This is another post I was planning to write a few weeks ago which got interrupted by my wedding and honeymoon.

A few weeks ago, Joel Spolsky wrote a post entitled Strategy Letter VI which I initially dismissed as the ravings of a desktop developer who is trying to create an analogy when one doesn’t exist. The Web isn’t the desktop, or didn’t he read There is no Web Operating System (or WebOS)? By the second time I read it, I realized that if you ignore some of the desktop-centric thinking in Joel’s article, then not only is Joel’s article quite insightful but some of what he wrote is already coming to pass.

The relevant excerpt from Joel’s article is

Somebody is going to write a compelling SDK that you can use to make powerful Ajax applications with common user interface elements that work together. And whichever SDK wins the most developer mindshare will have the same kind of competitive stronghold as Microsoft had with their Windows API.

If you’re a web app developer, and you don’t want to support the SDK everybody else is supporting, you’ll increasingly find that people won’t use your web app, because it doesn’t, you know, cut and paste and support address book synchronization and whatever weird new interop features we’ll want in 2010.

Imagine, for example, that you’re Google with GMail, and you’re feeling rather smug. But then somebody you’ve never heard of, some bratty Y Combinator startup, maybe, is gaining ridiculous traction selling NewSDK,

…

And while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email. And you’ll tell your children how excited you were to get 2GB to store email, and they’ll laugh at you. Their nail polish has more than 2GB.

Crazy story? Substitute “Google Gmail” with “Lotus 1-2-3”. The NewSDK will be the second coming of Microsoft Windows; this is exactly how Lotus lost control of the spreadsheet market. And it’s going to happen again on the web because all the same dynamics and forces are in place. The only thing we don’t know yet are the particulars, but it’ll happen

A lot of stuff Joel asserts seems pretty clueless on the face of it. Doesn’t he realize that there are umpteen billion AJAX toolkits (e.g. Dojo, Google Web Toolkit, Yahoo! User Interface Library, Script.aculo.us, etc)  and rich internet application platforms (e.g. Flash, Silverlight, XUL, etc)? Doesn’t he realize that there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of the entire Web conforming to standard user interface guidelines let alone everyone agreeing on using the same programming language and SDK to build Web apps?

But wait…

What happens if you re-read the above excerpt and substitute NewSDK with Facebook platform?

I didn’t classify Facebook as a Social Operating System for no reason. GMail and other email services have become less interesting to me because I primarily communicate with friends and family on the Web via Facebook and it’s various platform applications. I’ve stopped playing casual games at Yahoo! Games and now use Scrabulous and Texas Hold ‘Em when I want to idle some time away on the weekend. All of these applications are part of a consistent user interface, are all accessible from my sidebar and each of them has access to my data within Facebook including my social graph. Kinda like how Windows or Mac OS X desktop applications on my machine have a consistent user interface, are all accessible from my applications menu and can all access the data on my hard drive.

Hmmm…

I suspect that Joel is right about NewSDK, he’s just wrong about which form it will take. “Social operating system” does have a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

Now playing: Kanye West - Two Words (feat. Mos Def, Freeway & The Harlem Boys Choir)

Mini-Microsoft has a blog post up to let us know that his Facebook account was cancelled. In the comments he clarifies he wasn’t specifically targetted and this is just part of the Facebook terms of service. He writes

For those who probably will never see this Facebook help-topic, this is what I've been directed to:

http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=45

The only relevant text that I can find:

"Facebook does not allow users to register with fake names, to impersonate any person or entity, or to falsely state or otherwise misrepresent themselves or their affiliations."

I imagine they only do something when someone complains vs. being constantly policing things. And someone out there (scanning the crowd of exceptionally good looking people who visit here) must have taken it upon themselves to complain.

I didn’t realize that if I don’t provide 100% accurate data about myself (thus making identity theft easier) I could get my account banned from Facebook.

