Just in case people are wondering, Cedric and I were traveling last week, and by coincidence we’re both on vacation this week. So if things seem awfully quiet here, that’s why. Everyone will be in the office next week, so things will be back to normal.
We’re delighted to have won in the Data category alongside world-class companies like Google and Yahoo. Thanks to all of you who nominated us and then voted for us!
The finalists for the “Webware 100” awards were selected by the editors of Webware.com, a CNET site, but the ultimate winners were picked by the site’s users.
The “Webware 100” Awards recognizes the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation.
Webware.com editors received and reviewed thousands of entries.
Finalists were selected and featured in an online voting poll, where users voted and ultimately selected 100 winners in 10 categories.
John Lilly, Mozilla’s COO, clarifies his stance on Apple’s Safari strategy after his previous missive attracted more attention than expected. (Writing about Steve Jobs is always a great way to pump the ol’ traffic stats.)
He hits on a point that I’ve heard repeated on many occasions by top Mozillians: our goal is not to maxmize market share, but to ensure choice on the web (my paraphrase).
I understand and respect this point of view, but it does have implications for the (brace yourselves) Mozilla platform debate, which in my mind is very much ongoing. If you see Firefox as an old school web browser then John’s thesis is pretty convincing. 20-25% market share is plenty to ensure that people sit up, take notice and (hopefully) fix their broken IE-focused web apps to conform to web standards.
If you see it as a platform, however, a whole other dynamic takes hold. One of the most important considerations for any app developer in choosing a platform is how widely the associated runtime is deployed. In the case of AllPeers, we’re running on top of Firefox, and the more people who have it, the easier our lives are. (Of course we’re also keen to help switch people over to Firefox, as our recent bundle announcement attests.) As we move slowly towards a shared Mozilla runtime, the same is going to apply to all Mozilla-based apps. So perhaps it’s time to revisit Mozilla’s traditionally relaxed stance on market share.
Oh and John, is it me or does your favicon look a lot like the logo of golf fashion god J. Lindeberg?
Our graphic designer, Sasha, whipped up this adorable logo for Mozpad. Not that this is the most important consideration right now, but we’re allowed to have a little fun, aren’t we? I’m curious to know: do we love it? Hate it? Or are we profoundly indifferent?
Sasa, our genius graphic designer, has created a few banners based on the same designs we have used for the highly fashionable AllPeers tee-shirts (look for them on Matt and me at Supernova this week!).
If you have a blog or a profile or a homepage and you would like to tell your visitors about AllPeers, feel free to cut and paste the HTML code next to your favorite design.
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File Sharing for the Masses
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Dont stop sharing!
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Share Different!
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Weapon of Mass Distribution
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Weapon of Mass Distribution
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Steve Jobs’s recent moves have tended to have a crystal clear strategic motive. No DRM on music files? He wants to sell more music. The iPhone? He wants to enter a new and hugely lucrative consumer market. New OS X version? He’s continuing his quest to supplant Windows as the operating system of choice by piling high all those sexy features that Vista failed to deliver.
So I was more than a little confused by the Safari for Windows announcement. Aren’t browsers now commodities that all support roughly the same set of de facto and du jure standards? Firefox’s motives are clear because they want to prevent Microsoft from (re)achieving dominant market share and imposing their proprietary crap on us. But it’s less clear why Apple would see Safari as anything more than icing on the OS X cake, in which case offering a Windows version is counterproductive since it diminishes their operating system differentiation. I turned eagerly to Cringely for enlightenment, but under the layers and layers of conspiracy theory I have to admit that I still don’t understand why he thinks Apple needs Safari on Windows and why AT&T would care.
My moment of enlightenment, such as it was, came when listing to CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast. The “buzz crew”, who generally seem to pride themselves on being endearingly clueless (much better than being a know-it-all like me, I’m sure), were bitching about how the iPhone’s extensibility is based on web apps. They assumed that this meant they wouldn’t be able to use apps unless they were connected to the internet.
Au contraire, as I told them in a voicemail that was doubtless far too long and rambling for them to actually run. The clear trend is to add offline caching of code and data to web applications. In this way we can get all their advantages, particularly the fact that they are sandboxed and can’t do anything too terrible to your computer, without that pesky need for round-the-clock connectivity.
Of course offline functionality for web apps is still at a primordial stage of development, and the various implementations are highly proprietary, unlike HTML, JavaScript and the gang. Could it be that Apple plans to release its own APIs for offline apps in Safari? In this case, the Windows version would vastly increase the reach of these APIs (and turn bazillions of Windows developers into potential iPhone developers).
