Web Services

It had to some..from SAI:

A source familiar with the negotiations tells us that Warner and the three other majors -- Sony BMG, EMI, and Universal Music Group -- all think they could do better creating their own music video Web destinations and are in early talks about forming a joint venture similar in concept to Hulu, the increasingly popular TV-on-the-Web joint venture from News Corp and NBC Unviersal.

As the amount of venture / speculative backed plays recedes, making real money beings to impinge into Web 2.0 wonderland. The majors have clearly learned from the Hulu lesson.

It would be really good for the overall experience though if they allowed innovative servces like Pandora to flourish, as its value is not so much the music as the discovery of it.

Like any good Open Source believer, I use Firefox. I'm a "late" early adopter, I like to use something once its been out in the market for 6 months or so (I've been through my guinea pig phase).

Anyway, this week I downloads Firefox 3 onto my laptop. Its a 3 year old Dell Latitude 400 machine on XP Pro, not top spec but has plenty of oomph still for what I need out and about (hmm - or maybe I do need a new one). The big desktop in the office does the serious heavy lifting (and game playing....)

Result - the system ground to a complete halt. Pages took longer to load than on dial-up days (5 minutes for this Blog Edit Page this am - that was the final straw).

Killed Firefox 3, went back into Internet Explorer and reloaded Firefox 2.0 - normal service is now resumed. Now, before y'all tell me that my computer can be upgraded, that there are help pages galore to help me speed up FF3, that I can tinker and disable and tune - let me just stop yous right there.

I don't care.

I ain't going to upgrade my machine - its a joe average machine compared to whats out there. Any successful package on the market today has to cater for a machine like this one or it will die.

Similarly, when I download something, I want it to work straight away, I don't want it bringing my computer to a grinding halt, and I especially don't want to faff around trying to search help groups for how to make the product work. If there are things I can disable, fine - but make it simple to find and do, not arcane. If its the only package that does the job, fine - I'll put the effort in. But web browsers are a competitive market. If this one's cr*p, hey, there are others

Now, I note that Firefox will withdraw support for version 2.0 in December 2008. I think thats a mistake, I think Firefox 3 is too big (or too bloated / inefficient) to run easily on many machines out there. They risk losing the market to Chrome (because its far more stripped down) and/or never getting the people moving over from IE. And the place you really really don't want to lose is the sweet spot of Windows users on - or interested in - Firefox, thats the big addressable market

Anyways, that my prediction for 2009 - Firefox 3 will lose Mozilla market share unless they can come up with a version or a download pack that loads cleanly and runs quickly on the average Windows machine out there.

Yesterday Twit or Fit (a sort of Hot or Not for Twitter, you rate the avatar of Twitter persons) launched with co-ordinated PR aplomb. I didn't blog it yesterday because the people behind it (Huddle) are a smart lot, and anyway EuroStartups need all the help they can get, but after chatting to a few people last night I felt I had to say something.

The reason I am not so sure it is such a good idea for use on a Social Media / Comms System is not, of course, because I'm a grumpy sod who doesn't "get it", you understand* ( Tim O'Reilly will be after them anyway ), but because of the sort of behavioural Game Theory it promotes on a social network, where building social capital is a key part of the game.

I can predict two games that will be played if this catches on:

(i) Migration to more beautiful Avatars, possibly even more attractive handles.

(ii) Increase in following "cute" avatars at the expense of uncute ones, irrespective of content

(2009 Prediction - £10 a pop for photoshopping beautiful Avatars is a runaway success Biz. Mind you, I suppose, being Twitter, if you have to listen to people wittering on about their lunch, they may as well be Gorjuss)

I've tried to describe this in the diagram above - in essence, the system will drive towards "A Listers" who are there because of avatabeauty, not contributions to the greater social capital. It will be not so much the Whuffie as Hottie Factor

(Followed via @hello! )

Thus over the longer term, it operates as a Social Media Ratchet - by allowing one to rate and then follow "beautiful people" (via the "Top 50 rated people etc) it turns social media into something more akin to TV, where content - even highbrow content - can only be presented by "beautiful people" today. I personally am thus concerned that the future "ratings" in social media will be based on attractiveness to a greater degree than is probably helpful.

For all of you who thus thought the 'Net would be a way of connecting the "Global Brain", of ensuring a new era of Aquarian Peace, Love and Understanding, for raising the Species IQ, this is all a bit of a let down. On the other hand, you can sell Ads against it and thus monetise it - another smart way to make money off Twitter!

