Sunday, April 27, 2008 1:13 AM/EST
Back in the good old days, big software companies did big things. Little companies tiptoed around in the shadow of the platform makers, gaining enough speed to liftoff and attract enough attention to survive long enough to be acquired. Like the old movie studios of the 30's and 40's, the technology studios of the 80's and 90's built stars and played them off until the inevitable decline.
So it went with Microsoft, as the seeming invulnerability of Gates' machine accelerated to the boundaries of global saturation. Though we tend to think of Google as the conqueror, the reality is that Microsoft has struggled most with itself, the victim not of decline but of lack of fuel -- the very customers who created the megalith in the first place.
Everything changed with the Net. The platform wars, the browser wars, the widget wars -- they're all really battles in the grappling with the living, breathing, swarm that is the Web. Even the argument over whether Office is dead is bogus, a joke that became a conference that begat a series of endless reiterations of the first O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference known as Web 2.0. The stuff that went over the wire now goes over the air; the stuff that used to persist solely on the client now comes from G@d knows where in the Cloud.
I pick on the conferences because they are an easy target, whether large and self-important like the Web 2.0 Expo this past week in San Francisco or small and private smoke-filled rooms like the ones that may await us in Denver in August. An easy target when the guy who champions dataportability.org is nowhere to be seen on the panels of numerous sessions on dataportability, the legitimacy of standards baked in the dark having the same dubious odor it had when Microsoft and IBM tried the same thing back in the Web Services Wars.
So we grow to expect little of big companies, entrenched publishers, and the various gatekeepers that fester at the margins of this unruly beast of the Net. Google grew so fast we bought the laughable notion they weren't attacking Microsoft with freeware, but it only seemed like a big company play after the fact, and even today is laughed off by so-called "enterprise" seers as a toy, albeit a collaborative one that can't be duplicated by the incumbent without triggering self-destruction.
Instead, we watch big company plays emerging from virtualized roots, the Amazon services, the social media clouds, the endless "little" company dance of instability, VC stupidity, and media carbonation of the Valley. This is the universe of the little Duchies, the Fenwicks where media storms roll down through the hills and tumble past with names like Twitter and Friendfeed and Twhirl.
I'll call them microbigs, because the media treats them like they're big companies with little to lose and everything to gain. The microbigs can seem transcendent like Facebook or possessing the lifetime of a gnat like a thousand forgotten startups or neverwases, but nowhere are the range of possible outcomes more encapsulated than Twitter.
Twitter is a Rorschach test of a microbig. I see it as the most important enterprise event of the MicroBig era; others see it as SocMedBS. We're both right, of course, but put your head down on the tracks and you'll hear the superliner approaching: Live Mesh. Just when we thought it was safe.... Are the big companies back? Is it time once again to assemble the open source wagons? To whom do we look for authority in fighting this battle?
First, is Microsoft a big company? Sure, but composed of monolithic special interests or a fast-moving collection of microbigs orchestrated by a self-healing mesh. One from Column A, the Office group, secure in revenue via the corporate channel but increasingly undercut by virality -- or one from Column B, Silverlight, secure in cross-platform transparency with a 100 million client gift horse in NBC's Olympic coverage on the horizon.
Both poles are curiously hamstrung, Office by its size and historical association with pre-Web lock-in, Silverlight by its perception as a virtual iPod with nothing to play or project. And there's the media, similarly hamstrung by the notion that the only play here is to stick the two together and move Office to the Web. The problem: that's not a microbig, it's a regular old big company.
Then there's the mesh. Looks bigco in purpose, staffed by the new guard at Microsoft, the best and brightest of Redmond and the seedlings that trace back to Groove and forward to the intersection with telecom and hardware. But try an interesting thought experiment as we did on The Gillmor Gang, and throw Mesh lead David Treadwell a series of microbig scenarios, and the answer comes up yes.
First, the Coke Classic questions: When's the Mac version? Two months. What's the difference between this and FolderShare. Never mind that who cares about FolderShare to begin with. What about Sharepoint? What about Groove? No wonder there's even a little doubtthat Microsoft can get traction with this, what with channel conflict left and right with its own flailing Net-grappling product lines.
Finally, the real questions: Does Silverlight intersect with Mesh to produce the Net OS? Answer: Yes. Treadwell calls it orthogonal and complementary. MicroBig language. Can Mesh support Twitter streams orchestrated by identity mapping via affinities and abstracted to devices across OS, mobile, and corporate divides via Silverlight? Yes, but it can do so much more. Yes, but I didn't ask about WIndows. OK, yes. When?
Big company play at MicroBig velocity. Yes, and rather than yes, but.
Gillmor: Is this service intended to compete against or enhance, which is a good part of the question, Google and Amazon Web Services?