I can understand why they want to encourage people to use real names since they want to be the kind of place that have users like “Dare Obasanjo” and “Robert Scoble” not ‘carnage4life’ and ‘scobleizer’ since the former implies a more personal experience.

However it seems dumb to be trying to replicate Friendster’s mistake by killing off every account that didn’t conform to their standards. There are ways to encourage such behavior without being jerks as they’ve clearly been in this case.

Now playing: Dem Franchize Boyz - Oh I Think They Like Me (remix) (feat. Jermaine Dupri, Da Brat & Lil Bow Wow)

Yesterday morning, I tossed out a hastily written post entitled It Must Be a Fun Time to Work on Microsoft Office which seems to have been misread by some folks based on some of the comments I’ve seen on my blog and in other places. So further exposition of some of the points in that post seems necessary.

First of all, there’s the question of who I was calling stupid when talking about the following announcements

• Google announcing the launch of Presently, their Web-based Powerpoint clone. Interestingly enough, one would have expected presentation software to be the most obvious application to move to the Web first instead of the last.
• Yahoo! announcing the purchase of Zimbra, a developer of a Web-based office productivity and collaboration suite.
• Microsoft announcing the it would integrate Web-based storage and collaboration into it’s desktop office productivity suite.
• IBM announcing that it would ship it’s own branded version of an Open Source clone of Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite.

Given that three of these announcements are about embracing the Web and the last one is about building disconnected desktop software, I assumed it was obvious who was jumping on a dying paradigm while the rest of the industry has already moved towards the next generation. To put this another way, James Robertson’s readers were right that I was talking about IBM.

There is something I did want to call out about James Robertson’s post. He wrote

People have moved on to the 80% solution that is the web UI, because the other advantages outweigh that loss of "richness".

I don’t believe that statement when it comes to office productivity software. I believe that the advantages of leveraging the Web are clear. From my perspective

1. universal access to my data from any device or platform 
2. enabling collaboration with “zero install” requirements on collaborators

are clear advantages that Web-based office productivity software has over disconnected desktop software.

It should be noted that neither of these advantages requires that the user interface is Web-based or that it is rich (i.e. AJAX or Flash if it is Web-based). Both of these things help but they aren’t a hard requirement.

What is important is universal access to my data via the Web. The reason I don’t have an iPhone is because I’m hooked on my Windows Mobile device because of the rich integration it has with my work email, calendar and tasks list. The applications on my phone aren’t Web-based, they are the equivalent of “desktop applications” for my phone. Secondly, I didn’t have to install them because they were already on my phone [actually I did have to install Oxios ToDo List but that’s only because the out-of-the-box task list synchronization in Windows Mobile 5 was less than optimal for my needs].

I used to think that having a Web-based interface was also inevitable but that position softened once I realized that you’ll need offline support which means building support for local storage + synchronization into the application (e.g. Google Reader's offline mode) to truly hit the 80/20 point for most people given how popular laptops are these days. However once you’ve built that platform, the same storage and synchronization engine could be used by a desktop application as well.

In that case, either way I get what I want. So desktop vs. Web-based UI doesn’t matter since they both have to stretch themselves to meet my needs. But it is probably a shorter jump to Web-enable the desktop applications than it is to offline-enable the Web applications.  

Now playing: Playa Fly - Feel Me

This is one of those posts I started before I went on my honeymoon and never got around to finishing. There are lots of interesting things happening in the world of office productivity software these days. Here are four announcements from the past three weeks that show just how things are heating up in this space, especially if you agree with Steve Gillmor that Office is Dead ^{*(see footnote)}.

From the article Google Expands Online Software Suite 

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google Inc. has expanded its online suite of office software to include a business presentation tool similar to Microsoft Corp.'s popular PowerPoint, adding the latest twist in a high-stakes rivalry.
…
Google's software suite already included word processing, spreadsheet and calendar management programs. Microsoft has been reaping huge profits from similar applications for years.

Unlike Google's applications, Microsoft's programs are usually installed directly on the hard drives of computers.