( By the way, I am somewhat intrigued that the digital womenfolk - some of whom were quite upset over the recent T*tCrunch post, are not protesting that this too is demeaning - some things I will never understand.... )

Must go now, off to look for a hotter Avatar

* Hey, I set up the first AntiSocial Network on Ning you know!

A few weeks ago I sat on a panel at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm with Simon Aspinall, Managing Director, Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco - we had all just given talks on the future of Online Video - and it was clear from his talk that what they were planning was quite substantial. Anyway, Cisco have now published a white paper over here with their thoughts. The analysis we would recognise:

A New Generation of Media Challenges
As service providers strive to meet evolving customer demands, they are challenged to adapt to several overriding trends:

Explosive growth in video traffic: According to a recent Cisco Visual Networking Index Study, global IP traffic will reach 44 exabytes (1018) per month by 2012 -- more than six times the total traffic in 2007 -- with video being the dominant driver of growth. The same study estimates that video will account for nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.

Expanding sources of content: The paradigm of the past, in which content was created by major studios and delivered on a one-way basis to consumers, is over. Professionally developed content from major distributors will continue to have large audiences, but smaller-scale, semi-professional producers developing content for niche audiences will play a much larger role in consumer entertainment. Customers are also demanding more foreign-language content, such as Indian customers wanting "Bollywood" movies and Latino customers wanting Spanish-language programming. A service provider's ability to deliver this "long-tail" content, international programming, and other niche content will be a key competitive differentiator.

Rise of number and type of end devices: Today's customers may be accessing video via a multitude of devices -- standard-definition (SD) or high-definition (HD) TVs, personal computers, gaming consoles, or smartphones and portable media devices. Attempting to deliver media to each of these formats from separate content stores, over separate infrastructures, adds extraordinary complexity and costs. Service providers need mechanisms to efficiently serve all of these end devices with a single medianet.

Rise of user-generated video: The cost of video production and editing tools continues to drop, making video creation and distribution capabilities available to the masses. As more video consumers become video creators, operators can expect user-generated content (UGC) to make up a significant amount of their overall video traffic. Service providers will need new tools to integrate, catalog, and distribute such content to subscribers.

Demand for more social and interactive experiences: Viewers are already engaged in rich social networking and interactive content sharing on the Internet. Now, service providers must bring those same "Web 2.0" capabilities to the TV, bringing personalized home pages, sites like MySpace and Flickr, and RSS feeds and Web content into the TV experience. Operators that can deliver these capabilities will not only gain subscribers and customer loyalty; they will unlock a new world of advertising and supplemental revenue opportunities (Figure 1).

Demand for greater mobility and control: Customers want video content that adapts to their own lives and schedules. They want to watch whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever and however they choose. That means the ability to record and share programs over the network, to access time-shift services such as "look-back" and "start over," and to extend media content across multiple screens (TV, PC, mobile device), even within a single session.

As a colleague, Keith McMahon noted today, Cisco already had a lot of assets in this space, and needed to glue them together - Medianet is clearly the badge by which it is being done.

But it is a signal that the war to build and populate multi-media platforms / ecosystems is beginning if the big iron boys are starting to supply the gear.

Dave Winer has a post up, looking for something to fill the gap between simple messaging systems with limited length (eg Twitter) and the far more complex systes such as Friendfeed. We're not certain there is such a gap, as shown in the diagram:



Sez Dave:

Twitter is to FriendFeed (in 2008) what MS-DOS was to the Mac (in 1984). Have we come full circle? Amazingly I think we have.

In the 80s, MS-DOS users argued whether or not we needed a graphic operating system. "Need" was the big idea. They said they could do everything you could do with a Mac on the PC, and they were more than right about that -- they could do more on the PC than you could do on a Mac because there was more software for it. In 1984 the Mac had a lousy spreadsheet and a cheap word processor, and whole categories completely missing like databases. This is analogous to the correct argument that Twitter has more people to connect with, and of course that's the whole point of both products -- connecting with people. Twitter wins that one, hands-down, nolo contendere. And FriendFeed, even in its name, admits that this is the game, after all it's called FriendFeed, not CoolFeaturesFeed, although of course, that's why I like it.

Problem is, most people are voting the other way with their digital feet, and I humbly submit the reason is as I charted above. The total population who have the time to deal with complex messaging of lots of stuff is small.

Not only that, the simple systems are being used in ever more sophisticated emergent ways, so they increasingly become "Good Enoughs", squeezing that gap a bit more.