Treadwell: This service is a different level than Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services does a great job of providing what we sometimes call utility computing resources-- the ability to do mass scale storage, computation, etc. This service doesn't have anything that operates at that level
Gillmor: Well it sits on top of services that operate at that level.
Treadwell: That's exactly correct.
Gillmor: So can you wire the two up? Can you sit on top of Amazon services and use Mesh services to synchronize and orchestrate them?
Treadwell: It would certainly be possible for somebody to create a virtual device of a sort that uses Mesh's open protocols to use S3 as one type of device. We don't have that support today, but again, by virtue of the open protocol, somebody could create such a device.
Gardner: If someone decides they didn't want, for some reason, their content to go out through this platform, wouldn't it be fairly easy for them to block it?
Treadwell: They could simply choose not to map the folder. Is that what you mean?
Gardner: Not the end user necessarily, but perhaps the large organization that's got content.
Treadwell: I see your point. That's one of the things we know we have to do a good job with Mesh; that is, to be IT-friendly, and to give IT control on what kinds of data can and can't be stored on this thing. In addition, one of the things that we expect to do longer-term is to allow IT departments to operate their own cloud storage mechanisms, such that data owned by that enterprise would only be stored on that enterprise's devices and that enterprise's servers. They would never go to Microsoft and they would have complete control of that data.
GillmorGang 04.25.08
Yes? Yes. So what you're saying is that Google is a microbig. Yes, did I say that? No, but I didn't ask that either and the answer is still yes. Bottom line: Microsoft can't gain and retain traction with Mesh unless the answers are yes.
Where we take this is even more interesting than whether it will be successful in Microsoft's stated terms, that with a dominant client position on the desktop and a growing one in gaming, mobile, and corporate they will get the lion's share of whatever becomes the coin of the realm (services.) Looking at Mesh as a data synchronization transport ignores its abilities to virtualize identity, permissions, information aggregation, realtime feedback loops, and other SocMedBS attributes that define the substructure of, for example, a Twitter-Mesh-Silverlight gateway to compete with GTalk/Twitter etc.
Imagine (not for long will it be ephemeral) an information bus that orchestrates the signaling of text, rich media, calendar, communications, transaction, and group location status under a social graph umbrella based in part on user-controlled behavior aggregation (gestures). Now imagine what Google needs to do to match this architecture and its overwhelming lead in connectors to existing hardware via Windows.
Google's answer for now is no. There's no need to attack Mesh directly, but rather continue to iterate on Officenomics while retaining its dominant leads in user credibility and advertiser cloud. But Microsoft can efficiently hybridize Google and other microbig services with the Mesh layer added, creating information bus fail-over to multiple streams (virtual devices) to insure enterprise levels of reliability and security.
Those who dismiss this SocMedBS should note that even without Mesh or a Silverlight installed base of sufficient size or a Twitter that can scale at the affinity level, we are already able to orchestrate multiple services at an adhoc level with tangible results. For example, Friday's Gillmor Gang was carried simultaneously by a Ustream feed with live video from my studio in Daly City and graphics intermeshed with the conference call by Jerry Schuman in Los Angeles, a live chat with questions from a global audience, the concurrent Twitterstream, and members of the Gang including Robert Scoble by cell from Ansel Adams' playground deep in Yosemite.
It's another fine mesh we're getting into. But we have to face the facts that choice is the only weapon we have for progress. Whether it's someone trying to force a choice of who we are friends with, or guilt by association with other ideas and experiences, or any gatekeeping that isn't in service of any of us, that is to be rejected and routed around until the obstruction clears. It's time for us to act like the microbigs we can be, and, like Microsoft, just say yes.
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Sunday, April 13, 2008 6:56 AM/EST
Bob Dylan once made a record called Self Portrait, full of some of the most bizarre recordings of his career. Among these clunkers - mostly clunkers - was one called Days of 49. It had a tight groove, sort of post John Wesley Harding meets Nashville Skyline, and it concerned the Gold Rush of (for the post-boomers) 1849.
I can't remember the words, or need to look them up on Google. But I can feel the rush of excitement, the same one that woke me up this early Sunday to proclaim why this is history repeating itself: Businesses are moving faster than the services we're inventing.
You can call me what you want, Zimmy even, but the reason Salesforce is going to rock our world on Monday when they announce whatever Google linkup they can is because the users are ahead of the algorithms. The collective disruption of the iPhone, Twitter, Silverlight, and even this MacBook AIR with its USB 3G card I'm using mandate a speed of adoption that will dwarf the transitions of the past.
