objectively" happened, but a whole lot more "you" in the process.
Obviously the incessant chronicling of our lives doesn't have to affect this very human process for grooming memories over time. However, I suspect that this will only be the case for as long as the tools for chronicling our lives are lossy. Writing something down will almost always leave enough room for the memories around the words to evolve, and the photos we take are only snapshots of instants in time. But what happens when we've got Justin.tv style chronicling (assuming we could store, search, and excerpt it all)? What happens when the collective brain of all of your friends tagging and commenting puts enough perspectives in the chronicle to mitigate this process?
One of the hosts on the show made the incredibly insightful statement that in the end all we are is "a bunch of memories strung together." But from the sound of the rest of the show, it is a string that is always moving twisting slightly this way and that. I wonder what will happen as technology starts constraining the way in which we allow ourselves to move the string over time.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 1 month ago (July 31, 2007)
After yesterday's rant about creating parallel infrastructures for messaging, I was amused to read Scott Karp's blog post on the "inefficiencies" of Web 2.0 where he argues that plugging your Twitter stream into Facebook and then consuming both it and the Facebook feed in Google Reader can get annoying.
Absolutely true.
However, parallel messaging infrastructures aside, Scott is missing the point. The cool thing is that we can do these things at all.
Find any three year-old who has discovered Legos and watch him go to town snapping stuff together. For the two years, the creations that he will assemble will look like molten piles of plastic growing haphazardly every which way, really amounting to nothing more than the sheer joy of knowing that force and concentration work magic with Lego pieces. This is exactly where we are with RSS and ATOM feeds and all of the hidden readers that can consume them (Facebook, Jaiku, Google Gadgets, Yahoo Pipes, etc.).
But keep watching that three year-old as he turns into a five year-old and you'll see something really amazing start to happen. The jumbles become ships, airplanes, cars. The haphazard construction gives way to a careful understanding of where a 1x2 makes all the difference and where a right angle join can turn a car into a rocket. And in the best of cases, these new found skills find ways to surprise even the very designers of the kits the respective pieces belong to.
When it comes to syndicating and remixing content and web application functionality, I think we're just about to turn that five-year old corner. We're really about to see the true promise of web services delivered— on a consumer platform and mostly by "user programmers" remixing feeds and plugging things together. And a little redundancy is a small price to pay for that.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 4 months ago (April 25, 2007)
Having spent a bit of time thinking about developing APIs since the HP acquisition took place a few weeks ago, I was very amused by an ACM Queue piece, "APIs with an Appetite," which considers how APIs can get too fat too quickly.
In essence the piece argues that a well thought-out API will have just enough method calls to provide the intended functionality plus an "escape hatch" call which may be ugly but which plays a critical role. The example given is the UNIX file-access API with its 5 basic types of calls: open, close, write, read, and ioctl, the last being the escape hatch call which lets one pass almost any data structure down in the guts of the operating system and get almost anything back.
I've always thought of ioctl as the ugly stepchild which somehow broke with the elegance of the "stream of bites" abstraction of its four siblings. And yet, as the article argues, it is precisely ioctl's ugliness that allowed the rest of the API to remain so pure while still actually being useful.
It's interesting to consider this design approach in the newly emerging set of web service APIs. The Flickr API is the posterchild for the new web and yet, while the API is quite useful, the author of the ACM piece may consider it "fat." After all, there are a bunch of repeated methods for dealing with collections of things: photos, people, sets, etc. And yet, each of the method families belongs to a different namespace and returns slightly different data structures.
This short piece is definitely worth reading for anyone working on web service APIs. The final point about monitoring the use of the escape hatch call and learning from it how to evolve the API is perhaps most applicable in the web environment (where everything is centrally logged for later study). As the coolness of just having an API fades and is replaced with an explosion of services and APIs, we'd be well served to take this piece to heart.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 4 months ago (April 9, 2007)
There was a great article about our new owners in today's New York Times which is a great read if you are interested in the internals of HP and the future of printing. Of course it elicited a bunch of emails from my joker friends wishing me well in what seems to be an epic battle as people consume less paper and more screen.
What is most interesting to me is a point which VJ makes in the piece about how most companies don't innovate when they are on top, but rather when they are struggling at the bottom of the heap. One of the most exciting things about Tabblo being part of the new strategy is that we get to take part in the strategy from this rather unique vantage point.
Today Apple shipped its 100 millionth iPod. This is a wild and crazy success and yet it's interesting to think that HP's installed base of home printers is significantly larger than this. Is Apple thinking about what comes after the iPod and are they willing to swing hard to get there?(1) Is Google making acquisitions around what might come after AdWords? Does Microsoft really want to make a product bet on web-based software?
Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma is supposed to be business-101 for anyone working in technology. It's good to see that my new bosses have actually read it.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 4 months ago (April 8, 2007)
In what is a great example of how Digg/Reddit have made blog post titles irrelevant, Paul Graham has a piece called "Microsoft is dead" which is really much more about how they are now irrelevant. The thrust of his argument is that Google and AJAX make their platform irrelevant for new hackers.
