I'm on the way back from my trip and this is the part of the vacation that sucks. It's going to take a total of 5 flights to get from Abuja back to Seattle as well as about half a day of sitting around in airports as well. Below are a bunch of last minute impressions about Nigeria and London (where I'm currently posting this from).

• All the male restrooms in Heathrow airport have condoms dispensers. This really has me scratching my head since the only place I usually see them is in night club restrooms which makes sense since a bunch of hooking up goes on at night clubs. So now I have this impression that somewhere in Heathrow there is a bunch of debauchery going on and I'm not a part of it. It must be the first class lounges...

• If you ask a British bartender for a 'Long Island Iced Tea', don't be surprised if he responds "We don't serve tea at the bar, twit!"

• It seems I've picked up homophobia by osmosis while in the United States. I kept finding it weird that men could be seen holding hands together either for emphasis in a conversation or while walking without being seen as 'gay' in Nigeria. Similarly having guys sleep in the same bed also gave me a similar vibe. I can't believe I'm getting culture shock from my home country.

• Do you know who cleans the streets of Lagos & Abuja? The street sweepers, literally. I was freaked out to see people with brooms sweeping the sides of the roads in both Abuja and Lagos without the luxury of safety cones. My memory fails me as to whether this is an improvement from not having street sweepers from a few years ago or this was just the status quo.

• Soft drinks sold in plastic bottles seems to be gaining popularity in Lagos & Abuja. Back in the day it was all about the glass bottles, which were always redeemed by people. In fact, the price of a bottle of beer or a soft drink always assumed you'd be returning a bottle as well. It took me a while to get used to the 'wastefulness' in the United States where people just threw away the bottles. Of course, there were other places where the wastefulness surprised me as well when I first got here such as using paper towels instead of wash rags or styrofoam silverware & plates instead of reusable plastic ones at fast food places. Now it's the other way around. After doing the dishes at my mom's I was confused to not find paper towels nearby. I am becoming so American...

• Thanks to a ban on external imports of various consumer goods we now get Heineken and Five Alive brewed locally.  Awesome!!!

 

In his post entitled Google News and RSS Dave Winer writes

It's the same reason I'm not giddy withdelight that Microsoft decided to call their support of RSS "web feeds"

Considering that the support for XML syndication technologies in IE 7 includes both flavors of RSS (1.0 & 0.91/2.0) and Atom, I personally don't think it is a good idea to call the feature 'RSS'.

Then there's the fact that RSS does sound a bit geeky, after all most people call them web pages and web sites not HTML documents and domains.

Internet Explorer is used by hundreds of millions of regular folks not just geeks. The IE team is simply trying to make the feature approachable to end users.

 

Over the past couple of months the MSN Spaces team has gotten a bunch of feedback about features users would like to see in the service. Common requests include more flexibility in customizing the look of the space, ability to play videos or music in a module and the ability to add modules containing cutom HTML.

The team has been listening and all of those features were released yesterday as Powertoys. As Powertoys they aren't fully supported features and are only available in English. They are basically cool hacks by some of the developers on the Spaces team which are a prelude to what this functionality might look like in a future release of Spaces.

If you are an MSN Spaces user you should read Mike Torres's posts about how to enable the HTML Module, Windows Media Player module and the Tweak UI Powertoy. They totally jazz up your Space.

Great work from Ryan for being the man with plan on getting these out.

 

 

In response to my post Using XML on the Web is Evil, Since When? Tantek updated his post Avoiding Plain XML and Presentational Markup. Since I'm the kind of person who can't avoid a good debate even when I'm on vacation I've decided to post a response to Tantek's response. Tantek wrote

The sad thing is that while namespaces theoretically addressed one of the problems I pointed out (calling different things by the same name), it actually WORSENED the other problem: calling the same thing by different names. XML Namespaces encouraged document/data silos, with little or no reuse, probably because every person/political body defining their elements wanted "control" over the definition of any particular thing in their documents. The <svg:a> tag is the perfect example of needless duplication.

And if something was theoretically supposed to have solved something but effectively hasn't 6-7 years later, then in our internet-time-frame, it has failed.

This is a valid problem in the real world. For example, for all intents an purposes an <atom:entry> element in an Atom feed is semantically equivalent to an <item> element in an RSS feed to every feed reader that supports both. However we have two names for what is effectively the same thing as far as an aggregator developer or end user is concerned.

