5:20 p.m. — Quick Hits #2— Quite a few non-Americans here today. Many of Eastern European origin. Or at least they’re the ones that get up on the microphones and ask questions…— Hoping to get off a fuller story on this later, but for the time being would like to note that it appears as if Google’s OpenSocial is aiming to cut off Facebook’s air supply—and having some success at it. “Many sites, one API,” is the OpenSocial motto. In English: The service gives developers the ability to design applications for social networking sites without learning the technical intricacies of each particular social network. A skeleton key of sorts that fits many doors. Largely traction-less one short year ago, OpenSocial now boasts more than 5,000 apps built upon it. Through OpenSocial, developers have access to over 550 million users, including MySpace and hi5. Facebook is not supported…— “Widgets” is not just a meaningless accounting term anymore. If you have a website and want to spruce it up a bit, check out WidgetBox.com, the biggest supplier. It’s worth a look for sure…
— Joshua Porter, author of the book Designing for the Social Web, just spent a solid three hours talking about the value of community on the Web. I can’t help thinking that if our smartest people spent more time working on improving real communities than virtual ones, our world would be better off. Also, if I score a job at an Internet company with a title of “Community Organizer,” can I be President?
— Back in the old days (2001), I worked on a package for the now defunct Forbes ASAP magazine that looked at how integral free labor/user-generated content was to so many Internet businesses. It’s incredible how huge this dynamic has become. Often, user-generated data is what actually creates the value of the enterprise. Facebook makes boxes and we fill them in, for free. Genius…
— However and meanwhile, we’ve heard a ton of talk today about users “gaming” these user-reliant services. As valuable as all this user-generated content is, companies are also finding it necessary to add staff to prevent user abuse. Josh Porter used Digg as an example, remembering when the Top Diggers all teamed up to digg each other’s stories regardless of how diggable they were on their merits…
— Does anybody have any clue what “the semantic web” is? It’s supposed to be the Next Big Thing, but nobody seems to know what it is. Maybe that’s an indication that it truly is What’s Next?
— Judging by how many Macs I see around the Big Apple, it’s shocking to think that Apple has less than 20% market share of the PC market in the U.S. Looks more like 90%, from where I sit…
— As a writer, I’m personally encouraged by the direction the Internet has taken. Especially in NYC, blogs and other forms of written expression are ENORMOUS. The Web is in constant need of compelling (and less so) content. Maybe a B.A. in English is not so worthless after all…
3:39 p.m. – The Word of the Day: “Embedded” Wrote earlier today about how websites are increasingly made of parts obtained elsewhere and then assembled here. Thus, the ubiquitous use of the word “embedded.” Remember that word, because that’s what companies like Google and Amazon are going to be in your website and everyone else’s, if you and everyone else use the free tools they’re giving away. Let’s take YouTube as an example of what being embedded means for Web 2.0 ventures. General theory: Google allows most any schmuck with a website to use YouTube’s technology on his own website, so as to show video easily and cheaply. Concrete example: I run a small business—tax preparation, let’s say. I want to give my workers access to training videos, but I don’t want to spend much (read: any) money on hosting or distribution. I just want the videos to be available on my website so my workers can see them and learn from them. I want to look like I am up on the new technology, using this whole Internet thing to my advantage.So I use YouTube technology to “embed” these videos in my own website. It’s free and it’s easy and I look smart. Thank you very much, Google. Much appreciated.As Klickable.tv’s Chief Technology Officer described it, “Everyone in America is using YouTube’s bandwidth.” No wonder Google is contemplating putting server farms on ships at sea. They need the buoyancy, because they’re carrying the rest of us deadbeats on their back.
However, let’s all remember the axiom, “You don’t get something for nothing in this world.” There is a reason that Google and Amazon and WordPress and myriad other companies are giving you their stuff free. And that reason is not altruism. It’s market ownership.
Read the terms of service on these free tools and you’ll realize that you don’t own what they give you . You only own the right to use it—for now. Tomorrow could be different.
To use a bricks and mortar metaphor: the cornerstone of your building is my property. I own that cornerstone, in perpetuity. And I can take it back whenever I want.
Or better yet start charging you to use it.
