Marc's Voice

final April ‘08 blog post

Happy Birthday to Paolo

Congrats to Scobleizer on finally selling out. It’ll put Milan through college.

DataPortability.org - Six Months strong - and a nice new site - too. Now about that logo……

Fine with me - lets just stop using the term Web 2.0. Tim O’Reilly won’t like it - but we’ll all be fine without it.

Congrats to John Battelle - for cashing out early - like Matt Mullenweg and the guys from Metacafe. It seems to be the thing to do.

Nice little bit of innovation from Mixx. They’re now a web service which offers the ability for ANY news service, newspaper, magazine, ezine, whatever - to comment on stories. This is the next logical extension of Digg - which is a Web 1.0 lock-in exploitation model. Mixx has really taken the spirit of citizen journalism and interaction to the next level!

Economies of scale versus niche content - Marshall Kirkpatrick hits it on the head. We are grappling with this very issue - as we speak.

One thing I can say for sure - is that ’subscribing to people’ is a feature that’s here to stay. Whether it be in a News Feed, FriendFeed or baked into your blog tool or email client.

The trick is gonna be to use this feature vis a vis other contexts, services and use cases.

I really liked the graph from Marshall’s post - so I stole it.

Did you know P Diddy is getting a Hollywood star? Now you do.

Yet another social application server platform - Ringside. They’re true open source - I don’t see no business model.

This is one case where less is more. Casual bullshit ad clicks mean nothing and should (if at all possible) be filtered out of the ecosystem. So Google getting fewer ad click throughs is actually a GOOD thing. Eric Schmidt agrees.

My favorite line from this article on ‘Adobe guru to improve Windows interface‘ is this: “Photoshop has well over a decade’s worth of accumulated menus, panels, and dialog boxes..” Actually that’s two decades worth - dude.

Wright-Obama locked in a generational conflict.

Om has a conference called ‘Structure 08′ which looks pretty coolio.

It doesn’t surprise me if LinkedIn is making some serious CPMs. They’re the epitome of the niche high quality target market.

Mister Wong acquires Lifestrea.ms

The commodization of frameworks continues.

Congrats to Eran Hammer-Lahav on his new title “Open Standards Evangelist” - it has a nice ring to it.

Thank you to Mark Hendrickson for remembering us…… (though I was surprised to hear that one could get Ning’s source code - I’ll have to try and get a copy.) Maybe Marc will bring that up in our open conversation.

Textcu.be, SocialThumbs, Watercooler, Weplug, MOG, Fixya,

In closing - here are two little Canter girls in the Canter’s parking lot in LaLa.

You’ll notice that I’m adding more images to my posts.

How to build the mesh - #5: Tools

Tools Tools Tools - this is one word you can’t ever use with a VC. You mention tools and they tune out.

I’ve been tracking the evolution of tools for a while now, as the web appeared, as countless tools companies cloned the Adobe and Macromedia models (and failed) and as on-line tools have caught up with the functionality of traditional desktop based tools (can you believe its taken Adobe THIS long to finally come out with an on-line Photoshop?)

But on-line tools have something desktop constrained tools will never have. Community.

And now that we have two-way APIs + community + content - tools nowadays are truly a new paradigm when compared to what we were building in the 80’s.

I used to simply say: “tools today aren’t shrink wrapped, they come with community and built-in help from your peers and they can be updated immediately and can adapt to the times - in a much more timely manner. Tools can output scalable content and you can try them out first - before you have to buy them.”

But we’ve gone beyond just those simple statements.

Tools today are needed to keep track of all our personas, profile accounts and relationships.

Tools today are needed to organize, manage, backup, synchronize and interoperate your digital lifestyle worth of content and ultimately DO the data portability.

Tools today need to seamlessly fit into the mesh - and be designed to edit any element of the mesh - in any way, shape or form. These tools will take the shape of node adjusters, structure editors, feed filter mechanisms, attention data auctioneers, on-going sync managers or just plain old outliners. These new kind of tools are all ABOUT the mesh - and they’re going to facilitate making the mesh a reality.

So Tools are a key aspect of my design of this series of “How to build the mesh” blog posts and we can now see how all the pieces of the puzzle can come together. As long as we design our tools to work with multiple personas, take advantage of persistent ubiquitous content, tag and index structured content and include a Live Web aspect - tools of the future will create a new business model which has not been possible up until now.

