Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V54; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52 and V53:

1. On page 70, I added Google Maps to the list of Ajax examples.
2. On page 84, I added Google App Engine to the list of interesting products from Google.
3. On page 85, I provided a new (working) link and details about Zimbra.
4. On page 87, I added a link to IBM’s new “Bluehouse” product.
5. On pages 89-90, I added two new pages of details on the iPhone 3g.
6. On page 91, I provided additional details on CIsco’s acquisition of Five Across.
7. On page 132, I added a bullet point with a link to Nicholas Carr’s article on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

I probably won’t do any more updates for another week or two, but this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy…

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V53; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52:

1. On page 6, I noted that the Michael Wesch “The Machine Is (Us)ing Us” video has now been viewed 5.6 million times, as of Jun 8, 2008.
2. On page 8, I added a bullet point indicating that while the “long tail” is not one of the main “Web 2.0 tools,” it is a “related concept”
3. On page 15, in the discussion of “risks of Web 2.0″ platform, I noted that the comparison between the Keynote/PDF version of this presentation, against the Google Apps version, was so bad that I recently deleted the Google Apps version altogether.
4. On page 17, I added a note to indicate that the chart showing usage of various technologies — including the Internet and Web 2.0 — was taken from a 2006 survey that had been cited on the previous page.
5. On page 20, I updated the Twitter example with a screen shot from my Twitter home page as of this morning.
6. On page 24, I updated the count of Twitter users to 1,811,515 as of Jun 8, 2008. I also added a new bullet point citing a Business Week article indicating that Obama and Clinton each had approximately 30,000 Twitter followers during their primary campaigns, but Obama used his more effectively.
7. On page 26, I changed the first bullet point to indicate that Zappos is a shoe-selling company, not a shoe-manufacturing company.
8. On pages 29-30, I updated the Dopplr example with screen shots from my Dopplr home page as of this morning, which shows that I’m in Rome, along with various other details about who’s in Rome, who’s in my home town of New York, etc.
9. On page 35, I added a couple of sub-bullet points about MySpace, indicating (a) that it’s larger than every other nation except China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia; and (b) that I had written a blog posting about this issue, titled “A United Nations Seat for Myspace?“
10. On page 37, I updated a note about Obama’s “Yes, We Can” video, indicating that as of Jun 8, 2008 it has now been viewed 8.0 million times.
11. On page 75, I added a citation to a blog posting entitled “Did Rails Sink Twitter?“
12. On page 80, I updated the first bullet point to indicate that the book Web 20 Design Patterns is no longer “forthcoming”; it has now been published.
13. On page 85, I updated a bullet point to indicate that, as of Jun 8, 2008, it was still unclear whether Yahoo would continue as an independent company, be acquired by Microsoft, or consummate some kind of marketing/advertising arrangement with Google.
14. On page 87, which discusses IBM’s activities in the Web 2.0 world, I added a note that IBM now has a Vice President of Social Engineering.
15. On page 88, I added a “placeholder” bullet point for the iPhone 2.0 that is scheduled to be announced/released on June 9th; and I also modified a bullet point to reflect my belief that Apple’s distribution of iPhone software apps via iTunes will represent an interesting example of the “long tail” concept.
16. On page 123, which discusses technology trends, I added a note to the bullet point asking whether computers might someday exceed human intelligence — noting that the June 2008 IEEE Spectrum journal has a special report, entitled “The Rapture of the Geeks: separating science from fiction in the technological singularity”
17. On page 127, I added a bullet point indicating that senior executives’ acceptance/non-acceptance of social networks & Web 2.0 will become a more and more significant differentiator; I also included a citation to a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Clay Shirky.
18. On page 130, I added a bullet point with a citation to another paper discussing the use of Web 2.0 in educational environments.
19. On page 134, I added a bullet point with the publishing details of Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations.