As the government has learned from allowing reporters to be embedded in units fighting in Iraq, embeding is a more complex arrangement than it may seem at first glance. Mutual interests can and do diverge. What embedded really means is that you’re in bed with somebody else.
That can be a good thing — but it can also get messy.
2:50 p.m. PDT— Quick Hits
— Ran into two New York-based journalists in the elevator, didn’t catch their names. One seemed pleased he didn’t have to fly to California this year to go to this conference. The other one didn’t agree, saying that was always the best thing about this conference: it was in California. Both were looking for the free lunch, and headed back downstairs when it wasn’t available in the media rooms…
— Dion Hinchcliffe sees Amazon’s web services suite “emerging as a best practice for web startups.” Amazing how many things Amazon is doing these days, and how well. This company is a beast on the e-commerce scene, not only mastering its practice for its own advancement but now embedding itself in everyone else’s efforts to imitate its success. Bezos is having the last laugh…
— Startup Digital Chalk (DigitalChalk.com) reduces data storage and distribution costs for corporate training video and audio by 75% in the first year. How? Cloud computing. Don’t know what that is? Don’t worry about it; just concentrate on the 75% savings in the first year…
— Quick, name the three biggest social networks. Facebook, MySpace, and…and…and…hi5. Who? What? Never heard of it? Headquartered in San Francisco, hi5 Networks is not as ballyhooed as its competitors but growing like a weed outside of North America. It’s the #1 social network in numerous countries in Latin America and Asia. Give them credit for realizing what so many tech companies don’t: not only wealthy white Westerners use computers anymore!
— Last week, I wrote a column noting that New York Nerds are hard to find. Not at this conference they’re not. They’re all over the place today, coding while they listen to speakers speak about coding. Thank God I thought better than to wear a tie; I would have felt like a freak. The Christopher Walken T-shirt and checkered Vans are fully appropriate in this environment…
— Always kind of comical to see so many high-tech folks using PowerPoint for their speeches. You would think, with this crowd, that something more “advanced” would have come along, since the program is basically just glorified flash cards. But Microsoft, and simplicity, continues to dominate…
— Add “Jakob’s Law” to Moore’s and Murphy’s, if you buy into Web 2.0. Jakob’s Law states that “users spend the vast majority of their time on other people’s websites.” The upshot? Get your stuff on other people’s websites! Be open, be generous, be a partner…
1:54 p.m. — The Web Is the Platform (Seriously, It Is)I’m happy to report that New York City feels great and powerful inside the Javits Center at Web 2.0. Wall Street may be crashing, but the Internet is only getting bigger and better — and people here are definitely excited. You made the right career choice after all, web developers.Planning to drop in on several of this morning’s workshops (tomorrow is for theoretical speeches, today is about real-world tech). Luckily I got stuck in Dion Hinchcliffe’s talk, “Building Successful Next Generation Web 2.0 Applications.” I must say that this was a fantastic talk and very convincing of its thesis: Web 2.0 is a whole new world, and an exciting one to boot. Of course, Hinchcliffe runs a consultancy and is a booster of this whole Web 2.0 concept, so he’s hardly an unbiased source.However, please do not dismiss this Web 2.0 stuff as mere boosterism. I am far from a technical genius and even farther from a lover of technology for its own sake, but I am fully convinced that Web 2.0 is the realest of the real. Wide-ranging, informative, and commonsensical, Mr. Hinchcliffe convinced me that cliché-sounding phrases like “the web is the platform” are not hype but reality.That it’s already happening was perhaps the best proof of Hinchcliffe’s thesis. Amazon and Google are the two big names that kept coming up. Both of these huge companies have built extensive web services businesses whose sole goal is to provide developers with the “picks and shovels” they need to do their work. The 300-some odd developers who crowded the room this morning, sitting on the floor and lurking in doorways, listened intently and scribbled notes and couldn’t have cared less about Lehman Brothers. That’s the old world, this is the new.Tools are being made available to these people, more and more every day. For free or cheap.
Amazon, Hinchcliffe says, is at the forefront of ‘cloud computing’, for example, a key component of the Web 2.0 infrastructure. While the technical nature of this component rather eludes me (and you too, maybe), the bottom line is that cloud computing means that a developer can build a data center of unlimited capacity with a few clicks of his or her mouse—for very cheap. When storing data is basically free to the user, lots of ideas go from impossible to possible.