Because users first interaction with new tools nowadays is done - for free - unfortunately most people have a hard problem then seeing ANY value in the tool - even after it has become an intrinsic element of their everyday lives.

It amazes me that people would spend $40 on a bottle of wine or videogame or a tank of gas - yet they wouldn’t pay $40 for a essential tool which improves their lives. This is partially because so many of the tools and services out there today simply suck - and lack any depth or value beyond a single feature or gimmick.

But REAL tools have to be:

- flexible, general purpose and able to be applied to a wide range of tasks, functions and application areas

- have a wide range of features and support traditional tool features, like ‘Save as…’, ‘Open’ and ‘Undo’

- be accessible to beginners, while also providing the depth advanced users demand

- be compatible with open standards as well as a wide range of proprietary protocols, data formats and APIs

How many on-line tools that you know fulfill these simple requirements? Not many.

Beyond just wide range of features, tools today also suck because they are designed to only do one or two things. Its as if “simple” dictated the application usage. Well that may work for a screwdriver or hammer - but many of the tasks and applications areas that need tools today ARE complex scenarios and challenges. So the tool BETTER be able to solve the problem, cause this KISS shit just don’t cut it - 9 times out of 10.

Tools today are a single feature, rushed out to market, which remain in Beta and never really get finished.

Tools today are ad driven which is fine, but that forces them to cater to the masses, ignoring the very specialists who really need tools and who are willing to pay for them.

So tools in general have gotten a bad cred - and rightly so. So its time to change that!

Take a look at a tool called ‘webOutliner‘. It was created by Marc Barrot with help from Doug Baron, Danny Goodman and myself. Though still a bit unstable, this tool should give everyone an idea of what is possible - today (it’s actually four years old.) It has ‘open’, ’save as’, a file directory, supports RSS and OPML and combines the old school functionality of outlining (MORE, Think Tank) with web links, media, hyperlink transclusion and structure editing.

Best of all Weboutliner feeds on a very basic UI notion of outlining and hierarchical editing. Instinctfully one hits the carriage return and gets a new node. If you hit the tab key - the node indents. And if you select a node - you can turn it into a link or attach media to it. It works the way you’d expect a web based outliner to work.

So too must our text editors, video and audio editors, or image editors work in this same instinctual manner.

Now combine this desktop-like editing capability with a community of peers.

Now we can have a marketplace to buy and sell assets and resources only your peers can appreciate. Now you can “reach out” to your community and ask them a question that only your peers can answer. Now you can build in relevant content into the tool - which actually HELPS you out in your everyday tool usage. RSS feeds, editorial content, targeted ads, affiliate deals, knowledge bases and deep databases of video Help - can all enhance and multiply what an on-line tool - is.

So community + content is possible with tools.

Now how will two-ways APIs further amplify and multiply this opportunity? Simple - it gets rid of ever having to lock-in your customers into the tool.

Sure - your customers CAN lock themselves in if they wish. But they won’t HAVE to. One will be able to go to a particular tool, use it - and then go back to what they were doing - leaving no residue, formatted account, attention data tied to your name, or other forms of ‘lock-in’ which currently is REQUIRED of ALL on-line tools.

Two-way APIs mean that once you’ve grabbed - lets say your photos from Flickr, Picassa and Plum and edit them into some aggregated album, you can then send that new album back “from whence it came”- and leave NOTHING in the tool.

This kind of flexibility and power will be standard functionality in tools of the future. And as long we we’re smart about designing these tools to work with the mesh - I believe we’ll be able to charge a decent buck for the tools - assuming of course you’re charging via a tiered pricing scheme.

So in conclusion:

two-way APIs + community + content = tool

Final note: no chart or list of issues for this one. Now onto UI Objects!

My summer project - works-in-progress

Given the release of Live Mesh, Dataportability.org’s new logo and web site and the increasing attention to FriendFeed, Minggl, Plaxo, OpenSocial, the Social Graph APIs, Twitter, oAuth, Facebook apps and OpenID - I started working on a series of blog posts called “How to build the mesh”.

