2005 Archives

Links: Dec 31, 2005

What caught my eye in the last weeks of the year:

• Google opens up Google Talk--libjingle is the library behind it. A lot of work to be done to make it an easily reused component, but it's already underway. Lots of possibilities.
• Google Feed Reader API To Be Released--now I know why the reader application was so underwhelming. It was proof-of-concept for the API.
• The Blogosphere Would Be A Lousy VC FIrm--"A half-billion dollar buyout might go unremarked upon, but a consumer-facing Web 2.0 company sold to Yahoo! or Google at a $20M - $40M valuation will set the blog world on fire."
• Yeald--the Interactive Investor Journal. What if Digg readers wrote detailed stories instead of just pointing to them?
• Research Note - TV 2.0: How To Think Strategically About the Future of TV--"edge platforms and edge competencies". I like the idea of an edge competency, being good at riding consumer demand rather than attempting to manufacture it through narrow channels.
• The Economics of Coffee Shops--"Make your rent in four days to be profitable, a week to break even. If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close."

Google Talk APIs Released

The march to ubiquity and innovation in IP telephony continues, with Google Talk APIs released. Much as happened with our Where 2.0 conference (where Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and Google and Yahoo! local APIs showed up just in time for the conference), the technology announcements are lining up in advance of our Emerging Telephony Conference. It's not that folks are targeting our conference, it's just that we put ourselves in front of an oncoming train...

Pull the Plug on Tech Distractions

U.S. News & World Report groks Life Hacking, featuring some suggestions by our friend Danny O'Brien. While I don't necessarily agree with the analog tilt of the piece--the focus being too much on pulling the electronic plug and eliminating tech as distraction rather than attenuation of information in whatever form it takes in your life--it's obviously great to see attention paid to the subject. The reporter actually dropped me a line asking for my top tips: if they don't end up appearing online in some form, I'll be sure to post them here.

eval( '(' + YahooWebServices + ')' );

Our friend Jeff McManus over at the Yahoo! Developer Network clued us in to Y! Web Services now being available in a delicious new flavor: JSON--JavaScript Object Notation. Say bye-bye to XML parsing and the need for (very much) intermediary code when building Web 2.0 or single-page applications using Y!'s services and data. Simply fetch a wodge of JSON representing serialized results from Yahoo!'s servers, eval() (pronounced "evaluate") to turn it back into a JavaScript object, and your application is dealing with ordinary JavaScript objects. And even if you're not writing your code in JavaScript, there's most likely a JSON parser for your programming language of choice, allowing you to skip all the XML bits and get on with your application.

I can't tell you how useful a bootstrap it is--purists' shuddering at the thought of a language-specific encoding of data over the wire aside--to deal directly with data in a way your programming language (and application) understands. In May of 2000 when I released the Open API for our Meerkat RSS aggregator, I produced something similar in the form of a PHP-serialized objects.

Also, I've been meaning to mention Toni Schneider's P.S. on the latest Yahoo! Widgets (nee Konfabulator) featuring access to your personal Yahoo! (rather than just aggregate) data:

PS: Now that widgets can access personal user data such as Yahoo photo albums, calendars and address books it is possible for any developer to look at our new widgets and figure out how to tap into that data as well. However, please note that the calendar/address book/etc APIs that we’re using in these new widgets are not officially supported through the Yahoo Developer Network, so proceed at your own risk (or wait for the official APIs to come out).

Yahoo!—particularly their Yahoo! Developer Network, continues to open things up with abandon to third-party Web app developers willing to give the emerging Yahoo! platform a whirl.

ETel: The ETel Blog

Bruce Stewart's doing great work over at the Emerging Telephony blog. I loved this snippet from his interview with France Telecom's Norman Lewis (emphasis mine):

Stewart: Who thinks they own this space: the Telcos, the ISPs, or the Google/Yahoo/EBay trinity?

Lewis: Actually no-one but the customer 'owns this space'. If there's anything we should learn from history is that user behaviour and social forces will determine the shape of this space in the future. Just remember the first predictions on telephony itself!

