The reason I ask this question is that nobody can argue with the premise by saying “NO! They’re different!”. There’s a lot of discussion going on lately about “service x” is the “service y” killer, or I’ve got 95,000 followers on “service z” in just two days (63.23% of service x after 10 years), etc… Some of these questions seem interesting, some of them pointless, and still others are just a silly cry for attention.

The common denominator

In nearly every case when some web service is being compared to another there is always someone, and often multiple someone’s, who jump into the discussion and expose the truth that the two things are in fact different. Often, this pronouncement seems to be made in a tone that implies the discussion should just end now because the answer has been found. No point in continuing. Quite similar to finding the rosetta stone with the number 42 prominently chiseled on it, we now know that the question was pointless because someone just figured out that Twitter != del.icio.us.

What’s really going on

There is a fairly useful idea that is often employed in analysis that is called “compare and contrast”. It is a way that humans can recognize patterns, extrapolate functionality, and synthesize ideas. Consider it to be the same thing as a thought experiment. In order to get value out of a question such as this, the items being compared need not be identical. In fact, if they were identical THAT would be a reason to quit talking about it. I mean really, WILL Google be the next Google? They have feature parity, and the exact same user base, and they even share a URL. Yes, I can say with reasonably high confidence that Google has a great shot at being the Google of tomorrow. Have either of us learned anything from that? I doubt it.

Consider something that has nothing to do with technology. Take apples and oranges. Lots of folks use this one to imply that you’re comparing something that can’t be compared. But what if? What if an orange had a skin like an apple, that didn’t taste disgusting, and was easy to bite through? It would be something else, neither orange nor apple, but it might be something I would want. That is the point of all these compare and contrast questions - it’s like “fusion” cuisine and it’s one of the easiest ways to come up with something new. Take two things that are not the same and combine the best of both. Do you like what you ended up with?

Here are some technology examples of the same kind of thing. When Steven compares Twitter to Windows, I learn something. It gives me a perspective that I can immediately grasp, and it’s an angle I hadn’t considered. When Alan Stern discusses a missed opportunity by del.icio.us, it immediately resonates with me. I remember the potential that service had. Thinking about how I use friendfeed today leads me down the path of “what could del.icio.us have done to get me there with their service?” Would it look different than friendfeed? Probably. Can I learn something by connecting the dots? You bet.

STOP IT - I know they’re different

In an appropriately subtle way, I would like to suggest a simple 12-step program for those that feel compelled to enlighten the world that an egg is really not a baseball. The first few steps go something like this:

1. Admit that you have a problem.

2. When the urge to point out that the letter “R” is not even remotely like the letter “V”, give other people a little credit. A blind cat could figure that out.

3. Take 10 deep breaths and step away from the keyboard.

…additional steps as appropriate to get to 11

12. Once you’re OK, come back and say something useful.

All right, you people can really say anything you want. Freedom of speech and of expression are valuable stuff. I just wanted you to know how it comes across when I see it.

I’ve probably been reading Seth Godin’s blog for too long. I’m starting to notice the marketing messages in common stuff that people usually ignore. Yesterday I drove by a convenience store that had a really large yellow banner with three big words that they really want the world to know. The sign read:

DELI

NEW MANAGEMENT

Now I’m sure that someone thought this would be a pretty compelling message, but when I read this I thought “what are they trying to say?”. My interpretation is this:

DELI - we’ll go broke if you just buy gas. Come inside and spend some money on high margin stuff. We’d hire a dancing bear if it would make you come in the store.

NEW MANAGEMENT - the people that used to run this place were completely incompetent. We’re a lot better, so forget anything that ever happened here that was a bad experience.

I don’t really have a problem with the “buy more stuff” pitch. That’s just market-driven capitalism and I wish them the best of luck selling sandwiches. The really odd thing to me is that if the primary feature that you want to promote about your business is that the people who used to be in charge have left, either the previous management created a horrific train wreck, or you don’t really have much to promote.