Fun stuff, appropriately lambasted by wizened veterans like Dave Winer and Don Dodge and put properly in the context of "Rich Internet Applications" by Ryan Stewart. So rather than plumb the depths of the argument, I wanted to keep the plane at 30,000 feet:
For a platform strategy to be displaced (and this is what Microsoft has done brilliantly up until now), you need to have a new platform strategy and a viable economic model.
Are AJAX-enabled web applications enough? Not by themselves. It's cool to have a much richer experience in the browser but I doubt that this alone is discontinuous enough. Outlook web access was after all, the first AJAX-enabled web application, made by the very folks at Microsoft who this new platform is supposed to make irrelevant. Despite the portability advantages of data-in-the-cloud, turning the world of PCs into dumb terminals doesn't even necessarily feel like it is altogether a step forward in the evolution of personal computing.
However, there is something else that makes Web 2.0 a much better candidate as a full on platform: people. Tim O'Reilly has been writing about it for years, and plenty of others have jumped in; collective intelligence, smart mobs, folksonomies— however you label it, the idea that people can come together and trade, write encyclopedias, etc. is really powerful. I don't think we even know how to understand what this new people platform is really defined by, but we can see its outlines in examples emerging from the wild. For instance, Twittervision is a great example of an app built on the people platform.
That said, we still need the economic model to give the platform enough time to grow its ecosystem. Microsoft has had wonderful one here in software licensing. Open source has a pretty good one in the gift economy and ego/reputation (albeit not as good as Microsoft). Web 2.0 most definitely does not have a good economic model in "selling the feature to Google/Yahoo." Furthermore, it's not clear that the ad thing is going to work, especially as we see increasing returns to scale in the online ad networks, and try as we might, no non-content provider has yet to crack the subscription model on the consumer side.
Without a viable economic model, it will only be a matter of time before Microsoft and Google incorporate the features that make the people platform into their respective businesses and leave a vast wasteland of cynical folks capable of using pastels and rounding corners on rectangles. This stuff is really hard to get right; you need the platform shift (timing), the economic model (business), and the emergent ecosystem (developers) to work together for a long stretch of years. And no matter what the cool kids at Y-Combinator are worrying about these days, I'm not sure we've got all of the key ingredients in place.
As an aside, if you want to see a great example of someone who got this right on the money the last time around, go and listen to this long-ish talk by Bill Gates from 1989 when he talks about the PC ecosystem. He must have been in his mid-thirties at the time, and it is just amazing to hear how well he can navigate the level of detail up and down to paint a really cohesive vision of where personal computing was going back then.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 9 months ago (Dec. 2, 2006)
James Surowiecki, who wrote 2004's fascinating book, The Wisdom of the Crowds, has a great piece in this week's New Yorker on Nintendo's strategy with their new Wii game console where they are clearly ceding the #1 and #2 positions (by volume) to Sony and Microsoft but still managing to squeeze out a nice place/profit despite being #3. It's a great read for anyone interested in the dynamics of marketshare but especially good for the lemming investors/entrepreneurs/analysts who cover the web space and talk about the importance of "being the biggest," or "being at scale relative to the competitors."
This whole #1 or #2 thing started when Jack Welch, head alpha business monkey and super chief executive from GE, declared that if his company wasn't #1 or #2 in every market segment they competed in, he was pulling the team and exiting the business (covered in Surowiecki's piece). General managers in all sorts of industries then took to this notion in droves and started applying it broadly. What most people missed however, was that Welch was referring mainly to industrial goods businesses where there are huge up front capital costs that have to be amortized over a limited number of purchases very quickly. When you build a turbine factory for example, there are about 18 buyers in the world for your stuff and if you can't get decent marketshare in the segment, you fixed costs quickly become the death of you.
Not so in just about every other industry, and especially, service or content businesses. A few years ago at the D conference, Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs what the difference was between being the CEO of a computer company and being CEO of a movie company. I expected a total puff answer but was surprised to hear Jobs talk pointedly about the difference between zero sum market places and non-zero sum ones, and specifically talk about the different industry dynamics when you're out choosing an Apple over a Dell (either/or) as opposed to seeing Antz and A Bug's Life. According to him, managing a non-zero sum business (including people, projects, strategy, and tactics) was a disaster waiting to happen— which is why this piece in the New Yorker should be required reading for the take-the-market embahs looking for the next eBay opportunity.
Notwithstanding the rallying cries of the attention folks, most of the businesses we are in are far from zero-sum. I would argue that the closer a purchase of a good or service gets to emotion as an underlying driver, the further away it gets from Welch's #1/#2 model of survival because by definition is is far from zero sum.
While Surowiecki does not make this same zero-sum argument for why the Nintendo is in a great place with its Wii strategy (he prefers to focus on the classic serving an unserved segment argument), it is nice to see that implicitly the company's strategy is an affirmation of the Jobs statement on competitive dynamics. I'm no console gamer (I think I was more in the Apple ][ generation) but I do love talking to them and fantasizing about how someday a modern-day console may win me over like Myst/Zelda/Castle Wolfenstein did in years past (the only 3 computer games that have ever sucked me in deep), and what I've been gathering about the Wii is that even the most die-hard Xbox/PS3 folks are eager to get one both because it is cheap and because it provides a whole new axis for game play despite its underpowered hardware and lack of cutting edge features.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 9 months ago (Nov. 19, 2006)
As I was looking at Techmeme today in order to refresh our sponsorship link, I noticed that the absolute rage this weekend is the "leaked" memo by Yahoo SVP Brad Garlinhouse about how the company has no focus, is too fat, and most importantly, is trying to do too many things at once (and is thus spread "thin like peanut butter"). There must be hundredsofbloggers linking to the 2-3 main threads playing out over this public mea culpa, and for the most part there seems to be consensus around this notion that there are far too many redundancies in the projects that the company is pursuing.