As usual, you can download the 33-megabyte PDF version of this presentation by clicking here, or on the icon below; you can also download it as a 34-megabyte Powerpoint file by clicking here. It’s published under the GNU Free Documentation license (GFDL), so you’re welcome to modify the material and reuse it any way you want, free of charge; the second page of the presentation provides the usual caveat emptor disclaimers. The material is also available/downloadable as a Powerpoint file from my Slideshare page; but because Google limits the size of uploaded presentations to 10 megabytes (along with several other annoying limitations), it’s no longer available on Google Docs. If you’d like me to make the material available in some other format, or on some other hosting site, please drop me an email note and let me know.

Here’s a summary of the material that I’ve added since the last version

1. On page 5, I updated the count of YouTube downloads of Michael Wesch’s “The Machine is (us)ing Us“; it’s now up to 5.5 million downloads.
2. Also on page 5, I added a bullet point with a link to a YouTube video that provides an audiovisual explanation/definition of Web 2.0, based on the Wikipedia article.
3. Also on page 5, I added a bullet point with a link to a sarcastic YouTube spoof, entitled Restaurant 2.0.
4. On page 18, I added a bullet point with a link to a Business Week article on “Beyond Blogs“.
5. On pages 19-25, I added several new pages of material to show the Twitter website (for those who have no idea what Twitter is all about), the Twhirl client-side tweet-reader (which runs on both Windows and Mac computers), Tweetstats. and several other aspects of Twitter.
6. On page 19, I added a description of Twitter that I got via a “tweet” from a Twitter user: “IM is real-time, person-to-person communication while Twitter is baby email with everyone where you get to pick whose msgs to read.”
7. Also on page 19, I added a bullet point with a link to a case study showing how a small business is using Twitter.
8. On page 22, I added a new page to show an example of Tweetwheel.
9. On page 23, I added a bullet point with a link to a slide show that describes the difference between email, IM, blogging, and Twittering.
10. Also on page 23: I added a bullet point with a link to a St. Louis newspaper article about using Twitter to provide real-time information about the traffic impact of a repair-shutdown of a busy highway in the area. I added the same information to an existing link on page 100, which discusses the use of Web 2.0 in government.
11. On page 24, I updated the statistics about Twitter to show that it had 1,752,793 subscribers as of May 30, 2008 (which, by the way, represents almost twice as many as the 952,517 subscribers that existed on March 29th); I also added a link to this chart, which shows Twitter’s recent exponential growth. I think Twitter is going mainstream, and will really begin to scale up at this point (if its architecture can handle it, which is very much an open question at this point. If you’re interested in keeping up with the statistics about Twitter’s growth, consult Twitstats whenever you want.
12. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point with a link to GroupTweet.
13. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point link to my blog article about “Twitter in Plain English“.
14. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point with a link to Dan Farber’s May 18, 2008 blog discussing some interesting statistics about the ratio of followers to following that one sees on Twitter.
15. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point link to a blog posting on “What is Twitter Used For? The Message is the Medium“; also, from the same author, “What is Twitter For?“
16. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point with a link to an online store that now carries “Eat. Sleep. Tweet.” t-shirts.
17. On page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to Dan Farber’s Apr 28, 2008 blog posting on “What Twitter Brings to the Party“.
18. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to a new service called Tweetcube, which supports file-sharing of files, via Twitter, of up to 10 megabytes.
19. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to an article about “tweetjects” and “blogjects” (i.e., objects that tweet and blog); and I provided some examples, including the twittering London Tower Bridge, and a twittering house (see also this article from Wired).
20. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to Tweetclouds, which lets you see which words you use most frequently in your twitter messages.
21. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to Twitterphone.
22. On (new) page 26, I displayed part of the Zappos Twitter page, as well as a link to a Harvard Business Publishing article entitled “Why Zappos Pays New Employees To Quit — and You Should Too“.
23. On page 28, I eliminated the “private beta” description of Dopplr. It’s now open to the public.
24. Also on page 28: I added a bullet point to indicate that Dopplr is now integrated with LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, and Flickr in order to help build a larger network of one’s “fellow travelers”.