Last night I completed #4 in the series - and I’ve been creating little charts along with each post - to emphasize that any of the areas I’m covering are in fact their own stand alone ecosystem. The mesh that I’m imagining will combine and multiply these disparate areas into an open world that will make sure that small developers can continue to participate along the way.

So the time has come to ‘lay these charts down on top of each other‘ to get an overall picture of what the mesh will look like. And what better place to do that than my back yard fence?

So I’ll be throwing parties throughout the summer (once a month) and inviting people over to contribute and discuss the ramifications of all these ‘rivers of people’, ‘people’s marketplace’, real-time nervous system, blood of our forefathers, content as infrastructure, two-way APIs and new standards that will be needed.

BTW Dora has nothing to do with this architecture.

How to build the mesh - #4: the Live Web

I just love this title.

I just love the idea of using the web as a real-time distribution and communication platform. A Live Web - alive with our thoughts, dreams, business hustles, flirts, updates and expression.

All sorts of players, variations, monopolies, platforms and solutions are emerging in this burgeoning area - unfortunately most of them with no business model except: “maybe we’ll get lots of page hits” or “we’ll know who these people are - so we can exploit that fact - and put targeted ads in front of them.”

The current discussion over Twitter, Friendfeed and other new forms of communication is to be expected as with each new generation of technology, comes a new cadre of startups, brands and acquisitions. Meebo is out hustling itself and Skype is available for purchase. Wherever there is money to be made - somebody will figure out how to exploit and monetize it.

The Live Web presents a particularly interesting financial upside - as VoIP and video conferencing stumble directly into the Telco domain and mobile devices used for IM, Twittering and photo uploading grow bigger and bigger everyday.

So there’s plenty of interest, investment cash and innovative startup energy to inspire a 100 different platforms and services - all involving real-time video and presence, some variation on VOIP, 3D and video conferencing and of course - every possible permutation on IM, chat, text or what’s been known in the industry as ‘Twittering’.

Jabber created a wonderful standard called XMPP - which is being adopted by many Live Web vendors - but not all. And I’ve always thought that they’d be some sort of ‘open Twitter’ - eventually. Routing, ricocheting, dispatching, proxying and pinging are back in rage now and Dave Winer has merged his Twittergram technology in with a routing/switching technology that promises to route any kind of web service to any recipient.

The world of 3D gaming is generating the kind of revenues that would make even Microsoft blush.

So we know people love this stuff, they want more of it - and it probably has to do with special hardware like mobile and wireless devices, game consoles, headsets, sensor devices, flat panels and kiosks. The Live Web will be everywhere from your car, boat or the woods to the walk path between the parking garage and your office/school or home.

Then once you’re in your home, cell repeaters or wifi will get you downstairs, in the bathroom, out in back and in an elevator at work. Then once you’re sitting in front of your laptop - you’ll seamlessly transition over to another ‘version’ of the Live Web on the screen of your machine(s.)

Anything that is alive will be with you - all the time - unless you turn it off.

One thing we have to remember is that these technologies not only make money for the founders, but also change people’s lives. And there are entrepreneurs in Singapore, Dubai, Berlin and Rio who are doing the same tech for THEIR customers. So we all need to think about level playing fields, accessibility around the world - and a truly worldwide mesh - in languages other than just English.

What this blog series if trying to focus on are the issues that are greater than one platform winning or somebody selling out. I’ve been trying to piece together an overview of all the ways that the Mesh will form - and outline what standards and best practices are needed, along with advocacy groups, major players and any outstanding issues to discuss.

I started with the #1 ID - one’s personal profile, set of Personas and the Groups that they’re a member of and their Social Graph. We now have OpenID and oAuth and lots of interest in uer centric ID issues nowadays - and I place this area in the center of every other area in the series.

I then covered #2 Persistent Ubiquitous Content - which includes eveything from the free BBC archives and Archive.org’s massive on-line digital media libraries to Wikipedia, iTunes and every other kind of on-line digital content - that’s there all the time. Knowledge bases, YouTube and Flickr also fit into this area. Imagine if all that stuff was available to you - all the time via two-way APIs. These repositories don’t have to be READ only, we can store all our UGC stuff there as well!

And recently I did #3 in the series - which covered one my favorite pet peeves - structured content - and the idea of shared servers of this stuff - with APIs and feeds coming in and out of it. Content as infrastructure. Tags and bookmarks as anchors and nodes for the mesh. Ricochet end-points of the starfish.

