The Always-On-You Web

ISO: Engineering Lead & Co-founder

2007-10-04T07:40:00.000-07:00

We've begun circulating the following job description...

Your mission is to co-architect and build a peer-to-peer system for editing and circulating XML documents with diverse content types, for a market of millions of business teams. You possess remarkable collaboration skills and software engineering talents; a passion for elegant design and quality code; a sense of urgency and attention to detail. You are courageous enough to fly in the face of conventional industry wisdom and navigate the inevitable right-angle turns that every start-up encounters. You are adept at creating connections and developing them into relationships. You are excited to join a pre-seed start-up, help drive it to the next stage, and become a co-founder with a substantial equity share. Prior experience in a high-intensity start-up is a plus.

We are a software startup applying a novel architecture and web UI to a vexing, long-standing problem afflicting millions of business teams. Our goal is to build an irresistible product that spreads virally, becoming part of everyday life for the vast majority of knowledge workers.

Always-on-you Web Blog Paused

2007-01-02T10:03:00.000-08:00

We're taking a break from blogging to help a friend get a business started, and do some more detailed prototyping of an always-on-you web app. More to follow late this year...

[AoyW] Why Email Persists: It's P2P

2006-09-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

"Anne 2.0" writes that email persists despite numerous attepts to replace it over many years because it is "good enough". Benefits she points to are: 1) Interoperability 2) Personalized Organization 3) Easy access control 4) Single point of information access. All good points, as are those that she enumerates where email fails.

However, there is a fundamental difference between email and all the mechanisms that have been proposed to obsolete it: Email is peer-to-peer. Everything else is server-centered. Email uses servers, true, but they merely provide relay service or secondary storage. The email application sees a field of peers, identified by unique addresses, and reachable via the nearest SMTP service.

What hasn't been tried is applying the user-centric P2P approach of email to writing and content-creation apps, which are the fundamental tools of the knowledge worker. Isn't P2P messaging really a feature of these apps, rather than a disconnected app itself?

Were a P2P wiki framework to emerge, enabling private wikis distributed among teams of collaborators, with commentary or chat embedded on any page, would the email client still persist as the primary—and frustrating—tool that it is today?

[AoyW] UWB Wireless Finally Working?

2006-08-31T09:47:00.000-07:00

A Japanese outfit I've never heard of has announced a Wireless USB hub. Is ultra-wideband finally going to escape from the demo hall into the real world?

This device is essentially a wireless docking station for your PC. You plug a flash-drive-sized UWB radio into a USB port on your laptop, and plug USB peripherals into their small hub unit. Voila, you're connected to your peripherals wirelessly.

If this gizmo actually works, terrific. Even if it does, it's a bit of a yawn. UWB is supposed to empower ultra-mobile devices, like media-pods, cameras, smartphones, and flash drives. Imagine a flash drive that you never have to plug in to access; walk up to any PC, and have access to all your data (and always-on-you web apps :-) at gigabit speeds. Here's hoping this is a first commercial step towards that future.

[AoyW] The 'Web Office' Is a Tiny Niche

2006-08-22T09:06:00.001-07:00

The web has solved a lot of problems in the past decade, but has had little impact on personal and team computing. We're still banging away in MS Office and shoving docs around via email, or piling them up on file servers. Any number of web-based online services and intranet software products have been offered to change this. They have seen relatively low adoption. As Exhibit A, I offer this Alexa graph of well-known web office (aka Office 2.0) sites, including—for contrast—the popular sendspace.com email-attachment manager:

click for full size

The Alexa numbers may well be inaccurate; what I find interesting are the trends of this graph. Why do they look so flat for all but email attachment distribution? I believe these services can't spread virally, unlike consumer web services, because business technology requires approval by management and IT staff. Management is leery of shipping confidential data out to web services run by a third party, and even if IT depts had ample time to evaluate new tools, they are uneasy about systems they can't control.