I don't buy it. It's particularly interesting to see this piece come out just two weeks after everyone applauded Ev for relaunching Odeo as a sort of modern-day incubator because of his belief that it was just too hard to predict the hits a priori. Why can't this same reasoning be used to justify the co-existence of Yahoo Photos and Flickr, Delicious and MyWeb? After all, if Ev is right, and the home runs are too hard too spot up front, what a company like Yahoo needs to do is adopt a portfolio model where each property becomes an investment buying for the eyeballs and hours of potential users— to say nothing of the fact that it is not clear that there are not distinct non-overlapping audiences for some of the "competing" properties. They may be too slow to kill off the losers, and the company may in fact be over-run by middle management embahs that lack the cojones required to make big strategic bets, but if the Odeo learning is right, the fundamental portfolio plan for big hits seems pretty sound to me.
Except that I think that part of what is killing Yahoo is that they've gotten themselves cross-wise to the grain of the web. That term comes from Paul Graham's essay defining Web 2.0 when he applied it to describe why success seems so friction-free for Google while other similarly-sized companies (Yahoo) seem to struggle in the brave new Web 2.0 world. Because of their roots, because of this huge Damocles sword hanging over their heads every night at 12:00AM (just one billion page views to go before the clock rolls again!), and maybe even because it is staffed by Hollywood types, Yahoo can't escape this "hits-based" approach to building destinations on the web.
And yet, if there is one thing we can say about Web 2.0 is that to truly add value, people building applications, communities, etc. need to think less like bricks and more like mortar. When the web was new, getting big was all that mattered, and even with the recent MySpace-inspired frenzy, misguided M&A folks have felt that building the biggest pile of bricks was the only path to winning. This notion more than anything else is what is guiding Yahoo's current portfolio model— buying companies and hoping that a few of them can turn out to be big bricks with little in the way of direct investment post-merger and alignment within an overall strategic vision.
Meanwhile Google, with its syndicatable AdWords service and bottomless appetite for crawling even the most miniscule of sites, is showing us again and again that mortar really pays the bills (not necessarily though that they are any better at acquiring companies). Someone recently told me that 40% of requests for YouTube streams are requested from a non-YouTube site (thanks to the embeddable YouTube widget)— a statistic which, if true, is the ultimate affirmation of the services-as-mortar model that Google seems so good at pursuing.
Interestingly, a couple of Yahoo's more popular recent acquisitions have been great mortar plays— Flickr and delicious. The unfortunate thing seems to be that as soon as these little mortar players get under the purple umbrella their mandate seems to change to building big bricks in order to justify the eventual "monetization strategy."
I am sure there are many things currently plaguing Yahoo that have nothing to do with this brick-and-mortar metaphor— I mention it only because it seems to be a decent way to think through a more coherent (and timely) strategy for making something out of the sticky mess that Yahoo is currently facing.
Posted by Antonio
3 years, 9 months ago (Nov. 13, 2006)
Markoff had the scoop on the next tidalwave of innovation on the Internet with front page puff piece in sunday's New York Times on the coming Web 3.0— a vast interconnected fabric of machines that understand each other and do our bidding so that we can schedule vacations, buy cars, and do all sorts of neat things with preciously little input on our part. Good times.
If you suspend disbelief for a moment on the possibility that you would want to ever have a machine buy me a car or book me a vacation without the level of time that you normally invest in doing those things today, I think the best way to tell that the piece is lightweight— and more importantly that it probably has the predictive power of lottery ticket— is to go into the time machine and look at Apple's Knowledge Navigator concept video from the 1980s and see how much of this Web 3.0 vision is just rehashing a very sexy idea that people trot out (like Sculley did then) when they are lacking a real actionable vision.
To be fair, it probably going to happen someday (along with flying cars and matter replicators) but so far in the future that it seems silly to be writing now about how this is what's coming after Web 2.0. Of all of the discussion that followed the article, my favorite take on it was Ross Mayfield's which simply stated: it's about the people stupid, and not about the super smart computers that reason.
While everyone else was busy working on all sorts of flux capacitor-like algorithms for processing the vast array of data on the web, Google proved that a conceptually simple algorithm for intelligently using key metadata could build enough value to unseat huge incumbents. Even today, the blogosphere gets all abuzz about startups that try to take on ridiculously hard computer science projects and productize them in the short time usually allowed by the venture model (even when it doesn't seem to work) and instead ignore incremental efforts to make what we have better and more usable.
