Chris Boese's Weblog

Dan Gillmor gives much-needed perspective on the journ-opoly's real market failures

Link: Dan Gillmor: Journalism monopoly was also a market failure - Advertising - Salon.com.

Dan lays it down tough, but he says some things that really needed saying, that needed amplifying.

I'm still pretty freaked over the general decline of the overall enterprise of public affairs reporting, investigative reporting, civic and civil society reporting and analysis, as these behemoth media monopolies falter like a single-species pine forest hit by the bark beetle.

But Dan is at least reminding us, reminding me, of something I knew, suffered with as the status quo, never quite reconciled myself to as the years rolled by, but found myself increasingly powerless to do anything about it to fight those monopolies, at least until the blog movement and the idea of citizen journalism came along.

Not that the pretty feeble but courageous citizen journalism and non-profit journalism efforts caused the massive monopolies to shiver in their boots. That mild contribution to the monopolies' death is just a thousand cuts, with the IDEA of the real masses, the huge reading publics accessing content for free online. Those readers were fed by an advertising-subsidized content machine, however, a machine created and delivered in an industrial, mindless assembly-line, tape-recorder-journalist-as-low-wage-line-worker model, not with a a critical thinking and analysis (even semantic parsing!) information age model (one could argue the Internet model is SEO-driven, nearly-bot-written content thinly scraped to follow trending topics... but that's a subject for another post!).

But the real death blow is being struck by the hand that fed the monopoly powers: advertisers cutting back in the face of the Great Recession.

Jan Chipchase leaves Nokia, joins Frog Design - BusinessWeek

Link: Jan Chipchase leaves Nokia, joins Frog Design - BusinessWeek.

I know I'm finding this story late, but ever since I heard Jan Chipchase do a talk on his research and design work, I like to follow what he's doing wherever he's doing it. Sort of like Carmen Sandiego!

Jan Chipchase leaves Nokia, joins Frog Design

Posted by: Helen Walters on April 05, 2010

Interface designer and anthropologist Jan Chipchase (that’s him in the background, taking the picture) has made a name for himself and collected quite a following as a result of his work at Nokia, where he worked in both the research group and the design team (read a 2007 BusinessWeek Q&A with him here.) Having joined the Finnish telecoms company in October, 2000, Chipchase spent nine years in Tokyo and the last at Nokia Design in Los Angeles. Now, however, change is afoot, as Chipchase moves to work at design and innovation consultancy, frog design. As the firm’s new executive creative director of global insights, Chipchase is relocating once more, this time to Shanghai, China.

[...]

What does your title mean and what will your new role entail?
It’s a global role, so I won’t be restricting myself to Shanghai. Having said that, it’s a growing studio, so I look forward to being part of that story. Within frog, I hope to bring my considerable hands-on experience of going out into the real world and bringing insights and information and inspiration back into the organization. I’ve seen firsthand how that can affect not only what a company decides to make, but how it decides to make or even whether it should make. And by “make”, I mean products and services and applications, even things like how an organization structures itself, how it puts processes in place for innovation. Put it this way, it’s pleasantly messy. No Teutonic, Finnish answer of “this is how it is.” It’s way more interesting than that.

[...]

OJR's Robert Niles: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

Link: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists.

Boy, there's some intriguing stuff packed into this short Online Journalism Review piece by Robert Niles, stuff that gets said on the way to saying something else, and those are the bits that give me pause!

They seem to have more ramifications for the world of writing and literacy than they do for the world of vocational training for journalists, although they are also in some sense tossed off, and could use more support than a hasty generalization.

So I figure, why not look in at them here? Let's look beyond the practical vo-tech employment concerns and wax a bit philosophical.

First, to Robert Niles:

Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

By Robert Niles

What's the value of journalism?

The short answer is, of course, "whatever someone will pay for it." But a more thoughtful response gets at why people are willing to exchange something of value for news information.

Economics 101 teaches that if more people want something, and the scarcer it is, the higher the price. With millions of new websites competing for people's attention, advertising rates across all media have plunged, threatening news businesses that depend upon advertising income.

[Hmmm. Tell the Econ 101 argument to poets, and they may beg to differ.