Certain "on-demand" apps like salesforce.com have made some headway among businesses which don't have the IT resources to deploy such solutions in-house. Management can approve outsourcing for capability which they couldn't otherwise access, e.g. CRM. But email is the only personal app which has made substantial headway as a service for businesses (perhaps because incoming email originates offsite anyway?).

Intranets.com, the biggest success of the Web 1.0 team sites, was acquired last year for $45M, a little more than they'd raised in venture cap. That was after six years of chasing users. Can an AJAX UI change the adoption curve of such sites? Check the trend lines on the graph for jot.com and projectpath.com (the most popular of five Basecamp domains), and draw your own conclusion.

The online web just isn't reaching a lot of users in this space, and server-based intranet solutions don't spread virally either, as end-users can't set up servers. The always-on-you web can change that.

The always-on-you web is any web app that runs on a user device (laptop, Wi-Fi smartphone, flash drive) and shares data with other users on a p2p basis. It's a web app that doesn't require an intranet or online server. It's a web app that the user carries, so it's always-on-you, as opposed to always-on(-if-you're-online). And it's a mechanism which can spread virally in a business environment, because users can deploy it themselves.

[AoyW] The Office 2.0 Conference

2006-08-18T23:29:00.000-07:00

I just came across the web site for the upcoming Office 2.0 Conference which has an interesting list of speakers from web 2.0 startups.

As you might expect, most or all of these outfits offer hosted or intranet solutions. As such, they have to run the gantlet of the corporate IT dept for vetting/approval before they can solve any user problems. In other words, they can't spread virally among most enterprise users, a problem which consumer web services don't have.

Nonetheless, the goals of these startups are much the same as those of the always-on-you web, even if their solution architecture is Web 1.1 :-)

AOL Releases Search Logs. Who's Next?

2006-08-06T21:31:00.000-07:00

Several hundred thousand paying AOL members have just been deliberately stripped of their privacy to the entire world.

Oh. My. God.

Now, folks, is there any question whatsoever that personal and business use of online apps like Writely, Basecamp, and Google Spreadsheets may be unwise?

As a member of such services, you don't own your data, and therefore you can't protect it.

Most ordinary web surfers already get this, which is why web-based personal computing apps have faired so poorly over the past decade. I wonder when the webtopian pundits are going to wake up.

Update: AOL's apology isn't remotely satisfactory. What are they doing to put the genie back in the bottle? They need to launch their legal eagles at those sites now redistributing this data, even if the license they attached to it allows redistribution.

[AoyW] Coming Attractions

2006-07-21T16:02:00.000-07:00

I've been unable to blog much in the past month and topics for blog posts are piling up. Here's a preview of the posts coming in the next couple weeks...

David Beers, in an essay on his blog, proposes a mobile phone approach to the need addressed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. He favors the "always-on-you web" model with a phone as the personal server device, rather than a flash drive. Wi-Fi smartphones would enable this, although Bluetooth or UWB (aka Wireless USB) are preferable for their point-to-point networking, i.e. no access point. (Wi-Fi can do that, but it has to be reconfigured by the user, who then loses Internet connectivity.) Unfortunately, Bluetooth has had little success outside of the wireless headset, and UWB continues to be next year's big thing.

* * *

Just to point out a flash-drive-based app system that is NOT the always-on-you web... Lexar is promoting the Power to Go software, which enables a variety of Windows apps to run directly from a flash drive. You could call this the "always-on-you office". This is cool, but if it's a web-oriented future we're rushing into, this is a backward-going time machine.

* * *

A reader wrote in to point out the Bouillon Project, which enables a peer-to-peer, worldwide wiki, wherein pages are accessible only when they've been recommended by your "friends" in the network. This sounds pretty neat, but it's not obvious to me what the mass-market application is, outside of the social networking game. I'll try to keep track of this to see what application ideas they propose.

[AoyW] The WebOS Bandwagon

2006-07-04T06:54:00.000-07:00

Paul Boutin ought to jump off the WebOS bandwagon and have a look at the road! Like so many others for so many years now, he trumpets the vision of the WebOS, whereby PC apps and data move online... into the clutches of a posse of middlemen: the app service, the network service, and the billing service.