From the article I.B.M. to Offer Office Software Free in Challenge to Microsoft’s Line

I.B.M. plans to mount its most ambitious challenge in years to Microsoft’s dominance of personal computer software, by offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations.

Steven A. Mills, senior vice president of I.B.M.’s software group, said the programs promote an open-source document format.

The company is announcing the desktop software, called I.B.M. Lotus Symphony, at an event today in New York. The programs will be available as free downloads from the I.B.M. Web site.

From the blog post Yahoo scoops up Zimbra for $350 million

Yahoo has been on an acquisition binge late, but mostly to expand its advertising business. Now Yahoo is buying its way deeper into the applications business with the acquisition of Zimbra for a reported $350 million, mostly in cash. Zimbra developed a leading edge, Web 2.0 open source messaging and collaboration software suite, with email, calendar, document processing and a spreadsheet.

and finally, from the press release Microsoft Charts Its Software Services Strategy and Road Map for Businesses

 Today Microsoft also unveiled the following:

• Microsoft® Office Live Workspace, a new Web-based feature of Microsoft Office that lets people access their documents online and share their work with others

…

Office Live Workspace: New Web Functionality for Microsoft Office

Office Live Workspace is among the first entries in the new wave of online services. Available at no charge, Office Live Workspace lets people do the following:

• Access documents anywhere. Users can organize documents and projects for work, school and home online, and work on them from almost any computer — even one not connected to the company or school network. They can save more than 1,000 Microsoft Office documents to one place online and access them via the Web.

• Share with others. Users can work collaboratively on a project with others in a password-protected, invitation-only online workspace, helping to eliminate version-control challenges when e-mailing drafts to multiple people. Collaborators who don’t have a desktop version of Microsoft Office software can still view and comment on the document in a browser.
  

As you can see one of these four announcements is not like the others. Since it isn’t fair to pick on the stupid, I’ll let you figure out which company is jumping on a dying paradigm while the rest of the industry has already moved towards the next generation.  The Web is no longer the future of computing, computing is now about the Web.

* I do. Disconnected desktop software needs to go the way of the dodo.

Now playing: Prince - Sign 'O' the Times

Over a year ago, I commented that sometimes it feels like working at Microsoft is like working in Dinosaur Country. Every time, I hear the phrase “software as a service” or it’s cousin “software plus services” it makes me feel this way. Most of the people uttering this crap don’t realize that this makes them sound as dated as the old codgers who kept on talking about “horseless carriages” when everyone else called them automobiles or just plain cars.

Case in point, this article from the Telegraph entitled Microsoft powers up for change which contains this humdinger of an opening paragrapgh

Chief executive says free software, downloadable online, is on the horizon for consumers. Josephine Moulds reports

Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, yesterday signalled another step towards a dramatic change in the software giant's business model.

In London on a whistle-stop tour, Ballmer was discussing the delivery of software packages over the internet. "We are a software company, and yet in a sense, the very form of our core capability is changing. We need to change our capabilities so that we are not just good at writing bits that you put out on CD and deliver, but rather writing this thing that is a living, breathing, dynamic, organic thing."

What’s next? A press release announcing that pasteurization may not be a fad? A news story conceding that heavier-than-air aircraft may just be the way to go after all? 

*sigh*

Now playing: The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

I scored an invite to FriendFeed and after trying out the service, I have to say it is both disappointing and encouraging at the same time. It is disappointing because one would expect folks like Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit who helped launch Google Maps, Gmail and AdSense while at Google to come up with something more innovative than a knock-off of Plaxo Pulse and Google’s SocialStream which are themselves knock-offs of the Facebook News feed.

On the other hand, this is encouraging because it is another example of how the digital lifestyle aggregator is no longer just a far out idea being tossed around on Marc Canter’s blog but instead has become a legitimate product category.  

