Abstract Curiosity

Speaker Presentation Files : Web 2.0 Summit 2009

2009-10-27T02:39:00.000-07:00

This is more a note to myself that these are on my TODO list.

Speaker Presentation Files: Web 2.0 Summit 2009

Enjoy,

/Paul

LinkedIn Surpasses 50 Million Users

2009-10-14T13:31:00.001-07:00

As reported by many folks, over at the LinkedIn blog, they now have hit the 50 Millon Professionals Worldwide.

There is a boat load of coverage which you can see via Techmeme, see link, about Linkedin.com reaching 50 millon professional users, but there is an interesting tidbit over at ReadWriteWeb.com (link),

“Update: Adam Nash, Vice President, Search & Platform Products at LinkedIn, says things are set to improve in the future. Below in comments he writes: "Marshall, I think you'll be quite happy with our plans for improvements to our APIs. Stay tuned." Fantastic! Let's see what you've got, Adam.”

/Paul

U.S. Web Users’ Time on Social Networks Has Tripled

2009-09-26T19:27:00.001-07:00

[via the great folks at Gigaom.com, see link]

“Around 17 percent of all time spent on the web in August in the U.S. was on social networks, up from 6 percent during the same period a year ago, suggesting that sites like Twitter and Facebook have not only grown their audience size, but augmented user engagement. Meanwhile, advertising on social networks rose to $108 million last month from $49 million in August of 2008, an increase of 119 percent.”

/Paul

Nielsen: Twitter's growing really, really, really, really fast

2009-03-19T15:16:00.001-07:00

[via link]

From the CNet article:

“A small new survey from Nielsen about the five fastest growing "member community destinations" in the U.S. reveals what we all kind of knew already: Twitter is at the top. From February 2008 to February 2009, it clocked in at a whopping 1,382 percent growth rate.”

/Paul

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

2009-03-11T04:45:00.000-07:00

[via link]

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Google’s Top Ten Products

2009-01-01T12:51:00.001-08:00

[via Techcrunch, link]

Recently I have been in a number of conversations where people were proclaiming how HUGE the adoption of Google docs, Google Mail etc... is

It is amazing how much hype surrounds them and how blindly people believe that they are a MSFT Office killer etc.....

So thanks to folks at Techcrunch we can see that in the US, Google Docs and Google Speadsheet do not make the top 20 apps on Google, and as for Google Mail while it is 4th on the list, it still has less than 10millon unique users per month!

Certainly there can be some inaccuracy with numbers like this, but they tend to be close enough and give a good general guide.

The other interesting fact about Google's Docs and Spreadsheets is the lack of engagement from the visitors, i.e. Compete.com reporting that the average user only spends 5 mins a month on the Google docs and visits the site 3 times a month.

Don't get me wrong, I am a fan and heavy user of Google docs, but there is a lot of hype about how many people actually use it and how heavily it gets used. Google Docs are successful, but certainly no run away success or Office killer right now.

With such low numbers and the difficult that will come with placing ads etc... I wonder will Google keep the apps, they are in the ads business after all, and not business productivity apps.

Anyway's, at least I now have a post to point to the next time I have one of these discussions about Office killers :)

In fairness, the most likely Office killer is MSFT!! Maybe OpenOffice but certainly not Google - with its offering and adoption todate.

Ciao,

Paul

Cloud Computing in Plain English

2008-12-31T04:11:00.001-08:00

Facebook's ban of breast-feeding photos!?!?

2008-12-30T10:29:00.001-08:00

[via link]

In my mind there is no excuse for this, FB is just plain wrong!

[image via link]

A TED talk by Steven Strogatz: How things in nature tend to sync up

2008-12-30T10:19:00.003-08:00

TED Talk by Steven Johnson - The Web and the city

2008-12-30T10:19:00.001-08:00

The State Of The Twittersphere

2008-12-23T10:14:00.000-08:00

[via Techcrunch, see link]

2008 was certainly quite the year for Twitter, with Techcrunch quoting the following from the Hubspot report.h

"Some other key stats from the report:

—70% of Twitter users joined in 2008
—20% of Twitter users have joined in the past 60 days
—The average user has been on Twitter 275 days

So it is pretty much all newbies, and mainstream adoption is just getting started.