In a gold rush the cost of anything surges to meet the demand. Some call these events bubbles, but the real price of a hamburger in SIlicon Valley today is how much you can get done while eating it. Take Twitter, the steam engine of this revolution. It's an iron horse of infinite speed, streamlined to take text and tiny urls and push them onto the bus through the Gtalk pipeline.
Value is created not by the mechanism of sending but the algorithm of receiving, a hybrid filtering based on maintaining discovery through Tracking your own identity while following and notifying the stream of a subset of your core peers gated by the volume of the flow relative to the realtime stream.
The product is like panning for gold: separating the nuggets from what we called fool's gold then and the bloggerati now. But the winners could afford the 50-buck burgers and the houses overlooking the Pacific, and eventually new money became old. In recent weeks, the anger at this new wealth creation has been focused on the most visible of these prospectors, with Times articles about bloggers slumping over in their chairs, cartoonists committing Twittercide, and TechCrunch running the table.
I'll skip the logic of why this isn't happening and focus instead on why we're fools if we ignore this. First, the business processes we think we will have a hard time implementing with these loosely coupled on demand services are not the ones we will be working with when we get there. Swirl the pan and let the sand stream out, then look at what's left.
Did you expect the volume of iPhone clicks that bubbled up as a result of a real mobile browser experience? No, you were arguing about the Blackberry's superior keyboard and battery life. Did you correctly predict the three most popular applications on the device after 6 months of use? Twitter, NewsGang, and Gmail in my case. If I had to throw one away, it would probably be email.
Let's strip some more silt away. Gmail on every device other than the iPhone is my storage medium, the collector of email, IM, and through the Gtalk/Twitter gateway, Twitter. Search becomes my memory, directory, calendar, reminder. But NewsGang is my window into the collective intelligence of our swarm, in this case those who share RSS aggregation and their behavior (gestures) in a feedback loop.
Now watch email and even IM get stripped out, through the same piping and filtering process I described with Twitter track, follow, and notification. Twitter absorbs much of the value of both streams, by bootstrapping always-on (iPhone/AIR/3G) to deliver realtime interactive interrupts on the fly. Email is oh so an hour ago for an increasing number of events and transactions, and we only have to look at what the telegraph did to Pony Express to know where that goes.
Zimmy I may be, but stupid I'm not. We're talking about modeling business processes that use email and even RSS on a Twittergram that won;t be sent either way. Pick up that nugget and roll it around in your hand. In the Days of Old. In the Days of 49.
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Sunday, April 06, 2008 11:52 AM/EST
I've been immune to Bruce Springsteen for more than 30 years. Tonight, that is over. I'd heard so much about the power of his live show, the legend of Clarence Clemons, the Soprano jaunt of Little Steven, yadda, yadda, yadda. Nothin. Nice guy, man of the people, power anthems that never really connected.
The harbinger for me was an appearance on Today a few months ago, where Springsteen and his E Street Band debuted an anti-war song with the most startling spoken intro that the veeps at GE must have blinked through like a sip of tart limeade. Living in the future, well, you should get the record. Tonight, I finally did.
For me the secret unfolded about an hour into the 2:45 show, when Living in the Future returned. Before then, I was doing the usual stuff, eating a hot dog, sipping beer, watching the blue collar crowd like some astronaut from wherever it is I think I'm coming from.
We'd been given earplugs by a knowledgeable friend that I'd tried then abandoned, then tried again. The effect was something like the lesson I'd learned at Shea Stadium all those years ago, to push my fingers into my ears just hard enough to filter the screams. There, almost like being underwater, a secret world where the sinews of the music were exposed: the backbeat, oh wait, the cymbals, the several guitars, all of it surprisingly clear in this muddy soundscape.
The earplugs bought me time to get over myself, a process I was unaware had begun. A process of learning that the things that separate us are like the high frequencies chopped down by the plugs, insistent in their clarity but ultimately muted by the fundamentals that we share below. We are born, we live, we die.
Growing up in New York, with a built-in view like the Steinberg New Yorker cover, I believed I could make it anywhere if I made it there. Down there a mile below were the fly-over states, what now we call the Red states, what a line from a Springsteen song called a beautiful place to be born. Whuh, what was that? I realized I'd taken the plugs out a while ago, as the E Street Band began to sink in.
These are prayers, I began to realize. Time to reap, time to sow. Another secret: you can't understand Max Weinberg's power until you feel it, midranges pumping the blood through the body of the music. On Late Night, it almost feels like one of those Emenee toy drum kits, all high end and foot with nothing in the middle. Tonight, it was the frame on which everything is built.
Behind us, a burly guy with a sign pleading for a favorite song bellowed like a slaughterhouse steer. I started to put the plugs back in, but Springsteen reached out into the crowd for another sign and began a slow ballad whose name escapes me. Now I was done with listening, tipping over into thinking of my children, the rush of sky past my father's profile as we drove home to the City down the Thruway, the thoughts of a child not knowing these moments were so filled with mythic proportion for my life, as they are for each of us.