While journalists have long had to contend with the idea that their best work has the value of the Daily Fishwrap, the thing that people pile up unread, throw away daily, or use to line birdcages, poets have lived with this deep knowledge, that their very best work, their best of the best, work that strives for standing the test of time, or ephemeral, contingent, and quickly forgotten work like performance art, has an economic value of precisely ZERO, since before the time of Gutenberg. 

This is neat: Ford named Brand of the Year for social media innovation

Link: Society for New Communications Research Announces 2009 Fellows` Choice Award Winners for Innovator, Visionary, Brand and Humanitarian of the Year | Reuters.

Neat write up below on Ford (I work for Ford at Razorfish).

Society for New Communications Research Announces 2009 Fellows` Choice Award Winners for Innovator, Visionary, Brand and Humanitarian of the Year

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(Business Wire)--The Society for New Communications Research (http://sncr.org), a global nonprofit research and education foundation and think tank focused on the latest developments in new media and communications and their impact on business, media, culture and society, today announced the Society`s Fellows` Choice Award winners for the Visionary of the Year, Innovator of the Year, Brand of the Year and Humanitarian of the Year as part of the SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards program.

The 2009 SNCR Fellows Choice Award winners are:

* Visionary of the Year: David Plouffe, President Obama`s campaign adviser, for his successful use of social media communications tools and technologies in the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign strategy

* Innovation of the Year: The Kindle, the popular software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 for reading e-books and other digital media

* Brand of the Year: Ford for its innovative use of social media to improve the way the company communicates with its stakeholders

* Humanitarian of the Year: The Iranian Political Bloggers for their courageous use of blogging tools and Twitter to try share their experiences with the world and to try to effect political change in Iran

"The SNCR Fellows have chosen an incredibly impressive variety of individuals and organizations for this year`s award winners. These special award winners have the vision and success to provide a valuable example to others and we are honored to be able to acknowledge them through this awards program," commented Jen McClure, president, SNCR. 

[...]

The Society for New Communications Research is a global nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and education foundation and think tank focused on the advanced study of the latest developments in new media and communications, and their effect ontraditional media and business models, communications, culture and society. SNCR is dedicated to creating a bridge between the academic and theoretical pursuit of these topics and the pragmatic implementation of new media and communications tools and methodologies. The Society`s Fellows include a leading group offuturists, scholars, business leaders, professional communicators, members of the media and technologists from around the globe - all collaborating together on research initiatives, educational offerings, and the establishment ofstandards and best practices. For more information, email us at [email protected] or call +1 408.266.9658.

SNCR

Media: Jen McClure, 650-387-8590 [email protected]

Dan Gillmor proposes some "New Rules of News." I pick my favorites.

Link: The new rules of news | Dan Gillmor | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Constantly risking absurdity and death... er, no. That's Ferlinghetti.

Um, clearly risking IRONY without death, Dan has waded into trying to define what journalism is yet again! Thanks Dan! Don't know what I'd do without you, and I mean that seriously (having taught from and even blurbed, I think, your terrific book We the Media).

But for the irony! It's so postmodern!

From this insightful list of 22 New Rules for News, we first must talk about Rule Number 11...

11. We would never publish lists of ten. They're a prop for lazy and unimaginative people.

I guess lists of 22 are OK then? Numerologists would tell you 11 and 22 are Master Numbers that can't be reduced, linked to both channeling IDEALISM into the planet from a higher plane (one more than 10 items) and working as a MASTER BUILDER, some kind of journalistic Freemason, I guess.

There you go, Dan. Always trying to moving things to a higher level! Lists of more than 10 items are OK. Whew! [grin]

I jokes. But some good stuff to chew on in this list of 22 items. Because Dan doesn't wade into the polemic that surrounds so much of the debate about the future of journalism (but instead has characteristically put his money where his mouth is, to work as a practical master builder of sorts for the highest kind of idealism the religion of journalism can sustain) I find it interesting picking his brain on this stuff.

Some things I agree with. Some I don't. Some are more important. Some less. Which inspired me to add my (for what it's worth) two cents.

How about a list of my 10 favorites?