—The most popular days of the week to Tweet are Wednesday and Thursday
—An estimated 5,000 to 10,000 new accounts are registered each day.
—Only 5 percent of all Twitter users have more than 250 followers.
—Only 0.8 percent have more than 1,000
—22 percent have five or fewer followers
—Another 24 percent (the largest group) have between 11 and 25 followers"

/Paul

Facebook Growing by Over 600,000 Users a Day

2008-12-22T10:52:00.000-08:00

[via InsideFacebook.com, see link]

This is amazing growth by FB.

<quote>

While Facebook has been growing at around 300,000 to 400,000 active users per day for most of the fourth quarter (based on our estimations), its growth rate seems to have significantly increased in recent weeks to 600,000 or perhaps even 700,000 new users each day.

</quote>

And its engagement numbers are equally impressive,

13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day
700 million photos are uploaded to the site each month
4 million videos are uploaded each month
15 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared each month
2 million events created each month
19 million active groups exist on the site

With that kind of growth, it is easy to see Facebook become a core engagement hub on the Web.

/Paul

Twitter's CEO predicts future uses for Twitter

2008-12-22T09:59:00.000-08:00

[via the folks at ZDNET, link]

What do 2008 and 1931 Have in Common?

2008-12-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

via watchmojo.com

US and Canada: Sad and Sadder

2008-12-08T11:05:00.000-08:00

via watchmojo and from this original article (link)

Canada’s lost close to 71,000 jobs last month - the worst single month drop in a quarter century - in a clear indication the U.S. recession is beginning to wreck havoc on manufacturers and workers in central Canada.

Almost all the job losses were in Canada’s manufacturing heartland. Ontario shed 66,000 workers - 42,000 of those factory jobs - pushing the province’s unemployment rate up six-tenths of a point to 7.1 per cent.

Overall, the Canadian jobless rate edged up to 6.3 per cent from 6.2 per cent in October, but would have been worst if not for the fact that 48,000 fewer Canadians were looking for work in November.

News from the USA:

The news from south of the border was no better, with the U.S. reporting a 533,000 jobs contraction last month after losing 320,000 in October and 403,000 in September. The U.S. is down 1.9 million jobs since last December.

After years of impressive expansion, the Canadian economy has ground to a halt, with little growth in the first three quarters of this year and economic decline in the current quarter. Falling commodity prices, a comparatively high dollar and the impact of the slumping U.S. housing and auto sectors have dealt a blow to the forestry, mining and manufacturing sectors across Canada.

In the United States, the recession appears to be getting worse.

“The economy has been slowing since December 2007. The real question is whether the economy is in a recession or depression?,” said Peter Morici, an economics professor with the University of Maryland school of business.

Scary stuff!

/Paul

Food for thought!

2008-12-07T09:21:00.000-08:00

Here are some clips of Peter Schiff

It is interesting times we live in!

Its not like some folks did not see this coming, the problem seems to be that it was not the right people..

The question now, can the folks that got us here, dig up!

/Paul

The Yahoo brain drain!

2008-12-07T09:16:00.000-08:00

So MSFT's Ballmer has picked his Advertising/Search Czar, Ex-Yahoo EVP Dr. Qi Lu, and crowned him as President of the Online Service Group.

Its interesting times ahead, especially with the fixation of MSFT on the advertising/search market.

There is some excellent coverage out there in the ether, here are some links I found insightful,

- http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/04/email-from-steve-ballmer-to-the-microsoft-troops-yahooer-qi-lu-to-run-online-services/

- http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081204/boomtown-decodes-microsoft-ceo-steve-ballmers-memo-on-new-digital-guru-qi-lu-so-you-dont-have-to/

- http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081204/microsoft-confirms-qi-lu-hired-as-digital-chief-mcandrews-out/

- http://kara.allthingsd.com/20081204/former-yahoo-tech-star-qi-lu-likely-to-be-named-microsofts-digital-head-by-next-week/

Having someone join MSFT at such a senior exec level with such a prestigious background in the engineering of Search and Advertising is a very deliberate move by MSFT. The core business of the Group, i.e. gestures, is super important, but also so is how in the mid to long term these approaches can be graphed onto Windows and Office as brands is something that has to be further explored and resolved.