Springsteen dove out into the sea of hands, demanding someone pass a small sign forward to him, then rushing grinning to the microphone to stand there as the cameras zoomed in: Bruce, you are my real father. Whuh, I felt stupid and joyous. Like I do now, an idiot who fell in love at some arena rock show. Little Steven started coming to the side near us, staring out into the crowd, looking for and finding us and pointing (it seemed) directly at us to say: Yes, you got it.
The other guitarist, Nils Lofgrin, leaned out over the other side of the stage, listening to the audience singing the choruses and playing them back to them, not leading but listening to and layering in with them. Now they were playing the songs of the faithful, those same ones I flew over like the Red states so many times. I began to test the air above my head with fingers outstretched, realizing no one would notice or care how foolish I might have felt.
Now it was over, and then the gracious encore, with a curious throwaway tune that I somehow knew was a setup for the last song, the American Land, a Gaelic thunderbolt with one line scrolling past on the monitors that said something about keeping out the immigrants who came here and built the land and died for it. And then I understood it, that Springteen and his incredible band know what they, and we, are about, that change is upon us now. That we are the common man, each of us in our own precious unique way, inescapably strapped to the mast of this enterprise called life.
Thursday, April 03, 2008 6:12 PM/EST
Mike Vizard and Steve Gillmor on Intel's new Atom chip, the iPhone shortage, Microsoft's Albany project, IT shutting down the Gtalk, and what Mike calls "our social contract with the government." Recorded Thursday, April 3, 2008.
NewsGang Extra III 04.03.08
Tuesday, April 01, 2008 1:59 AM/EST
For some months now, the proto-blogger of the blogosphere has been focusing on two subject areas: Twitter and the presidential campaign. Dave Winer correctly anticipated the power and growth of the real time messaging platform, building several applications around the Twitter API and its identity namespace. And his political analysis has jumped from Scripting News to Huffington Post to a series of Sunday morning interview podcasts that capture and harness the pulse of the new real time network.
I say "new" because social media has rapidly advanced from a metadata honey pot to the nexus of such signals and a microchunk form of content creation. As Net celebrities such as Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis move their brands from blog posts to short bursts of text and video, the resultant youtubing of the A List has set off a feeding frenzy. Before we dismiss the relevance of this trend as navel-gazing, we should pause to remember that much of the rest of the world is just now incorporating the blogging wave into business, family, and the living history of this time.
But the argument over the differences between blogging, podcasting, and professional media has grown stale as we focus more on the stories being told than the tools used to deliver them. When the top stories on blogging's Techmeme Top 40 charts these last weeks were about the business of blogging, the natural conclusion was that nothing was going on - that the purity of the citizen revolution was giving way to the lure of the easy buck and the clarion call of the click.
Sorry, but it just ain't so. We're living in one of the most disruptive and ongoing storms of innovation we've ever not fully comprehended in realtime, and you only have to watch the fear and emotion spilling all over the highway to get a sense of the power of what is going on just off-stage. Twitter may appear to be a solution in search of a problem, or an eyeball machine with no business model, or just the latest rendering of high school for the techno-elite - but the panic you can smell means something.
Panic is the Bear Stearns buyout, the Yahoo emasculation after the last board meeting, the acceleration of the Swiftboating of the campaign from late August in the last two campaigns to early March this time. Google's rush to announce a Google Gears off line solution in its Google Docs word processor suggests the threat of Microsoft's Silverlight has moved the production schedule up the only way it can be done - by dribbling Gears out one App at a time in a rolling update from read to read/write.
Do the math. If you're in corporate IT or a Wall Street analyst or a VC or a consultant, what does this portend? What does panic mean to those lying in wait for the fundamental shift in the marketplace? Sell or buy? Is social media ready to step up, or is this a sucker's game, a carny runway where nothing is revealed while your pocket is picked as you stumble to the parking lot.
Or sit down at the soothsayer's table and summon up the huddles behind closed doors where strategies are being baked into action. Is this tumult really about modeling friendship, or molding startups and careers, or the digital equivalent of Legos where you pipe services into an increasingly aggressive filter of real time messages and pointers into competitive intelligence?
Yes, it is. Twitter represents the uber-network of actionable signals, with immature but relentless tools for rapid information triage unmatched by other services. It's not an accident that the most powerful client is Google Talk with its track mechanism, or that pointing out the inefficiencies of the Twitter alert system (@Replies) provokes anger, attacks on the motive of the chronicler, and anxiety about comprehension of a system commonly derided as a consumptive waste of time.