I've written at some length on this blog about why that model hasn't caught on (and won't), and about an alternative model, the "always-on-you web", that brings web benefits to personal and team software without forcing your apps and data online. Have a look at the "Key Posts" sidebar group on my main page.

But the bandwagoneers play on, content to speculate on the road ahead, rather than contemplate the road underfoot, which is wholly impassable.

Dear Tim O'Reilly

2006-06-05T05:44:00.000-07:00

Dear Tim O'Reilly,

I chose the name Web 2.5 for my blog (subtitled "the always-on-you web" and the first result at Google for "Web 2.5") because I believed the term "Web 2.0" to be generic. I would not have chosen this name had I known that CMP's trademark was in the works, because in that case a conference named the "Web 2.5 Summit" could be said to confuse the market, even if a Web 2.5 event sought a completely different audience than your Web 2.0 Conference.

I accept your assertion that your conference defined the term Web 2.0 as it is now broadly used. I agree that you have established commercial ownership of the term for conferences. And I know your motivation is pure when you assure the web community that Web 2.0 can continue to be used without restriction outside the conference context.

The trouble is that much of the web community is not comfortable with a term that is restricted so. We find ourselves in the bind of having embraced your term enthusiastically, widely, but now admonished not to use it, nor similar terms like mine, for conferences. We feel blindsided by this turn of events; we have a great deal invested in this meme; we are not sure how to respond.

We still earnestly hope, despite your signals to the contrary, that your partnership will cede the term Web 2.0 to the community, and rebrand your conference ever so slightly (a move that would surely generate tremendous coverage at this juncture). That feels to us like the kind of magnanimous gesture we might expect from your organization, at least as we understand it from its track record in the community.

We will be set adrift, for a time, if you refuse us this gesture. What new label should we apply to our movement? What thought leader should we turn to? What cost will this transition exact? Our creativity, I'm sure you will agree, is better spent in other endeavors.

Most Sincerely,

Liam Breck
Network Improv
5th of June, 2006

[AoyW] Eliminate E-meetings, Collaborate Better

2006-06-02T09:16:00.000-07:00

I just came across this fascinating post on collaboration. It posits that group discussion fails when soliciting ideas and feedback. The first few replies in a discussion may be authentic, but every other reply is tainted by them.

It proposes one-on-one email between the facilitator and each participant, e.g. BCC all participants with the request, then summarize their replies, without attribution, to all for feedback/vote via BCC again. This restricts "conversation", which makes sense; everyone knows what a waste of time meetings are.

In the context of peer-to-peer wikis, a dicussion/chat mechanism could provide a "deferred reveal" feature, i.e. all responses are posted to the shared space, but if the topic is marked "no-reveal", only posts by the facilitator are visible to everyone, until the facilitator unmarks it, or enough time elapses.

Going further into wiki editing, the facilitator would put up a page and request enhancements, and participants would change the initial page, without seeing others' changes. The facilitator would then merge the best stuff. How big a pain is merging vs. losing great ideas that don't emerge, and arguing about lesser ideas?

Reminds me of "management by walking around".

P.S. don't read the other comments before leaving yours :-)

[AoyW] Nokia Releases Mobile Web Server

2006-05-30T09:25:00.000-07:00

Nokia's open source Mobile Web Server software turns your Symbian phone into an Apache server. (They should have called it the Pocket Web Server.) Browsers reach your phone via the internet through a gateway component, which routes traffic to the wireless service. It makes the phone in your pocket internet-addressable, provided you have a data plan on your phone.

How would you use this? Personal publishing and file-sharing come to mind, e.g. offering photos and recordings of the event you're attending to an audience of friends. Everything you capture is immediately accessible to them, without a separate step to post it.

This is pretty cool, but it's not what I mean by the always-on-you web. The reason to carry a web server, or more importantly a web application server, is to enable productivity and team apps with a web UI. That is, a UI where interlinked pages, with hypermedia content, are the focus, instead of files/folders, applications, and a stack of windows. A web UI also allows you multiple local screens, each of which may view different pages in your webs/wikis. Users would naturally want to share some pages; those would be sync'd peer-to-peer, whenever net connectivity is available.

