Another excellent Wired article entitled “The Firefox Revolution”. Much of it is history-of-Firefox stuff that you can find elsewhere, but I found this exposé to be particularly detailed and entertaining. My favorite part is where the author (Josh McHugh) talks about the impact of Firefox’s growing market share on Microsoft’s plans for its next-generation operating system, Longhorn. He pegs the battle as a struggle not so much between web browsers as between APIs (XAML vs. XUL), just as I did in my “Bring Back the Browser Wars” essay last August. I especially like his contention that even smallish growth in Firefox usage is going to give Microsoft big headaches because it will no longer be ubiquitious, a precondition to imposing its proprietary languages on the world.
And a second great read I stumbled upon today: a summary by Jef Raskin of his book The Humane Interface. For those who don’t know, Jef was the original creator of the Apple Macintosh (before, by some accounts, control was wrested away from him by Steve Jobs). It’s rare to see a completely original take on user interface design now that the desktop paradigm is so firmly imprinted in people’s minds, and even rarer for one to make so much sense. In fact, we’ve unwittingly used many of his suggestions in AllPeers, including a complete lack of modal dialogs and a generic resource/action paradigm that closely resembles his idea of content and commands.
It strikes me that the perfect embodiment of his notion of a desktop-less user interface focused exclusively on manipulating different kinds of content is the web browser. People are spending more and more time in their browsers anyway, even when working with local data (witness Google Desktop, for example). What is lacking is a way to unify web interfaces across different types of content. Currently, the operations that can performed on HTML pages are pretty limited (basically they can be viewed and nothing else), and native support for other content types is restricted to images. Support for other content types can be achieved only through use of plugins based on a very low-level API, precluding the kind of user interface rationalization that Jef proposes.
Nonetheless, I think it would be much easier to add these capabilities to existing web browser architectures than to modify fully blown desktop-based operating systems like Windows and MacOS to conform to a simpler and more intuitive usage model. Seeing as Linux is groping around for a way to penetrate the desktop market, why not just go the whole nine yards and use Mozilla Firefox as the native user interface? A bit of a stretch, I know, but I can just about imagine a MozillaOS based on Linux that boots up in the web browser and stays there.
Sure, some might say, but that’s exactly what Microsoft is planning to do with Longhorn. I haven’t actually looked at Longhorn myself, so maybe I’m shortchanging the folks in Redmond. But as far as I can gather, what Microsoft is doing is more about making the browser look like a desktop than the opposite. They simply have too much baggage (zillions of users, zillions of lines of code) to make a truly fresh start. Since Linux is still used primarily as a server platform without any graphical user interface at all, the open source folks have an opportunity to beat Microsoft to the punch with a radically new interface that is simpler, cleaner and more modern than anything that could be achieved by overhauling Windows.
The tagging battles rage on, with a slew of posts by Clay Shirky provoking an unusually active discussion among the Many-to-Many blog readership. As a card-carrying acolyte of knowledge management who is deeply skeptical about current efforts to create a semantic web, I feel like I can sympathize with those on both sides of the debate.
On the one hand, Clay has a point. After years of effort by slews of brainy individuals, the semantic web is going nowhere. Then one day someone strikes upon the right balance of usability and utility to create a tagging system that is both simple enough for people actually to use and robust enough to be of value to a community of users, not just the one doing the tagging. The new Technorati Tags feature drives home the point raised by the brilliant-in-their-simplicity tagging systems used by del.icio.us and Flikr, showing how cool it is to unify them with each other and with blog tags (which have been around for a while in a non-folksonomy manifestion).
So now we have something that actually adds value, and something is undeniably a whole hell of a lot better than nothing. The last thing we need is for some pedant to crawl out of the woodwork and demand that we pile complexity onto a working (albeit somewhat rough-and-ready) solution in the service of an abstract academic goal that patently isn’t feasible anyway. The only way to avert disaster, runs this argument, is to push back against the ontology-heads with all our might until they crawl back into their ivory towers and let us get on with our business.