The XML solution to this problem has been that it is OK to have myriad formats as long as we have technologies for performing syntactic translations between XML vocabularies such as XSLT. The RDF solution is for us to agree on the semantics of the data in the format (i.e. a canonical data model for that problem space) in which case alternative syntaxes are fine and we performs translations using RDF-based mapping technologies like DAML+OIL or OWL. The microformat solution which Tantek espouses is that we all agree on a canonical data model and a canonical syntax (typically some subset of [X]HTML).

So far the approach that has gotten the most traction in the real world is XML. From my perspective, the reason for this is obvious; it doesn't require that everyone has to agree on a single data model or a single format for that problem space.  

Microformats don't solve the problem of different entities coming up with the different names for the same concept. Instead its proponents are ignoring the reasons why the problem exists in the first place and then offering microformats as a panacea when they are not.

I personally haven't seen a good explanation of why <strong> is better than <b>...

A statement like that begs some homework. The accessibility, media independence, alternative devices, and web design communities have all figured this out years ago. This is Semantic (X)HTML 101. Please read any modern web design book like those on my SXSW Required Reading List, and we'll continue the discussion afterwards.

I can see the reasons for a number of the semantic markup guidelines in the case of HTML. What I don't agree with is jumping to the conclusion that markup languages should never have presentational markup. This is basically arguing that every markup language that may be used as a presentation format should use CSS or invent a CSS equivalent. I think that is a stretch.

Finally, one has to seriously cast doubt on XML opinions on a page that is INVALID markup. I suppose following the XML-way, I should have simply stopped reading Dare's post as soon as I ran into the first well-formedness error. Only 1/2 ;)

The original permalink to Tantek's article was broken after he made teh edit. I guess since I couldn't find it, it doesn't exist. ;)

 

I've been doing a bit more travelling around the country this week. The travel high point was a trip by helicopter today to a number of places including a local chief's palace and the village my dad where my dad was born. I took a couple of pics from the helicopter as well as on the ground and hope at least a few of them come out OK.

Below are a couple more random thoughts that have crossed my mind during this trip since my previous post

• The proliferation of mobile phones is even more significant than I thought. I had assumed it was a city thing since the phones I saw folks with were in Abuja (current capital) and Lagos (former capital). However visiting less developed areas also have shown a high proliferation of mobile technology. In my dad's village I saw both a pay-as-you-go booth for MTN, a local mobile service provider, as well as a kiosk where a enterprising local entrepeneurs were renting out uses of their phones at 20 naira a call (about $0.15)

• When I was growing up it was common practice for local businessmen to sell products that had been unsafe for public use in developed countries. It seems we now have a new government body called NAFDAC whose job is to act as the Nigerian version of the FDA. NAFDAC has been so effective that there have been multiple attempts on the life of the head of the organization by pissed off business owners whose products she's taken off the market.

• The only thing scarier than being in a speeding car in typical Lagos or Abuja traffic is being driven in a speeding car in Lagos or Abuja traffic with an in-dashboard DVD player which is showing hip hop videos with half naked chicks dancing seductively. I kept wondering if the driver could keep his eyes on the road. That's it. Next time I come here, I'm walking everywhere.  

• As I expected the common questions from family and extended family were when I'm going to show up with a future spouse and when I'm going back to school. What I didn't expect was so many people asking when I became such a fat ass. In hindsight, I should have expected it given that I haven't seen some of these folks in almost a decade and I've put on dozens of pounds since then. I definitely need to get back in shape. 

 

 

Tim Bray has a blog post entitled Not 2.0 where he writes

I just wanted to say how much I’ve come to dislike this “Web 2.0” faux-meme. It’s not only vacuous marketing hype, it can’t possibly be right. In terms of qualitative changes of everyone’s experience of the Web, the first happened when Google hit its stride and suddenly search was useful for, and used by, everyone every day. The second—syndication and blogging turning the Web from a library into an event stream—is in the middle of happening. So a lot of us are already on 3.0. Anyhow, I think Usenet might have been the real 1.0. But most times, the whole thing still feels like a shaky early beta to me.