Now in this post - #4 - I will try to make sense how the Live Web and all this real-time communication, updating, presence management, feeds and APIs - can create a multiplier effect with one’s ID by putting it into context with all this persistent online content and all sorts of anchor points and structured content culminating in new ways for different platforms to interact in what we call ‘the mesh’.

Not Microsoft’s mesh - our mesh (though they’re certainly free to mesh their mesh into our mesh.)

The Live Web is a commodity. Everybody is gonna have it - so there won’t be any huge tollgates or lock-ins into one particular technology or vendor. Even Skype is finding that out today. By utilizing tcp/ip and http the Live Web benefits from having an infrastructure in place to build on. But the Live Web can only be practical if it’s ALSO connected to the world of POTS and mobile devices.

GSM (the standard for cell phones) is pretty ubiquitous, but there are other forms of cell phone technology out there (CDMA) but nobody seems to worry about that. The different speeds for uploading and moving data (none of which are interoperable) have fragmented the so-called 3G world. But its the handset manufacturers and carrier platform vendors who have hopelessly fragmented the world of cell phones - to the point where there are over 10-15 different development platforms to worry about to ship ‘mobile’ compatible software.

This just makes it that more challenging in connecting the Live Web into the mesh - and enabling any kind of vendor to mesh into that same opportunity - as the Big Boys enjoy today. But it can be done!

The incredible real-time communication vehicle which we call IM, chat or Twittering provides a base platform from which 100’s if not 1,000s of unique solutions and innovative use case scenarios are being born - as we speak.

But the Live Web is more than just communicating.

It is about presence and just knowing if someone if there or not. And the world of 3D immersive virtual reality. Its about a swarm grid of tiny sensors monitoring the status of some factory or city streets and reporting back 20 times a second. Harnessing technology to improve our lives and make a buck - is what its all about.

We all have benefited from this ‘live web’ - and we could give credit to IRC or to AOL - but at the end of the day IM is a complete commodity - especially since its now in Facebook, MySpace, etc.

At no time did advertising ever get in the way of IM (though the current AIM bots are a bit cumbersome to ignore.) I always assumed that one day we’d wake up and all these banner ads, surveys and flash thingies would have taken over our AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN Messengers. But that day never happened.

Its too bad that the IM platforms never united together - but that gave birth to Meebo and god bless them for that. For those of you who don’t know what Meebo is - its a platform that gateways and connects together ALL of the major IM platforms. And they use Jabber’s XMPP protocol as well!

Efforts have begun to unite the greater ‘Live Web’ in some meaningful way - perhaps around XMPP or some other kind of ‘open standards’. At least some vendors are talking about standards. That would be coolio.

Twitter is now a platform for Live Web apps (with video copycat Seesmic right behind) - just like Facebook is a platform (and OpenSocial) for social apps.

To me it’s really obvious how this all meshes together with one’s ID, persistent content and structured content. But maybe its not that obvious to all of you - so let me just stop here and say “Live Web functionality will be an intrinsic part of our digital lives and thus - the mesh in general.”

Every ‘digital lifestyle aggregator, social network, blogging tool, productivity app, legacy system and Intranet apps - will all come with built-in Live Web functionality. It’ll be as common as “Open as….” and email.

And there will be all SORTS of permutations, variants and unique Live Web solutions which will enable all sorts of new startups and entrepreneurs. Around the world.

Action Items in this area include:

- uniting IM protocols together utilizing XMPP - Meebo for everyone

- supporting standards for access and privileges controls - so one’s access controls are respected and interpreted correctly by other networks

- opt in controls - so the end-user can control whether or not their email and other info can be moved elsewhere if it’s in someone else’s Contacts list

- the pervasive notion of ‘multiple personas’ - so that one can maintain multiple sets of friends, content, etc. all within the ‘umbrella’ of a single Live Web account

- DNS-like infrastructure - so that multiple copies of the same service (eg. Twitter) - can share member databases

- and (of course) we need to continue to educate end-users on the importance of their control over their own data

Action Items in general include:

- make sure that ALL the open standards continue to rise in popularity, that all implementations are compatible with each other and that more open standards get created

- testing and compatibility labs - a place where we can guarantee that everything works together. Building a COMPATIBLE mesh will be a challenge - and it won’t ever happen if things break or don’t work.