First, the set-up (so it makes sense):

Dan sez:

You may have noticed – you could hardly miss it – the blizzard of anniversary stories last month about the fall of Lehman Brothers, an event that helped spark last year's financial meltdown. The coverage reminded me that journalists failed to do their jobs before last year's crisis emerged, and have continued to fail since then.

It also reminds me of a few pet peeves about the way traditional journalists operate. So here's a list of 22 things, not in any particular order, that I'd insist upon if I ran a news organization.

He's got me at Number 1, which just happened to be one of my pet peeves too, especially when I worked in TV-Land.

1. We would not run anniversary stories and commentary, except in the rarest of circumstances. They are a refuge for lazy and unimaginative journalists.

Dan tells my friend Grayson Daughters that the "lazy and unimaginative journalists" line was added by the editorial process at the Guardian, and that he wouldn't have used that term himself. I would have! If I'd have stayed in newspapers instead of morphing into cable news, it probably wouldn't bug me so much. But if I have to see ANOTHER Coney Island hot-dog eating story, I'll barf up all the hot dogs those guys are eating.

Sad shift work, really, was what it was, for 24-hour news staffers who couldn't get those days off. I didn't mind the national election rituals. But certain non-holidays that lead to a pre-set mandatory programming mantra of cliche's could just make me run around the room screaming. Like the hurricane preparation story, as the hurricane is of course "bearing down," right before it starts to "wreak havock."

How about the Super Bowl Sunday bizarro land programming as a national holiday?

OK, maybe it isn't a refuge of "lazy and unimaginative journalists" at all. Nope, I'm sure it isn't. They dread those godawful assignments. The mandate for such "coverage" comes from on high, editorial/management, that you MUST stack a show a certain way on those cliche' days. Mother's Day. All the stories about these days have to have several invocations of "We" in them, and the on-air staff have to chuckle or sigh sadly along with the same remarks from the year before.

I have to stop. I'm giving myself nightmares.

Rules 2-3 are from the glory days when citizen journalism was a bright and shiny new thing. It still has great promise, and I'll invest as much energy in it as ever, but oh boy, the rumbles I hear from the trenches. There's a lot of blogger payola not disclosed on the ground in some state and local political wars!

Rocky Mountain News Postmortem by John Temple, former editor/publisher

Link: TEMPLE TALK: Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News - Text and video of speech delivered at UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google in Silicon Valley.

I couldn't resist pulling some really interesting and insightful quotations from the text of this speech by John Temple at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit. I'd noted the earthquake the closing of the Rocky Mountain News sent through the journalism world back when it happened, and this follow-up sort of gives it additional context.

Background on John Temple: (bio pulled from his blog)

"John Temple is the former editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, which printed its final edition after almost 150 years on Feb. 27, 2009. Under his leadership, the paper won four Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other national awards for journalistic excellence. Temple also served the E.W. Scripps Co., owner of the Rocky, as vice president/news of the newspaper division."

Here are some links to places you can read or catch the entire speech, online:

Lessons from the Rocky Mountain News - Text and video of speech delivered at UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google in Silicon Valley

The death of the Rocky Mountain News in February rippled around the world. Many want to understand what happened and what we can learn from the loss of Colorado's oldest newspaper.

Today I kicked off the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Googleplex (the company's headquarters) in Silicon Valley.

The following is the text (The link takes you to Scribd, where you can print out the speech. I have also attached it below. I apologize for any inconvenience people have had trying to access my presentation) of my speech. You can also see a video of my presentation (the keynote slides, with my voiceover) at  Vimeo. Here is a link to the keynote slides themselves.

But here are the bits of the speech that jumped out at me (and has been gathering steam around Twitter too, I think). It is a tremendous look at something, a moment, I think, that will be seen as a key turning point in media history. Forgive me for taking the bits out of context (indicated by elipses . . .). Also, all indications of emphasis are mine.

[...]

Recently, when I asked my former colleagues at the paper for reflections on their experience since its closure, Bernie Lincicome, a fine sports columnist, wrote me back: “I feel like the cadaver being asked by the funeral director, how did you like the flowers?” I’m not sure what that makes this talk. Maybe the funeral director being asked to perform his own autopsy and offer guidance from the other side on how to save the lives of others suffering the same malady.