I also dislike the Web 2.0 meme but not for the reasons Tim Bray states. Like the buzzword "SOA" that came before it "Web 2.0" is ill-defined and means different things to different people. Like art, folks can tell you "I know it when I see it" but ask them to define it and you get a bunch of inconsistent answers. For a while even Wikipedia had a poor definition of the term Web 2.0. The meat of the description there is still crap but the introduction is now one that doesn't make me roll my eyes. The wikipedia entry currently begins

Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.

This is a definition that resonates with me and one that has gotten me jazzed enough to have written my first Bill Gates Thinkweek paper as well as give Powerpoint pitches to lots of folks across MSN from VPs & GMs to fellow rank and file PMs & devs.  

The problem with "Web 2.0" and other over hyped buzzwords like "SOA" is that 90% of the stuff you hear or read about it is crap. Or even worse are like Tim O'Reilly's Not 2.0? post which hype it as something that will change the world but don't give you a good idea why. Reading stuff like Tim O'Reilly's

There's a set of "Web 2.0 design patterns" -- architecting systems so that they get smarter the more people use them, monetizing the long tail via a combination of customer-self service and algorithmic management, lightweight business models made possible by cooperating internet services and data syndication, data as the "intel inside", and so on.

just leaves me scratching my head. On the other hand I completely grok the simple concept that folks like me at MSN are no longer just in the business of building web sites, we are building web platforms. Our users are no longer just people interacting with our web sites via Firefox or IE. They are folks reading our content from their favorite RSS reader which may be a desktop app, web-based or even integrated into their web browser. They are folks who want to create content on our sites without being limited to a web-based interface or at least not the one created by us. They are folks who want to integrate our services into their applications or use our services from their favorite applications or sites. To me, that is Web 2.0.

You folks should probably just ignore me though since I am quite the hypocrite. I may pan the writings of folks like Tim O'Reilly and call 90% of the stuff written about "Web 2.0" crap but I did give up being a speaker on two panels at PDC to sit in the audience at the Web 2.0 conference. Due to a variety of reasons I could only pick one and based on how much value I got out of ETech I decided to pick Web 2.0

 

According to the RSS Bandit roadmap the time draws nigh for the next release of RSS Bandit codenamed Nightcrawler. As with the previous release we will have an alpha version which will be mostly feature complete, followed by a beta version which will be feature complete and then the final release. Last week, Torsten and I agreed on the following plan for the alpha version of Nightcrawler.

Release Date: August 31, 2005

New Features:

• NNTP Newsgroups support
• Downloading of Enclosures/Podcasts
• Subscription Wizard replaces Add New Feed dialog
• Fast Mode (shutting off comment threading which uses a lot of CPU)
• Synchronization with Newsgator Online
• Atom 1.0 Support
• Extensibility Framework to Enable Richer Plugins
• Item Manipulation from Newspaper Views (e.g. Mark As Read, Flagging)
• Tip of the Day on Startup

There's also a persistent bug that has been bothering some of our users where posts from different feeds end up being mixed up. We haven't located the source of this bug but have added some tracing to the build which will be enabled in the alpha. Users who end up with mixed up feeds after the alpha can send us the trace files which should help us narrow down the source of the problem.

There are a couple of features I'd like to see in the final version such as "Comment Watching" so I can tell when a post I am interested in gets new comments. However we need to start locking down for the next release so that feature isn't likely to make it in unless I can sneak it in before the beta.  If there are other small, nice to have features you'd like to see in Nightcrawler please file a feature request in SourceForge and we'll see what we can get to before the final release.

Any comments or other feedback would be greatly appreciated. 

 

Nick Bradbury has a post entitled AttentionTrust.org in which he talks about a new non-profit entity that has been formed by Steve Gillmor, Seth Goldstein and a few others. Nick writes

In a nutshell, the idea is that your attention data - that is, data that describes what you're paying attention to - has value, and because it has value, when you give someone your attention you should expect to be given something in return. And just because you give someone your attention, it doesn't mean that they own it. You should expect to get it back.

I know that sounds a little weird - it took me a while to grok it, too. So I'll use an example that's familiar to many of us: Netflix ratings and recommendations. By telling Netflix how you rate a specific movie you're telling them what you're paying attention to, and in return they can recommend additional DVDs to you based on how other people rated the same movie. In return for giving them your attention data - which is of great value to them - they provide you features such as recommendations that they hope will be valuable to you. In my mind, this is a fair trade.