- two-way APIs - until we can write back into systems and services as easily as we can get data from those services we won’t have a symmetrical architecture and a successful mesh environment

- establish OutputThis as a standard for content producers to list all of the destinations they’d like to route their content - to. SEE Dataportability.

Summary of open standards we have already:

XMPP

Some leading proprietary APIs:

AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Skype, Twitter, Pownce, Jive, Seesmic,

Major players and people to watch and listen to:

Meebo peeps, Evan Williams, Leah Culver, Phil Rosedale, Jaron Lanier, Dave Sifry, Jeremie Miller, Blaine Cook,

Ralph Meijer, Peter Saint-Andre, Robert Gaal, Kellan Elliot-McCrea, Matt Tucker, Mickaël Rémond, Harper Reed, Anders Conbere,

Major organizations, events and advocacy groups:

Jabber, Jive, Twitter, Seesmic, Process One, Jaiku,
Final NOTE: OK 4 down, 6 to go. #5 = Tools will be about the new kinds of tools I see appearing now that two-way APIs + community + content = tools. #6 = UI Objects will be all about the standard kinds of ‘client side‘ user interface objects which will soon just be commodities we choose and assemble together.

#7 = Infrastructure - when I start to weave the quilt of the mesh with common threads, #8 Constructs which is a rather conceptual area, based upon the premise that if we write our code similarly, it’ll be that much easier to map our data structures and APIs to each other. #9 = Marketplace is there cause we all gotta make a living - and I call the final area - #10 Standards - which is clearly the belly of the beast.

UPDATE: Blaine Cook emailed me to clue me into some of other players down in the trenches.  Doing the work.

This is gonna be one hella week

Not only is it QueensDay in Amsterdam, but just about everyone I know has their birthday in the next week or so.

Yahho will get bought by Microsoft.

We’ll have started two new big projects.  Can’t mention their names - yet.  But one will go live in June, the other July.  We’re shrinking the time it takes to build these things - out.

And Kara Swisher hits it on the head: “nobody know what Twitter or FriendFeed is - but everyone knows about Facebook.”

Om Malik scoops Dave Winer on his his announcement.  Good luck to Dave, Borthwick and SwitchABit.  This sounds a bit like our OutputThis service (written by Shelly Powers.)  But all OutputThis does is route blog posts.  Clearly routing everything - is needed.  We’ll totally use this is our upcoming tool we’re working on - now.

Mary Hodder is diving deeper into the accusations the WebGuild folks made.  I blogged about this earlier - with my own opinion. But Mary (in typical style) doesn’t always believe everything she reads and has had some strange experience leaving comments on the WebGuild site.  So I’ll make sure to track and update this story……….

BrightKite, Calameo, YackTrack, BooRah, Nile Guide, SaysMe

Recent images from the Data Sharing Workshop

 Here’s Kaliya:

David Recordon, Chris Saad, Joseph Smarr  and Angus.

The Microsoft guys - Angus and Inder:

Here I am making a point:

One sided blogosphere conversations

So I tried to publicly engage someone from Ning on the issues surrounding their promotion of their # of overall networks - but lack of details on what those #’s really represent.

I asked to find out:

- how many of these 230,000 networks had more than 5 people in them

- more than 10 people in them? more than 150 people in them?

- how long were people staying on these networks? what were they doing?

This kind of information is useful to us all - sociologists, entrepreneurs, social media practitioners, etc.

Hearing about the total number of networks is almost useless.

Sure sure - some people may call my request motivated by some sort of jealousy over Ning’s recent absurd valuation and funding of an additional $60M (which is AFTER the investment banker fees - as Marc has pointed out!) But that’s besides the point.

Marc Andreessen blogs.

It may be unfair to ask Brooke Hammerling (the Ning PR person I publicly requested an answer from…) to blog, but Marc already has his blog set up.

Recent posts on why he’s supporting Obama, why he’s tickled pink about getting all that money and other juicy topics are fine for him to blog about.

But the blogosphere is a two-way conversation. I read about that in Cluetrain.

