We’ve posted a minor upgrade, AllPeers 0.55.1, to the AllPeers download page. We fixed a bug that was causing crashes for a small number of users. In addition, we’ve made some fixes to the Spanish and Greek versions. Finally, we now have a brand new language: Brazilian Portuguese.
I’ve always seen myself as a software developer in the Bill Gates mold, minus the bad hair days. (Okay, minus the hair, period.) I’m as passionate about programming as the next guy, but money is definitely a major motivator for me as well. So it’s been hard for me to understand the mentality of open source developers who often seem positively repulsed by the slightest whiff of profit.
Working with Mozilla for a couple of years has given me a lot more opportunities to interact with the altruistic coding set, and I think I’ve finally nailed it. Basically if you say to an open source developer, “I’ll give you $1000 to do this,” they’ll look shocked and mumble something about being too busy. But if you say “I’ll bet you $10 you can’t do this,” they won’t sleep or eat until they’ve proven you wrong.
“History repeats itself,” goes the saying. “And historians repeat each other,” continue the wags. I just repeat myself. In November 2005 I was already blogging about the wonders of Techmeme (then Tech Memeorandum) and how the rise of aggregated news sites was leading me to unsubscribe from a growing number of RSS feeds.
Nearly a year and a half later, nothing much has changed. I still find probably 90% of the articles that I read on Techmeme, with a smattering on Google News (which I only seem to visit nowadays to find golf articles) and the rest in the tiny number of feeds I still subscribe to (mostly Planet Mozilla). Just now I spontaneously exclaimed to Cedric that if I were to start a new startup today and it couldn’t be AllPeers, I would focus on developing a customizable news aggregator. I know this has been tried before, but I still haven’t seen anything truly useful come out of these efforts. It’s a hard problem, but not nearly as hard as making a search engine that understands natural language queries, something some people seem to think is around the corner.
To reiterate: I want something that gives me the best of Techmeme and Google News, tailored to my tastes as identified by my RSS feeds, the pages I visit and the links on the aforementioned sites that I click on most. In addition, it should add posts from my feeds that exceed some algorithmic threshold, as well as pages that people like me have looked at. Initial setup has to be dead simple and provide instant results. Ideally I just upload my OPML file, tell it which aggregation sites I like most and it would spit out an already-pretty-good Techmeme style page, personalized to my tastes.
I hereby predict that the first usable offering of this type will appear over the next twelve months. Please indulge me by forgetting I ever predicted this if it doesn’t happen (and rest assured, I’ll be sure to brag about my prescience if I happen to get this one right).
One of the most heated discussions in the Mozilla room at FOSDEM concerned the Mozilla Manifesto, a draft of which was published recently by Chief Lizard Wrangler Mitchell Baker. As this excellent article on Inc.com explains, Mozilla faces the challenge of laying the ground rules for a completely new type of organization: an open source company that actually makes money… lots of it.
Traditional corporations have it easy; their goal is basically to maximize return on investment for their shareholders. Run-of-the-mill open source groups do not generally have to engage in too much soul-searching either. The vast majority are so small that they can operate on feel. And the larger ones mostly seek only to improve their software, with no revenues, business goals or other such messiness to distract them. Mozilla, on the other hand, is now attempting to reconcile the altruistic goals of an open source community with the needs of an entity that makes software for consumers, not developers, and finances its activity with a healthy stream of revenue from outside parties.
The Manifesto does an excellent job of making the Mozilla credo explicit. Despite nitpicking about the third principle (after all, who doesn’t think the internet should enrich the lives of individuals?), Fosdemers didn’t find much to criticize, which is quite remarkable considering the scope and ambition of the document. The main complaint, which I share, is that specifics about Mozilla itself are too intertwined with what might otherwise serve as a general framework underpinning a wide range of other companies and non-profits. One excellent suggestion (made by timeless, a mysteriously pseudonymous Mozilla developer) was that details like the history of the organization be included as annotations rather than embedded in the core text. I suggested that the pledges be reworked to make them as easy to adopt wholesale as the principles are (something that I think would require very few changes to the text of the document).