But what if Netflix collected this information without your knowledge, and rather than using it to give you added value they sold it to another service instead? I imagine that many people wouldn't like that idea - chances are, you'd want to be given the opportunity to decide who this information can be shared with. This is one of the goals of AttentionTrust.org: to leave you in charge of what's done with your attention data.

But what about this whole idea of mobility, as mentioned on the AttentionTrust.org site? What's the benefit of making this stuff mobile? Dave Winer provides a nice example: suppose you could share your Netflix attention data with a dating site such as Match.com, so you could find possible partners who like the same movies as you? For that sort of thing to be possible, you'd need to be able to get your attention data back from any service which collects it. (As an aside, this also means you could share your Netflix queue with any new DVD rental service that comes down the pike - so my guess is that smaller, up-and-coming sites will be more willing to share attention data than the more entrenched sites will.).

The attention data is what separates the giants in the Web world like Amazon & Netflix from their competitors. It is in their best interests to collect as much data as possible about what users are interested in so they can target their users better. The fact that [for example] fans of G-Unit also like 50 Cent is data that makes Amazon a bunch of money since they can offer bundle deals and recommendations which lead to more sales. Additionally record labels and concert organizers are also interested customers in the aggregate data of where people's musical interests lie. It is arguable that this is also beneficial to customers since it makes it more likely that their favorite artists will appear in concert together (for example). Similar concepts exist in the physical world such as supermarket loyalty cards.

How much data websites can store about users can vary widely depending on what jurisdiction they are in. Working at MSN, I know first hand some of the legal and privacy hurdles we have to clear in various markets before we can collect data and how we must make users aware of the data we collect. All this is documented in the MSN Privacy policy. To better target user's we'd love to collect as much data as possible but instead adhere to strict policies informed by laws from various countries and guidelines from various privacy bureaus.

It currently isn't clear to me whether AttentionTrust.org plans to become another privacy body like TRUSTe or whether they plan to be a grassroots evangelization body like the WaSP. Either approach can be effective although they require different skill sets. I'll be interested in seeing how much impact they'll have on online retailers.

As to why I called this the "Return of Hailstorm" in the title of this blog post? It's all in the 2001 Microsoft press release entitled "Hailstorm" on the Horizon which among other things stated

"HailStorm" is designed to place individuals at the center of their computing experience and take control over the technology in their lives and better protect the privacy of their personal information. "HailStorm" services will allow unprecedented collaboration and integration between the users' devices, their software and their personal data. With "HailStorm", users will have even greater and more specific control over what people, businesses and technologies have access to their personal information.

Of course we all know how that turned out. The notion of mobile attention data basically requires Web companies like Netflix & Amazon to give up what for them is a key competitive advantage. It makes no business sense for them to want to that. I wish Steve Gillmor and company luck with their new endeavors but unless they plan to lobby lawmakers I don't see them getting much traction with some of their ideas.

 

I recently stumbled upon a blog post entitled Why MSN is lost again... from Guillaume Belfiore which claimed that MSN is lost because we copy features from competitors without having a roadmap for where we want to go. He uses a specific example of the recent announcement that MSN Spaces will have a social networking feature as proof and claims that we are simply copying Yahoo! 360.

I was going to write a response but then realized that Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! had written a post about this topic which is a generic answer to posts like Guillaume's. In his post Secrets of Product Development and What Journalists Write Jeremy wrote

Before I came out to California to work at Yahoo, I watched the business and culture of Silicon Valley from a distance. I read lots of the trade rags, tech web sites, and books about early Internet companies (the Netscape era).

One of the things that amazed me about Internet companies (usually the portals) was how quickly they built things and were able to react to each others moves with frightening speed. Company X would do something amazing and new only to be leapfrogged by Company Y just a few weeks later.

They were putting on one hell of a show and it was all amplified by the crazy bubble of the late 90s. I loved it.

The tech and business press would say things like "in response to Company X, Company Y has just..." or "in an effort to defend their business from Company Y, Company X today launched a new..."

I saw headlines like that all the time and still see them today.

Today there's one important difference: I'm on the inside now. For the last five and a half years, I have had a front row seat to the inner workings of what I used to imagine (with the help of a small army of journalists and reports).

Now I see it first hand and hear about it from coworkers and friends at other companies. And you know what? It's even more insane than it looked from the outside.