Probably no more far-fetched than Cringely’s theory… whatever it is.
UPDATE: Looks like I got the timing right on this story, for once, since Om Malik just published his own hypothesis.
UPDATE: So I got onto Buzz Out Loud after all, the following day (episode 496 for those who feel like trawling through it). One minute thirty-seven seconds of fame! And what’s more, I was listening to the latest TWiT this morning in the gym (5am workout courtesy of Prague/New York jet lag) and they put forth their latest prognostication about Safari on Windows: it’s all about the iPhone and Google Gears. You heard it here first.
I’ve posted minutes from yesterday’s meeting to the mozilla.community.mozpad newsgroup. Please join the newsgroup if you’re interested in following Mozpad’s activities, as several people have promised to post threads there and get some additional discussions going.
Just a quick note to let you know that we’ve put a maintenance release online: AllPeers v0.60.1. The biggest change is we fixed a problem some people were having updating from old versions of AllPeers to the new format. We also fixed a bug in the UDP support. If you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, don’t let that worry you.
The follow is a translation of an article from the French website Ratiatum that deserves to be read by the English-speaking among us.
In a ridiculous and grotesque judicial move, made possible by the DADVSI law passed by the UMP government and, above all, by the Vivendi amendment supported by Nicolas Sarkozy, the SPPF, which represents independent labels in France, is suing three P2P software vendors.
And so it begins! The Vivendi amendment, hotly contested when it was debated in parliament and passed by a whisker by the Joint Committee of the National Assembly and the Senate, has been put to the test by French music labels. They have filed suit against three software vendors: Morpheus, Azureus and Shareaza. It has to be said that they would have been wrong not to take advantage of this gift given to them by the De Villepin government and Donnedieu de Vabres, a government minister, a gift that was carefully wrapped, so to speak, by then Minister of the Interior and UMP president Nicolas Sarkozy.
The amendment, requested by the eponymous French conglomerate, punishes by three years in prison and a fine of 300,000 euros the publishing of “software manifestly designed for illicit use.” Never mind its lack of precision and the insecurity that it subjects software vendors to. Its application in civil law forces publishers of file-sharing software to put in place measures to prevent the downloading of illicit content. It is on this basis that the Société des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (Society of Phonogram Producers in France) filed suit against three software vendors. They hope to win the right to have the case judged in France and are asking for 20.3 million euros in damages and interest.
The choice of the three applications being targeted is interesting:
- Morpheus is a sitting duck that it is just too easy to take pot shots at. Already found guilty in the United States, it is itself seeking 4 billion dollars from eBay but no longer boasts a single user.
- Azureus is one of the rare open source programs to have dared to dip its toe in the waters of commerce by providing content publishers with a source of revenues. The publisher of the BitTorrent client has created a VOD platform, Zudeo (now Vuze), in the United States.
- Shareaza is an open source multi-platform application that has never had commercial ambitions, has never displayed any advertising and has therefore never earned a single euro of revenue. It is essentially the work of a lone developer. Even today, no ads can be seen on the official website nor in the software itself. It is nonetheless one of the most popular clients for downloading legal content from the Ratiatum download channel.
Since someone requested this, here is the complete transcript of our video tour. If anyone submits an audio translation we will produce a new version of the tour for that language:
Welcome
In this Tour, we will show you the basic principles of AllPeers, the easiest way to share files and webpages with your friends and family, privately and securely.
AllPeers runs inside Firefox. Sharing a whole directory of files is incredibly easy:
- First click on the ‘Share’ button,
- Then drag and drop the directory or the individual files you want to share,
- Enter your friends’ email addresses,
- Add a subject and a message and press “Share”.
Your friends will receive a message from you directly in their email inbox inviting them to install AllPeers and download your files. There is nothing to configure. Just enter your friends’ email addresses, and you’re good to go.
Importing Contacts
You don’t always remember your friends’ email addresses? No problem, you can import your contacts from Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail directly inside AllPeers. And don’t worry, no email will be sent to your friends until you actually share files with them!
AllPeers Navigator
Once your friends have installed AllPeers they will appear in your contact list. To display your contact list, simply click on the AllPeers button in the main Firefox toolbar. If your friends are online the icon next to their name will be red otherwise it is grey.
Sharing Files
To share files with an AllPeers contact, just drag the file onto their name. It does not matter if your firend is online or not. Or you can drag a folder. Or 2 folders. You can also share a webpage by dragging its tab. Or you can share all of the above at the same time. Oh, and AllPeers is also the fastest way to share a photo from the web. Just drag it from the page! Add a subject and a message, press ‘Share’ and off we go.