We're in a crescendo of information overload profiling, crouched in the curve of the wave as it breaks over the blog/news media coalition and moves to the realtime transaction flow of the information terminal. The evidence is all around us: Social media hives that form, engage, stratify, atrophy, and are succeeded by new formulas that allow rebooting without insulting or hipping the culled to their fate. No wonder the panic.
Let's step back from the fear and marshal the opportunities of this transition. Social networks are not toys. They are powerful frameworks that sit atop a liquid sea of signals, more and more attuned to the sypathetic vibrations of the aware, call them customers or children eager for knowledge - it makes little difference. When our children look at us, what do they want to see? Bravado, anger at the questions being asked? Or the gathering of their eyes toward ours, the wink of humor at the impossibility of catching up instead of the despair of fatigue before the first coffee break.
Twitter is not killing blogging, nor the A List, nor the move toward commerce. Radio never died, TV is not dead, especially not the podcast. We're awash in a symphony of music, but only when we stop being afraid of the absolute enormity of its possibilities can we begin to embrace them. Becoming an adult means learning to respect the child in each of us, for surely we are the only ones who can calm ourselves.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 11:51 AM/EST
Yesterday's announcement of Yahoo joining with Google and MySpace to form an OpenSocial Foundation may have seemed like good news for social media developers, but for me it was a golden opportunity of a different type. For months now, I've been on a rampage about Google's violations of user privacy with its Google Reader, GTalk, and Gmail products, and here was finally a great chance to rain on the interoperability parade. That is, until the call came in.
To recap, Facebook has a social network and no revenue. Google has what looks like a social network lurking inside its suite of on-demand Office tools, tons of revenue, and no legitimate way to turn all of that metadata about not just what we share but who we share it with into gold. The pesky problem Google has is something called the social contract.
When I first saw Gmail in its invite-only beta release in May 2005, I couldn't believe my eyes: unlimited storage, threaded conversations, worked on any machine or OS, and free. The deal was pretty simple. Google provided the service, I provided the lock-in, my own handcuffs in the form of my data, poured into the ever-expanding gigabytes of storage as the years rolled by. The performance kept just ahead of the early adopters, then the friends of those adopters, then the emerging subclass of information workers who used Gmail as a conduit around IT and in between jobs and corporate Exchange servers.
Then Gtalk shipped (a euphemism for the previous CD-bound era that morphed into zero-footprint upgrades released in between page refreshes). The IM client leveraged the open-source Jabber infrastructure and stitched IM, e-mail, and note-taking into a seamless fabric all flowing into the Google cloud. Again, free in return for ultimate allegiance and all your data. It was a Damn Yankees pact for sure; you knew the favor would be called in, but somehow just not right now, thanks.
Of course, all along we knew what we were getting into. It stared right at us in the right margin of each e-mail, the scoped links that drew their relevance from our private communications. The sponsored links offered for this post so far (I e-mailed it to myself) include The intelligent factory: virtual product and production planning (Siemens); Java distributed: Scalable High Performance Data Grid Download White Papers (Gemstone); Better Quality Computers, Lower Prices and More Choice (AMD); free IM & VOIP for everyone at your domain (Google); and something called Real-Time DB for NCOW where ANTs Data Server gets the data to the right place in real time (ANTs).
The deal is simple: These ads are just for you, unread by humans or the IRS, just these cute little algorithms massaging your closest-held secrets into helpful recommendations. It's the Amazon suggestions up- and cross-sell model, and as with Google's AdSense and AdWords, sufficiently relevant and click-inducing to pass the smell test for users. The social contract: You keep this private and we'll give you all our clicks.
But what happens if you start to get the feeling that this data is being used outside your control for purposes you never understood were intended or possible? Data leaks such as the AOL release of anonymous search keyword patterns brought the notion that all these clicks are being recorded to public attention (don't search for how to murder your husband). But typing those words in Gmail seemed safer (I'll leave it to you to see what that brings up) as long as Google was transparent about how it uses this data not just in Gmail but everywhere in its services.
That confidence hit the skids for me when Google released a new feature that surfaced previously private Google Reader shared RSS items, based on what Google decided were friends based on user behavior with Gtalk, Gmail and its Contacts lists. Suddenly actions taken in one social context (chatting and e-mail) were mined to provide access to an unguessable URL containing shared items going back in my case for at least three years.
You could argue (and many including Google have) that shared means shared, but the social contract in which I engaged to use this feature included an unguessable URL so I could e-mail or IM the link to people under my control, not the whim of a simple but somewhat coarse algorithm that could turn a troll maintenance exchange into a friendship. In essence, two acceptable social contracts combined to produce a disruptive third one in the worst sense of the word, disrupting my confidence in Google's previously transparent and equitable use of my behavioral data.