This message may be helpful in some extreme cases, but to me it almost seems like the nuclear option in promotion. Hunting around on Flickr, it does seem to be a fairly common message.

photo credit Robyn Gallagher

The background

I haven’t been writing much except for code, documentation and email lately. One of the things that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading during this quasi-hiatus is Alexander van Elsa’s most excellent blog with the really long name: Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior (that’s how it shows up in Google Reader, anyhow). Alexander’s writing works for me for a number of reasons:

• I’m a sucker for long-form blogging. This is kind of anti-schizophrenic-2.0 in concept, but I think most things worth talking about can’t be fully described in 140 characters. I’d rather spend twenty minutes thinking about something substantial than flitting to 30 web sites and speed-scanning 1,000 rss entries doing pattern matching looking for something good.
• As a requirement for #1, the whole thing only works if you have something to say. Alexander brings a perspective and depth to his writing that I find engaging.
• He comes highly recommended by at least one cranky blogger. As Steven appropriately pointed out in his respect post, finding someone you can learn from is something of a treasure.

All of that was a really long-winded lead in to the thing I’ve spent some time pondering the past couple of days. In the first post in his current series, Alexander goes on a bit of a thought experiment regarding the human factor. The first point is that openness will inevitably triumph over the walled garden, but we will still need some place on the web to call “home”. We’re left kind of wondering about what that will be. I want to find out.

Home is…

Everyone knows that home is where the heart is. There may be some real truth to that, but it’s not real helpful in painting a picture of the way we will navigate the social web of the future. I did a search on the term “home is”, and got some interesting results.

  #1: Wikipedia - A home is a place of residence or refuge. Didn’t even need to visit. The google summary was enough.

  #2: seti@home - That’s kind of ominous.

then, a bit further down, I come across the title for this post: http://homeiswhereweparkourhouse.com/. Similar to the snail picture that I found on flickr, these folks take “home” with them when they travel around. This approach seems to have some advantages, and I think it may have some parallels in the way we view “home” online.

To get a little more specific about what I think about when we’re talking about our online home, here are a few different things that combine together and help define our “place of residence or refuge”:

• a launching point
• a statement of who we are
• a place to have friends visit

Launching Point

This is part of what we consider to be home. It’s the place we leave to go navigate around the world, it’s familiar and comfortable and we know how to find things from here. Google kind of works in this role, but it feels kind of generic. That may be a bit of the idea behind iGoogle, where you can move the furniture around a bit. The thing is, though, there’s not just one place like this. Today’s social web leads to a navigational style that’s a lot like staying in every house in the subdivision while you’ve got a room at the Hilton and the Motel-6 (reference to MySpace, obviously) and have construction started on four different houses in different cities and you’ve moved in to your friend’s cool new boat to see what that would be like. Twenty open browser tabs and a couple of Adobe AIR apps later, when you’re browsing around trying to decipher the difference between a “digg this” badge and “shovel this” and “drop kick this” and “trip on this” and on, and on - you just have to think there’s a more sane way to navigate and share stuff. Has to be.

We seem to be building control panels like FriendFeed to solve the problem, but it’s funny how quickly the idea becomes like one of those Russian doll things. This joke pretty much sums up how difficult it seems to be to own that one essential service that is home for finding stuff. All that navigational home base variety abounds, and we haven’t even talked about “normal” aggregators. Google Reader, FeedDemon, RSS Bandit, etc… These things are also important pieces of the navigational puzzle. There is still a lot to be done here, as the current tools are fulfilling about 5% (swag - margin of error ~90%) of their true potential. One really important function that has been envisioned but I don’t think I’ve seen implemented, is that this tool needs to prioritize the things that I find important. Must be because it’s a hard problem.

Statement - This is ME

Another thing that defines home for us web dwellers is some kind of structure that people can drive by and use to make judgements about us. What neighborhood we live in, whether we mow the lawn often enough, what kind of cars are out front - you know the drill. This is probably less nebulous than the home base concept above, but there are still a lot of options. Am I mostly defined by what shows up in Google, or my blog, or stuff I say on FriendFeed, or Twitter, or comments that are splattered across the web with my name on them (including even the ones I authored), or…

Well, it’s not perfect, but it does seem a little less confusing and a lot harder to change. It does seem to be a bit telling that there is a growth industry in image consulting/personal marketing/seo just to help people present the “this is me” picture in the best possible way. I can’t imagine what my kids are going to have to go through to get a job.