The portable web app server gives you a framework for online web apps like Writely and Basecamp, without driving your data onto the grounds of a third party, nor forcing you online whenever you need to edit. (That's key; most knowledge workers can't simply sign up at an online app service and start posting company data to it; you have to get approval from IT mgmt. That's not just a pain, it isn't very gosh-darn likely!) This personal web service could run on a wi-fi smartphone, an Origami slate, or from a flash drive on any available PC.

Update: Turns out that this post is a decent response to Gabor Cselle's recent musing, What's Missing in Web 2.0?.

Thanks to Oliver at MobileCrunch for alerting me to the news.

O'Reilly, Get Real

2006-05-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

There was an O'Reilly-style way to handle the trademark issue: 1) Announce that CMP was about to receive the servicemark. 2) Note that, since the filing, many web 2.0 events have occurred. 3) Indicate their desire to strengthen the Web 2.0 Conference brand. 4) Ask the web community for feedback on how to proceed.

Monday Update:
During this debacle, many bloggers have noted that they never liked the term, and please can we try a different one now. As you've gathered from the title of this blog, I think it's a fine moniker. The web has evolved; blogs and wikis are novel and genuinely useful, and advertisers are crawling all over it. Social networking is probably a fad, as are other aspects, like Writely and Basecamp, but it's all worth trying. And the web will evolve further, inventing tools that give ordinary users a web context for everyday work without forcing them into the clutches of third parties—that's Web 2.5, the always-on-you web.

The web community attracted unrelenting cynicism and bitterness after the dot-com bubble burst, and Web 2.0 is a way of telling the world that we're back, we're here to stay, we're here to change everything.

Saturday Update:
As I noted in a comment to John Battelle's defense of his partners' actions, the servicemark 'Web 2.0 <event>' (where event is a generic term like conference or workshop) was the wrong thing to trademark. Having done so, not foreseeing how widespread the use of 'Web 2.0' would become, it was the wrong thing to defend. Changing the name of your shindig to 'Web 2.0 Confab' or somesuch would have caused your partnership little trouble, and would have been defensible, both legally and morally.

Yesterday, assuming that O'Reilly couldn't be this clueless (or this), I came out in defense of them. Today, I'm joining the mass demonstration.

Seriously, would anyone be willing to help organize and/or speak at a Web 2.X Conference in the Bay Area for this fall?

Get O'Real... O'Reilly Not to Blame for CMP Misstep

2006-05-25T21:30:00.000-07:00

Update: As it turns out, I'm dead wrong. O'Reilly IS to blame for this blunder. (Rick Segal offers a pithy analysis.) I couldn't imagine they could be this foolish. May I suggest you not attend the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference this year. I won't.

An Irish non-profit has received a cease-and-desist from CMP Media, claiming to own a service mark on the term 'Web 2.0'.

Uh-oh, I hope there isn't a mass migration to 'Web 2.5' if CMP sticks to its (rather low-caliber) guns. That term has been coined, folks!

Tim O'Reilly, a fellow with probably the best public image in all of tech, is taking heat (lots) for a legal move by another company. The blogosphere has taken the original post on the story at face value, and not bothered to read the text of the C&D letter, an image of which is included in the post. Yet another example of how bloggers are not journalists.

Update: Intriguingly, there has been a fight going on at the Wikipedia Web 2.0 page about whether to mention the fact that CMP has claimed a trademark on the term. So far, the editorial consensus is to exclude this detail.

Apologies for the off-topic post, readers. We will return to the decidedly less hype-driven Web 2.5 story shortly.

53651 Users Can't Be Wrong...

2006-05-15T09:01:00.000-07:00

But they often are. As pointed out by Josh Kopelman, this is the readership of TechCrunch (current count at right), without counting readers who go direct to the website (a lot). This crowd has a very different relationship to the net than the mass market. Many of them believe that the internet will someday become a global brain, which all logic & data will move into. Near-term, they believe the internet is the PC.