And you thought Amazon was still just selling books and lawn furniture?
Google, meanwhile, through Google Code, is doing the same thing — albeit in its own style (less “open” than Amazon’s but still utterly brilliant, according to Hinchcliffe). From Google Gadgets to Google App Engine to the fast-growing direct challenge to Facebook called OpenSocial, Google is going to give you what you need to build software for the Web. And, in turn, you are going to keep using Google for all your development needs. Google is your friend who helps you, developers.
Remember that. And there will be a test: Big Google Brother demands it.
Google Maps is perhaps the best example of how revolutionary, yet sensible, this new paradigm of “the web is the platform” really is. Early on, Google decided that other websites should be able to use Google Maps as a part of their website. This led to some of the first “mashups,” including HousingMaps.com, which merged apartment listing data from Craigslist with Google Maps to create something totally new and very cool. Today, Google Maps is the #1 most used API (Application Programming Interface) on the Internet. The classic win-win.
Facebook operates on this same premise: share and share alike, and be a part of other people’s creations in order to get yours out there, too. Yahoo and even Microsoft are also headed this way.
But the point of Mr. Hinchcliffe’s talk—indeed the point of Web 2.0 as a whole—does not concern names and companies; it concerns a totally different way of thinking about software and the Internet. It concerns creators being generous. “The Walled Garden of Internet 1.0 is a thing of the past,” argues Hinchcliffe. “Websites are starting to be composed of parts drawn from other places. The innovation is in the assembly of applications, not in the source code of any single application.”
In other words, if you are a developer, then, you must give to get. Your application, whatever it is, should not need to be “found” by users on your website, but rather should be able to be distributed throughout the Internet by third parties, on their websites. Thus the growth of “widgets,” for blogs.
The end result, for the user, is web pages that are powerful software programs in and of themselves, full of interactive bells and whistles. And these web pages are not expensive to make, because there are all these tools available for free or cheap. It’s just a matter of putting them together.
The funny thing is that, as Hinchcliffe noted, a lack of generosity is, in a sense, what’s preventing the final triumph of this “federated” or “mashed-up” Web 2.0 world: users are unwilling to give their personal information to developers. If I, as a developer, can’t see your personal and business calendar, I can’t build you this super-cool calendar that combines the two and makes your life easier and better. Bank account information is a prime example of data that users won’t fork over, no matter how innovative and excellent a program could be concocted if only that data were available.
But perhaps our minds will change, adapt, if only developers just keep giving us more and more cool stuff. Either way, users always win when the web is the platform—which it almost always is, now.
8:30 a.m. — Web 2.0 New York: Will Anyone Care?Last night, I was excited to go to the Web 2.0 conference today. This morning, I woke up and turned on the television. These days, in New York, those two don’t mix. The news is loud and bad. Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy. Bank of America buys Merrill Lynch, but not before the stock price falls from $93 to $17 in less than two years — if BofA hadn’t bailed it out, Merrill would’ve filed for bankruptcy, too. Insurance behemoth AIG might go under. Bank failures multiplying. Unemployment rate doubled since last year…People pay $3,000 for studio apartments in this city. And go out for dinner and drinks frequently. In New York, you can legitimately make $100,000 and be living paycheck-to-paycheck. And a lot of people used to getting paychecks are going to stop getting them. I’ll bet they’re worried. I bet so many of them are worried that the City itself will feel worried. It’s a gray day here and summer is over and if no more paychecks, no more private school for the kids. The Farmer’s Almanac predicts that this is going to be one of the coldest winters in a long time.I am excited to get down to the Javits Center and see if the New York tech crowd is excited or just sort of going through the motions, dancing under a dark cloud as Gotham goes cold. They were planning to be excited. It’s the first time this event’s ever been held here, and it’s a big event, an symbol of Silicon Alley finally “making it.” If the NYC tech crowd is still fired up despite the economic news, they’ll be kind of alone in this city—and maybe, in that brave aloneness, they’ll actually live up to that bright future that techies so often sell us on, that terrific money-making exciting someday we can all be a part of. Maybe. We’ll see. But this morning, without a doubt, New York is in mourning.
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