So what exactly is FriendFeed? The site enables users to associate themselves with the various user generated content (UGC) sites which they use regularly that publish RSS feeds or provide open APIs and then this is turned into the equivalent of a Facebook Mini Feed for the user. You can get a good idea of it by viewing my page at http://friendfeed.com/carnage4life which aggregates the recent activities from my profiles on reddit, digg, and youtube.

The “innovation” with FriendFeed is that instead of asking you to provide the URLs of your RSS feeds, the site figures out your RSS feed from your username on the target service. See the screenshot below for this in action

Of course, this same “innovation” exists in Plaxo Pulse so this isn’t mindblowing. If anything, FriendFeed is currently a less feature rich version of Plaxo Pulse.

I personally doubt that this site will catch on because it suffers from the same chicken and egg problem that face all social networking sites that depend on network effects. And if it does catch on, given that there is zero barrier to entry in the feature-set they provide, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook and a host of other services roll this into their feature set. I expect that News Feed style pages will eventually show up in a majority of social sites, in much the same way that practically every website these days has a friend’s list and encourages user generated content. It’s just going to be another feature when it comes to making a website, kinda like using tabs for navigation.

I’m sure Marc Canter finds this validation of his vision quite amusing.

Now playing: Puddle of Mudd - Control

I don’t really have anything to say about this that hasn’t already been said but I did find the following article in the New York Times entitled  EBay’s $4 Billion Lesson in the Value of Hype worth sharing. Juicy bits excerpted below

As Microsoft mulls putting up to $500 million into Facebook at a $10-billion-plus valuation, it may want to consider the fate of eBay’s adventure with the Internet phone service Skype.

When eBay bought Skype in 2005, it boasted that Skype had 52 million users and was adding 150,000 new ones a day. Even though Skype only had $60 million in revenue that year, eBay figured that with so many users it would be able to profit somehow — both by charging fees for communication services and through links to its auction and payments services. Today, eBay admitted this was a whopper of a mistake, and is taking a $1.4 billion charge to reflect the gap between what it paid for Skype and what it turns out to be worth. EBay paid $2.6 billion in cash two years ago for Skype and said it would pay up to an additional $1.5 billion based on how the company performed.

...

1. Just because a company has a huge and growing audience doesn’t mean it can find a huge revenue source. Skype’s appeal is that it offers services free or very cheap. That limits its ability to raise prices. And it turns out that there are limited opportunities for advertising or add-on services.
2. It’s almost impossible to pay for a deal through “synergies.” EBay executives talked about how Skype would be useful to connect buyers and sellers in its marketplace. This always seemed to be hooey. The eBay market is already full of chatter, mainly by e-mail, and sometimes by phone. Sure, some of that might well be handled by Internet phone, but how much and what value was created by eBay owning its own voice chat system? Not much, it turns out.

I can't imagine any metric under which it made sense for eBay to pay over $2 billion for Skype, let alone the $4 billion which was the potential final price. This deserves to go straight to the top of the  List of the Worst Billion Dollar Internet Acquisitions of all time.

Now playing: DJ Green Lantern - D12/50 Cent - Rap Game

I'd like to say big "Thank You" to all the folks who tried out the recent release of RSS Bandit. Based on feedback from the RSS Bandit forums, it looks like so far the release was solid except for two regressons and an oversight on my part.

These issues have been fixed and we just uploaded an updated installer which can be obtained at RssBandit1.5.0.17b_installer.zip.

The issues fixed by this refresh are listed below

• Annoying dialog box pops up instead of yellow warning bar when ActiveX warning is displayed. (bug 1796850)
• Difference between unread count on MyFeeds node and "Unread Items" folder, (bug 1796849)
• Folder hierarchy not uploaded when uploading feed list to Newsgator Online
• Feed upload to Newsgator Online stops with “InvalidUrl error” if a URL that cannot be processed by Newsgator Online is encountered (e.g. intranet URLs, local file system URLs, etc).

I’m disconnecting from the grid starting tomorrow morning and shouldn’t be back online until October 1^st. Try not to get into too much trouble while I’m gone.  