That is not a vision that the mass market will ever embrace. Ordinary users have a healthy fear of centralized control, and a rational aversion to organizations that would rent property that individuals would benefit from owning, like their data. If you sign up the entire TechCrunch readership to your shiny new Web 2.0 app service, you might not sign up anyone else.

Croquet Proposes Web X.0: P2P, R/W, 3D

2006-05-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

Nothing like a little alphabet soup to start the day... Croquet, a research platform that has escaped from the lab, sprung free by a startup called Qwaq, proposes to be "an operating system for the post-browser Internet". Nothing ambitious, mind you.

The focus of their post-browser net vision is not publishing, but collaboration, purportedly on a large scale. Intriguingly, its architecture is peer-to-peer, so end-users can build the Croquet web one node at a time. That is a Good Idea. Today's server-centric net tends to serve organizations well, and individuals rarely. MySpace and Blogspot are about the extent of the user-defined net, and they don't support much more than blather.

The Croquet user experience is a 3D universe of interlinked worlds; or perhaps interlinked apartments, as each world is more likely to be a set of rooms than landscapes. Clearly the stack of overlapping "windows" pioneered by PARC and first commercialized by Apple is a terrible way to organize or present information. The browser, with its hyperlinks and history deck, is far more sensible, and akin to the ubiquitous spiral-bound notebook. Croquet takes this idea into the third dimension.

But 3D conveys the feel of wandering around with a patch over one eye and a cheap scuba mask on your face; you can't experience realistic 3D without stereoscopic display and peripheral vision. I've not seen any research showing that 3D UI dramatically improves on 2D UI for ordinary tasks. 3D is hugely popular for gaming, so the technology works, but it hasn't migrated to more productive uses. What does 3D add to mostly-textual content? Think about a bookshelf: it's a 2D array of titles; grab one, open it, and you see a pair of 2D pages, in a stack.

Another potential stumbling block for Croquet is its apparent complexity. Perhaps this is simply due to the way the web site describes it, but it sounds like a bear to master as a programmer. You have to learn smalltalk, for starters, and then a mountain of APIs and paradigms. The wonderful thing about the web is how little you need to know to do useful things. Given time, the Croquet team may hide some of its complexity. But given its academic origins, that time could be a long one.

Robert Scoble got a demo recently. The Wikipedia article describes the grand vision and project history.

Personally, I'd like to see a 2D, P2P, Read/Write web for personal and small-team applications; based on SVG, and incorporating PC documents/apps. Hmm, that sounds familiar... Oh right, I'm writing it! It's called airWRX.

AoyW vs. In-Office Spam

2006-04-24T00:28:00.000-07:00

In-house spammers, i.e. most people you work with, have become a leading headache at the office. These well-intentioned miscreants habitually send messages to a group of people, often with documents attached, when only one or two are involved in the issue in question. They repeatedly send a document after each edit which they feel is significant. It's gotten so bad that knowledge-workers are now spending their days in Outlook, trapped! Outlook, or any email client for that matter, is hardly a project-oriented workspace tool, as you may have noticed.

This situation highlights three gaps in the desktop environment, when compared with the web: 1) The PC has no project workspace, whereas an editable web site is a project workspace. 2) Email is a protocol, not an application; email should be delivered to project workspaces, not in-boxes. 3) The desktop has no content-sharing mechanism other than email.

Creating a workgroup web site is an obvious approach to the problem, either on the intranet or at an online service. However, web workgroup tools have seen little adoption, largely because they are server-based. As such, they cannot be deployed by end-users; they require IT Mgmt approval and/or support. (IT Mgmt is especially skeptical of online services which pull company data offsite.) Also, centralized tools force users to think twice about everything they write into them, as all of it will be accessible to colleagues and managers, for all time.