The real interesting parts here is also how influential this hire is going to be to the Yahoo folks and whether a jump to MSFT is now more attractive to them.

/Paul

Is it too late for Sun's JavaFx?

2008-12-07T09:10:00.000-08:00

via TechCrunchIT (link) I see that Sun has finally released JavaFx.

While I have not taken the Fx out for a test drive yet, currently I do not see a need!

As always Jonathan Schwartz does a fantastic job (see video below) in framing the current state of the marketplace, the challenges ahead and where the opportunities lie, but right now I just don't see Java and/or JavaFx being it.

Putting aside the financial challenges (layoffs and poor results) and technical challenges (i.e. Cloud Computing etc..) that Sun face, I don't believe there is going to be much traction and where the momentum is for Java and specifically J2ME just is not obvious to me right now.

There is a huge war taking place between MSFT, GOOG, Adobe and Apple; and unless Sun starts fleshing out the offering more and build out things like an app store, distribution channels, developer value propositions, support multiple development languages, Cloud Computing etc... the mass traction will not happen.

This is not to say that there will be no success stories and so on, but the way I view JavaFx right now, it is not going to be anywhere near as pervasive as Flash/Flex/Air and Silverlight.

While all of the FLOSS and OSS innovation that Sun fosters in the community via Java, I have great difficulties understanding why some Server-side JSR's (with a Cloud Computing slant) were killed and that its core Cloud Computing offering (i.e. Network.com) have not been course corrected, as they would have more impact on the bottom line in my view!?!

If GOOG does a Java version of AppEngine, this is a missed opportunity that SUN had - and with engineering talent from SUN now working for GOOG. Also the fact that Network.com is not getting any mindshare or traction is just a travesty, with a small book store in Seattle leading the way. And to top it all off, all the ground breaking work they have done in CPU core design and interleaving thread execution and concurrency........ and so on.......

Honestly I just don't get it and I do apologise to those that do!

As always, just some thoughts,

Enjoy the Video!

/Paul

Will JavaFx have any impact? Or is it probably too late?

2008-11-30T09:22:00.000-08:00

In only a few days, Sun will launch JavaFx 1.0 and the question that comes to my mind, is it too late? and I mean really late!!!

Right now I have not played with the tech stack, but irrespective of that, a quick look at the landscape and timing raises some interesting questions about the validity of such an offering and has the ship already sailed (and the horse bolted etc....)

For a while now the RIA category has existed, and its only in the last 2-3 years or so that the category has started to gain any serious traction - as the last possible capabilities of AJAX are squeezed out of it through Web2.0 innovation and maturing Frameworks - and the hype cycle moves onto the many devices and the occasionally connected usage scenarios and therefore rounding off the target scenarios and rich capabilities that are required in today's market.

While Adobe could be positioned historically as the founding vendor of RIA, it has taken them years (with hard to parse/grok product management, pricing and overall MarComms) to realise the value proposition that they could offer the market and only recently have they declared Flash a platform!! While the road ahead for Adobe and its Flash platform is rocky, the fact remains they are the move viable alternative to Microsoft and its Azure and Silverlight offerings.

Already Microsoft's Silverlight is in its v2.0 and the roadmap for v3.0 is being talked about. see this blog post from ScottGu, link. When you compare the stacks, feature parity is so close that only the die-hard "religious" or those with ultra specific requirement would care. The outstanding issue here is the velocity that Microsoft has rev'ed Silverlight, its toolset and its very large ecosystem of Enterprise developers. But Adobe know this and focus both on the Enterprise proposition, but doubles up on its strong position in Web2.0, via Video and Push/data eventing.

The important aspect to bear in mind here is not even the fact that its an emerging trend, with IBM and Google getting involved, see link and link, but its the solution delivery capability that need to be looked at here. With HTML 5 going to take ages to roll out (see link), we generally are speaking about (in a broad sense) only having a 2 horse race in my view.

Of course this is only where the rubber hits the road, and having Web Services enabled offerings is the crux of the occasionally connected service enabled world. In this space Microsoft is planning both a horizontal and vertical massive expansions of its wide ranging capabilities. Not only that, but so is Adobe, i.e. via SaaS/PaaS offerings, but realistically we are going to see a gravitation towards Amazon and other Cloud/Elastic Computing offerings - as well as the re-canvas'ing of existing SaaS platforms and offerings.