Now playing: G-Unit - I Wanna Get to Know You

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that various folks at Microsoft have come to grips with the fact that RESTful Web services are the best way to expose data sources on the Web. One problem I’ve voiced is that we may forget that REST is about uniform interfaces and end up with half a dozen different Microsoft protocols for doing essentially the same thing.  This seemed to be the case when you consider Project Astoria and Web3S, both of which are designed for creating, retrieving, updating and deleting relational or not so relational data via a uniform interface over the Web. I’ve written about both projects in the past, see Google Base Data API vs. Astoria: Two Approaches to SQL-like Queries in a RESTful Protocol and Web3S: A RESTful Protocol for Accessing Windows Live Services if you’d like an overview of both technologies. 

However, thanks to enterprising folks like Yaron and Pablo on both sides there is a much better story coming from Microsoft with regards to RESTful protocols which should please even the Atom contingent.  The details are in Pablo’s post Astoria Design: payload formats which contains lots of juicy nuggets.

Let’s begin.

Pablo writes

The goal of Astoria is to make data available to loosely coupled systems for querying and manipulation. In order to do that we need to use protocols that define the interaction model between the producer and the consumer of that data, and of course we have to serialize the data in some form that all the involved parties understand. So protocols and formats are an important topic in our design process.
…
Multiple formats, one protocol (almost)

For the most part there is a single “protocol”, and by that I mean the set of HTTP headers for requests and responses, as well as the overall interaction model. In certain cases in order to make a format really look natural to clients we do need to introduce a format-specific protocol element, but we try to keep those to a minimum.

Also, any added protocol elements on top of HTTP need to be done so that unsophisticated agents can ignore a lot of that, do “plain HTTP” and still get by for the most part.
…
Now, with the almost-single protocol in place, the question comes to which formats should we do. Right now we’re thinking ATOM/APP, Web3S, and JSON. We need to define the basic requirements for any format used in Astoria, and then map those to each format we want to support. That’s what comes next.

What this means in practice is that Astoria defines the protocol semantics while Web3S will define the data format specific semantics. Even more interesting is that services that utilize Astoria will be able to take advantage of any client applications or libraries that support the Atom Publishing Protocol as long as they aren’t in reality tied to a proprietary implementation of APP such as GData (e.g. Windows Live Writer).

Pablo’s post goes on to talk about the data model used by Astoria and how it is mapped to Atom, JSON and Web3S respectively. He also calls for feedback from the community, so if you are interested in Microsoft’s implementation of RESTful protocols either as a developer customer or an interested observer…let Pablo know in the comments to his blog. There are lots of folks at Microsoft who’d love to hear what y’all have to say.

Before I forget, Pablo did have this to day about their RDF support.

What happened with RDF?

The May 2007 CTP also included support for RDF. While we got positive comments about the fact we supported it, we didn’t see any early user actually using it and we haven’t seen a particular popular scenario where RDF was a must-have. So we are thinking that we may not include RDF as a format in the first release of Astoria, and focus on the other 3 formats (which are already a bunch from the development/testing perspective).

My personal take is that while I understand how RDF fits in the picture of the semantic web and related tools, the semantic web goes well beyond a particular format. The point is to have well-defined, derivable semantics from services. I believe that Astoria does this independently of the format being used.

For some reason, I'm not surprised about this decision. I do wonder if dropping RDF will actually bring to light some closet RDF supporters who'd love to see supported in Astoria?

Now playing: N.W.A. - Appetite For Destruction

Last month there was a press release published by Sophos, an IT  security company, with the tantalzing title Sophos Facebook ID probe shows 41% of users happy to reveal all to potential identity thieves which reports the following

 The Sophos Facebook ID Probe involved creating a fabricated Facebook profile before sending out friend requests* to individuals chosen at random from across the globe.
...