[...]

So some pretty smart people were at the top of the company that owned the Rocky Mountain News. Yet none of that was enough for the Rocky to survive in the Internet era. The Rocky published its final edition on Feb. 27 of this year, the first major paper to shut its doors after the economic crash of the fall of 2008.

On the day the closure was announced, Scripps CEO Rich Boehne told the staff assembled in the newsroom: "You are the model of what a great newspaper should be. It's a tragedy for the industry that you disappear."

[...]

 As one former Scripps executive told me in talking about what has happened to the newspaper industry, words that I think apply to the Rocky, “We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn’t give up the idea that we were newspaper companies.”

Well, Scripps isn’t a newspaper company anymore in what was its biggest market. And today I’m going to walk you through the lessons I think might be taken from its largest paper’s failure. While this is going to be a newspaper-centric talk, I believe you’ll find that the lessons apply broadly across radio, TV, magazines and other media, too.

But before I subject the past to scrutiny, you need to know I don’t exempt myself from criticism. I was the top editorial person for the Rocky’s final 11 years and part of the business leadership team. I bear my own share of responsibility. It’s easy when looking back to see things that might seem obvious to us today, but it was a lot more difficult when we were in the thick of the fight, and most of the revenue growth and almost the total revenue pie came from the main newspaper product.

That said, the first lesson I hope people who care about the future of local news take from the Rocky’s experience is this: Being a “great newspaper” isn’t enough in the Internet era. You have to know what business you’re in. We thought we were in the newspaper business. Working on the Web, you need to think of now and forever. At a newspaper, people largely think about tomorrow. Thinking about tomorrow isn’t enough anymore. Consumers today want services when, where and how they want them, and they want to be able to participate, not just receive.

Jury backs Blackboard Inc. patent claim against Desire2Learn

This is killing me just so badly, I had to post on it. Those who know me well know the reason why the entire saga sticks my my craw, beyond the reasons cited in the article below. I'm hoping for a drawn-out appeal process, perhaps all the way to Supreme Court, with a lot of mainstream media attention.

Here's a bit from the Chronicle of Higher Ed (I can't believe the content is outside their oppressive firewall... that's an odd change)

Link: Blackboard Inc. Is Awarded Payment From Competitor in Patent Case - Chronicle.com.

Monday, February 25, 2008

Blackboard Inc. Is Awarded Payment From Competitor in Patent Case

By KATHERINE MANGAN

Austin, Tex.

A federal jury in Texas awarded Blackboard Inc. $3.1-million on Friday, saying that a smaller Canadian competitor, Desire2Learn Inc., had infringed its patent for a system of delivering course materials online. The jury also found that Desire2Learn had not shown clear and convincing evidence that Blackboard's patent was invalid.

Blackboard's general counsel, Matthew Small, said the verdict validated the company's assertion, which has been challenged by many higher-education technology experts, that its system was unique when the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Blackboard the patent in 2006. The office agreed last year to take another look at the patent after Desire2Learn and others challenged its validity. That review is still pending.

"They won this round, but the battle is not over by any stretch of the imagination," John Baker, president and chief executive of Desire2Learn, said in an interview Friday. "We'll continue to fight and hopefully remove from the educational community this very dark cloud."

The company is considering several options, including appealing the verdict, continuing to challenge the patent at the federal level, and modifying its software so it does not infringe Blackboard's patent.

Mr. Baker said he was "shocked" when the jury announced its decision after deliberating for nine hours over two days in the U.S. District Court in Lufkin. The trial lasted two weeks.

[...]

Blackboard, which is based in Washington, sued the smaller, Canadian-based company in 2006, saying Desire2Learn had infringed its patent and taken away customers that should have been Blackboard's (The Chronicle, Aug. 2, 2006). The Canadian company has been one of Blackboard's primary competitors since Blackboard took over another rival, WebCT, in 2006.

'Prior Art' Dispute

Desire2Learn, which has its headquarters in Kitchener, Ontario, argued that Blackboard's patent was invalid and should never have been granted in the first place. Lawyers for the company said that Blackboard officials were aware of similar technology, or what's known as "prior art," that existed before it filed its patent application, and that the company had failed to divulge that information to the patent office.