It's easy to understand the power of "the story" around machines that truly reason— after all science fiction has trained us for the last 60 years that this eventuality is going to bring with a whole universe of interesting possibilities— so it's understandable that Markoff would know the Times readers would eat this up. What is not so great is when the air is sucked out of the discussion because of fluffy proclamations about "Web 3.0" and the ensuing raging debate about whether we are there yet or not. It's overload and has three direct casualties that I can see:
There are people out there doing very interesting things around a lot of what could eventually really help the coming of this future that science fiction writers have been writing about, most notably anyone involved in microformats work. These guys are doing great stuff but it's going to be very incremental, and as such, it's important that we neither rush them nor discourage them.
If you pull the bread out of the oven too soon, it simply will not have risen enough and you'll get a gooey mess. Tim O'Reilly's brilliance in coining Web 2.0 wasn't in the what but in the when. For a variety of reasons, he just nailed the timing at exactly the right moment. Peter Rip talks about Noah Spivak's company being "outed" too early which I am sure is not an isolated incident.
While understandable, the shoot-for-the-moon science project approach to big stories can sometimes cause all of us little people who work hard for our coverage to take our eye off the ball (A social photo site that doesn't implement groups for 3 months because there are "cooler" things to do?!?).
We as entrepreneurs, makers, power users, and gadflies need to stay focused on what is achievable and what actually brings value to users in measurable increments of time. From that perspective it might be better if John would stick to covering research labs in universities (which he does mention), or better still, covering something like the transport of matter through information streams.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 3 months ago (May 30, 2006)
I love the Pew studies for their conclusions even if I don't entirely understand their methods. The latest (via ClickZ News) proclaims that nearly 50MM Americans are generating content on the web. Of course this includes all sorts of things from leaving comments to sharing pictures, but despite this, the really good thing here is that this many people are willing to engage in a participatory medium.
I've written before on the magic ratio of 1-10-100 as proposed by Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo, so I'll skip the description here and just say that we might be approaching a time when that ratio skews in favor of more people creating content. But we need a couple of things first:
Better tools that can be properly contextualized
Most "content creation" tools on the web today suck, plain and simple. I'd guess that ranked by popularity or use, our old friend TEXTAREA would win hands-down. So where are the MacDraws, the PageMakers, hell even the MS Words of the web? I think when dealing with text Gmail comes the closest to being good today, and it isn't even a tool for creating content that is going to be published. Imaging tools are weak, and layout tools all but non-existent (which is a big part of the reason why we started Tabblo). And this is to say nothing of better tools for audio, video, and a few other media types. Someone needs to push iLife to the web, and fast.
Except that the tools need to be mashable, in a good old Web2 style. I want to see my layout tool of choice for words and photos right there in on my MySpace profile. On Om's blog there is an interesting post today about how social network sites are the new media– if this is indeed the case, all the best creative tools in the world will be nothing but silos if the can't play well on both import and export for starters– nevermind the necessary deeper integrations that users are going to come to expect.
Better Repurpose-ability of Content
I'd write more Amazon reviews if Amazon would also publish a blog of all of my reviews for me, at my own URL, while providing me with some styling/editing controls. I'd make more iDVD slideshows of my photos if I could also get hyperlinked iWeb-like sites out of the effort. I'd even do more LinkedIn if I could get a "portfolio site" out the other end that was part-resume, part reference checking app. In all of these cases, the key is that the tools should be smart enough to allow me to easily repurpose my creative investment in any particular piece of "content." At my old company we made layout tools that allowed hundreds of thousands of people to assemble photo books that we would then manufacture. People would spend hours crafting stories out of their photos and captions but the only type of output we supported was the physical book. We were (and probably still are) the best tool for making photo books but it wouldn't have taken that much of an effort to be pretty good at a number of other forms of output.
I think I've said it before on this blog, but this I will repeat: we live in very interesting times indeed. Man, as Graham Swift wrote, has always been a story-telling animal, but it is just now that the combination of the Internet as a persistent publishing platform, and the PC (and PC-like devices) as creative tools, that we're getting to the really interesting stuff.
Another attendee at D observed to me that while last year was all about the iPod and how it seemed to have no boundaries, this year's conference scarcely had any mention of Apple's beloved little device. Instead the session speakers and chatter in the hallways were all about the importance of content getting on the network (from both the media companies and regular folks) with a specific emphasis on video. I think that this may in part be due to the fact that Apple had little presence at the conference (Steve didn't even show), but another more important reason may be that Apple being Apple has stopped really having something worthy of the buzz in the portable player space. Sure Bose-clones are nice, and the iPod ID is still good enough to eat, but startups like Zing are showing that the important next step for these devices– a step which would excite the geeks that attend events like D– have to do with networking the devices together to do more interesting stuff.
The most interesting aspect of the Zing player was not its music-playing (ID-wise, the iPod has it beat hands down) but as Rafe writes, that it comes built-in with everything that one would need for a peer-to-peer communicator: wi-fi radio, speaker, and microphone. A friend of mine, Jordan Pollack, gave me an idea 5 years ago around a peer-to-peer Blackberry that would store small txt messages among the peers in a mesh-style LAN until one of them got Internet-connected and sent the messages out into the wild, and I've been in love with it ever since, mostly because of what a neat hack it would be. All you would need for a near-ubiquitous connection would be enough density of people carrying the devices and the occasional device passing through an open Wi-fi spot so that it could dump its stored payload out on the net.
With the Zing you could even add a sort of voicemail-like format to the mix so that people could have asynchronous voice communications with anyone anywhere on top of the synchronous voice calls available within the mesh formed by a pool of these devices.