As we have noted throughout this year, most people want their content Filtered, not Firehosed. And from time immemorial in New Tech, people will vote for the simpler thing.

The news today is full of Facebook Connect (here and here for eg) and even on the Economist.

The Economist as always does an excellent job of summarising the issues:

It is an ingenious stab at solving several nagging problems at once. Web surfers like to socialise while they browse the internet, but many prefer to do so only with their friends rather than with perfect strangers. Previously, they could post web links back to their social network by clicking on a button called “Share This” or something similar. With Facebook Connect, however, they can interact with their friends while on another site. On a news site, for example, they can see what their friends are reading, how they rated a story, and what comments they left.

Many website owners like this because it lowers the entry barrier to new visitors who may want to interact with the site—by commenting, for instance—but don’t like the hassle of registering. Better still, the website is granted access for one day to the visitor’s public information on Facebook, such as his tastes or travels, which means content and advertising can be targeted accordingly.

I.e. in exchange for making it easier for you to do what we want you to do anyway, we are going to scrape your user data and pimp unwanted stuff at you. Some bargain - but its the sort of aggregation play that only large walled gardens can afford in the early days - you don't payz your money and you don't getz the choice. Later, maybe, true Open systems will come.

But why use Facebook - its basically Yahoo 2.0, a Social Media Portal (complete with Groups, Ads, Widgets etc) with fairly clunky comms bolted on as an afterthought. Much more elegant would be to use something like Twitter (or any User ID that lets me access a sophisticated Comms system and my social connections). As Dave Winer notes:

We're now reaching the end of a cycle, we're seeing feature wars. That's what's going on between Facebook and Google, both perfectly timing the rollouts of their developer proposition to coincide with the others' -- on the very same day! I don't even have to look at them and I am sure that they're too complicated. Because I've been around this loop so many times. The solution to the problem these guys are supposedly working on won't come in this generation, it can only come when people start over. They are too mired in the complexities of the past to solve this one. Both companies are getting ready to shrink. It's the last gasp of this generation of technology.

So, in the light of Next Generation thoughts, how about......:

Twitter Connect would be a much more elegant service simply because Twitter is better at doing that one thing - communicate with people on your social network. If you are interacting on/over/in etc other people's content, why bother with a portal?

I know its tres fashionable to trash email as a failure compared to more modern (aka incomplete) systems like Twitter etc (Coding Horror being the latest to cast aspersions) - but is it really true? For example, he pointed to thoughts by one Tantek Celik on the subject (abridged below)

1. Point to point communications do not scale.

All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of "To" in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually "working" on any thing in particular

However, while 1:1 email is not scaling for me, I feel like 1:1 IM is scaling which would seem to refute the above reasoning. There are two reasons why this is not so:

1. You are only busy with instant messages (IMs) from people when you are active in your IM client. People can only send you IMs when you choose to be online, rather than whenever they choose to do so. This gives you much tighter control over both how much and when you IM, as opposed to email which continuously piles up whether you are online or not.
2. Perhaps IM simply has a higher scaling limit than email. That is, per the three hypotheses, since IM is much more usable than email, perhaps there is a factor of 10 or more in terms of the number of IMs you can receive and respond to as compared to email. In other words, perhaps IM also has a 1:1 scaling limit, but just one that I haven't encountered yet.

Now this is just not a valid comparison. He's comparing a system which has total persistence to one which you limit the participants, only communicate when you are using it, and that has no persistence. Of course its going to be less overloaded, because you're governing it in all sort of ways. I think nearly everyone who pans email and praises (insert your favourite comms system du jour) makes the same cognitive errors:

(i) Your email address is usually more universal, ie more people contact you on it - thus, by definition, the volume of email will be higher

(ii) Email is typically used by people you have to talk to, IM by people you prefer to talk to. Imagine if everyone used Twitter the main comms medium, and email was a private system between friends. Boot, foot, other......

(iii) Email has persistence (it builds up) and is Asynchronous (it waits for you). IM's are the falling trees of comms - if you are not there to hear them, they don't exist.

If IM had persistence and was used by all people to talk to you, it would mount up as quickly as emails do. Or, if emails faded away within seconds of not being read and only a few people had your address, it too would be a wonderfully lightweight system.

Where I think he is more on the button is here:

2. Emails tend to be bloated with too many details and different topics.

Email requires more of an interface cognitive load tax than IM (as compared to the time spent on writing the content itself), thus people naturally put much more into an email (perhaps in an unconscious effort to amortize that interface tax overhead across more content). People may feel that since they are already "bothering" to write an email, that they might as well take the time to go into all kinds of detail, and perhaps even add a few more things that they're thinking about it.