Google compounded the problem by essentially telling us to pound sand when a Slashdot outcry bubbled up. Yes, Google, we now understand that shared means it could be shared with random "friends" around the network, but what about all the shared items I've been sharing with human-selected friends going back several years? Well, said Google, you can turn off the shared feed globally (thereby deleting a valuable archive from Day One) or you can delete your friends one by one from your contacts list.
But remember the context of this response, the week following Facebook's Beacon PR disaster, where misuse of user behavior without any opt-in and ephemeral opt-out (here's this little requester that we're showing you that says, wait a minute, the phone is ringing, and ... gone) produced a firestorm and the eventual Big Backoff. Google, on the other hand: Have a nice day.
Until the call came in. I've been complaining about Google's intransigence, Nixonian stonewalling, etc., in a series of posts, Gang episodes, and NewsGang Lives, and Google has played along by being absolutely deaf, dumb and silent. Yesterday, when the OpenSocial Foundation was announced, Marshall Kirkpatrick invited me to comment in a live blogging post on ReadWriteWeb where I suggested that socially corrupt contact and behavioral data would flow over this industry alliance, poisoning the aggregate pool of data and serving as a back-room deal to create a poison pill to block the Microsoft Yahoo acquisition to boot. Reminiscent too of the Microsoft-IBM freezeout of Sun in the WS-I interoperability gambit back in the good old Web services days.
Then the phone rang. A Google official who will remain nameless for the moment was suddenly on the phone, listening, offering words of understanding and agreement, things like "Google must be responsive to users" and "yes, good point," and in general completely ruining this entire head of steam I've been building and cultivating for months now. Now, the news isn't all bad (good?). I drew some faint hope when Mr. X suggested that he in fact wasn't the right person to actually get something done, and we spent a few minutes figuring out who that person might be. Perhaps the lid will go back on and silence will again break out.
But for now, as I await the next step, I'm left with the strong possibility that peace may be breaking out. My boss is not pleased.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008 4:14 AM/EST
Lifestreaming has been a favorite swarm for the attention crowd in recent weeks. Friendfeed is my favorite, not because I use it much but because it's a bit of a greenfield, a place to start over and remodel the information triage space.
The last two days have seen crucial piping strategies from Discus, a commenting service and a two-way sync between Outlook and Gmail. And I've been getting slammed on Twitter for my unorthodox tracking strategies, most importantly including some avoidance of the @twitterer reply mechanism.
Briefly, I'm using a combination of Gtalk/Twitter with tracking turned on on several important keywords, namely stevegillmor, gillmor, and newsgang. The Gtalk client can be popped out and floated outside the Gmail window on my desktop, freeing me to monitor callers during NewsGang Live, or NewsGang.net itself where I aggregate RSS items based on the NewsGang's interests and behavior.
This lets me see not only people I follow but those who are gesturing to me with keywords I've signaled my interest in monitoring. The @stevegillmor reply signal deposits pointed messages in my Reply inbox in the Twitter Web client, but I have to leave the follow flow to overtly go there to receive those messages. I've also experimented with a rich client shareware product, twhirl, which allows multiple simultaneous identities to be open, as well as color-coding all follow, reply, and direct messages into one stream.
If that were the only criteria for this Twitter consuption platform, I probably would migrate to twhirl full-time; it offers a simple WYWYG interface that features point-and-click icons for replying or direct messaging that pre-populate the message with the appropriate nomenclature. A pop-up window scrolls up from the bottom when new items arrive on a timed schedule, and I can monitor the flow of both my personal and newsgang accounts, the latter where I follow virtually anybody who expresses interest or engages with the NewsGang community.
But where this breaks down is in the transition to my mobile client, the iPhone, where the Twitter mobile client has no interface for replies or direct messages, and no access to the track command of Gtalk/Twitter fame. I end up spending catch-up sessions when I return to the iMac or AIR spooling back through the Gtalk client or looking up the archived chats in Gmail.
Now I'm getting pushback for avoiding @messages, which are difficult to render on the iPhone and not what I want to do for the most part elsewhere. What I do want to do is respond to direct requests for dialogue while leaving open the opportunity for the larger community of people who follow me to absorb the flow. In other words, while I may be answering someone directly, I'm always cognizant of the power of the Twitter space to amplify and accelerate ideas and issues in this hybrid public/personal editorial space.
This Twitterstage is unique in its various overlapping attributes, what I would call a swarmscape where ideas are accelerated by the realtime interaction around ideas, questions, assertions, humor, avoidance, and other gestures much richer than those of the aggregated services they draw on: IM, email, blogging, etc. So my shorthand methodology takes the form of first replying with the Twitter name without the @ sign, then shortening it as the dialogue extends to first name or just continued response, always assuming that the participants will either find it sufficiently interesting to follow me (and hopefully I them) or if they wish, use the @message to trigger my track keyword harvesting.