Certainly the fact that these tagging systems have costs as well benefits is well worth remembering. But Clay goes a bit overboard in his excoriation of ontologies. The most glaring flaw in his argument is the assumption that ontologies for tagging stuff on the web are going to look more or less like the Dewey Decimal System. There’s a long continuum between flat tagging and a bloated, rigid hierarchy designed to catalog physical objects which, by their nature, can only occupy one spot in the taxonomy. It seems to me that we have every reason to believe that the sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle of this continuum, not at the edge.
Clay uses abstract concepts like “creativity” to demonstrate the absurdity of trying to determine, a priori, where a given tag should be placed in a hierarchy that is unavoidably incomplete and subject to change in the future. Fair enough. But why throw the baby out with the bathwater? Hierarchy would also let me say things like “dogs and cats are both animals.” Then I could see pictures of dogs, cats, rabbits and hedgehogs on Flikr by keying them indirectly to the animal tag. That sounds useful to me, and since it seems unlikely that dogs and cats are going to stop being animals any time soon, Clay’s argument loses a lot of its punch.
Tim Bray also has a good point when he notes that namespaces would give more structured communities the option of creating more powerful tagging systems without mucking up the communal tagosphere. (Blimey, did I just coin a term!?) This is another way to introduce hierarchy into the mix without spoiling the unsullied elegance of the plain vanilla folksonomy.
Always On, a community-cum-social networking-cum-blogging website created by uber-VC Tony Perkins, is publishing excerpts from a recent Silicon Valley schmoozefest held at the exclusive Churchill Club. The most recent transcript, entitled “Open Source Equals Open Content,” caught my eye because it sounded like it could almost be the name of an essay that I am currently finishing up (stay tuned!). As it turns out, the title is a bit of a gyp because the label “open source” seems to be have chosen precisely for its attention-grabbing potential, not because the subject under discussion has any relationship to open source software.
Nonetheless, the discussion begins promisingly. Tony, the moderator, points out how the blog revolution has turned the media equation on its head because readers no longer have to rely on a few centralized sources for their news and information (naturally Dan Rather is mentioned). Interspersed between (sometimes shockingly clueless) comments by the remaining panel members, who are all big name VCs and technology pundits, he elaborates:
…there’s a tension point right now between the open-source media people—where it’s a free-for-all of ideas, and there’s more transparency and collaboration—and the old-media model where editors control everything and there’s no participation. They have to control every damn thing that happens under their brand. When I say they’re going to ‘relent,’ I mean that they’re going to have to open up—because if they don’t, people won’t trust them, and they’re going to lose…
I think what he was looking for (and what I would have expected) was a discussion about how media will function in a future where centralized editorial control is rejected by a public with increasing access to a cornucopia of open information sources. Instead, he was slapped down instantly by his fellow panelists. Whereas it seems obvious to me (and presumably to Tony) that the current blog revolution and related trends in digital media are only the tip of the iceberg, with far more disruptive developments still to come, the others apparently feel that the revolution is already over. The very contention that open media like blogging will have a profound effect on established media companies is thus trivial because, hey, it’s already happened. What’s more, things are the way they are because that’s what people want. They’d like their newspapers and TV news programs to stay just the way they are, thank you very much, with blogs forming not a challenge but a nice complement. The proof? Well, people still read newspapers and watch TV news, right?
With all due respect, gimme a break! It would have been fun if Tony had mounted his soapbox to rubbish these arguments and expose them for what they are: extraordinarily short-sighted. But I suppose that isn’t how a moderator is supposed to treat his illustrious guests. Bloggers are not constrained by any such social graces, however, so let me take a crack at it.
A trend as important as blogging is news aggregation, something that was not discussed at all by the panel (at least in the published excerpt). I used to have a few online publications that I would read regularly, like Wired and the New York Times. Nowadays I only consult two online news sites: Google News and Slashdot. Both are aggregators; that is, they filter content from other sources rather than creating their own. So I end up reading articles in a huge range of publications, driven not by brand loyalty but by my interest in a given story. Google News is still fairly conventional in that the news sources are mostly online versions of print newspapers and magazines, but Slashdot is more inclusive and links to many blogs as well.