In other words, people write too much stuff in an email. In this respect systems like Twitter are better, they force you to say your piece in 140 characters (its why I don't like Friendfeed - that's Twitter for people who like to woffle).

Actually though, I'd argue the problem with email is that the cognitive load tax is too darn low - for the sender - i.e. there is just not enough of a transaction cost to make people think twice about writing and sending their essays off to multiple cc's. This low transaction cost is true as well for all IM, but that is mitigated by typically no CC capability, non persistence and not being asynchronous. In fact, that is Email's problem - it is just so powerful in comparison, that the "just click to call" simplicity becomes a problem

No, the real trick to make Email usable (and in fact to make any mass comms system that replaces it usable) is, counterintuitively, to put more of a cognitive load on the sender upfront. Now, looking at Coding Horror's 3 thoughts in that light:

We should avoid sending email out of a deep respect for our peers -- so that they are free to communicate as effectively and as often as possible with us.

1. Channel that private email effort into a public outlet. Discussion boards, blog entries, comments, wikis, you name it. If it can be indexed by a web search engine, you're in the right place -- and many more people can potentially find, answer, and benefit from that information.

Interesting idea....but how might it work in practice? Do you still need to send a mail/twitter/whatever saying where they can find it? (And in some cases, the last thing you want is for comms to go public - its more than your cover that gets blown ). Nonetheless, a good idea.

2. If you must send email, make it as short as possible. Think of it as Strunk and White on speed. Can you reduce your email into a single paragraph? How about two sentences? How about just the title field with no body, even?

Now this I think is a Twitterific idea - imagine if emails only allowed say 500 characters before the writer had to go through some hassleful procedure to get more (ah, they'd send it all as attachments, making it doubly irritating)

3. Remember the theory of communication escalation. Email is just one communication tool in our toolkit; that doesn't mean it is always the right one for whatever situation is at hand. Take advantage of phone calls, instant messaging, text messages, and so forth, as appropriate. Scale your choice of communication method to the type of conversation you're having, and don't be afraid to escalate it (or demote it!) as the ebb and flow of the conversation shifts.

Don't you just love those people who email you, ring you to see if you got it, and ping you on Skype "just to make sure".

So none of this (with the exception of the 1st) will really solve the problem, which is that email is a more powerful comms system than the others and too easy to send. It comes back again to increasing the sender barrier, so they self-regulate.

Taking a leaf from IM's book, imagine if:

- You could only send emails to 4 people at a time (like Skype)

- Emails were only 500 characters (like those text boxes on some websites) and no attachments allowed, just url links (Twitter)

- You chose who had your email address (all IM), and anyone else's emails to you were dumped into a "don't see um" tank (Twitter)

- Any email sent to you when you weren't online bounced back to the sender "undelivered - try again later" (IM)

Email would be wonderful, as you can see - of course, some other system would have to take up the mass comms load, and people would bitch about that filling up their inboxes, but hey......

(Which is my point, really - if we didn't have email, we'd just have to invent it again)

Three twts do not a summer make, but I was musing this morning on the changing nature of where I got my blog reading from - and then a comment from Steve Bowbrick and a link to this post by Fred Wilson popped up (on Twitter). Fred's post notes that:

I've never used an RSS reader. I've used services like Techmeme and Hacker News to surface interesting posts for me. I still do. I visit each of them about five or six times a day. They are my RSS readers for tech news. Twitter does the same thing for me, but I also get stock news, political news, family/friend news, and some humor too. It's like reading a custom built newspaper.

But enough about Twitter. This post is about Techmeme. I've been obsessed with Techmeme for the past couple years. And I think that obsession is coming to an end. I still plan to visit it as much every day. But I think I'll stop jonesing for my posts to get picked up there. The conversation is happening all over the place anyway and I don't think any one service will ever be able to host it all anyway.

....and Steve notes that:

I discover more interesting stuff in my first 10 minutes on Twitter in the morning than in a fortnight of... you know... all the other stuff

I started reading "blogs" via surfing and RSS reader, overloaded my RSS reader (as one does), then stripped it down and started reading via Technorati search. It became clear hat what I was doing was looking for filtering sstems, so I set off to look at what was going on there. Digg and Delicious never did it for me - a bit too random. Tried taking in a few Big Blogs (TechCrunch, GigaOm) but they seemed too narrow to use as "filters". When Techmeme came along I was very impressed, though as Fred notes, of late its gone more for the Big Blogs so there is less variety (and more PR primping in my view). Friendfeed never did it for me, I think its partly critical mass, but partly format - most people there are not saying anything that could not be condensed to 140 characters.