One thing we couldn't figure out 5 years ago was how to start the process going because as with all networked gizmos, having just one or two wouldn't be any good at all. And that is where the passion that people feel about their music comes in. If you are already carrying the device around for another purpose, all the comms. stuff would just be a nice added bonus.
A term used by evolutionary biologists comes to mind to describe just how a network like this might roll out: as an exaptation.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 3 months ago (May 24, 2006)
I don't usually get excited by the happenings in the iPod ecosystem but Apple's new collaboration with Nike is really cool. The plan is to build an RF pedometer that can feed telemetry to the iPod via an attached wireless receiver. As anyone who runs a lot can tell you, this is a very nice thing indeed.
But it also shows the kind of power and platform lock-in that Apple has gotten with the iPod. When people talk about that, it is usually in reference to Apple's music store and its proprietary DRM which is currently definitely a form of lock-in, but ultimately one that can't last. However, the lock-in that comes from the fact that the iPod is the only constantly semi network-connected portable device (on an open network, unlike the cellphones) might just last for quite a while, or at least until we finally get to the promise of cheap-enough networking for regular everyday devices (and that seems to be one of those classic situations where everyone is confusing a long view with a short distance).
As you get more digital music, the incentive exists to constantly be syncing your iPod to your PC to refresh your portable library. The podcasting folks saw this as an opportunity to push new content to the device for a sort of "time-shifted radio" experience, and they were right on. That said, no one is properly leveraging the back-channel yet (moving data from the iPod to the network) mostly because the software is not rich enough on the iPod to capture any data worth sending back (playcount and song ratings being the only exceptions).
But with this Nike collaboration, the possibilities are much richer due to the fact that the iPod is going to be collecting all sorts of data about your activity. And by the way, Nike is not just now waking up to this idea; for a while they (and others) have had non-networked devices that do this, and even associated websites for runners to compete on stats in virtual races. The problem has always been that the cost of participation has been too high both because those other companies were not software companies (remember the first Audible player software anyone?), and because it was just too much hassle for most people to spend all that time connecting a device just this purpose.
However if I am already going to be connecting the device to sync my music, the cost of of getting on the network is in effect subsidized by music listening desires, and everything else gets to ride along for free. One thing Steve and co. are well aware of is just how passionate people are about their music, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if this Nike thing is just the first step to truly leverage the iPod ecosystem in interesting ways (beyond colored socks and compact speakers) that point us in the direction of the world of networked devices.
I can't wait for people to start hacking on those data feeds to do more than whatever the Flash-encrusted Nike site will do. Recently I read a blog post (which I can not for the life of me find) about how the real reason Apple dropped PortalPlayer was because they were beefing up the hardware to run a scaled-down version of OS X on the devices. This is probably a complete fantasy, but how nice would it be to have a device that is that more general purpose (read: programmable), talking on an open network to services and perhaps sporadically even to other devices being synced by others?
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (July 2, 2006)
Businessweek has a sensationalist piece, "So much fanfare so few hits," that argues that Google seems to just toss these half-finished products out there that don't do nearly as well as their core search product, and that as such competitors should stop worrying about them as the "new Microsoft/IBM." After the piece hit the blogopshere, others piled on with arguments about Google's poor marketing and even worse product management to second the opinion that the company really was a one-trick pony. Scoble has even jumped in and suggested that their lack of attendance at Gnomedex may be a sign of some bigger slip.
It takes time to build a new platform people, and we should all be as lucky as Google to be able to afford to have so many irons in the fire. The approach they have taken has two clear benefits that people involved in the discussion don't mention explicitly. First, it is clear that the world has changed, and that webapps running inside of the browser are the new platform. You don't have to look further than the amount of interest a small little startup like Tabblo has garnered in places like the Wall Street Journal (or fittingly enough alongside Google in the Washington Post a few days later) to see that it's suddenly interesting to regular folks when a company stands up and says: we believe we can do formerly desktop-bound activity X better, and we are betting you will think so too. All sorts of companies with products big and small are coming on to the map with online replacements for everything from IM to spreadsheets, and users are signing up. So in that sense, just having something out there in the field is a good idea even if the offering is not fully baked.
The second advantage of taking this approach is that the best hackers are always itching to work on the up-and-coming platform and right now the biggest nucleus of this activity is at Google. We engineers are just notorious about loving the conceptualization phase, the architecture phase, and that initial burst of hacking to get features done, and in that sense a company where you can be constantly launching new products that have in-built audiences in the millions is just like crack for the Google hackers. What we're not so good at is putting the finishing touches on things: triaging bugs, collecting customer feedback, and getting iterations in that don't move the feature set forward but make the product easier/better/faster (which incidentally is why I am proud that we made it out of beta in 45 days at Tabblo) but this is where good product management and discipline can really help.
And herein lies the piece of the discussion that I did agree with: it seems like Google could really benefit from better product management. It's not glamorous– and it certainly won't get the press– but at some point people will/will not switch from Yahoo Mail or MSN Messenger based on the feel of the app, and no amount of good PR will do that for you. Given Google's late entrance into a bunch of these categories: mail, news, finance, etc., they have to keep in mind that they do need to play a game of share-shifting instead of new market growth when it comes to users.