Brooke did answer me ‘back channel’ via email and I’ve had others approach me telling me I’m supposed to leave Brooke alone (she OBVIOUSLY has powerful friends.)

These same people told me I’m supposed to bring this up with Marc.

And since he spells his first name the right way - I figure I’m entitled to at least a little public conversation on these issues.

We’ll ignore the issues of the valuation and whether or not Ning EVER has to become “cash flow positive” (that’s VC talk for “profitable“.) And the related matters of monetizing users for the explicit purpose of selling out and reaping huge benefits (read: “profits“.)

I gotta wonder if the word ‘altruism’ ever strikes home? Is there anything besides making a profit that matters?

We’ll also ignore the issue (for now) of Ning being truly open and whether or not they will allow individuals or entire networks to export their data to some other network. Ning has - in fact - in the past pointed to code that would facilitate that exporting - so I have no reason to believe they would prevent that from happening (what about IMPORTING networks?)

In fact I do care about Ning - even though some people get all snarky about it - I think Ning exposing these #’s will give us a great opportunity of looking at the phenomena of social networking in a new way. Its not about the quantity, its about the quality.

Metcalfe’s Law should not apply to relationships. It’s NOT about the more the merrier.

I’d much rather be on a network of 150 then 150M.

When Marc blogged about Ning surpassing 200k networks - he stated that 70% of the networks were active and that less than 1% of the networks were p0rno. So he obviously thinks we’re ‘kind of’ interested in the details - we just want MORE details - please.

So how about it Marc? Would you release this data so that folks like danah boyd can understand what’s going - on - even better? I posted an open letter to you and Gina last summer - but I never got a reply (public or private.) Hopefully I will this time.

Another run-in with the O’Reilly trademark police

I like this guy Daya Baran. 

He’s not afraid to speak the truth and point out that O’Reilly is promoting his son-in-law, is working behind the scenes to fuck little guys like him - and in general - acting like O’Reilly.

We’ve seen this before with O’Reilly - with them staking claim to the term ‘Web 2.0′.

This is enough to get me to go to the next Web Guild event.

This is what the blogosphere is all about.  I had never heard about this story (why isn’t TechCrunch, Read/Write, Om or Rafat covering it?  Where’s Kara when we need her?)

Daya outs O’Reilly and points out that the insider’s “old boy’s network“  is working behind the scenes to hurt the Web Guild (by contacting Web Guild speakers and supporters.)  Google apparently has agreed to help O’Reilly in this kind of conduct.

The only way I found out about this - is that I just received a monthly newsletter from Web Guild.

Here’s the story. 

End of April ‘08 - blogging - #2

Gillmor Gang - Friday April 25

It  didn’t look like there’s much happening at Web 2.0 Expo. Oh well.

Needless to we now have the battle of open platforms - Live Mesh versus Y! OS.

At least Yahoo is finally saying what they wanna do. It looks pretty coolio.

The Bell Video store is getting all sorts of coolio features - from our PeopleAggregator platform.

All sorts of people are interested in Live Mesh. Hmm- I think I’ll go try it myself.

Speaking of Microsoft - it’s nice to see them listening to customers and actually giving them what they want.

“We are in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 is all around us,” Tim O’Reilly - and I own the trademark.

$6B in bottom line profits - last quarter for Microsoft

And I disagree with Mary Jo Foley - meshing Y! OS with Live mesh is actually gonna be fun and profitable!

Congrats to Ty Roberts and Gracenote

MixWit, Vysr, MySpace apps, Grou.ps, Twitter outliner, Open Sports Network, Mnggl, MySocial 24×7, Xiha, Sound Index, United Dogs,

We got Slashdotted today - or shall I say “Tom Joynered”

Our client RadioOne (and their division InteractiveOne) started to stroke for publicity today and went on the Tom Joyner Show and PBS and got their new acquisition BlackPlanet.com to link to their new content site NewsOne we built for them.

They’ve got an exclusive interview up with Malcolm X’s grandson - who just got out of jail.

They also sent out 2M emails - and it all went off TOO well.

Our poor little site went down once and teetered all day. But now it looks like its solid and stable.

Take a look. This is why god invented Slashdotting.

The NewsOne content channel (and its brother channel theUrbanDaily) are incestuously joined at the hip to a new social network called OnOne.com.