The real question is: will Mozilla succeed in its audacious goal of creating a new type of organization, able to compete in the consumer space against armies of blood-thirsty capitalists without become one of them? I admit to being mildly skeptical (while remaining steadfastly supportive). Won’t the best contributors eventually jump ship in the search for fortune, as well as just fame? Will the organization be able to maintain its democratic ethos as its staff, user base and revenues continue to grow? It’s certainly an awesome challenge, but then writing a successful web browser ain’t no piece of cake either, and Mozilla is as well-placed as anyone to give it a shot.
I’ve posted a new version of my system tray icon implementation to bug 325353. For those who haven’t been paying attention, this patch implements an XBL binding called “trayicon” that adds an icon to the system tray. It currently works on Windows only.
Key features of the trayicon are support for minimizing and closing windows to the system tray, choosing the icon/tooltip to use and displaying a context menu when the icon is right-clicked.
For this patch I tried to integrate all the feedback that I’ve received in comments to the bug. My goal is to get it reviewed and checked in as soon as possible. I also ported to the latest trunk sources, but I’ve posted a version for the 1.8 branch (Firefox 2.0) as well. I don’t expect the latter to make its way into Firefox, but I figured it might be useful to people creating their own Mozilla builds (including us). Finally, I separated out all the Windows-specific code to make it as straightforward as possible to create implementations for other platforms. I’m hoping that someone will step up and create versions for MacOS and Linux. There’s a sample extension attached to the bug if you want to give it a spin.
Long-term users of AllPeers will remember that we used to use this system tray icon, but we discontinued this because of various problems. In a nutshell, it felt too much like we were hijacking the browser by adding something as fundamental as a system tray icon with close to tray functionality. (This is a diplomatic way of saying that I nearly got lynched by a radical group of Firefox fanatics.) We have a strategy for resolving this, however, and I’ll be talking about this more in the (hopefully near) future.
This quote from Mozilla’s IRC channel makes a biting point about the absurdity of using DRM to prevent consumers from doing what they want:
<bz> there should be rules against copy/pasting code
<Jesse> you could enforce them using DRM
One of our fervent user sent us this picture today.
In case you are wondering, this is the Teletext service of Slovak TV channel Markiza talking about AllPeers. Nice catch!
Yesterday I came across two separate articles raising questions about Steve Jobs’s sincerity in his now famous “Thoughts on Music” essay. John Gruber brings up these questions only in order to refute them, referring to two negative reactions to Jobs’s announcement (by Paul Thurott and Paul Kedrosky) and explaining why the authors are dead wrong. Bill Thompson, on the other hand, is firmly in the skeptics’ camp. He simply doesn’t believe that Jobs means what he says when he calls for eliminating DRM.
This skepticism is rooted in the assumption that Apple will never willingly give up the benefits of the iPod/iTunes lock-in it has achieved thanks to its FairPlay DRM. What these critics seem to have forgotten is that the buzz when the iTunes Store was launched was that Apple, having failed to convince the major labels to forgo DRM, had concocted the least intrusive scheme possible out of necessity:
Jobs has been an outspoken opponent of so-called digital rights management (DRM) in the past, arguing that limitations on digital music will undermine the market for legitimate content.
It was only later, when people began to realize the implications of FairPlay on the dynamics of online music sales, that they decided that Steve Jobs, universally heralded as a business genius, must have seen this coming. (I first encountered this view in an article entitled “Convergence Kills” that was as prescient in this regard as it was dead wrong about Apple’s future entry into the telephone market.)
