TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Another Tag Silo - Twitter Hashtags

A few days ago, I riffed on how the failure of user-powered tagging was what was driving the need for a semantic web - that jumbled, discontiguous tagging implementations had created a plethora of tag city-states who’s inability to talk on a “national” level had reduced the tagging movement to a curiosity.

Today, another entrant in the form of Hashtags - tags for twitter post. Again, useful within the silo of the twitter-verse, but clunky to extend outwards. You can read more on hashtags via stoweboyd, or stephanie booth, or check out full coverage.

The stated purpose of hashtags is to all one to follow a topical twitter-stream, as was useful for those techies fleeing the SoCal fires this past year. But how much cooler would it be if you could stitch together Twitter content, Flickr coverage, posted videos, blog posts, and news, into a single realtime view of a given situation? That would look a lot like the output of a semantic application.

To do so now would require onerous hard-coding of proprietary hooks into each services API (twitter, flicker, youtube, etc.), with more custom coding to parse out time and geo-relevance data. As I mentioned in my previous article, a two-tiered tagging system composed of machine and human tags, shared in a consistent format, and conforming to common baseline standards would enable this.

hashtags, semantic, tagging, tags twitter

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The Phone Rings for Thee: Google to announce Monday?

The WSJ is reporting that Google is set to announce its GPhone plans Monday (Nov. 5), announcing partnerships with T-Mob and Sprint initially. God willing, that will push bloody Facebook and OpenSocial off of TechMeme for a few days.

So - what does a GPhone mean to me?

Familiar Business Model: I’m assuming that the GPhone will be a mobile OS built by Google, deployed on hardware built by others, serviced by multiple carriers, supported by localized advertising of some kind. That layout seems like a natural fit for Google: its got a familiar business plan, a familiar ethic (open platform!), and forwards the mission of organizing all of the world’s data, an increasing amount of which, in the form of call records, contact data, videos, and photos is tied up in mobile devices. Hell, if you think about it, its an near mirror of the desktop world: Google writes apps and services, deployed on hardware by multiple vendors (every desktop and laptop ever made), supported by ISP’s.

Optimized for the Cloud: IMHO this is where Google will really differentiate. If the OS provides a well-conceived conduit into Google’s cloud, it will be golden. I want to…

1. Access my mobile voicemail through GMail online.
2. See my call history online.
3. Be able to make voice calls online and see that history on my mobile.
4. Have a single online/mobile contact infoset.
5. Save & load pictures and video too and from a GDrive storage cloud automatically.
6. Enjoy true calendar integration - i.e.: if a GCal event is set with an alarm 15 minutes before, I want my phone to ring with a reminder, wherever I am.
7. A full suite of API’s and mobile developer tools to spur development and innovation on the platofrm.
8. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Apple is inching its way there with the iPhone/iTunes marriage - but its synchronization is limited to your desktop, whereas Google’s is global. Of course, Apple’s strategy is tuned to the mass market - its a model that people are familiar with, as reflected in sales. I’m guessing that Google’s geek-centric value propositions are going to see slower initial adoption, buy greater long-term penetration, even if white labeled.

Fundamentally, a single repository for your communications info, accessed through multiple channels (phone, internet) just makes sense. Google, as others have noted, is a natural fit to quarterback this combination of software, hardware, and infrastructure. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Google can pull it off.

apple, google, gphone, iphone, microsoft, sprint, tmobile wsj

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Miro vs. Joost: The Doctorow Doctrine

Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing’s slayer of DRM, writes this morning about open source Joost-killer “Miro.”

Miro has done extensive outreach to indie creators, has no privacy-invading tracking of your viewing habits, delivers HD video, and is built on free software and open standards. [from BB]

Download the free software, pick the channels you want (over 2,500 of them at present, and anyone can publish new channels), and Miro will subscribe to your favorite net-shows, checking their RSS feeds for new episodes and downloading them with BitTorrent… It doesn’t matter what video format the shows are in, because Miro includes VLC, the open video player that can play pretty much every file-format on the net. [from BB]

Cory then points us to the Miro vs. Joost page on the GetMiro site, which summarizes Miro’s benefits vis-a-vis Joost, and wraps it all up with “Do you want corporations to decide what you watch?”