Gathering Place

This is an essential function of a real-world home. More and more, it seems to be a function of our virtual home(s) as well. I was intrigued by the reasons that Hutch gave for switching his home page. The reasons all seem to boil down to “the content is better (and it’s not slow)”. As we shift from the free-for-all world of forum posts and blog comments to an environment where we only hear the people we find interesting, it starts to feel a lot more like my living room and a lot less like a trip to the mall. Interestingly, in the process we get a lot closer to a launching point that knows what I want to see. Rather than doing some wickedly difficult statistical modeling of my reading habits, filtering the source to people I find interesting is a pretty good start. A big difference between blog aggregation (which is also “interesting person” filtered by definition) and FF/Twitter activity streams is the amount of effort that has to go into interacting. This is the secret sauce that makes both of these services so compelling. It’s not about gathering data from rss feeds in one place. That’s a simple problem and easily solved. Friction-free interaction is the big draw. As much as I’m a proponent of spending 20 minutes reading a blog post, or an hour writing one, I don’t really always have the time. The time and effort bar is just so much lower for Twitter and FriendFeed that it’s not a fair comparison. Ultimately, if this is about having conversations, then these “short form” venues seem a lot more like a conversation to me.

Mobile Phone, Mobile home

While pondering this stuff during my commute for a couple of days, I came to the conclusion that we’re really heading towards a future that gives us the ability to communicate with people in really intelligent ways. We should be able to get feedback from people directly without the hard interrupt of a phone call. It will be a system that travels with us, and knows who we are in some significant sense. Going down this path led me to the inevitable “but what would make this mainstream” questions. It’s easy for people who are always glued to a laptop, but what about all the normal people who seem to be everywhere and don’t really spend much time on the web? It’s just so blindingly obvious that I wish I didn’t spend so much time thinking about it. Normal people already have this. It’s SMS. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry. It isn’t the pittance of data transfer that’s important. It’s that for most people their cell phone is “home” and it’s their social network, and it fulfills all the stuff I just spent so much effort typing about. This definitely falls into the category of I knew that, but I don’t think I realized how important it was until I really spent some time thinking through it.

photo credit SantaRosa OLD SKOOL

Strange but true, for those who may be wondering if I died or something, you need not fear the worst. There are a few cobwebs collected on the blog here, but I somehow managed to still remember the password. That’s a big win in my book.

So, where’ve you been?

First, before we just jump back in to me spouting off about something, I think a quick update is in order. I’ve been completely consumed with the enormous task of delivering software for the last month or two. The really, really good news is that this effort is paying off. It’s quite thrilling to start seeing some buzz around our product and the company. We’re not completely past crunch-time yet, there’s a mountain of work on my plate. Hitting a couple of critical milestones has, however, given us just enough breathing room that I’m starting to think about stuff like mowing the lawn and eating regular meals again. Blogging falls somewhere in there.

Can you get to the point already

Fair enough. I know it’s bad form to go on and on about not posting. It really bugs me when people do it.

Mark Evans is a writer who continually says things that resonate with me, and he often captures my imagination with an idea that challenges my assumptions and makes me think. I read Mark’s “love affair with FriendFeed” post, and spent a bit of time thinking about it. Ultimately, my opinion differs from Mark’s because FriendFeed for me is a service that is quite useful. I believe it has the potential to be both mainstream and HUGE. As is often said in these discussions, everyone has a different experience with the service. That fact is a real plus for FriendFeed. Personalization and customization are critical to being flexible enough to meet a wide range of needs.