In the pushback around this issue, I've also referenced my shorthand expression for a comparable observation of gesture fidelity in the blog space, namely the use of links as a measure of authority and respect: Links are dead. What I mean by that is that I often choose not to link not as a measure of disrespect but as a measure of an increased recommendation or gesture of authority. In essence I'm suggesting you link to or follow the person, not the individual post or item.
That's largely because I assume most people have read the common wisdom on the subject that I'm referring to, namely the high page viewed offerings of the usual subjects or the aggregate pool of link-formed swarms as typified by Techmeme. Rather than waste their time by referencing something already consumed, I encourage aggregating the feeds of those sources and harvesting the behavior of the reader and his or her circle of peers to more efficiently triage the external information space.
Twitter, of course, accelerates this efficiency even more with its expanding and fluid circles of micro-communities, the clouds of individual users that intersect and resonate both individually and at the affinity level. As lifestreaming strategies attempt to organize and pipe these signals through the information pipeline, as synchronization of message stores allows fluid movement between machines and even variously-scoped identities, and as tracking becomes available at the API level to bring it to the iPhone, the @message will find its place as one arrow in a powerful quiver.
Thursday, March 20, 2008 3:02 PM/EST
Mike Vizard and Steve Gillmor discuss IT's take on the election, how the enterprise is handicapping the cloud computing revolution, and whether Microsoft's Silverlight challenge will push Google into an Adobe acquisition. Recorded Thursday, March 20, 2008.
Sunday, March 16, 2008 1:49 AM/EST
On The Gang this Friday, Dan Farber asked me what I was doing in this new gig - a column or a blog? No difference, I replied. Just like there's no difference between mainstream and bloggospherian journalism and commentary. This is my opinion, and in the self-contained universe that is this space, it's the guiding principle, the law, the prime directive, the universal theory. I am the writer, editor, judge, and jury. The one thing you won't find here is more of this argument.
It's not that other opinions aren't valid. It's just that we don't have enough time for it in this rapidly developing technology environment, where the simple abstraction of XML has unleashed the most incredible ongoing innovation cycle most of us have ever seen. Sure, for some of the original pioneers of computing, the rush of insight at its most foundational level probably felt like this - Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston with the spreadsheet, Bill Atkinson with the screen redraw he thought he saw but then "reinvented" into existence, Adam Curry and Dave Winer when they prodded each other into the RSS enclosure.
Today's brainstorm is Twitter. When it first surfaced I circled it like a bear does a baby seal - not quite looking at it, not believing it could be such an easy target, having no idea whatsoever of its apparent or eventual usefulness. But something about this stupid 140-character limit and haughty self-promotional beacon in the cybernight gave off an eery glow, the faint hint of what is coming. Twitter, when combined with such obscure hacks as TinyURL, podcasts, blogs, and most disruptively I suggest, executable code, has spawned a communications platform that will blow right past everything except platforms that allow it to dominate.
The heart of it is the hunger for immediate update, the news, the jolt of disruption, the possibility of synaptic leaps. It began as each program did with 'Hello, World' and quickly evolved to conversation, the back and forth of discourse. Soon it became the disrupter of static search, where you searched for people instead of what they said. 'Who knows how to hook up this printer?' 'Is it spring ahead fall back or feed the cold starve the fever?'
The international community entered stage left; where blogging and publishing had siloed, twitterers created a ballpark wave that followed the sun westward as news developed. By noon Pacific, the shape of the news was hammered into a burnished form, molded in Techmeme and the jaunty thrusts of TechCrunch, Hardball, and the new journal of record, accessed via the Twitter API.
Just as Google Reader reached a crescendo of adoption that triggered the freewaring of NewsGator, NetNewsWire, and FeedDemon, Twitter aggregators stole the momentum of shared items and transferred it to the Twittersphere. Podcasts, which had languished during the video bubble, returned with a new lease as the iPhone Flash barrier and drivetime bandwidth ubiquity swamped NPR and Disney Radio, even All-Beatles channels. Suddenly people looked forward once more to dishwashing, exercise, long commutes, and the constant drumbeat of the mobile Twitter client.
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.
On The Gang this Friday, we opened the lines up to the Twittersphere first via my smaller cloud of followers, then dramatically midway through when Calacanis and Scoble engaged their huge yet overlapping audiences. The resultant swarm of comments, questions, and even more powerfully, @ crosstalk communications between nodes produced an energy that we will certainly exploit as much as we can, and assume will be understood and emulated most quickly in the very space where it might seem least applicable, the enterprise. Hello, world.