A few thoughts:

Yes. Most people do want corporations to decide what they watch. That’s what the vast, vast majority of people have accepted already with cable TV, satellite TV, BlockBuster or NetFlix for rentals, and so on. If you really think about why that is, it makes sense: media corporation’s programming decisions reflect aggregated demand trends - i.e.: to produce popular programming, they produce shows that people will want to watch - i.e.: they’re acting as a content filter based on their gestalt understanding of popular culture.

That understanding is never perfect, and to be sure media co.’s are guilty of trying to manipulate popular culture and dumb it down (boy bands, “reality” tv, and everything else banal). But - independent programming isn’t inherently any better - take a look around YouTube and see how culturally significant or politically insightful the average user-created, crowd-sourced, indie-produced net clip is.

So - regardless of my own political affiliations, do I consider freedom from corporate rule to be a source of competitive advantage for Miro? No. Consumers want to consume. Not filter, sift, evaluate, subscribe, and then consume.

Corporations remove all of the barriers between consumers and consumption, and consumers have stated - more or less unanimously - that they’re willing to pay the financial and cultural (reduced selection) price for that value proposition. Joost recognizes this, and capitalizes on it.

Ultimately, Miro is positioning itself as a long-tail content portal - an entirely valid niche product category, where it will no doubt enjoy success in a number of market segments. Positioning itself vis-a-vis Joost, is IMHO folly, however - its a different value proposition that appeals to different usage scenarios and different markets.

Hopefully Miro does better than the last, almost identical entrant in this market: crowd favourite FireAnt (see initial review comparing FireAnt to Joost, later problems, and “acquisition“).

boing boing, cory doctorow, doctorow, fireant, joost miro

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Google’s OpenSocial: tough questions outstanding

Let’s start by summarizing Google’s “OpenSocial” API: its a Microsoft strategy. OpenSocial is targeting developers with the hope that a plethora of must-have OpenSocial apps/widgets/services will drive adoption of the member social networks.

I have some questions…

1. Will OpenSocial get adoption in the developer community? The OpenSocial union depends on developers wanting to develop apps across the properties included. Are there currently crowds of developers complaining about how difficult it is to code for both LinkedIn and Orkut? If not, will OpenSocial kickstart the developer rush? Does OpenSocial serve a real need - or a business case / marketing strategy?
2. Will the availability of widgets translate into member growth? Assuming that the developer community does take to OpenSocial, will their produce translate into new members, increased activity from existing members, both, or neither? Does anyone really understand the market dynamics of the widget economy?
3. Where’s MySpace? Or Bebo? Obviously Facebook isn’t going to be a part of this. But - the one-tonne gorilla MySpace is still going out on its own API/developer path. From where I sit, its sort of looks like a third party situation in American politics - MySpace is the Ralph Nader that’s going to screw OpenSocial’s Al Gore. If only they could run on the same ticket…

Yeah - so I’m not too bullish on OpenSocial. It strikes me as an initiative that looks good on paper - but in practice lacks the market relevance to really get traction. Mathew’s more positive, though he notes the absence of FB and MySpace. Richard is rabidly enthusiastic. Marc and Ning are obviously happy too.

So - after weighing in all of those opinions, do I still think the battle is over? Has Facebook won? Well, no - but they have a significant first mover advantage and have repeatedly shown conceptual leadership in the social networking space while others have languished.

OpenSocial isn’t combating a lack of API’s for the included services; its combating the perception the each of these services is a has-been, or is irrelevant.

That’s a big uphill battle that will need to be won with innovation and excellence - not just whiz-bang API’s.

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Vudu is doomed

I just read this early review of Vudu’s $400 set top box, the purchase of which allows you to pay for movie rentals.