The reality is that Apple does benefit from DRM-induced lock-in, but this comes at a very high price. First of all, more and more people are finally accepting the obvious fact that DRM vastly reduces the size of the overall market for online content sales (Paul Kedrovsky’s boneheaded attitude notwithstanding). Also, the effect of this lock-in is probably exaggerated for the reason cited by Jobs in his article: the vast majority of tracks are still ripped from CD (or downloaded illegally) and are therefore bereft of DRM. Finally, there is a growing backlash against DRM both among the general public and at the governmental level, most notably the legislative action against Apple in a number of European countries that Jobs also mentions.
Seen in this light, it’s easy to imagine what was going through Jobs’s head. Apple was originally against DRM but was forced into it by the record labels. Now that it is perceived as having engineered the whole situation in order to sew up the market for online music, it is suddenly finding itself the primary target of the anti-DRM crowd. Nothing I’ve ever heard or read about Steve Jobs would make me doubt for a second that he would jump on the opportunity to set the record straight.
It’s true that his reasons for eschewing licensing of FairPlay to other parties are a bit thin, but you can hardly blame him when this is clearly the worst of all scenarios for Apple. The status quo at least affords Apple with a strong barrier to competition, whereas a DRM-free world would let Apple compete on its formidable design and engineering merits while getting a (perhaps slightly smaller) piece of a much, much larger pie. Licensing keeps the pie small but eliminates lock-in, so a little dubious spin is perhaps to be expected. But when Jobs says that he would prefer to see DRM go away entirely, I for one believe him.
Thanks a bunch to Wired News for including AllPeers in their 10 Best Firefox Add-Ons alongside DownloadThemAll, Greasemonkey, FoxyTunes, All-in-One Sidebar, FotoFox, Linky, Viamatic foXpose and User Agent Switcher.
Nick Carr muses about how technology stimulates economic inequality, with copious quotes from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. Using the example of the YouTube founders, he ponders why productivity increases appear to have benefited the rich and super-rich far more than the middle class, whose wealth is apparently growing even more slowly than that the poorest workers.
Bernanke’s analysis looks plausible as far as it goes:
A possible link between technological change and the substantial increases in the wages of the best-paid workers is that some advances, such as those that have swept the communications industry, may have contributed to the rise of so-called “superstars” - a small number of the most-gifted individuals in each field who are now better able to apply their talents in what has increasingly become a global marketplace.
It’s dangerous to base economic conclusions on anecdotal evidence, but this certainly jibes with my experience. People with highly specialized and sought-after skills are better able to monetize these skills, a result of straightforward supply and demand. In the past, a superstar programmer living in, say, Denver would only be able to earn the highest salary that a company in that city is willing to pay. Nowadays, secondary costs (e.g. communication overhead) associated with employing remote workers have fallen to the point that the same programmer can probably earn much, much more working for a company somewhere else in the world who values his or her unique skills more highly. In practical terms, demand for this individual has soared. Globalization has also made it easier for skilled workers to relocate, creating further efficiencies. The Economist recently ran a survey on executive pay (beware of pay wall) that reached a similar conclusion: top executives earn much more nowadays because they have more opportunities to sell their abilities to the company that can best exploit them.
None of this applies to those at the middle of the pay scale. Sure, technology may have made them more productive, but it’s probably done the same for less skilled workers as well. Garbage collectors and construction workers make heavy use of new technology and are more efficient as a result. White collar workers benefit as well, but not in a way that would make them salable on the “global marketplace” that Bernanke refers to.
One point that Nick doesn’t mention with respect to the very richest individuals is the importance of critical mass in making money from technology. The reason that the YouTube guys made so much money is that their business is so dependent on network effects. This leads to a winner-takes-all situation where the first player to reach the requisite tipping point garners the vast majority of rewards for the whole sector. Whether YouTube achieved this through superior skill, luck or timing is largely irrelevant. The fact is that people want to put their videos where the most people will see them and likewise seek videos where they are most likely to find them, a strongly virtuous circle. The same thing happened with Skype, eBay, ICQ and countless others, and as a result their founders all ended up filthy rich.