The judge in the case, Ron Clark, rejected that argument.

Mr. Small said Blackboard never claimed to have invented the course-management system. What the company did invent, he said, is "a course-management system where a single user with a single log-on could have multiple roles across multiple classes." For instance, a person who was a student in one course and a teaching assistant in another could log on once and access all of his course materials.

"It really was transformative for the industry," Mr. Small said. "We knew we were the first doing it at the time, and that's why we applied for the patent. People look at the technology now and say that's obvious, but at the time, we were the first, and we're very proud of it."

[...]

"This is a signal event in educational technology," said Alfred H. Essa, associate vice chancellor and deputy chief information officer for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. "It means that the big boys are playing for keeps and will use their patent portfolio at any cost to crush and deter new entrants. As a community, it will take us a long time to recover from this mess."

[...]

Eben Moglen is founding director and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, an advocacy group for open-source software that has challenged Blackboard's patent. Mr. Moglen, who is also a professor of law at Columbia University, said there is plenty of evidence, presented both in the trial, and to the federal patent office, of similar technology that existed before Blackboard's patent was issued. He added that his group plans to continue fighting to invalidate Blackboard's patent.

"We see this attempt to strangle or force licensing of Desire2Learn on the basis of an invalid patent as clear evidence that Blackboard cannot be trusted," Mr. Moglen said.

[...]

But Mr. Small, the Blackboard lawyer, said the "highly educated jury" included two people with master's degrees in information systems, two others who were academic-computing administrators, and the city's postmaster."

Their decision left many in the industry wondering just how much power Blackboard now wields.

Peter A. Schilling, director of information technology at Amherst College, said colleges may decide it's too risky to use any course-management system other than Blackboard's. The patent, he said, is so broadly written that professors may be afraid to even use wikis or blogs.

Blackboard's president, Michael L. Chasen, testified during the trial that his company will not sue colleges that use open-source software to create their own online learning systems. Mr. Small repeated that promise during the trial and pointed out that his company signed a legally binding pledge promising that it would not take action against colleges that use free, open-source software.

[...]

It's that bold paragraph above (emphasis mine) that chaps my hide so completely. As I was reading all the court materials and blog postings about this, I found myself thinking the exact same thing as Peter Schilling above.

It is just chilling. I really don't trust what Blackboard says in the paragraph after that, simply because of the way this patent was set up, and now, so oppressively enforced.

Backstory: at one time I was working on an interface design (very different in its foundational model from Blackboard's, partly because I was so dissatisfied with the Blackboard products), an interface for which I also entertained the notion of submitting for a patent.

I still have those materials and that model, which is why I was looking at the Blackboard patent claims so closely, and while I still need to read more of the fine print, I have to say, if what they have is their criteria for a patent, there are quite a lot of us who worked with educational and groupware software interfaces who could have patented our work 15 years ago or more. What a scam!

I'm not quite sure why the prior art claim was dismissed so easily. I expect that to come back up again. I hope there will be more to come, and that this ridiculous decision will not be left to stand.

Beware the coming social network wars?!

Link: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook - New York Times.

What's up with this? A big "secret source" expose' on deep background? A coming onslaught?! The underdog forces of Google (ahem) and some conspiracy, some cabal, dare we say a back room deal? They are all marshalling their forces to SAVE US ALL from the utter takeover of the world by....

Facebook.  (er, Microsoft? The 1.6 percent solution?)

(full disclosure... these days I somewhat resemble that solution)

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!

Oh no! Not the old frumious Bandersnatch!

What? You don't believe we Facebook users are in imminent peril? Well, just look at this secret-sourced NYTimes article below, and tremble with fear! Then you can say a little prayer that Google and friends are there to save us from ourselves.

Link: Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook - New York Times.

Google and Friends to Gang Up on Facebook

By MIGUEL HELFT and BRAD STONE

Published: October 31, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 30  —  Google and some of the Web’s leading social networks are teaming up to bully the new kid on the block — Facebook.    