Friday, March 07, 2008 1:45 AM/EST
Mix '08 came of age in a methodical but elemental way as Microsoft signaled both its intention and confidence in weighing in on the new generation of technology that many have suggested is moving past the Windows colossus. As Ray Ozzie assumes the command and control of the company's strategy, Steve Ballmer stayed largely on script as the leader of the business imperatives that drive the company's transformation.
Ozzie's keynote may have seemed short on specifics and light on delivery, but by the end of Scott Guthrie's wrapper of presentations, the outlines of Microsoft's offerings of both transparency and cross-platform Silverlight services loomed into focus like the iceberg in front of the Titanic. As waves of demos from the likes of the Hard Rock Cafe collection and the Aston Martin virtual showroom filled the big screen, I found myself shaking myself to attention as I realized this was not Your Father's Win32 anymore but the Silverlight Express bearing down on an eager developer crowd who smell money.
Ozzie speaks not in code or subterfuge but in maps, utilitarian words that build as sentences one on the next to find a casual but sturdy ledge on which to rest before the next climb. Here's an exchange with Ray in XML Magazine from 2000, when Ozzie unveiled his Groove architecture after 3 years of secret research and development:
Ozzie: We want you to build apps that are very tied to the environment so that you have a good, rich interface. That's in contrast to products that I've built in the past where you have the same interface on all platforms.
Gillmor: Sort of.
Ozzie: Well, close.
Gillmor: Let me just tease you a little bit.
Ozzie: We tried to... [Lotus Notes] was uniformly bad on all platforms.
Gillmor: There you go.
Ozzie: [Laughs.] Well, I'm trying to correct the error of my ways.
Now, 8 years later and 2 years since Ray delivered a call-to-action memo with Gates' baton-passing endorsement at a San Francisco press conference and disappeared back into the lab, he is ready to unveil the details of what he has learned this time. You can follow the link to the earlier conversation and retrace its footsteps, and I'll bet you see that so much of what he was hewing out of the materials he had then is now baked into the sinews of Silverlight waiting to be uncrated within a trustworthy platform for the new realities of what he calls the hub that is the connected Web.
Whether it's the IE8 adherence to the Firefox/Safari emergent standards, the XML extensions for Activities and Web Slices, the potential for Silverlight to appear on any mobile platform that provides an SDK (hello, Cupertino), or Steve Ballmer's measured insistence on walking the walk in political lockstep with Ozzie's architectural plan as a must-do for the Yahoo deal to be successful -- the message is consistent that Microsoft has internalized what they must do to avoid further hemorrhaging of their ability to make a difference in the build-out of cloud computing.
The most important lesson Ray has learned is that we no longer are bound to applications in the monolithic evolution that produced Office. In this new Internet operating system, applications become modules or services that can be loosely coupled together under user control on demand, as needed. The container is no longer the metaphor, but rather the message queues that asynchronously distribute the metadata that describes the UI (XAML) and the delta changes in data to distributed participants. In 2000:
The only way you can really architecturally support multiple people in groups working offline is if you roll back, insert changes, and roll forward again. Unlike Notes, this isn't actually a replication architecture. This is a distributed-transaction architecture, where transactions must execute in a certain order and that's how everything eventually synchronizes. But transactions can be rolled back, and they get meshed in a deterministic fashion.
Yesterday, at Mix, Ray continued,
Just imagine the convenience of unified data management, the transparent synchronization of files, folders, documents, and media. The bi-directional synchronization of arbitrary feeds of all kinds across your devices and the Web, a kind of universal file synch.
Go back and look: the details are built on a platform Ray and his team had to frame out from scratch, but even so like a model/view/control architecture, the concepts have survived to fit neatly into the current scenarios. More generally, from 2000:
Another hard problem that we are trying to address in a transparent fashion is the fact that people use multiple computers. We want to make sure that we are building a product where peers are actually people, not necessarily devices. If you use a laptop, a desktop computer at work, and a desktop computer at home, you can still interact with the same people interchangeably--and use your devices interchangeably without having to worry about synchronizing.
So it went then, and so it goes now. Just as applications will be atomized and refactored, the parallel distribution of data to multiple providers will create what Ozzie calls the power of choice, the one safe bet Microsoft can make to catch up in the online game.
Here is where the trust issue plays most fundamentally; as server virtualization abstracts the notion of "what do you want to do today" to "what can we do for you today", the opportunity to close the sale between essentially identical offerings is trust, the virtual representation of family and friends, the social mesh. Microsoft's Facebook investment was relatively trivial, but as Ballmer pointed out, the partnership that seeded it is potentially priceless. This is the world where things are uniformly good on all platforms.
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