I’ve been using Bloglines as my feed reader since I started reading blogs, which was some time in mid-2004 if I recall correctly. In that period, it’s hardly evolved at all. The one thing that it has going for it is critical mass, which enables it to provide useful stats about how many people are subscribed to which blog. Over the years I’ve used the Bloglines subscription stats for Peer Pressure as a proxy for our total subscriptions, and I’ve watched it go from zero to 11 (when my family and close friends subscribed) to nearly 100 (after being Boing Boinged and Slashdotted a few times) to over 250 (after we announced AllPeers and started to get some buzz).
So it’s with some regret but also with exhilaration that I finally left Bloglines behind me this morning. As I mentioned, the site hasn’t really added anything new in years, besides a new Ajaxy UI a few months ago which I don’t find significantly better than the old one. On the other hand, I’ve been having problems lately keeping track of which blog posts I’ve read, since the new UI seems pretty buggy and doesn’t always mark a feed as read when I click on it. I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Google Reader, so I finally bit the bullet and switched (very painless to do with OPML, by the way). I’ll miss the Bloglines subscriber stats a bit, but when I have time I’ll try to figure out a way to get Feedburner up and running without changing our feed URL, which will anyway provide us with much more precise information about who is reading Peer Pressure.
Software companies based in the United States have traditionally had an advantage over the rest of the world, otherwise so many of the top names wouldn’t be American. No European or Asian company has come even close to attaining the dizzying heights of an Amazon, eBay, Yahoo or Google. Nonetheless, this situation is slowly changing and an occasional theme of this blog has been the rise of Europe as a software power.
One of the biggest advantages that European companies have over their counterparts across the pond is a better, more intuitive understanding of multiculturalism. Nowhere does this manifest itself more clearly than in language. The vast majority of Americans speak only English competently (if that), whereas most Europeans with any kind of education can get by in at least two, with many people speaking three, four or more languages proficiently. This gives you the kinds of deep insights into other cultures that are essential when delivering a product to an international audience.
AllPeers (the company) is no exception: among our 14 employees we have seven nationalities, with four working languages in our Prague office. So it’s almost ironic that the software has been available until now in English only. I’m pleased to announce that with v0.55 we’ve rectified this problem, with the help of a fantastic group of volunteers on Mozilla add-on translation site BabelZilla. The new version is available for download in the usual place. Besides support for Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Slovak, Spanish, there are a number of other improvements (particularly some new additions to the chat functionality) that you can read about on the download page.
Techdirt noted last week that Vista’s release has not evoked anywhere near the same level of excitement as that accompanying previous versions of Windows. And this despite Microsoft’s reported $500 million marketing budget for the new operating system. Heck, Bill Gates was even on the Daily Show the other day, setting Jon Stewart straight on such pressing issues as the correct use of the F12 key (and acquitting himself quite well).
So now it’s official: computers are no longer interesting devices. 90% of what most people do on their computer takes place in a web browser anyway, so the browser is much more important than the operating system (and garners the lion’s share of publicity and attention). And clearly the web apps that run in the browser are getting plenty of hype as well.
The true shift is, however, even deeper than this, as I explained in the context of Apple’s iPhone announcement. Computers are exceptionally complex devices. Even experts spend an inordinate amount of time struggling with conflicts, glitches, viruses and generally obtuse behavior. If we wanted a strong-willed nemesis whose motives and actions are often impenetrable, despite that the fact that we foot the bill for every aspect of their care and feeding, we’d all just adopt a teenager, right? Meanwhile, the processing power of cars, phones, televisions and even refrigerators is growing rapidly, without all the mess and bother of a general-purpose computing device.
The combination of the web and special-purpose gadgets is killing the personal computer, and with it any potential excitement about a new operating system.
Thanks to Doug and his girlfriend for sending us this photo. Now how did they manage to get one tee-shirt each…?
Thanks to Paolo for sending us this photo. Ermmm, should someone tell him the design is supposed to be on the front 