On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster and Ning, according to people briefed on the plans. Those people asked not to be named because they agreed to keep the alliance’s plans confidential.

The strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook, which last spring opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site’s users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a “news feed” that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing.

“It is going to forestall Facebook’s ability to get everyone writing just for Facebook,” said a person briefed on the plans. The group’s platform, which is called Open Social, is “compatible across all the companies,” that person said.

“Facebook got the jump by announcing the Facebook platform and getting the traction they got. This is an open alternative to that,” the person also said.

[...]

[Oh, OK, I get it. It isn't Facebook itself that is an offensive smell unto the heavens, it's the closed platform. Because we all know, none of those companies ever tried to advance any closed platforms themselves before, right?

I'm sensing crocodile tears, in other words.

Now, generally I'm the first one to rant against walled gardens, most often right here in this blog. Yet for some reason, I have no interest whatsoever in MySpace, which is much more open than Facebook.

Most of my work online is outside any walled gardens, in the blogosphere. And yet.

And yet what is this REALLY all about? (Alfie?)

I don't like walled gardens, yet I DO like to keep my EMAIL private. And I patronize both Facebook and LinkedIn, which are fairly (but not perfectly) tight on keeping email spammers away by creating an Opt-In Whitelist out on the Cloud.

And THAT, folks, is the real frumious Bandersnatch in this saga.

Google and friends might SAY it is about open standards. They might SAY it is about improving the quality and interoperability of the social networking experience. Yaddah yaddah. I remember back in 2003 or so, when open source advocates were trying to set up an open FOAF standard like RSS, to be published with any page. Yeah, I tried it just to try it. Man, did it sucketh muchly.

Where were all these Great and Terrible OZ Champions of open standard social networks then, back when the interfaces were rough and clunky and only geeks would touch it? Back when the idea was just starting to take shape? Nowhere to be found.

And I bailed just about as quickly as I tried it out. The reason? Because OPEN platform with FOAF meant ANYONE could get at any social links I chose to put in that space (including spammers), and that was precisely what I didn't want. That stuff is myowndamnbusinessthankyouverymuch.

So are we supposed to buy that this is somehow the sequel of that grassroots foray?

Here's what I think: Google and friends got a whiff of many chips really are on the table, the real threat Facebook poses, and got their noses bent out of joint because they were being forced to play Facebook's game to get a piece of the action

THINK: what has really been the BIGGEST killer app since the birth of the Internet?

There's only one answer to that question: email.

And how much has the basic interface of email changed or substantially been improved on since the bad old days of Pine and all that gnashing of teeth?

Email is still a reverse-chronological list with items you open and close, save or delete. Even Gmail and others out in the Cloud have not substantially altered anyone's single experience of email (other than gmail's "never delete anything" mantra, which is still ominous to me).

We are all inundated by spam now, of course, because of the frictionless direct mail and fraud space, but aside from the spam filter industry that has arisen to put up walls and have them breached and put up new walls and have them breached, what is happening to improve or change our experience of email?

I personally find the interface of the reverse-chronological email In-Box list oppressive. I'd like to delete it from my life. It hides important things I want to remember. They get pushed off the screen as other more recent, less important things arrive.

That is the nature of an interface ruled by clock time and screen boundaries instead of by values and human needs. It persists because on a basic level its utility serves better than any alternative so far, SO FAR.

The reverse-chronological list email interface rules humans and social groups, rather than humans and social groups ruling it.

People who matter to me are forgotten in the exigence of the email moment, just as TV occupies our front minds with trivia and disrupts the values most of us would consciously choose, if we were indeed conscious and controlling the interfaces that dictate our lives.

Trivial email as sonambulistic distraction on par with TV? I think it could be, yet email is probably the most important thing in my life, STILL. I blame the interface, not my quality email connections.

I'd like to put relationships in the center of my online experience, not a reverse-chronological clock.

People at Earthlink and other proactive ISPs often urge us to make liberal use of the blacklists and whitelists they enable for us, but those tools are not useful to me at all.

Blacklists are useless because spammers are a moving target.

Whitelists are useless because they are like your own personal Emily Dickinson, "A Soul Selects her own Society," shutting the door on the divine majority.