The analogy I was going to make in disagreeing with this piece was between Google now and Microsoft in the late 80s/90s, and around how Microsoft also had poor product management around some of its products (Access, Word, Encarta, etc.), and managed to win just by staking claims and plodding forward, but I'm not as sure of it now, mostly because in the case of a lot of Microsoft products, the game was not about share-shifting so much as giving users who had not been exposed a chance to play with new functionality (by contrast, I'm fairly sure that anyone on the Internet who wants web-based email has already tried at least one of the services).
Product management can be learned however, so it seems to me that this will just be a matter of time for Google. After all, they could raid one of their dinosaur neighbors (say Intuit) who has limited prospects but plenty of grade-A product managers. And when they get that under control, shareholders and pundits alike will be happy that Google staked all of these claims in categories where it did not seem like the clear and early winner.
In the meanwhile, just give them a little time to discover just where the boundaries to this new exciting platform really are.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 2 months ago (June 22, 2006)
Pete blogs some interesting HitWise stats released into the blogosphere today by LeeAnn Prescott about how Photobucket is the #1 photo site by traffic, and poor "little" Flickr is only #6.
Comparing Photobucket to Flickr is like comparing one of those cheesy $5.95/month hosting packages you can buy from a zillion different hosting companies to MySpace. In both places you can create a profile and post it, and you can even use all the same funky styles. But no one would ever look at your page on XYZ-Cheaphost and confuse it with MySpace even though they both contain just about the same content.
On the web, there are two things that make up an "application:" a relatively robust set of tools that are provided for the user to "do something" (socializing, photo-sharing, etc.), and the community that grows up around these tools. In the desktop days you just needed the former, but in the web days it seems to me that if you don't have the latter, you're just a piece of infrastructure that can get sucked into some other webapp. In this case, Photobucket seems like a piece of infrastructure that is used by MySpace users to plug a clear hole in functionality.
Not that I have anything against Photobucket– after all they are the clear leader in their infrastructure category. They've managed to turn the crappy business of webhosting into something that seems to make money with just a teeny functionality twist and a new business model. But when Om writes that they won because of "simplicity" or giving the users what they want, I'm left wondering what it is exactly that they've won. MySpace (or CNET for that matter with their new All you can upload) could probably seriously put a dent in their growth curve by simply implementing that little bit of functionality. And if they get too intrusive with their collection of demographic data or their ads, some new entrant may decide that there is just room for the free-and-anonymous version of Photobucket.
It's interesting to think back to when Flickr first launched. I remember thinking: well this is ok, but I'm missing albums and photo effects, and invites, just for starters– there is no way I'm going to use this given how many other places I can go post a photo. But since then they've grown tags, a community, and a whole bunch of new stuff to entice, encourage, and otherwise entertain their loyal users. Will Photobucket have the same opportunity the grow functionality with its community the way Flickr did? Maybe. A look at their frontpage seems to show that they are moving in that direction. The challenge though is any app work they now do they have to undertake with a datacenter full of servers that is being pounded with request for photos on MySpace, and sometimes the weight of this makes you slow. It's why we don't worry too much about places like Kodak gallery coming after us at Tabblo– even with hundreds of engineers, they've got to deal with 3 billion photos and over 10 million users while we deal with... a whole lot less.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 5 months ago (March 14, 2006)
Lots of people have been going ga-ga over the last few days about "Zooomr," a Flickr copy that supposedly adds a couple of more features and leaves Flickr "in need of catching up" according to Mike Arrington.
I don't even want to go into the comparison between an industrial strength app capable of handling 3 million users and 100 million photos, and a hack done by a single person (if you have any doubt look for a great presentation on how Flickr scales at Cal's site, or just try Zooomer now that TechCrunch and others have sent 30-50K visitors over there). What I will focus on is David Berlind's piece: "'Trapped data' raises switching barrier to newer, sometimes better services." In it he argues that as we use online services that require our data, we have to watch the hidden lock-in when a new, "better" service comes around the corner.
Now, there are a few things that you can criticize Flickr for. But the roach motel effect is not one of them. In fact, I would argue that of all of the data-centric sites out there, Flickr is the absolute best at having a great, great, open data policy. When we started building Tabblo, we spent 6 weeks using Flickr as our backend and outside of some sluggish API calls, it was just amazing to see how much richness Flickr provided in its API, and how well thought-out it was.
But it doesn't stop there. Months later, when we sat down to integrate Flickr into Tabblo, we were again surprised at how rich the facilities are for integrating metadata from Flickr (tags, contacts, privacy settings). We were also floored by how easy the Flickr guys make it, and quite frankly, because of this, anyone launching a photo-related site today that doesn't provide Flickr integration off the bat can't be such a prodigy.
Berlind is right to point out that Webshots has a piss-poor policy for exporting data (as in, you can't) but this is also true of Shutterfly, OFoto, and Snapfish. The fact is that too many of these Generation-1 photo sites still believe that holding the high-res images hostage will drive more business through the print engines. Given how painful it is to upload high-res assets through today's asymmetrical broadband pipes, this is a really bad thing to do to your users.