25. On pages 29-31, I added more detailed slides to explain what Dopplr is all about.
26. On page 37, I updated the bullet point about Obama’s “1984″ YouTube spoof; as of May 28, 2008, it now has 5.2 million downloads.
27. Also on page 37: I added a bullet point with a link to the Obama “Yes, We Can” YouTube video — and indicated that as of May 28, 2008 it had 7.7 million downloads.
28. On pages 32-33, I added two new pages of material about special-purpose social-networking sites, and a screen shot of interesting YouTube presentations.
29. On page 46, I added a bullet point with a link to a recent CIO article indicating that enterprise mashups are on the rise.
30. On page 47, I added a bullet point with a link to the “ultimate Yahoo Pipes mashup list“. I also added a bullet point with a link to the Yahoo Pipes Twitter link monitor, which provides a stream of Twitter tweets that contain URL’s.
31. On page 62, I added a bullet point with a link to a mini-wiki tool called Backboard.
32. On page 76, I added a bullet point with a link to an article discussing rumors that Twitter may abandon its use of Ruby on Rails.
33. On page 85, I added a bullet point with a link to an Aprill 30, 2008 Information Week article summarizing Oracle’s plans to build a Web 2.0-friendly version of its enterprise apps.
34. On page 87, which lists several Web 2.0-related things going on at IBM, I added a bullet point with a link to IBM Rocks; and I added a bullet point with a link to a recent article about IBM’s Web 2.0 tools and plans; and I also added a bullet point with a link to a Business Week article about IBM’s use of social networking.
35. On page 88, I added a bullet point with a link to the Wikipedia article summarizing the basics of Microsoft’s Sharepoint product for blogs and wikis.
36. On page 99, I added a bullet point link to David Pogue’s March 27, 2008 New York Times column on “Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0?” And I also added a bullet point with a link to a May 6, 2008 CIO Australia article entitled “Enterprise 2.0: what is it good for?“
37. Page 99, with a list of “trends in large companies” got so crowded and busy that I broke it in half, and put the second half on a (new) page 98.
38. On page 103, I added a bullet point with a link to an interesting example of a “laggard” culture: 20% of the U.S. population has never used e-mail.
39. On page 105, I added a bullet point with a link to a Harvard Business School podcast on strategies for succeeding with social networking technologies in the enterprise.
40. On page 126 about ubiquitous/pervasive computing, I added a bullet point with a link to the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing.
41. On page 128, I added a new page about future UI paradigms, suggesting that (based on examples like Tweetwheel, Digg’s UI research, and IBM Rocks) some of them are likely to come from Web 2.0 vendors, startups, and inspired individuals. I also added a bullet point, with a link to Cisco’s recently-announced holographic video-conferencing technology (and I added a link to the Cisco announcement on page 90, which summarizes Cisco’s other Web 2.0 initiatives).
42. On page 99, I added a bullet point with a link to a recent McKinsey survey, summarizing usage of Web 2.0 in businesses.
43. On page 104, I added a bullet point with a link to the transparentgovt website, which has a list of about half a dozen countries whose governments are doing interesting things with Web 2.0
44. On page 126, I added a bullet point with a link to a blog posting indicating that Colombia has recently ordered 65,000 of the $100 OLPC computers, for distribution to its children. I also added a bullet point summarizing plans for a 2010-release of the 2nd-generation OLPC computer, with a link to a press release with more details.
45. Also on page 126: courtesy of Tim O’Reilly, who brought my attention to a May 31, 2008 New York Times article that I skimmed this morning but ignored, I’ve now added a bullet point on the page about ubiquitous computing to the article, which discusses billboards that are connected to the Internet, and which watch consumer reactions as they walk by.
46. On page 135, I deleted a bunch of Web 2.0 conferences that have already taken place, and added a June 25, 2008 event: International Conference on Enterprise 2.0, in Varese, Italy. I also added bullet points for upcoming Web 2.0 conferences such as SuperNova 2008 in San Francisco (June 16-18); Social Networking Conference in San Francisco (Jul 10-11); FOWA in London (Oct 8-10); Web 2.0 Expo in New York City (Sep 16-19); and the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco (Nov 5-7) . I also updated the details for the Wikimania 2008 conference in beautiful downtown Alexandria, Egypt.
47. On page 136, I added a parenthetical note to indicate that The ClueTrain Manifesto is now ten years old! (which simply demonstrates how easy it is for some companies to ignore major trends for a decade…) I also added a new book to the list: Social Networks Around The World: How is Web 2.0 Changing Your Daily Life?