Specifically Mark criticized a couple of things about the FriendFeed experience. First, there is the noise level. I have to say that I was pretty concerned about this at first, but sometimes it is best to just let go and enjoy the ride. Initially, the stuff I saw on FriendFeed was a nice manageable bit of thoughtful conversation. Mostly this is because I was subscribed to about five people. The experience changed pretty noticeably after I took Louis Gray’s advice and started subscribing to everyone that looked interesting. Is it noisy? You bet. Is it valuable? I would have to say yes. Surprisingly the noisy version is even more useful to me than the more civilized chat I used to have among a few people. That’s where the “drift diving” idea in the post title came from. You get dropped off where there’s a nice current, and amazing things just float past. You don’t even need to put much effort into it.

Secondly, there is the shiny thing syndrome that Mark mentions. This aspect, if it came to pass would matter to me quite a bit. One of the things that I find compelling about FF is that it enables me to follow and participate in conversations with people that are very interesting and influential. If the swarm of “digerati” suddenly abandoned the service it would definitely lose something. I’m pretty confident, however, that there’s a lot of staying power to the service. This does seem like a pretty good yardstick. If all of the fans and cheerleaders move on to something else, perhaps there is not enough compelling value to the service to hold people’s attention. Time will tell on this one.

What’s so great about it then

In one of those “I’ll know it when I see it” concepts - FriendFeed is driving us in the right direction. I don’t believe that this is THE be-all and end-all service, but it’s the best I’ve seen so far. There is a confluence of capabilities that I need that all intersect right where FriendFeed lives. The killer aspect of FriendFeed is NOT in the aggregation of multiple services and multiple people.

The thing that makes it useful is that it enables the closest thing we’ve got to friction-free conversations. The aggregation of feeds is a necessary component that brings in source material, but is not the point in itself. Rather than having to run all over the web chasing a bunch of links, I get to see and participate in conversations that people I like to follow around are having. It changes the focus of the conversation from a post on a blog somewhere to a group of interesting people talking about a bunch of stuff. Twitter almost does this, but unless you’re following half the population of California, Twitter can be like a surreal scavenger hunt just trying to figure out who said what. On FriendFeed, they all get nicely organized, like this.

The feel of conversation in FriendFeed is just completely different than comments on a blog. Rather than having one person pontificate and everyone else discuss, it raises the commenter to a more equal participant. There isn’t a feeling of having the discussion be below the fold. The discussion is the content.

Also, this conversation is not just about things I write. I read a lot more than I write (obviously). Being able to quickly share things I read and find interesting was enabled with Google Reader and other rss aggregators quite some time back, but this always left me feeling kind of unsatisfied. Did anyone even read it? Did they understand what I liked about it? Being able to see what the writers I like are reading is also pretty amazing.

Finally, there are more things I think the FF team has done well, but I just want to point out another possible contrast. Mark asked if FriendFeed is the “next Facebook”, or just something we’ll soon grow tired of. I think it won’t be the next Facebook. FriendFeed does not feel at all like a walled garden.

Photo credit nieve44 and Steve Deger

I just helped my wife through this one, and I thought it might be potentially helpful to someone out there using GMail and having this issue. The problem that we ran across is that a draft that she had saved was “sort of” vanished. In the summary view, you could read the first line of the mail, but when you open the draft it’s just a blank screen. Puzzling. Turns out that it’s a “known issue”. The latest and greatest version does this, apparently if the draft is saved without a subject. GMail has it written up as a problem they know about and are working on, so I expect it will be fixed pretty quickly. The workaround is to use the old version of gmail that is linked in the help topic on this issue.

So, that’s the tip, now for the observation. I’ve used gmail a lot over the past couple of years. It’s a really useful application. There are many, many good things I have to say about it. It does sometimes feel a little spooky, however, to depend on something that only exists on some server that I can’t see across a network I can’t control that is being run by people I don’t know and have never even directly dealt with. The simple fact of the matter is that it can be torpedoed at any time for any number of reasons and there’s not really much I can do to work around it.