Recently at a conference, I asked an employee from one of these large photo sites why they didn't just clone some part of the Flickr API as a goodwill gesture and use it to position against their other Gen-1 competitors. She told me that "Emily from Des Moines doesn't care about APIs, or high-res images." And that may in fact be true of Emily, but it certainly isn't the case with all of those new services (like us) that think they can fill some needs not currently being addressed.
I'm all for picking on Webshots, and Ofoto on their lack of openness. But Flickr? Those guys should be given a medal where open data (and metadata) policies are concerned.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 9 months ago (Nov. 21, 2005)
Though the topic of defining Web 2.0 has been beat to death, Paul Graham throws his hat in the ring with another great essay.
The arguments are thoughtful but the best part comes at the end when he discusses the nature of the medium:
Web 2.0 means using the web as it was meant to be used, and Google does. That's their secret. The web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That's why their success seems so effortless.
Love that notion. And this essay just goes to show that a fresh perspective can help make two of the most tired, over-written topics in the blogosphere these days (Web 2.0 and Google) interesting again.
Finally, (semi-related) for a little entertaining Thanksgiving reading read the talk that George Dyson recently gave at Google. I won't spoil the end by excerpting but it is quite a fun read.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 11 months ago (Oct. 8, 2005)
Just coming back from the Web 2.0 conference. Overall, I have mixed feelings about it. Some great folks attended and some of the presentations were pretty good but the venue was way too small for the crowd and the conference sort of stank of web 1.0 exuberance in a strangely self-conscious way. It had a very strong business overtone to it (a good index is always climbing above the crowd at the breaks and counting the blazers) which is not always a bad thing though it does sometimes make the conference feel repetitive (as was the case here).
It's also a testament to the emergence of the blogosphere as a source for think-food in that a lot of what was said (both in-session and in the hallways) is stuff that has been percolating from the blogs of the usual suspects for months now. In fact, perhaps the best overall summary of all of the themes of the conference is the piece that Tim O'Reilly put together ahead of the conference to hand out with the goodie bags. If you read this, and wait for a couple of talks from the conference to show up on IT Conversations (like this one and this one), you'll be getting the bulk of the brainfood.
As I was reading Tim's piece on the way out to the conference, I got stuck on his use of the term "lightweight business model" which he ascribed to most Web 2.0 companies. Though I like the term quite a bit, I couldn't help feeling like he was using it as a euphemism for Adsense and the conference did little to dissuade me from this opinion. Several questioners mentioned this throughout the conference-- that every entrepreneur there seemed to have the same business model in mind: run Adsense until the company can be sold to Google, Yahoo, or MSN.
[One rare and incredibly refreshing exception from this trend were the guys from The Ladders who were at the show just as attendees and who struck me as incredibly sharp when it comes to inventing and refining a new business model for jobs online].
I don't think that there is anything inherently bad in this grow-a-service-and-get-acquired strategy if you've got the right connections and a willingness to exit at a relatively low valuation (To underscore this during the first day of the conference Weblogs Inc one of the first and best of the new media blog networks was picked up by AOL for $25MM-- certainly nothing to sneeze at but hardly a home run).
2006 will be an interesting year in the context of the Web 2.0 hypotheses. In one of the better sessions Toni Schneider from Yahoo said that last year was a year of discovery where it comes to Web 2.0, this year was the year of products and services, and next year would have to be the year of viable business models. I remember watching this process during Web 1.0 and thinking that it was going to come to a crashing end way before Hotmail sold itself to Microsoft for $400M+ and ICQ sold itself to AOL for some similarly crazy amount, so I'll leave that sort of judgement off the table for now.
I love O'Reilly conferences-- at OSCON for example, I often come back with pages and pages of notes of stuff to try and people to follow up with. Between ETech, OSCON, and Web2.0 I think O'Reilly is making a good go at replacing the old triumvirate of PC Forum, Demo, and Agenda. But my main criticism of this conference (which perhaps is a criticism of business conferences in general) is that it should have spent a little more time exploring the fundamental question of what comes after the Adwords-Till-Buy/Bust model runs out of gas-- or even whether this "lightweight business model" will run out of gas at all.
Update: A nice piece on just what was so disconcerting about the conference from a business perspective.
Posted by Antonio
4 years, 11 months ago (Oct. 2, 2005)
The blogosphere has been a wonderful source of product recommendations for me. I've found coffee machines, books, rock bands, movies, and open source tools just to name a few. And by in large I am always really happy with the pointers. They keep me subscribed to around 200 feeds, 20 of which I listen to very carefully.
Which is why when I needed a PC laptop, I chose one of the new IBM Thinkpad X41 tablets. It's been a long time since a PC laptop has excited me in any meaningful way (the first z505 VAIOs did and before that the Thinkpad 560 which was the Powerbook of its day) and I figured that "tablet experience" might get me there. After listening to Scoble continually praising both Windows XP Tablet and the "Experience Pack," I decided to take the plunge. I chose IBM (or Lenovo rather) because they've always made the sturdiest and in my opinion best overall laptops. I figured the 6 week wait was because of how awesome these things were.
I finally got the machine two days ago and I have to say, if first impressions count towards long-term product-love, this is going to be a short and bumpy relationship. The out-of-the-box experience with the X41 Tablet is so bad that it can only be compared to the experience of setting up one of those $400 Dells (except you don't feel like you've gotten a "deal").