But there is a sea change taking place. Telcos have begun to understand that voice is simply another data service over wireless or wired networks and that this migration of voice into the application layer opens voice to competition from other application-level players, such as portals. Though it appears GTalk, Y! Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger and eBay's Skype could commoditise Telcos as simple pipe-providers, it should be remembered that Telco expertise in identity and authentication, quality of service, convergence, billing and customer care, places them in a strong and potentially dominant position. This space will become hotly contested: Telcos believe they can maintain their positions while ISPs, MNOs, portals and others believe they too can occupy this space and thus overturn old hegemonies.

'Telcos' in the traditional sense of the term will not occupy this space. VOIP is destroying existing business models and they will be disintermediated. But in the words of Lawrence of Arabia, 'nothing is written' - yesterday's Telcos can transform themselves if they recognize this threat and become 21st Century converged communication platforms.

Norm's keynoting at the Emerging Telephony conference. It's fascinating to think of telcos as having strengths in identity, QoS, and customer care. I certainly noticed that the ISP I worked for became more like a telco the longer it was in business: a call center helpdesk, online account checking, online status checking, they're even offering voice services now. I'd love to survey customers about their experiences with phone companies and ISPs: who has the better service? Who gives better value for money? Who would the customer rather put their business with?

ISPs have acquired many of the skills of telcos (any ISP still in business has become very good about billing!), and now they're looking hard at identity. Can the Internet crew out-innovate the Telco crew and be the first to converge on a single platform offering that is high-quality and does no evil toward the user? The best part about VoIP, in my opinion, is that it breaks down the barriers to entry; it's now possible for garage startups to write applications that before were only the result of dedicated multiyear multimillion dollar projects at carriers. And with US communications alone a $700+ billion market, it's mighty attractive to developers.

Nature Magazine Checks Out Wikipedia vs Encyclopedia Britannica

As the veracity of Wikipedia is questioned and lawsuits threatened, Nature's Timo Hannay dropped a note to the Radar crew about a test the folks at Nature magazine conducted to see which encyclopedia had more errors. The experiment "sent 50 pairs of Wikipedia and Britannica articles on scientific topics to recognised experts and, without telling them which article came from which source, asked them to count the numbers of errors (mistakes, misleading statements or omissions). Among the 42 replies, Britannica content had an average of just under 3 errors per article whilst Wikipedia had an average of just under 4 errors -- not as much difference, perhaps, as most people would expect." Also see the subject-by-subject breakdown, accompanying editorial (subscribers only), and Timo's blog which has links to Nature's interview with Jimmy Wales about it.

Preparations for Class Action Against Wikipedia

Preparations for a class action law suit against the owners and operators of Wikipedia are underway. I can't figure out whether this is a chilling shot across the bow of any site with user-generated content, or whether it's a timely reminder of the obligations to society that technologists must observe as they invent within that society. Or, possibly--and I only throw this out as a remote and wild conjecture, a hypothesis (if you will) to be tested against available datum, a brainstorming session "throw it at the wall and see what sticks" flag to be run up the pole so it may be seen who salutes it--that it's a case of greedy opportunist whiners out to make any quick buck they can from whatever makes the headlines in the last slow news week. Ahem. Update: the lawsuit web page has the same whois data as QuakeAID, a site whose authenticity Wikipedia questions--see this summary of what happened for why the site may just be a Google Ad-revenue trick. Thanks, alert readers Nathan de Vries and Matt! Update 2: The people behind the class action site deny the connection and explain why the whois data is the same. Check the comments in the blog entry for details.

Herb Simon on Attention

Tim passed me this great Herb Simon quote he wandered across on Wikipedia that perfectly sums up the "Attention Economy" theme of this year's ETech.

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it." (Computers, Communications and the Public Interest, pages 40-41, Martin Greenberger, ed., The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.)

Virtual Earth becomes Windows Live Local

MSN Virtual Earth (discussed here earlier) has been upgraded and rebranded as Windows Live Local. It has several nice user interface improvements (such as pushpins for arbitrary annotations, and driving directions by clicking rather than having to know the address of where you're going--it happens), and some sweet detailed aerial photography that (as Marc Hedlund said) makes cities look like The Sims, but the rebranding is the big news.