I also tried to add a visual/graphic image to each page, so you wouldn’t be forced to stare at nothing but a page full of text (actually, I’m not so worried about the impact on people who look at the material on their computer screen; I’m more concerned about audiences falling asleep when I present the material in my seminar). But you should be aware that virtuall every image/graphic that you see is hyperlinked to some non-trivial material — e.g., a Website, an article, a YouTube video, etc. So don’t be fooled by pretty pictures; there’s content behind it.

I’ll probably be making some minor updates to the material during the seminar presentation in Rome next week, so check back from time to time to see if there is a new “V53″ version available.

Here’s the presentation:

I don’t know how (or if) the other speakers’ presentations will be available; but if you’d like to download the 1.9MB PDF version of my presentation, click here, or on the image below…

You should attend in person, if possible, so you can not only hear my presentation, but also some excellent talks by Beth Layman and Larry Dribin on other aspects of software metrics. But if you can’t find an excuse for coming to Rochester, then there’s a fallback option: you can download the 2.5MB PDF version of the presentation by simply clicking on the image below …

During the past month, I’ve written approximately 450 short “micro-blog” messages on Twitter; that works out to approximately 15 “tweets” a day. During the same time, I’ve managed to find the time to write approximately 5 blog postings/articles. That’s quite a difference: five blogs per month, versus 15 tweets per day.

What’s the explanation? Simple: I’ve been really, really busy for the past month — tons of work, deadlines, and two weeks of travel to India and Russia. It usually takes me an hour or two to compose a blog posting (this one is much shorter, but take a look at my “Visiting Russia” blog for a more typical example) — and when I’m really, really busy, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find the time.

By contrast, a Twitter message takes less than a minute, and often just a few seconds. There is rarely any organization, preparation, investigation, analysis or other time-consuming activity. It’s just 140 characters (or less) of quick typing.

As I acknowledged in my earlier comment about the blogging/micro-blogging distinction, it’s certainly true that some of my Twitter messages are banal and trivial. But here’s a contrast: while I’ve been typing this blog entry, I’ve been watching (out of the corner of my eye) the steady stream of Twitter messages from my small community of “followers”. I noticed someone saying “I wish there was a version of Windows Live Writer for the Mac. I like using the Mac to write but blogging with the Mac blog tools is not fun.”

Without any serious thought, I typed a quick reply to this individual: “Have you tried Ecto as a Mac blogging tool? Works pretty well for me.” (And indeed it does: I’m using it to compose this blog posting!). My message took about 15 seconds, and barely represented a interruption/distraction at all; and while it didn’t transform society in any fundamental way, it may have provided some small benefit to one individual. Indeed, it might have been mildly interesting to a few dozen others who happen to see my tweet on their Twitter display.

It’s also interesting that the number of people who “follow” my Twitter messages has grown to the point where it’s approximately equal to the number of people who visit my blog … except that my blog-visitors are more likely to be frustrated by the fact that I’ve only posted five new articles in the past month. And the Twitter followers (as well as “indirect” followers who see my Twitter updates on Plaxo and Facebook) are likely to see a dozen “tweets” a day, which may help them remember who I am (in contrast to the person who posted a comment on my “Visiting Russia” blog posting that said, “Who is mr. Yourdon btw? Well known businessman?”).

Bottom line: hopefully my schedule will calm down in a couple of weeks, and I’ll be able to spend more time on old-fashioned blogging. But in the meantime, while things are busy, Twitter turns out to be a more effective way for me to stay in touch…

To put my vintage-2008 impressions in perspective, I should also mention that I’m a child of the Cold War, and never expected that I would ever visit Russia during my lifetime. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was certainly aware of Sputnik and the military might of the Soviet Union; and I watched in fascination as the Soviet empire disintegrated into roughly a dozen separate republics and transformed itself into a capitalist economy. But the knowledge was all academic, and removed from my day-to-day experience — just as the news that most Americans read today about events in Baghdad and Tehran is more abstract than real.