Oh yeah this post was about Sun and the imminent release of JavaFx1.0..............

Please don't get me wrong, I have tremendous respect for Sun and Java (and of course MySQL, now part of the Sun/JAVA family), but I do wonder about them sometimes (and you will see what I mean when I talk about their P&L). Also, when I look at the landscape, I see them as a provider of some amazing hardware, but this software thing they have been trying for years, I am not so sure!!! And as for the OSS (and indeed FLOSS) position is just not helping the bottom line.

To expand on my point, when you look at this interesting post from Steve Gilmor, see link, I think it highlights some interesting points, especially this quote from the same post

"Sun Microsystems has been under particular pressure to realign; analysts and even Sun employees such as Tim Bray have been outspoken in their pleas for Sun’s executive team to jettison unprofitable ventures in favor of some kind of cloud strategy. CEO Jonathan Schwartz has hinted in recent months of some wood behind what Sun calls its Grid effort, and will this week roll out Sun’s JavaFX 1.0 front end technology to compete with Flash/Air and Silverlight."

Now this could be perceived that all is well etc... but at this moment in time I do not believe this to be the case - and I do hope they (i.e. SUN/JAVA) pull out of this nose dive, but I guess time will tell I guess.

As I have mentioned recently, Sun has made some announcements that gravitate towards a Web2.0 world , such as updating NetBeans to support PHP and in the near term Phyton (see link). Also the Sun Grid has existed for a long time now (see link) and in fact I would propose that Sun/Java has had many of the moving parts for a long time and has not been able to successfully generate a sufficient demand to have a positive affect its bottom line in any meaningful way for years.

The imminent launch of JavaFx v1.0 is a laudable goal, but in an age of dynamic languages and Cloud Computing, it adds nothing substantial to the space as I see it right now. Mind share has gravitated substantially away from SUN/JAVA in the languages space and runtimes; and we live in an era of dynamic languages and freedom of choice (and deployment), i.e. could you name a cluster of Web2.0 startups that have a core based on Java?

For that matter, could you name a SaaS offering that have innovated on Java and provided a leadership position on resource utilisation and governorship? I could, but instead of pointing out the obvious examples, let me highlight how SUN/JAVA canned the relevant JSR's circa '05/'06 and some of the core principals are now part of GOOG (for a significant period of time now and time will tell how GOOG AppEngine develops).

Its current position on all of this "stuff" is unknown and to be honest who cares!!!. Today's challenges are being focused on by today's innovators and aspirational forward thinking innovators and resign to the past a currency that is no longer needed in today's online world.

The fact remains that Java has strategically been going back and forth between desktop and server for the last 10+ years, when its foundations come from a company that had (not sure if this is still the case) a motto of the network is the device!!!! And this in a time-frame when the defacto business models is based on the space between the device and the server.

Even moving beyond this and looking at today's new world driven by the consumerization and commodization of software/services - and as this wave keeps spreading - the SUN/JAVA position is diminishing by the day and Sun's decision to push adoption over device has not helped it much, especially in an age of open standards (remember the SOA/SOAP/WS-* wars), Cloud Computing (anyone rememver Network.com) and the emerging market that is forming from the halo effect of Apple's iPhone.

Anyways, this is becoming a long post and I want to leave folks with a few thoughts.

SUN/JAVA makes practically no money (or has any growth) from Software and quite possibly has diluted its core business of hardware (and data centers) while providing an ecosystem that makes an equal if not more revenues.

At this link you can see how SUN/JAVA is making revenue from software, and here is an example,

	FY07	FY08	Growth
Java	$219M	$220M	!%
MySQL/Infrastructure	$198M	$208M	5%
Solaris, Management, Virtualization	$221M	$216M	-2%
Total	$639M	$644M	1%

Folks may wonder why this video was ever made, but I think the truth is coming true right now.

While Java may have big numbers of downloads, its the engagement and usage levels that really count, and even then, the SUN/Java first mover position in online is just going to kill the company - which no serious visible attach rates etc...

This is especially the case when we look at how the market has developed and the shift of the 3X bigger industry that is advertising and how it applies to the software industry.