So I'm going to let you in on a little secret about how products are developed at large companies--even large Internet companies that some people think are fast on their feet.

Larger companies rarely can respond that quickly to each other. It almost never happens. Sure, they may talk a good game, but it's just talk. Building things on the scale that Microsoft, Google, AOL, or Yahoo do is a complex process. It takes time.

Journalists like to paint this as a rapidly moving chess game in which we're all waiting for the next move so that we can quickly respond. But the truth is that most product development goes on in parallel. Usually there are people at several companies who all have the same idea, or at least very similar ones. The real race is to see who can build it faster and better than the others.

Think about this the next time a news story makes it sound like Yahoo is trying to one-up Google. Or MSN is "responding" to last week's launch of a new AOL service.

It's easy to get caught up in the drama of it all. But reality is often quite different than what you read.

Just because the media likes to paint it as if web companies respond to each other's development efforts in the twinkling of an eye as part of an eternal game of one upmanship doesn't mean this is the case. Although folks like to paint Web development as simply tweaking HTML pages, as Jeremy points out it takes a lot longer than one would expect to build and deploy services that will be utilized by millions of people.

The social networking aspects of Spaces have always been part of the vision and in fact when I was hired at MSN my boss told me that I'd be working on three things; a blogging platform, a social networking platform and an RSS platform. At the time, it wasn't clear my team would own the RSS piece so my [future] boss was worried that I'd be upset if I started on the team and the RSS piece moved elsewhere. Of course, since I already work on RSS Bandit in my free time I didn't mind if I didn't get to work on RSS as part of my day job. It turned out he was right and the RSS pieces ended up being driven by the http://www.start.com/myw3b and http://my.msn.com folks.

Don't believe the hype.

 

I've been in Nigeria for almost a week and so far it's been great. I've spent a bunch of time with family and friends, eaten a bunch of stuff I haven't hafd in years and decided I like MTV in Africa better than what we get in the United States. I've also been taking pictures of everyday life which I'll post to the photo album on my Space once I get back.

Below is a random grab bag of impressions I've had during my trip

• The traffic scares me. A lot. When being driven in Lagos & Abuja I tend to clench my fists while expecting we'll be in an accident at any minute. I can't get over the fact that as a teenager I used to be able to drive in this chaos and never had an accident. :)

• The proliferation of mobile phones is insane. There seem to be about half a dozen mobile phone carriers and almost everyone on the streets is carrying one. I was talking to my dad and he said the Nigerian mobile phone market is the second fastest growing in the world after to China. About two years ago when I was last here I saw more people downloading ringtones and texting than I'd seen in Seattle & Redmond, the trend has only continued. I have a bunch of pics of mobile phone ads on the sides of buildings and street hawkers selling pay-as-you-go recharge cards which I'll post once I get back.

• There is now a large local movie & hip hop scene. The movie scene was blowing up just before I left for college but it now seems to have matured quite a bit. It seems we export movies all over Africa. Folks have started calling the Nigerian movie scene "Nollywood". There are also a ton of local hip hop acts including one of my high school friends is now a rapper called Big Lo. About a decade ago he and I were part of a rap group called R.I.G. and I still have some of our tracks on my iPod. It's great to see that at least one of us is living our teenage dream of being a famous rap star.

• The newspaper headlines seem to focus exclusively on the goings on of the government & politicians or on tragedies involving loss of life. The contrast between that and the kind of stuff I usually see on the cover of USA Today is striking.

• Inflation is crazy especially in Abuja. Everything seems to cost a couple of hundred or thousands of naira. I still remember when you could get a bottle of Coke or a newspaper for under one naira. Then again, that was about two decades ago.

• There are a lot of billboards about HIV/AIDS prevention in the capital city in Abuja but almost none in Lagos (the former capital and commercial center). I'll try and get some pics of the billboards before I get back.

• Almost every PC I've used so far has been infested with spyware. Except for the Powerbook...

• The London bombings are on people's minds in my social circle. One of my mom's friends lost her only soon in the July 7th attacks. My sister and dad were in London during the first bombing and I was pretty rattled when it happened. It's good to see the British police have caught all the suspects from the second attack. 

• The local airline business seems to be thriving as well. Here's another place where there seems to be at least half a dozen competitors driving down prices. It looks like the government airline, Nigeria Airways, is finally out of commission. Good riddance.

• I miss Nigerian food.