From a marred user experience (minute long start up times? HDCP funged-up HDMI ports?), to typically ham-fisted DRM schemes ($20 movies playable only on your Vudu box), to expensive and confusing pricing (buy the box for $400, the rent or buy movies, with different types of restrictions on each transaction), Vudu seems like the same old lame “exercise in compromise” that Hollywood-supported businesses excel at producing. Confusing, expensive, & complicated, and delivering a modicum of convenience for those who live particularly far away from blockbuster.

Vudu nails closed their own coffin with this quote:

“Our research indicates that our likely first customers will be heavy movie watchers who own HD TV’s and earn high incomes. They have demonstrated a willingness to invest today in tomorrow’s lifestyle.” [from Paul Stamatiou]

Hooray for buzzwords! Wealthy technophiles are also noted for making informed decisions - hence the failure of every similar service ever launched.

I’m running an informal survey on UpcomingDiscs.com - pop over and share your thoughts.

I truly believe that digital content distribution will supplant physical media in the very near future, but IMHO Vudu is not going to be the one to make it happen.

vudu

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7 Definitions of Web 3.0

A few weeks ago, Google’s Eric Schmidt managed to sound like both a n00b and a tasteless PR hack in the same 2 minutes, while trying to define “Web 3.0.” I wanted to try and round up some useful things about “Web 3.0″ that Schmidt could have said. So - to that end, here are 7 definitions of “Web 3.0,” ranked roughly in order of plausibility, coolness, and common-sense compliance.

7 & 6. ReadWriteWeb’s Web 3.0 Definition Contest

RRW held a “Define Web 3.0″ contest to give away tickets to Tim O’Reilly’s farce of a conference, the Web 2.0 (TM) Expo. RRW’s contest chose three winners, two serious.

The first is a near uninterpretable re-hash of they typical Tim Berners-Lee “Semantic Web Spiel,” only tangled in with cult-y ATOM evangelization:

“Atom, the Atom API and semantics, particularly Micro formats initially, are the constraints that will make this happen. Atom features not because of technical merit but by virtue of it’s existing market deployment in a space that most EAI players won’t even consider a market opportunity. Hence Web based components start using Atom API as the dominate Web API – Feed remixing is indicative. Atom will supplant WS* SOA.” [from RWW]

The second can be summarized with this gem:

“Web 3.0 to me is video-driven social networking, video-driven news blogs and user created entertainment, and video-driven email (yep..one day!).” [from RWW]

OW MY BRAIN. Are you kidding? Video email is the best you could come up with for “Web 3.0?” And RWW liked this definition enough to pay you for it? Dude, why don’t you just sign up for 3D Mailbox? The future is here today!

5. Business Week’s Stephen Baker

Stephen Baker apparently lead a panel on “defining Web 3.0” in Monaco (what’s the broadband penetration there, I wonder?), almost a year ago. Unfortunately, the results they came up with can be summarized as “more 2.0.” More cheap, more pervasive, more access, better data security. Damn, Stephen, that sounds like a service pack release, not a new paradigm. Definitely worth holding that high-powered panel in a swanky location.

4. HowToSplitAnAtom’s Definition

This definition doesn’t seem to offer anything new over what we have now. RSS feeds? Search verticals? Results clustering? Search by content type? Sounds like the sort of well-intentioned but uninspired upgrade Yahoo or Ask would make to their search engine, and the sort of mathematical mojo that’s already incorporated into Google’s algorithm.

“Web 3.0 will take this one step further. If you are searching for information on Cars, for example, you would use the search engine as you normally would, but your results would be more specialized subengines. I would find BMW Search or Kia Search. From there, I would be able to dig deeper and find items that have been tagged as relating to BMW and sort them into their major categories (pictures, videos, blog posts, news articles, commerce etc…) Each of these could be captured as an RSS feed so that I can be alerted when something new is added to by search profile.” [from HowToSplitAnAtom]

3. Phil Wainewright - Layered Architecture, New Business Models

Phil tackles Web 3.0 from the enterprise direction, laying out a three level structure that he expects the next generation of companies to work in. API Providers are at the bottom, Service Aggregators act as middlemen, and Application Services (consumable products) sit on top. Profitability grows from the bottom up, with Applications being money-makers, and API’s being commoditized.