Mini-Rant

Upgrading a web application is supposed to be easier than bits on a desktop. I agree with the basic premise. The ease of pushing out some new release in the age of the web application still comes with a pretty heavy burden for testing and validation. I guess it’s still not nearly as big a deal as releasing MS Office from a test perspective, but still, there is a lot of havoc and grief that can be caused if you release something with some goofy defect and you’ve got millions of users depending on it. I guess the reason that I felt compelled to write this is that I obviously wasn’t the first person to come across the “all my hard work is lost” feeling of having a draft vaporize. Enough people have been stranded by this problem to have it bubble up pretty close to the top of the known issues list, and I’m sure that a lot of them had a more painful time of it that I did. After all, someone had to hit this thing when there wasn’t any help doc to point the way out.

Anyhow, to anyone responsible for day to day operations of web applications like this, first of all thanks. I know how difficult it is to be in a position where the thing has to be kept running all the time, and your effort should be commended. Also, you already know this, but please be thorough when you test your application. It’s really painful for a lot of people when you mess things up, even a little bit. Just because it’s easier than releasing something like MS Office doesn’t let you off the hook. In my view, it makes it a bigger deal. Look, you’ve got it relatively easy compared to a lot of product teams that have to be painstakingly thorough before they release something. It’s not asking too much for you to get it right.

Ah, well, at least the price is right. Probably why it’s still in beta after half a decade.

Hugh deleted his twitter account. Is the world coming to an end? Oh wait, maybe it’s not so bad.

I had to nod in agreement when I read Frederic’s take on the situation, which was a nice follow up to my laughing out loud just at the title of Steven Hodson’s analysis. The obliteration of twitter might even have been part of the equation when Hugh recently drew this:

It seems the reasoning behind it was simple. The way I parse his post is that it (twitter) is a time sink, and was getting in the way. Clearing the decks and focusing on what is truly important is a really useful exercise. I suspect this kind of cost/benefit analysis will become increasingly common and also increasingly important to each of us as the social aspects of the internet are becoming more abundant and easier to participate in with each passing day.

Not long ago, I was working on a blog post and my wife asked me “so what do you expect to get out of doing that?”. Pretty good question, and one that applies to just about everything. It’s ok if the answer is simply “personal enjoyment”, life isn’t just about making a buck. It is important for me to answer the question, however, if I’m going to have any clear sense of priorities. We’ve only got so many hours to spend. It’s certainly worth questioning the value of our purchases every once in a while.

photo (drawering) credit: Hugh

At the risk of this really becoming a pet peeve of mine, I just can’t keep my mouth shut about the ways that Network Solutions is pushing the edge of the envelope. This company is not content to sit back and copy what someone else is doing - not a chance. They’re innovating. It just so happens that they’re finding innovative new ways to profit at other people’s expense. Most often, it’s their own customers they take advantage of. Here’s the story on TechCrunch, I won’t bother rehashing the whole thing here.

The good news is that the grief seems to be limited to NetSol hosting customers from my limited testing so far.

The old quote commonly attributed to Thomas Watson, which he probably never made, just looks more and more relevant with every day that goes by. Pendulum swings are nothing new in technology and we seem to be on a tear towards consolidation of anything and everything into massive services in the cloud.

500 lb Gorrilas

The news about Google’s entry into this market seems pretty predictable - it’s not like you need to be the amazing Kreskin to imagine that they think cloud computing is significant. The news is also flying all over today, so it’s kind of unavoidable. If you heard there were 10,000 free signups available, they were gone pretty much immediately. There is a wait list, so if you like that sort of thing, go here.

Probably the most interesting thing to me about this development is what does it mean for developers. I really enjoyed the early perspective by Bob Warfield on the SmoothSpan blog. In response to people complaining that it’s Python only, he offers this:

…it doesn’t take Google very many languages before there are few complainers left.  Add Ruby on Rails and PHP, for example, and most of the Web 2.0 world is now in your camp.  Add Java and what’s really left?  Microsoft will be more isolated than ever on their .NET platform.

I think that is a really significant point, and it’s one that hi-lights what is really at stake here. In essence, it’s shaping up to be a platform war. The barriers to entry for platform wars of the past were creating a modern, robust operating system and gaining enough users to make the environment interesting then providing tools and an ecosystem for developers to be productive and make money. Today, it also looks like you need to build multi-billions of dollars worth of datacenter infrastructure too.