Brief impressions (after two days) follow, hoping that some future Googler runs across this amidst the sea of accolades about the machine (see: Stockholm Syndrome below). I will write more as I use it and hope that it ends up being more positive than this. But here is my first impression: do not buy this thing. Get one of the small Sonys, the Toshibas, whatever else and wait yet another rev on this tablet stuff. Better yet, if you care about the pleasure of using a good laptop, buy an Apple (iBook or Powebook).
Impressions
Apple has an intern who works in packaging at some heinous building in the back of DeAnza where they keep all of the ex-Newton gimps. This intern is not terribly bright; in fact she drools in meetings and likes digging into her ear with half-dismembered paperclips. That said, Lenovo would do well to steal her away (at the grossly overpaid rate of say $20/hr) to put her in charge of all product packaging. If you could take the inverse of the experience of opening a new iPod, opening an X41 Tablet is it. It may seem like a stupid thing to focus on-- the fact that Lenovo sent me so many plain cardboard boxes inside of other plain cardboard boxes that at the end on the unpacking I was convinced someone was knocking off those infinitely nested Russian dolls. By the time I got to the machine, my desk looked like a hobo community for smurfs.
Then you get to the machine itself. Now, part of what I read about online was how small the X41 feels, "almost like a real notebook." Yeah, right. The machine is about the size of a 12 inch laptop-- from 1995. The actual body is about normal thickness but the screen is the laptop's equivalent of Mr. Magoo glasses and the whole hinge mechanism makes the machine look like a door jamb. PC Magazine said that this was the first convertible (tablet) that just felt like laptop when it's in laptop mode. I might agree if they had said that it was the first convertible that feels like an ugly cumbersome laptop. Outside of the overall dimensions, the screen has way too much bevel around it (probably due to the inherent design limitations imposed by the touchscreen) and nine heinous buttons across the bottom of the bevel that were designed to be pressed by both fingers and the stylus. And to boot, each button has an ugly icon which is 90 degrees rotated when you are in plain laptop mode.
Let me get on to the substantive stuff. But before I do, a caveat. I have not used a PC laptop seriously since 2003 when I got an IBM Thinkpad T40. So this is where my complaints might have more to do with Microsoft (and the unbelievable proposition that Windows XP seems to be getting slower) than with IBM per se.
After the first power-on, the computer spends at least 5 minutes doing some sort of image copy setting itself up for first use. I guess the IBM product people were not taught about getting the user to that first moment of joy as quickly as possible. After the grinding of the HD is done, you're hit with a bunch of EULAs but since this is a pretty crumby part of most Wintel setup experiences, I'll just fast forward 20 or so minutes and 2 or 3 reboots to the first usable screen...which was a broken browser window with an internal C:* reference. I think it was something to highlight the features of the Tablet PC but I can't be sure. Again, why such little attention to first impressions?
When you get a pen computer, the first thing you want to do is... well use the pen. Windows XP Tablet edition gives you little clue as to how to do this. There is an additional Tablet icon in the Quicklaunch toolbar (disabled by default) which brings up a kludgey keyboard for tapping and some additional Programs in the Start Menu but outside of that it looks just like Windows XP. I guess this is what Windows people love (running the same interface/apps on anything from a cellphone to a workstation) but in my case it just reminds me that I've got a device which is not as good at being a laptop as a T43 would have been. There are Tablet specific applications (called the "Experience Pack") but only time will tell whether these are really useful. I have high hopes for "Snipping Tool," a program that lets you cut out and annotate anything that is displayed on the screen and the Paint program looks fun, but I'll have to write more after I've played a bit more with all of it.
One final initial software note: since I got my last PC laptop the world decided that Windows viruses were just too much of a problem and it seems like every computer I've seen recently comes with a 3-month version of Norton Antivirus. This seems like a good idea except for the fact that the program is such a pain in the ass in its constant warnings and fairly cryptic messages about "taking over" various functions normally performed by Windows. It also seems to present a performance tax to the overall experience, especially at boot time. I know that Microsoft is going to fix this with Vista but in the meantime, it's a real drag on the whole user experience.
And speaking of performance, the X41 feels sluggish. I have a gig of RAM in it and the standard 1.5Ghz CPU. I come from the Apple world where OS 10.4's Finder combined with pokey PPC G4 chips defines a new molasses standard. And yet, the X41 Tablet still feels like it wants to do a few million digits of PI every once in a while, especially when booting any of the tablet-specific applications. Yuk.
Stay tuned for further thoughts on the whole "tablet experience." For example, the battery (for weight reasons I got the standard one) seems to drain at a pretty nice clip. I would anticipate (though I haven't tested it) that I'd get 2.5 hours on one charge without sticking on the 8-cell battery which makes the machine feel and look like it has a tumor.
I will close this initial impressions review by observing that that my impressions run against the grain of what other X41 Tablet owners are saying. Google it and you will see that most people are experiencing a high degree of product love for their X41s. To me (at this point), this seems like some sort of Microsoft Stockholm syndrome combined with a dearth of good alternatives in PC laptop-land. Or maybe Apple laptops have rotted me to the core.
What is most fascinating about the announcement though is their hiring 
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