Enter the Always-on-you Web: a peer-to-peer web (which runs for each user from a flash drive or other mobile device) with both shared and private workspaces. In these shared webs, an electronic discussion is simply an object on a page with other content, e.g. a spreadsheet. New messages in that discussion, or changes to the spreadsheet, are distributed only to those who are sharing that web. They either choose to be alerted to changes as they arrive, or peruse them as time permits, depending on their role in the effort. In-office email is virtually eliminated.

[AoyW] There Is No 'WebOS Market'

2006-04-24T00:13:00.000-07:00

Richard MacManus draws up a WebOS market review. It's premature to call it a market, especially given the untimely demise a few years back of startups like WebOS.com and Desktop.com.

A WebOS is a solution looking for a problem. The idea of making the desktop user experience (with its clumsy silo-style applications, and haystack of files & folders) appear on the web is completely wrongheaded. The web offers a user experience that transcends the desktop; even non-technical users get this.

Rather than pushing the desktop up to the worldwide web, we should be creating web environments that can live on your person—the always-on-you web.

[AoyW] Yahoo Will Whack Your Email

2006-04-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

A few years back, I set up a Yahoo email account. I hardly ever used it, accumulating at most a few hundred kilobytes of data, including incoming attachments. I logged in pretty infrequently. The last time I logged in I received this notice (click for full size):

The key elements:
- You have not logged in during the past four months
- All email has been deleted and cannot be recovered
- Subscribe ($19.99/year) to prevent another four-month whack

"This email will self-destruct in four months." Cool feature. Now, how do you feel about Yahoo as a potential provider of online desktop applications, for which they store the data? For that matter, how do you feel about Google or Microsoft, or anywhere?

If you use online apps that store your data, you don't own your data. That fact has not escaped the mass market, and no volume of hype will hypnotize it to the contrary. The always-on-you web, which puts your data in your pocket, is the only suitable method for web apps that rival the desktop in the mass market.

[AoyW] Pocket Wikis in Sync

2006-03-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

The wiki is the app at the heart of the Always-On-You Web. Personal and shared webs obviously have to allow edit-in-place; what's the point of publishing read-only content to yourself? :-)

But the wiki as represented by Wikipedia isn't nearly flexible enough for the always-on-you web. For one, it shouldn't limit the content to rich text plus bitmaps (i.e. HTML). And it cannot corral the content in a single wiki instance. Always-on-you wikis that run directly from a flash drive, or live on your laptop, (see TiddlyWiki & PmWiki) won't be directly accessible to your collaborators; they need their own copy of the data in their own instance of the wiki. And that calls for a synchronization mechanism. A wiki-sync.

There are two ubiquitous sync systems, which everyone uses constantly... and I bet you can't name them. They are email and instant messaging. Huh? Yes, the number one way that documents are sync'ed by co-authors is via email attachments. This method imparts no implicit context for the object in question; discerning its meaning is left to the humans. But it works well enough, apparently. IM is simpler still, relaying a text block to some number of online participants, in near-real-time.

These simple, common mechanisms are the right stuff for sync'ing shared, locally-sited wikis. When a change recipient is online, they get the update instantly; otherwise the change is stored and forwarded when they're next online. The only thing to add is a tag that uniquely identifies the object that changed, so incoming updates can be processed behind the scenes.

My firm is designing an open sync service that will allow members to keep multiple instances of a data object in sync across the net. It's not just for wikis, any app could use it; it's not just for portable apps, hosted apps could use it. We'd love to get feedback from wiki warlocks and mashup masters about it, so drop me a line or leave a comment if interested.

AoyW Joins the BlogBurst Network

2006-03-27T10:41:00.000-08:00

I'm blushing while blowing my own horn, but this blog has been accepted into the BlogBurst network, a wire service which promotes choice blog content to major publishers. (Bloggers in the mainstream media bed? horrors! :)

Well, it figures. The always-on-you web is subtly emerging, and today we're the only blog on the beat. I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

[AoyW] Privacy Promotes Productivity

2006-03-20T13:20:00.000-08:00

Why is it that the web wave has left the desktop dry? Technical factors have been a barrier, but they're a berm made of sand; they dissolve in time. Social factors are more subtle, and a lot sturdier. The common architecture of web software raises some real social concerns, which have hardly been examined, let alone remedied.