But putting all that aside, here are my two basic impressions of the country: first, St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) is a beautiful city whose history and wide streets and historic palaces and art-filled museums (including the Hermitage, with over 3 million items of art) made me smile with pleasure. And second, Moscow is a huge, throbbing, aggressive, traffice-jammed, breathtakingly expensive powerhouse of a city, with 14 million inhabitants who seem ready to compete with New York and London and Tokyo and Shanghai and Bangalore and every other center of power around the globe. As such, the contrast between St. Petersburg and Moscow was roughly similar to the contrast an American sees between Boston and New York.

But Moscow actually reminded me somewhat more of Las Vegas than New York: much of the downtown area was garish and brightly lit, with casinos doing their best to lure patrons in for gambling; well, perhaps it was a little like Times Square in New York City. Of course, Times Square isn’t a good representation of the entire spectrum of neighborhoods and regions of New York City (especially when one thinks of Brooklyn and Queens and the Bronx and Staten Island); and in a similar fashion, I eventually traveled through various other parts of Moscow that seemed more residential and settled.

The “expensive” aspect of Moscow was an interesting anomaly: a Westerner staying in a first-class hotel can expect to spend $200 for an average bottle of California wine, and even more for French wine. Breakfast for two in our hotel room was a hundred dollars, and a small can of diet-Coke in the mini-bar was $15. But “average” Russians obviously don’t spend that kind of money, and I could even see the contrast while visiting an icon of American culture: lunch for two at McDonald’s was a little under $9. (There are now a couple dozen McDonald’s restaurants in Moscow, and they seem jammed at all hours of the day: when I was there, there were 20 separate lines of people, and each line was at least 10 people long.)

In between the low-cost fast-food economy, and the rarefied world of Bentleys and Mercedes and hundred-dollar bottles of wine (note: the Wikipedia article on Moscow claims that it is the home to the largest number of billionaires in the world), I assume there’s a middle-class society, with middle-class salaries and expenses — though someone did tell me (seriously, I think) that there is no middle class in Russia — and that people are either very poor or very rich. A week’s visit isn’t long enough to get any real sense of proportion about such issues; and even if I could have understood the social/economic demographics of Moscow and St. Petersburg, I have no idea if it represents the rest of this enormous country.

Indeed, I got a brief impression that Moscow and St. Petersburg might well be isolated enclaves, unlike the rest of the country, during a 5-hour train ride between the two cities. The train was punctual and efficient and comfortable, though it seemed a little more drab than the Amtrak Acela that whisks people back and forth between New York and Washington; but what really struck me was the drab nature of the countryside as we rolled along the relatively flat, wooded terrain. After passing through grim suburbs outside St. Petersburg, and then cemeteries and construction sites, most of what I saw (aside from birch forests and stands of pine trees) consisted of small villages along the train track, with tiny wooden homes covered with corrugate-iron roofs. It reminded me very much of the small towns and villages in the interior of Alaska, though I never got off the train to actually see what any of these villages was really like.

Aside from the garish, high-priced nature of Moscow, one of the other unforgettable impressions was the traffic: massive gridlock and traffic jams everywhere, at almost every hour of the day or night (except at 4 AM, when we headed from downtown to Domededovo Airport for our flight home). In many cases, traffic is literally at a standstill for long periods of time; and parking in the downtown area seems utterly chaotic. As a result, many people depend instead on the Moscow metro for local travel; in 2007, it was the most heavily-used metro system in the world, exceeding both Tokyo and New York.

My impressions of Russian culture and people are somewhat haphazard, and quite possibly inaccurate; but I’ll pass them along for whatever they’re worth. First, I was impressed by the complete absence of trash and litter in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. Perhaps this is because I arrived in Russia after spending a couple days in Bangalore, India — which is quite filthy by comparison. But New York is filthy, too, by comparison: in Moscow and St. Petersburg, I saw no trash, no newspapers blowing along the street, no food-wrappers, no plastic cups. Also: most of the men were relatively unattractive and poorly dressed. By contrast, the women were tall, thin, attractive, stylishly dressed in miniskirts or tight jeans, and consistently wearing high-heeled shoes even in places where it made no sense (it seemed almost impossible, for example, to walk across the cobblestones in Red Square in high-heeled shoes; but women did so without hesitating).