As anyone who has ever been involved in a software startup knows, it ain’t all about writing great software, sticking it up onto the web and listening to the sweet tinkling of cash piling up in your bank account. Unless you’re a breatharian, you happen to have cofounded Netscape or your father is Li Ka-shing, you need to find a way to finance your development team until revenues start to come in. This means succumbing to a fate that for most programmers is only slightly better than death: pitching to investors.
I’ve done my share of this over the past few years, and I have the scars to prove it. Certainly compared to the elegant intellectual immersion that is programming, it can be an exercise in excrutiating frustration to try to explain to a technical simpleton who can barely turn on his computer why your brilliant innovation is going to change the world. But this caricature is unfair for two reasons. First of all, while most potential investors aren’t hardened coders, some are… and in the software world the others tend to be bright individuals with significant technical knowledge and business smarts (otherwise how did they get all that money in the first place?). And secondly, those who are completely clueless about software often force us to confront issues that seemed obvious to us, until we tried to explain them to someone without the same background and world view (i.e. 99% of the population).
In the case of AllPeers, a question we get asked often is “why P2P”? Investors are understandably concerned that we are planning to sprinkle some magic P2P pixie dust on a bunch of existing application categories without a clear idea of why this is actually an improvement. This is very far from the truth, but having the question framed this way by people who aren’t necessarily going to go gaga over any and every new, sexy technology is a great way to ensure that you not only know what you’re doing, but you can articulate it clearly and convincingly.
All of this sprung into my mind in the context of the latest hullabaloo about Wikipedia, the (apparently) controversial collaborative encyclopedia project. I’ve written about Wikipedia before, including an article about the moderation woes that are at the heart of the current debate. I also wrote about how it would benefit from the infinite scalability inherent in a P2P architecture.
Another consideration that neatly unifies these two themes is the role of P2P in strengthening generic web infrastructure. Allow me to explain.
The web has turned out to be a fantastic software development platform thanks to a few key characteristics that represent a radical departure from how we used to make software. The most important is the use of a thin client that renders its user interface based on markup delivered to it by the server. This means that most web applications can run anywhere, both in the sense of “on any platform” (be it a Cray supercomputer or a handheld PDA) and “in any place” (so you can read your email on your laptop over a satellite phone while circumnavigating the globe in a one-man dingy).
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Platforms are the holy grail of software development because they offer the promise of creating an entire ecosystem that revolves around intellectual property that you own and control. As I argued in my last post, it’s getting harder to charge directly for using a platform because the internet has made it so much easier to develop and deploy free platforms in a distributed manner. But this doesn’t mean you can’t make gobs of money. Companies like eBay and Google have demonstrated how to generate huge, scalable revenue streams without using a simple-minded “just pay $29.95/month” pricing strategy.
So how do you know when your platform has made it? A useful rule of thumb is this: when you’re fighting to establish your platform, if user doesn’t have your software it’s tough luck for you. You can’t sell them complementary products and services and so you can’t make money from them. Once your platform is established, if a user doesn’t have it then it’s tough luck for them. All the cool applications are targeting your platform so the onus is on the user to get with the program or miss out. Once you reach this point you’re smiling all the way to the bank.
A cute analogy from the world of telecommunications occurred to me while in the States over the holidays. After a fun and relaxing trip to see my family in Connecticut (including my first meeting with my three-week-old nephew… he’s tiny!), I visited a friend in New York on my way back home.
“Call me on my cellphone when you get here,” she said. “My doorbell doesn’t work.”
It is evident from this that the mobile phone network in the United States now meets the criteria for a successful platform. Cellphone adoption in the U.S. has been slower than in Europe and Asia, and I imagine that even two years ago this would have been a case of tough luck for the platform. In other words, my friend would have had to go out and get her doorbell fixed or risk missing visitors. Now that cellphones have crossed that magic usage threshold, it’s the underequipped visitor who is out of luck. In essence, the wireless phone network has become sufficiently prevalent to take over the role of a lot of wired infrastructure (like that silly wire attached to your doorbell). And since essential “applications” (like getting into someone’s apartment) rely on owning a cellphone, the pressure to get one has become practically irresistible. As a result, the phone companies are making out like bandits.
Of course, none of this tells us how to create a successful platform, but at least we can recognize one when we see it.