"Windows Live" is the new vision for MSN--a portal with three apparent pillars: (1) Keeping up with the tech Joneses (Ajax, RSS, networked bookmarks, etc.); (2) Making money (classifieds, local search, and their advertising network); (3) integration of the online app world with Windows (some have described it as "Active Desktop 2.0"). Local's maps cut into all three parts: the rich online experience (though it's not so rich if you're using the Safari browser), the potential for long-tail local advertising revenue, and the inevitable "Map It!" right-click option for every address, business name, etc. in Office documents and Windows apps.

They also have a Location Finder, which figures out your location from the MAC addresses of visible network routers, similar to the Intel-sponsored PlaceLab. I enjoyed Mike Liebhold's commentary on the Location Finder privacy policy that basically says, "we're not just a passive MAC-to-location database, we will use your information". I couldn't find a similar privacy statement for the Local Live service, other than the general MSN privacy text that also says "we'll use your information but not sell it".

As we get more sites like Local Live and Platial that invite you to contribute your data to The Service, we'll need to pay more attention to these pesky privacy documents. Although the Attention Trust brings on the same headache I get when people talk Semantic Web and networked trust relationships at me, I absolutely love their guiding principle: you own the data you create. As we go into this age of participation information networks, we can have the credit report model for our data (Big Brother owns it and we'll be lucky to see anything but an annual summary of the data they have on us) or something (anything!) else. If we don't demand ownership, privacy, and accountability at the start, it's unlikely we'll be able to retrofit it in later.

Request: Open Source in London

Nikolaj Nyholm will be co-chairing EuroOSCON with me in 2006. Part of chairing a conference is meeting everyone involved in the field. He'll be in London, Dec 14-15, and is interested in meeting open source and emerging technology people. He'll also be at 22c3 in Berlin at the end of December. If you fit the bill, or know someone who does, drop him a line: nikolaj AT oreilly.com. Nikolaj's part of the team behind the fabulous Reboot conference and an all-round stellar guy. If you can catch him when he's in town, he's worth making time for.

MAKEbot Launched

The crew at MAKE just launched MAKEbot, an AIM bot that can send you new stories and search the MAKE archives. I love the idea of an alternative conduit for RSS-style updates of blog content, and the real-time nature of IM gives this an added "hot off the presses" feel. And it works on phones! Way to go, Phil and Sergio!

A Review of "Aardvark'd: 12 Weeks With Geeks"

This afternoon, I wound up more fried from project-switching than I'd been in a while, so I sat down with Aardvark'd:12 Weeks With Geeks, which arrived in my mailbox this week. A documentary about a group of interns developing Copilot, a new software product, at New York's Fog Creek Software -- would that be like watching paint dry? or Revenge of the Nerds V? or Apollo 13 Takes Manhattan? or Deliverance II: The Golden Master? Just the sort of question I was equipped to answer today.

The film is definitely more interesting in concept than actuality -- any one of the essays from Fog Creek CEO Joel Spolsky's blog, Joel On Software, will tell you more about software development, or Joel or Fog Creek, than the movie will. (In fact, Joel's relative distance is one of the film's biggest faults, since he is the most engaging interviewee in it. Maybe, as the company financed the movie, this was a deliberate choice, a sort of modesty, or a desire to make a movie more about the interns than him, but I wound up wishing for more.) As a result, the film isn't really for fans of Joel On Software and its author's point of view on development. The opening title sequence shows views of New York reminiscent of or directly mirroring Joel's photography, which he often uses on his blog, but you don't hear about photography as an interest of his, or for that matter anyone else's interests outside of work. While I'm sure Joel had the interns coding on a whiteboard during their interviews, we don't see that, nor any of the other Joel On Software tactics that might make this software project different from other software projects. The topic isn't discussed, but it's interesting to see Joel's "bionic office" in everyday use (though the stars of the film, the interns, apparently don't rate private offices). You get some good hints and clues about what makes software development interesting, though, and a few of the sequences are either directly engaging as documentary or useful as engineering practice.

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