Like Steve, I have been amazed at how Twitter has moved over the last year from being an airhead's delight to a system that is becoming remarkably good at filtering and highlighting interesting stuff.

So I am now watching with fascination to see how the Algorithm filter (Techmeme) and the Social Network Filter (Twitter) vie for influence on my (and others') attention span in the future.

From ZDNet comes news of Forrester's thoughts on why a company should use the Cloud rather than its own servers (I was going to comment on ZDNet, but their 2 page commenting signup process made me decide to blog it instead). Anyway, below is the economic argument:



Although this is all very true, unfortunately this is not the full picture of the real economics of Cloud computing. Here's why:

The sums you spend on The Cloud bit of the product or service are usually quite a small % of total value, unless the service is very processor / bandwidth intensive for its price (think YouTube). This means that the savings here are trivial compared to the risks you face if the Cloud:

1. Falls over and cannot serve your customers - in which case you stop paying the Cloud its pennies (hopefully you even have a few penalty clauses) but you lose Pounds.

2. In any way causes your confidential data to be lost, stolen or otherwise mishandled

3. Believes you have in some way abrogated its T&C and suspends your service.

To mitigate these you will need to ensure the Cloud contract also provides you with:

- A Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees a level of service (In the Old Networked Economy the Gold Standard was 99.999% uptime) plus a rate of response and penalty clauses that, if valid, motivate the provider to get you back up darn fast.

- An End User Licence Agreement (EULA) that makes it VERY clear that the data is yours, irrevocably, and cannot be used / sold / mishandled / stopped etc without VERY major damages to be paid. It is interesting to look at the EULA's of some current low end Cloud providers and seeing just who owns your data - a very recommended exercise for any would-be buyer.

- A Plan B, so if The Cloud in any way fails, you can switch over in a heartbeat to a working service. If this cannot be done, it requires you to pretty much run your own services, which means you may as well do some of it yourself - or back it off to a 2nd provider- in which case see if they can guarantee uptimes

These are the Real requirements for a Cloud service to be worth using for companies where the added value is high.

Now there are companies that can use it now, without these conditions being met - typically those with very high reliance on the infrastructure efficiency at this level, and where loss of service differences between value added and cloud costs are not too wide, and the added value of the content is not very high. Startups and processor hungry social media / user generated content plays fit this bill. For others, one really needs to get the sort of SLA and EULA that is common in traditional outsourcing to make it worthwhile.

I hate having to be the curmudgeon, but we are still firmly in the Hype stage of the Cloud (Gartner says so, so there!) and we probably need it to sink through its Slough of Despond before most commercial companies should look at it seriously - by then the cowboys will have gone out of business, the learning curve / Moore's Law effects will have made the services more reliable and economical, and there will be enough history with existing providers to know who is competent.

Until then, buy a spotty youth, a big server and a LAMP manual

Update - I see this this post has attracted the worst karma ratings since I had a go at Twitter in its geek first love phase - clearly Cloud is the new black (as broadstuff's writing and intellectual rigour is always of course above reproach, that cannot be the issue )

Friendfeed now offers an ability to post updates to Twitter, according to the Friendfeed blog. I saw this from Louis Gray's post, (via Twitter) which notes that:

The result essentially turns the lifestreaming functionality on its head. Rather than just have Twitter play a major role in inputting entries in user's feeds, FriendFeed now gives Twitter the chance to do more than operate as a microblogging tool, taking your personal FriendFeed, and mirroring it back Twitter's direction.

In other words please come and live your lifestream on Friendfeed, and we'll still tell all your Twitter friends what you are up to

For chatterboxes on Friendfeed this may seem like the opportunity of a lifetime to aggregate the rest of their lives and dump it on Twitter, but of course one of the strengths of Twitter is people can turn you off - and that has a strong moderation function. (In fact my main use of Friendfeed is to send all the noisy Twitter "power users" into it rather than following them, and get a once-a-day digest that I can scan in minutes - and to publish Broadstuff for people who would rather read it there.)

The question of course, if you are already on Twitter (which is the case for the far larger number of microblog users), is why add another intermediary to your personal workflow at all? To my mind Friendfeed - at the moment, anyway - is neither fish nor fowl. Its not closely linked enough to be a useful Twitter app, but it clearly doesn't really have a standalone role given that Twitter does most of what it can well enough, and has a far larger user base.