The stylish women, by the way, as well as the frumpily-dressed men, were uniformly young — either in their early twenties, or even younger. I did see a few “babushka” women begging for coins in various places, but I didn’t see any old men; perhaps that’s because the average life expectancy for Russian men is only 56 years. Because of a combination of low birth rates, high abortion rates, alcoholism, stress, and various other health problems, the population of Russia has been declining — in absolute terms — for the past several years, and is not expected to stabilize until approximately 2020.

Also, I found it interesting that almost nobody hesitated to offer a wide range of criticisms and cynical comments about Vladimir Putin, though I couldn’t help noticing lots of plain-clothes police throughout Moscow, with sunglasses and dark-tinted official cars. On the other hand, no one offered any criticisms — or even showed any interest — in the politics or actions of George Bush. For that matter, nobody showed any curiosity about the current U.S. presidential campaign, sports, movies, music, or any other aspect of American culture; and I only saw (or heard) one American tourist during the entire trip (but lots of American, British, and European business people in the hotels where I stayed).

So much for the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg. What about the computer industry, which was my official justification for visiting the country? Again, my visit was too short to form any in-depth conclusions, and I didn’t have a chance to visit any IT organizations or Silicon-Valley-style software shops. But here are the quick impressions I got from meeting and chatting with a couple hundred people in five different presentations that I gave during my visit:

1. Everyone seems well-read, and well-informed about current developments in software engineering, project management, and computer science. They’re hungry for knowledge, and they’re willing to do their homework.
2. For example, virtually everyone in my audiences was familiar with the concept of “function points” as a language-independent metric for measuring the size of a computer program.
3. Also, I was surprised by the number of people in my presentations who said their software organization had received an SEI-CMM “Capability Maturity Model” assessment, and even more surprised by the number of people who said their IT organization had achieved level-3, level-4, or even level-5. It’s not as high as one might expect in India, but significantly higher than what I’ve seen in the U.S.
4. On the other hand, I didn’t see much evidence of tool usage. An informal survey, for example, indicated that far less than five percent of the people in my presentations were using software estimating tools based on models like COCOMO; in the U.S., the figure is typically closer to ten percent.
5. The English literacy rate was much higher than I expected. When I give presentations in most parts of Europe, Asia, or South America, at least half of the audience listens to simultaneous interpreters via headphones; in Russia, roughly 75% listened to me in English, without translation.
6. I saw two Macintoshes in the audience; I’m not sure whether that’s good, bad, or irrelevant — but I found it interesting.
7. There is a very large and active group in Moscow discussing and debating agile software development; I was encouraged by this, and was again impressed by how well-read and well-informed people were on this topic.
8. I learned that while it’s amusing for Americans to joke about being banished to Siberia for various forms of misbehavior, it doesn’t make any sense to Russians in the software industry. The largest city in Siberia, Novosobirsk, is home to a thriving software outsourcing industry, and many Russians consider it a pleasant place to live.
9. Notwithstanding the success of outsourcing firms in Novosobirsk, St. Petersburg, and Moscow, I did not get the impression that Russia is likely to mount a serious competitive challenge to the outsourcing industry of India or China. Historically, Russian programmers have succeeded with outsourcing, especially for customers in Europe; but their salaries have increased dramatically in recent years (partly because of the inflation associated with the oil industry), and the labor rates are now almost comparable with Europe and the U.S. Aside from that, the population of Russia in January 2008 was a mere 142 million; that pales in comparison to the one billion inhabitants of India and the 1.3 billion inhabitants of China.

So … that’s what I saw, and what I learned, during my whirlwind visit to Russia. My wife and I took a couple hundred photographs during the trip, and we’re organizing them into a coherent collection (and removing most of the redundant pictures of Lenin’s Tomb and St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square). Once we’ve finished, we’ll upload everything into an album on my Flickr archives; check back from time to time to see if they’re there…