The founder of an enterprise IM startup recounted this anecdote: "While deploying our IM software at a hedge fund, I noticed the admins using AIM, and suggested to an admin that the new intra-office IM system for the traders would be helpful to the admins as well." Her response: "Will my boss be able to see what I've written?"

The answer was yes, of course. The firm bought the app to improve knowledge retention, among other reasons. The lesson here is that employees are averse to the vision of a manager peering over their shoulder when they're alone at the keyboard. If they know that it's merely possible, they will curtail their efforts, per the philosophy The Less Said the Better.

The PC, for all its deserved reputation as unmanageable, is a personal sandbox in which an employee doesn't feel constrained and watched. She is free to play with ideas and drafts, and chooses what to circulate to colleagues. That freedom is a boon to productivity.

That freedom doesn't exist in contemporary web software. Today, web applications are based on servers, so everything done with them is knowable by operators and managers. This has caused many web workgroup installations to meet resistance and even fail; employees are used to the virtual vanity erected by their PCs, and they prefer it to the open stage of a centralized environment.

Drawing the benefits of the web—easy navigation via hyperlinks, and a metaphor reminicent of the spiral-bound notebook with section tabs on the edge—out of the internet cloud requires a different architecture. Something more akin to the independent-peers arrangement realized by PCs and email.

That's the architecture of the Always-On-You Web: lightweight, personal web servers which run from mobile devices, and are accessed on any local screen device via a browser. Mobile web servers are peers, sync'ing any content designated as shared, and keeping private all else. The Always-On-You Web has no centralized servers.

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PS: in an effort to energize the bland blogspot layout, I've added an evocative banner image. It's a little artsy and a little risque. I'd love to hear reader reactions...

[AoyW] Introducing 'indi', a Web 2.0 Site in Your Pocket

2006-03-13T00:30:00.000-08:00

Last week at the ETech conference, the indi "personal web site" from InfoEther made a tentative debut for the digerati. Judging by the blog coverage it didn't receive, they didn't grok it. Maybe the only concepts the ETech audience can wrap their cortical folds around these days are those bits of fluff about to be sucked off the floor by Google or Yahoo. ;-)

The indi is a web application platform that runs directly from a flash drive on any PC. The application environment is written in a mix of Ruby and the Flash ActionScript language, with the UI rendered by the Flash player in the PC's browser. For perspective, the bandwidth of a USB 2.0 drive is comparable to a hard drive. Broadband, schmoadband. This environment isn't going to feel like any web site known to man. If the PC of the moment happens to be online, indi apps can hit the net to pick up mail or updates to a team calendar, or do multi-player gaming, or anything. If you can't get online, you've still got everything you need: data & apps, ready to rock.

The indi is a statement that personal web services like Writely and GMail don't have to run in the cloud. Rather, the data and apps of such services ought to live in your pocket, where they belong to you (not a third party) and are always immediately accessible.

Now, I know something about this space, since my company is working on an app with a similar architecture for a completely different market. You should consider me both biased, and well-informed.

The indi's designers chose Flash for the front end. In a word, "aghh". About the only compelling Flash app I've ever encountered is the Orbitz Pool Table game. And that crashes IE with disappointing frequency. When I first got Firefox, which doesn't bundle Flash, I was delighted by the Flash-free web experience. It's now my standard mode. Flash is to the web what game shows are to television.

Flash is a closed client and a proprietary protocol. It can't legitimately claim to be a presentation format, like SVG or PDF. (If it could, it would have euthanized PDF a decade ago, as Acrobat is one of those sad pieces of code that begs for a coup de grace, despite the worthy design goals that spawned it.) Thankfully, use of Flash seems to be declining steadily with the rise of the AJAX model.

However, if you plan to build a for-play web site, Flash is the only game in town. And games seem to be a key target for the indi. Bang...Aghh!