Sophos Facebook ID Probe findings:

• 87 of the 200 Facebook users contacted responded to Freddi, with 82 leaking personal information (41% of those approached)
• 72% of respondents divulged one or more email address
• 84% of respondents listed their full date of birth
• 87% of respondents provided details about their education or workplace
• 78% of respondents listed their current address or location
• 23% of respondents listed their current phone number
• 26% of respondents provided their instant messaging screenname

In the majority of cases, Freddi was able to gain access to respondents' photos of family and friends, information about likes/dislikes, hobbies, employer details and other personal facts. In addition, many users also disclosed the names of their spouses or partners, several included their complete résumés, while one user even divulged his mother's maiden name - information often requested by websites in order to retrieve account details.

This is another example of how Facebook needs to be better at managing multiple social contexts. Right now, there is no way for me to alter my privacy settings to prevent people who I’ve added to my “friends list” from seeing my personal information. The thing is my “friends list” comprised of more than just friends. It is comprised of co-workers, people who work at the same company, people I went to high school with, and close personal friends. There’s also the category of “people who read my blog or use RSS Bandit” that I generally tend to decline friend requests from. I don’t mind some of these people being able to access my personal information (e.g. cell phone number, email address, birthday, etc) but clearly I also don’t want every random person who reads my blog that wants to be my “friend” on Facebook to have access to this information. 

Is there a better way to do this? Below are screenshots of the permissions model we came up with for Profiles on MSN Spaces when I worked on the feature juxtaposed with the Profile permissions options on Facebook.

 Windows Live Spaces

Straightforward isn’t it? I suspect that the problem here is that the folks at Facebook are refusing to acknowledge that their user base is changing now that they’ve opened up. As danah boyd writes in her post SNS visibility norms (a response to Scoble) 

Facebook differentiated itself by being private, often irritatingly so. Hell, in the beginning Harvard kids couldn't interact with their friends at Yale, but that quickly changed. Teens and their parents worship Facebook for its privacy structures, often not realizing that joining the "Los Angeles" network is not exactly private. For college students and high school students, the school and location network are really meaningful and totally viable structural boundaries for sociability. Yet, the 25+ crowd doesn't really live in the same network boundaries. I'm constantly shifting between LA and SF as my city network. When I interview teens, 80%+ of their FB network is from their high school. Only 8% of my network is from Berkeley and the largest network (San Francisco) only comprises 17% of my network. Networks don't work for highly-mobile 25+ crowd because they don't live in pre-defined networks. (For once, I'm an example!)
...
I don't really understand why Facebook decided to make public search opt-out. OK, I do get it, but I don't like it. Those who want to be PUBLIC are more likely to change settings than those who chose Facebook for its perceived privacy. Why did Facebook go from default-to-privacy-protection to default-to-exposure? I guess I know the answer to this... it's all about philosophy.

The first excerpt illustrates the point well. Facebook worked well as a social tool in the rigid social contexts of high school and college but completely breaks down when you’re all grown up.  Of course, the Facebook folks know this is an issue for some of their users. However it may be a “problem” that they consider to be By Design and not a bug.

The second excerpt is there because I’m surprised that danah is unsure about why Facebook profiles will now appear in search results. There are a lot of people for whom their social network profile is their primary or only online presence. Even for me, besides my blog(s), my Facebook profile is the only online identity Web which I keep updated regularly. It totally makes sense for Facebook to capitalize on this by making it so that everytime you search for a person whose primary presence is on their site, you get an ad to join their service [since only the fact that the person has a Facebook profile is exposed]. In addition, if you want to contact the person directly, you’re a lot better off joining Facebook and sending the person a private message than posting a comment on their blog [if they have one] or hoping that they’ve exposed their email address somewhere on the Web that isn’t their profile.

Update: The ability to expose a Limited Profile does render moot a lot of the points I just raised above. However making it a separate option from the privacy settings for the profile and incorrectly stating that your friends can always see your contact information makes it less likely to be used by users who are concerned about their privacy. Another example of a design flaw that is likely considered to be By Design according to the Facebook team.

Now playing: Metallica - The Unforgiven