What’s in it for me?

In typical Google fashion, they have changed the game quite a bit here. It seems kind of simple, but the strategy of “free ’til you get big” is very powerful. I’ve personally been very aware of Amazon’s cloud platform and following with great interest. I’ve also not built anything using it because it would require me to commit to paying for storage and bandwidth bills. Even though it’s supposedly cheap at low volumes, I’ve not been compelled to take on that kind of commitment just to play around with something that I could maybe find useful someday. Better just to wait until I really need it to figure it out. With the Google model, there’s no hurdle. Sign me up. It might even be fun doing a little Python coding for a change.

What Microsoft will end up doing with this remains to be seen. They are undoubtedly heading for the same turf, it’s just too important to ignore. There is probably lots of really interesting cloud strategy tied up in the Yahoo acquisition. This latest development from Google definitely raises the bar. I really think that’s a good thing. Agree, disagree or think that’s all just obvious? Let me know in the comments, or over on FriendFeed.

photo (drawing?) credit Ethan Hein

How it starts

It’s really funny how easy it is to get lost in my current toolset. I’ve got 21 browser tabs open, google talk windows popping up out of nowhere, twhirl going off with news about twhirl being acquired. It just doesn’t let up. Not that I’m saying I’m overwhelmed, it’s just that sometimes I can’t exactly trace my steps when I’m concurrently following so many avenues to interesting stuff. So it always strikes me as a happy moment when I come across something really good and unexpected.

How it ends up

The thing I accidentally came across today was just pretty cool. I followed somebody’s tweet from Twhirl to twitter to who knows how many other people. Trying to get both sides of a conversation can be a challenge sometimes. Part of the conversation ended up being a fascinating series of messages from someone who’s a professional musician and also very plugged in to technology. Without really even expecting it, I found a blog and a twitter stream to subscribe to that will undoubtedly make me a better guitar player (not hard to do) and enrich my view of technology and music at the same time. Happy accident, that. This twitter thing is starting to get kinda fun.

So, with that, here’s a link to one of my new friends who doesn’t know me:

Beautiful Bass Blog

jeffschmidt on twitter

photo credit Violator3
update: careful with that flickr link for photo credit - some of it is a bit edgy

There was a discussion going around some parts of the blogosphere late last year about data archiving. I haven’t seen much about it lately. Partially inspired by my own vulnerability to data loss, and also by sympathy for Corvida retooling due to hosting problems, I think it’s about time to bring this back up.

Same coin, two sides

The original discussion from last year that I was remembering was triggered by the tragic death of Marc Orchant. Not very long afterwards, the discussion turned to the fact that it would be a shame if all his work just disappeared. Scoble and Winer both weighed in with a call to figure this out, and Frederic had a down-to-earth suggestion that we should just print what we want preserved if we really want to survive technology changes. Frederic has a pretty good point, but I would really like to have something that is a bit more discoverable over the network than a pile of paper. The paper backup is probably a really reasonable redundancy step, however.

The other side of this coin has a lot less to do with preserving a legacy for future anthropology studies, and a lot more to do with preserving our sanity in the here and now. With a lot of content that gets generated nowadays, we really have a serious lack of redundancy built in. In the age of Google and seemingly endless disk capacity out in the cloud(s), would it really be so difficult to do something like RAID 1 for web data?

So, who’s fixing this?

The one voice that I hear consistently talking about the need for a solution to this problem is John Udell. Is there anywhere else I should be looking to find the people that are diligently working to come up with an answer? I’m just starting down the road to looking into it more deeply, so any pointers would be appreciated. One thing does seem obvious about this - there’s a clear need here that seems to resonate with people. It also seems likely that if a reasonable solution was in place, it would be easy enough to find. Even if I couldn’t hunt it down I would expect that well-connected smart people like those I’ve linked to above would have come up with something. Those factors alone make this seem like an area that has a lot of potential for “innovation”. I’ve also got enough faith in our industry to expect that someone is going to knock this one out of the park (at which point we will all look back and say “gee, that was obvious”).

photo credit Kables