T restate my opening line (or to actually answer the question), I believe that JavaFx is really late to the game! (and so is IBM, but that is another post :-) )

I believe it to be so much so that it is already a footnote in the industry. Certainly there are some amazing possibilities for the tech stack, but as I view the world right now, the lack of other dynamic language support and upfront cloud computing is just going to kill it.

Also, even if Sun gets through these issues, despite all of the headcount and expenditure reductions, I just don't see this as a winner.

Apologies if I seem glass half empty; but traction and adoption are true core tenets of an Online systems platform (be it an external or internal facing offering and overall "SKU") and with the onious of responsibility that comes with consumer/commodity deliverables shifting, there comes the consumer question of where is the value and how do it exist in a solution delivery model.

Certainly early days for JavaFx but right now I reckon it is too little too late!!! and anyway's its lack of contribution to the bottom line for SUN will just make it one of the next things/teams to be on the chopping block.

/Paul

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

2008-11-23T10:51:00.000-08:00

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Sun updates NetBeans with PHP support

2008-11-23T10:31:00.000-08:00

[via link]

So Sun gets more Web2.0 with this adoption and the planned adoption of Python.

The question that I believe is hanging in the air will they hook up with AMZN and GOOG, and flesh out the MySQL offering or will SUN go down the Network.com route and realign the offering.

Amazing to see such a forward thinking company caught in such a pickle both financially and technologically.

/Paul

Zend Technologies is backing Adobe's Action Message Format (AMF) in Zend Framework 1.7

2008-11-20T08:34:00.001-08:00

[via link]

An interesting development having Zend incorporating AMF and certainly makes Zend a very interesting Fx for php development.

/Paul

Microsoft launches Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online

2008-11-17T13:22:00.001-08:00

MSFT has just fully launched Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online.

Details can be found at link.

Interesting times ahead, as MSFT moves into being a major player in the managed hosting space.

Adobe and SAP Announce A Strategic Alliance

2008-11-17T12:40:00.001-08:00

As I have previously mentioned, Adobe is getting its ducks in a row and is better framing its value proposition and offerings - so that it can be more easily consumed and leveraged by a developer ecosystem.

As I mentioned in this post (link), I have historically found it hard to parse Adobe's tooling and the overall solution delivery strategy that it has facilitated and enabled through its RIA (Rich Internet Application) evangelism. Things like pricing and unclear messaging, just made it too hard to choice and it has been difficult to find good examples or case studies.

The evolution of its developer offerings has immensely improved over the years and in fact the announcement of the Flash Platform is the summation of its efforts for the last few years.

Its to be expected that as part of the validation exercise that Adobe's MarComm et. al. must go through to shape the thinking of the "Enterprise" guy/developer or decision maker, Adobe annouce a strategic partnership with SAP and I am sure there will be more announcements to come,

As we march into what conceptually could be perceived as Web 3.0, it is no surprise that these two big brands for COTS (and perhaps also as ecosystem's for solution delivery) based solutions are partnering, as their role in the value proposition of value chain delivery and solution delivery evolves - as the consumerization and commodization of software keeps spreading.

Ciao,

Abstract Curiosity

Speaker Presentation Files : Web 2.0 Summit 2009

LinkedIn Surpasses 50 Million Users

U.S. Web Users’ Time on Social Networks Has Tripled

Top Viral Videos of All Time – over 100 millons views each

Nielsen: Twitter's growing really, really, really, really fast

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

Google’s Top Ten Products

Cloud Computing in Plain English

Facebook's ban of breast-feeding photos!?!?

A TED talk by Steven Strogatz: How things in nature tend to sync up

TED Talk by Steven Johnson - The Web and the city

The State Of The Twittersphere

Facebook Growing by Over 600,000 Users a Day

Twitter's CEO predicts future uses for Twitter

What do 2008 and 1931 Have in Common?

US and Canada: Sad and Sadder

Food for thought!

The Yahoo brain drain!

Is it too late for Sun's JavaFx?

Will JavaFx have any impact? Or is it probably too late?

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

Sun updates NetBeans with PHP support

Zend Technologies is backing Adobe's Action Message Format (AMF) in Zend Framework 1.7

Microsoft launches Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online

Adobe and SAP Announce A Strategic Alliance