In applying the Ruby language for the data management side (which runs outside the browser), the indi gets full marks for geek chic. It also provides a variant of the OpenStep UI framework (originally developed for the NeXT) for ActionScript. This puts the UI logic inside the Flash player, instead of streaming to the browser, the way our SVG Terminal does. The indi approach is analogous to an AJAX UI framework running in a browser, talking to business logic on a server; except that the range of Flash is far greater than that of DHTML/CSS. From the perspective of most developers, this is a rather tall stack of unfamiliar, though critically-acclaimed, technology. Where's the Java or Javascript? Eschewing Java may be a business decision; licensing the JRE for mass-market/consumer distribution may not make sense in this case. And they've opted for an open UI library, rather than Macromedia's offerings.

Naturally, the indi isn't shipping at this point. A private beta is in progress, and in email, I've been told the debut date is July 4 of this year; how clever, since the indi is named for "digital independence". (Amusingly, the beta user guide is in PDF—come on, guys, eat your own dog food!) ~~In good blogger form, I've had no contact yet with InfoEther.~~ I've requested a beta invitation... if they oblige I'll be writing more.

The indi is a different take on how you can use the web... it's the Web 2.5 take, and it has a lot more to do with the future of the web than all of the ASP 1.1 outfits combined—Writely, 37Signals, et al. Not that we don't need decent online apps, it's that the useful scenarios for them pile up to a much smaller heap than those for the indi and its ilk.

[AoyW] A Killer App for the UMPC/Origami

2006-03-10T08:09:00.000-08:00

The Origami tablet design from Microsoft seems to have been universally panned. Unlike most of the critics, I actually use an ultralight slate tablet constantly, the NEC LitePad. I'm composing this post with it. (Though I never use handwriting; I write with a shorthand method of my own design.)

Here's a radical idea for the UMPC: think of it not as a PC, but as a server. A device that could fire app UIs at any/many available screens, via wi-fi. Now you're not constrained by the tiny screen and pen input, but you fall back on them when no other PC is handy.

A scenario: You walk into the conference room with your UMPC, and all participating screens light up with your slides, plus UI to let your colleagues annotate them. The UMPC screen shows your slide notes. Later, your head back to your office, and your desktop screens and small office projector light up with whatever they showed before you left to give the presentation.

Windows doesn't offer much infrastructure to accomplish this example, but the web does, especially AJAX & SVG. Re-defining the UMPC as an always-on-you web 2.0 server unlocks a world of killer apps for it—apps which are better served from your pocket than the internet.

[AoyW] GDrive? GWrite? Gee Whiz (not).

2006-03-09T01:51:00.000-08:00

ASP 1.1, here we come! Google seems ready to roll out the GOffice, with calendaring imminent, file service in the works, and ink drying on the Writely acquisition. Is Microsoft worried? I doubt it.

Google has it exactly backwards, especially regarding online storage. Rather than an online repository and desktop cache, what users need is a mobile repository (e.g. 32G flash drive with UWB wireless) for always-on-you apps & data, with an online subset of data for (semi-)public viewing and mash-ups.

Wireless flash drives are inherently bigger, faster, and more reliable than any WAN-based service. The net should be used to sync shared content on your drive with others, not deliver it just-in-time.

32G not enough? Take 2, take 5... they're cheap and small. Flash doesn't have this density today, but at the curerent rate of improvement, it will within three years. Got to have it now? Carry a pocket USB hard drive.

Heavy storage consumers will also need auto-archiving of older content; user-encrypted and housed at more than one service provider (who has no visibility into the data due to encryption). Google won't be among those providers, because it has to see your data to figure out what ads to show you.

The sad thing about this waste of Google's effort and brand is that it's been tried before. Theirs was the vision of Intranets.com, and numerous other players, who blew a ton of venture cap during the dot-com era. Intranets.com was the most successful of the lot, they sold to WebEx last year for $45M. Mind you, they raised $40M and spent six years to get there.

Was the lack of Ajax the reason for all those failures? Or was it user reluctance to hand over their data to a posse of three middlemen (net, ASP, billing) and rent it back from them? Google is going to find out.