I’d like to make one thing is absolutely clear right from the outset: Web 3.0 isn’t just about shopping, entertainment and search. It’s also going to deliver a new generation of business applications that will see business computing converge on the same fundamental on-demand architecture as consumer applications. So this is not something that’s of merely passing interest to those who work in enterprise IT. It will radically change the organizations where they work and their own career paths. [from ZDNet]

Huh. Not bad - Wainewright has laid out an architecture for the delivery of next generation services, which certainly counts for something. What he doesn’t specify, however, is what those next generation services may or may not be - for the enterprise, or consumer spheres. Wainewright has a whole series of articles on this theme, however, which I admittedly haven’t had time to sponge yet.

2. Valleywag: Web 3.0 is still Web 2.0

Valleywag points to two examples of 3.0′ish companies - Radar Networks (semantic search engine), and Spock (people search engine). And then relates succinctly why they aren’t really 3.0 at all:

The problem with Spock and the greater ideal of a semantic Web is the continued need for human input. Intelligent tags for metadata don’t magically appear. Humans need to establish the relationships between data points. Even Spock claims to rely on users to ensure personal data is correct. Spock is going to have a hard time keeping tabs of all 6 billion people. How exactly is a semantic Web going to manage a world’s worth of data? Wikipedia can barely keep itself straight. [from Valleywag]

Well said. I love VW. These 3.0 services are just aggregating 2.0 data and functionality - an incremental step, but hardly a leap. As such, VW’s hasn’t so much provided a definition of 3.0 as it has eliminated pure aggregators from that definition. That’s an elimination I agree with; aggregation can add value, but crafting a paradigm shift out of remixed existing data is a big step.

1. Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web

Yup: #1 is still the seminal definition, from the father of the internet. In a nutshell, TBL’s 3.0 is much more structured markup and automation via a device independent, hyper-connected services architecture.

In this version of the Web, sites, links, media and databases are “smarter” and able to automatically convey more meaning than those of today. For example, Berners-Lee said, a Web site that announces a conference would also contain programming with a lot of related information embedded within it.

A user could click on a link and immediately transfer the time and date of the conference to his or her electronic calendar. The location - address, latitude, longitude, perhaps even altitude - could be sent to his or her GPS device, and the names and biographies of others invited could be sent to an instant messenger list. In other words, the “mark-up” language behind each Web page would be cross-referenced into countless other databases, once developers agreed on a common set of definitions. [from IHT]

My thoughts? The interactions and automation enabled by pervasive, well-structured and mappable meta-data would truly herald a “next generation internet.” But - at the core, this vision seems to be incomplete. While the means to store and communicate meta-data may be under construction as we speak (i.e.: evolving standards), the means of automating the creation of that meta-data is less so; without the always-in-the-future “intelligent agents” working to categorize & connect data, we fall back to algorithms, keywords, and the fragmented universe of human-powered tagging - which is where we are already.

So - while I can appreciate the vision and see its utility, my gut feeling is that TBL is talking about Web 5.0. The notion of “semantic information” has much thinking to go into it yet before it will truly revolutionize our day-to-day lives.

In Summary

The variance in definitions makes clear that 3.0 is still a moving target. The definitions out there oscillate between minor increments to the functionality paradigm we enjoy in 2.0 to AI-enabled visions of a connected future (5.0?). The reality will probably be both stranger and more boring than expected, landing somewhere in the middle.

Automated connections between databases, for example. Speaking to Valleywag’s concerns (or HowToSplitAnAtom’s vision), I think there’s still plenty of value to be found creating automated connections between human-populated databases. Del.icio.us tags could be adding semantic information to Yahoo!’s search algorithm, for instance (why they aren’t doing this already, I don’t know). Its a step towards TBL’s vision, but only about 1% of the way there.

Would integrating del.icio.us into their search algorithm make Yahoo! Search a 3.0 product? Ultimately, does it matter? As with 2.0, I think the definition will be emergent, defined gradually by a million small decisions, changes, and startup launches that take place daily. A few years from now, we’ll look back at today and be able to elucidate how whatever it turned out to be started; at the moment, however, were too deep in Weeds 2.0.