Downloading Files
When friends are sharing files with you, their name will turn bold and a “New in AllPeers” notification will be displayed in your Firefox status bar. Just click on their name and select the unread message to see what they are sharing with you. You can download individual files or download them all in one go. Once the file has finished downloaded, click on it to view it.
Downloading From Multiple People
In order for your friends to be able to download your files, you must be running AllPeers. However, if you are sharing with multiple people, as soon as one person has fully downloaded the file from you, there is no need for you to be online anymore since the file will be available from that person. If more than one person has the file, downloads are faster since you can different parts of the file from different people.
See Uploaded Files
To know if a contact has finished downloaded a file, click on their name and select ‘Outbox’. The word “Uploaded” in the thumbnails of the files that the contact has downloaded.
Chat With Your Friends
You can send a secure instant message by clicking on ‘Chat’ or right-clicking on your friend’s name. You can send instant messages even if your friends are offline. They will receive the messages next time the connect to the AllPeers network.
I’ve been studying the so-called “mental game” of golf lately, reading books like Zen Golf and listening to the excellent “Smarter Golf” podcast. Golf is mentally one of the most challenging sports, and not only because it’s so ridiculously hard to hit that tiny ball with a big ungainly crooked stick. You’re all alone over the ball, with no teammates to back you up and plenty of time to think about how badly you screwed up this very same shot last time you tried it three holes back.
The key to a strong mental game is to let go and stop stressing about past and (potential) future mistakes. Don’t set high expectations for yourself and don’t berate yourself if you fail to meet whatever expectations you do set. I’m a little high strung (and I have the broken clubs to prove it), so I’ve been working hard at this. And sure enough, you play better if you stay relaxed… and have more fun no matter how well you play.
Geez, you may be thinking, what is he blathering on about this time? Bear with me, I have a point here. I’m also reading Barry Schwartz’s excellent The Paradox of Choice, and he expounds on what I realized yesterday is a very similar theme. Right now he’s explaining the difference between a “satisficer” (happy as soon as they find something that meets their standards) and a “maximizer” (always looking for the very best, dammit, and never quite sure that they couldn’t have done better if they hadn’t looked just a little bit harder). The bottom line is that satisficers end up happier in the long run even though their stuff might not be as super duper way cool.
This is the best hint yet to solving my content consumption woes. I might look into speed reading, though I’m reminded of the old Woody Allen movie where he reads War and Peace in ten minutes and then summarizes: “It’s about Russia.” But at the end of the day, the important thing is to have the right attitude towards entertainment, and to remember that it’s something to be enjoyed, not to be terrorized by. Easier said than done in my case, but hey, I feel better already.
This is one of the four funniest things I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks.
We currently have two proposals out of seven for the proposed action items on the wiki. If you have volunteered to champion an item please take the time to write a proposal (a few sentences is plenty). If no one steps up to write a proposal we’ll have to drop the corresponding items.
Also, a reminder that I posted proposed wording for the overarching Mozpad mission. I’ll post this to the newsgroup (mozilla.community.mozpad) as well, and this will hopefully foster some discussion.
I would proposal this Wednesday (June 13th) for the next Mozpad meeting, same bat time, same bat channel. If this doesn’t work for people, please propose alternatives in the comments here or in the newsgroup.
UPDATE: Voting will be closed today so if you have been too lazy until now, now is your last chance to show your love to us!
Thank you to CNET Webware Editors and the Web 2.0 User Community for naming AllPeers a Finalist in the “Webware 100” Awards.
The “Webware 100” Awards recognizes the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation. AllPeers was chosen amongst 4,000 user-submitted nominations.
So now if you are reading this blog, you must help us win this competition by clicking here and voting for AllPeers.
If you don’t click here to vote for AllPeers or if you click here but vote for someone else, things could go horribly wrong for you. I don’t want to be heavy-handed but Pierre from Paris did not click here to vote for AllPeers and his house burnt the day after. Patrick from Texas did not click here to vote for AllPeers and his wife left him for another man. Mary from Toronto did not click here to vote for AllPeers and her mother-in-law made a surprise visit for a whole 2 weeks.
So no pressure people, click here and vote for AllPeers. We know who you are…
Okay, call me frivolous but check out this Wall Street Journal article. Is it me or did they totally steal my brilliant idea for a post title? What’s more, they’re actually charging for the article.
Anyone know a good lawyer?