All of which makes me all the more annoyed by Eric Schmidt’s speech. With everything there is to talk about, and with all the mind equity at Google, he could have said something meaningful instead of just reading off a press-release about Google Apps.

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Testing Wordpress Geotagging Plugin

This post is to test out a Wordpress Geotagging Plugin that I modified. The original plugin would add a “view map” link to a given post (and a great geotagging UI to the admin interface), but the modified version I built actually adds technorati-friendly geotags to the post itself, allowing for indexing by external applications - such as BlockRocker.

geotagging

Show on map

geo:lat=49.8928788516078 geo:lon=-97.1449327468872 geotagged

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Spock: Idiocy Writ Large

Well, well. According to Wired, hype-heavy people search engine Spock thinks people that write about pedophiles are pedophiles themselves, and isn’t afraid to share that knowledge with the world.

Jaideep Singh responded to Wired:

CEO Jaideep Singh claims Spock is no different than Google, indexing and aggregating information already available elsewhere on the web. Spock spiders major social networks and public sites, culling text and photos and adding descriptive tags to build your profile. If you’ve got a page on MySpace, Hi5, Friendster or Wikipedia, odds are good you’ve also got one in Spock’s 100-million-profile database. [from Wired]

Umm, no, halfwit. Google associates information with WEBPAGES. Spock associates information with PEOPLE. Those two things are different - in the latter case, mistakes are known as “libel.”

From the get go, Spock has reeked to me of dot com bubble. Hype, hype, hype. A technology that people don’t really seem to be clamoring for. Frat boy, misogynistic office environment. And now this: a technology that sucks, and stupid, deceitful means of driving adoption and collecting data (the “Mad Libs” app that Wired talks about). Back in the good old days, all of these clowns would have been consultants somewhere and at least inflicted themselves on clients only, instead of the the 100 million victims Spock has “indexed.”

google, idiocy spock

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Identity 2.0: Great Presentation from OSCON 2005

Just stumbled across this presentation by Dick Hardt (CEO of Sxip) at OSCON 2005 on Identity 2.0.

Its a fantastic summary of the notion of “Identity” - starting with our physical identity, credentials, and the transactions we undertake (i.e.: buying alcohol), and walking through site-centric, silo’d “Identity 1.0,” and taking us to the notion of Identity 2.0: open, portable, extensible, secure identity, which is sxip’s business.

Download Quicktime: small, large.

Stream Flash Video: Launch from here.

identity, oscon sxip

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Eric Schmidt (& Google) Miss the Point on Web 3.0

I just saw this perplexing video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt trying to explain what Web 3.0 is.

Ultimately, it seems that Schmidt just tries to shoehorn Web 3.0 into Google’s product strategy, talking about cloud apps that run on a variety of devices and that can be distributed virally. Is Schmidt trying to wag the dog here? Because on the Internet, the wag dogs you, dude. In all seriousness, trying to see emerging themes on the Internet is a fuzzy business in and of itself; trying to control those emerging themes by redefining them in your own terms is double bad as it (a) adds nothing back to the community driving the web’s evolution, and (b) traps you in your own mindset and positions you to miss the boat (see: Microsoft & the Internet).

I won’t even get into Schmidt’s definition of Web 2.0 (”the computer architecture we call AJAX”), or the fact that he dismisses the entire 2.0 movement as a marketing term. Talk about missing the point (AJAX??!) and disrespecting a lot of people, hard thinking, and hard work.

Google seems to be acting Microsoft-like. They’ve defined “what’s coming next” for themselves internally, and insulated by a layer of cash and a veritable-monopoly on several core products (search & advertising), show little care for what the rest of the ‘net thinks on the same topics. Google also seems to be Microsoft-fixated: the central thrust of their 3.0 vision directly combats Microsoft’s desktop model. I think these blinders are going to be a liability for Google in a 3 - 5 year timeframe.

Finally - what is Web 3.0, and how did Eric miss the point? I’m not sure yet.

cloud, eric schmidt, google, microsoft, web 2.0 web 3.0

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