The old classmate or distant cousin can't find you if you erase yourself from online spaces in the name of protecting yourself from spam.

If you build the moat around your castle too wide and deep, no one will be able to get in.

It defeats the purpose of being online in the first place: to connect (and not to buy things endlessly trying to fill needy emotional holes in our souls, WWW=TV II, as many online ventures desperately want us to believe).

Interfaces must serve the users AND their social groups, and not the other way around. And when interfaces do not serve, social groups should be empowered to reshape fluid interfaces to fit their needs and wants. This was what I found in my doctoral research in the late 1990s, and we are apparently still learning this lesson now.

Facebook is hot right now because it has seized a middle ground, allowing us to both HIDE and CONNECT. One foot in water, one foot on land. That's a walled garden I can live with. Not invisible, but not vulnerable either, because basically the Emily Dickinson in each of us is still in charge, and can shut the door on any divine majorities she pleases.

Google and its secret superfriends who think they are going to save us from ourselves by luring us away from Facebook (uh, just like Google Video persuaded all those avid YouTube users to abandon the YouTube communities and choose Google instead?) are actually operating out of fear, the SAME FEAR that sent Bill Gates into the browser wars with Netscape.

Why did Internet Explorer seek to crush Netscape? Because Microsoft saw the browser as a primary competitor for Windows, the browser as new OS platform. From the standpoint of Microsoft, if Windows is a shell that sits on top of MS-DOS, a browser can also become a de facto shell that sits on top of Windows, potentially superseding it.

Did Microsoft buy that 1.6% stake in Facebook for this same reason, jockeying with Google? It does seem to be High Noon a lot these days between Microsoft and Google, but I have no insight into any of that competitive business activity. I'm interested in interfaces and platforms.

I think Google and friends believe Facebook is fast becoming The Platform of the Cloud, a platform that sits on top of the browser in the same way the browser sits on top of the OS.

Our primary interfaces will always be a moving target as fickle users and social groups gravitate toward the interfaces that resonate and are most useful to them.

Blog software opened web publishing to legions of non-specialists, creating new social network interfaces, a reborn and empowered public Commons through simple publishing interfaces (not discounting any of the many private, group, and intranet blogs in use out there, as publishing can be both public and private and inbetween).

Gmail is trying to get us to move the same old email interfaces into new wineskins, out on the Cloud, but Google has not substantially changed the basic function of reverse-chronological list email interfaces that have been with us since Pine.

So what do I get from Facebook? Right now, at least (until Facebook, as many tools I've tried before, changes my basic experience on the site, and I bail), I think I get what could be the successor to email-as-killer-app.

For the first time ever in my online experience, I'm not just getting another platform. I think I'm getting something that could replace email as the central interface and portal for me online.

I mean, I've been on the web since 1993, and regardless of how well the browser interface has conquered the world, it's clunky one-way "interactive" features kept it from ever upstaging email as my primary on-ramp online.

Personally, I think Facebook has the potential to edge out email as the ultimate killer app, and that raises higher stakes for all business players involved, more so than just adding another rung in the infinitely beckoning and totally temporal platform "layer" wars.

But I'm not done pointing up some things from the NYTimes article that set me off on this tangent. Here's some more juicy bits:]

The alliance includes business software makers Salesforce.com and Oracle, who are moving to let third-party programmers write applications that can be accessed by their customers.

The start of Open Social comes just a week after Google lost to Microsoft in a bid to invest in Facebook and sell advertising on the social network’s pages outside the United States. And it comes just before the expected introduction by Facebook of an advertising system next week, which some analysts believe could compete with Google’s.

[...]

For now, however, Facebook has become the preferred platform for software developers.

By teaming with others, Google hopes to create a rival platform that could have broad appeal to developers. A person briefed on the plans said that the social networks in the alliance had a combined 100 million users, more than double the size of Facebook.

[...]

[You know, that unnamed person above is waving something phallic-shaped around, but it sure ain't 100 million users. This smells like someone blowing PR spin to me. I don't care how many "registrations" they can name in articles like this, they wouldn't be shitting little gold bricks in this special competitive alliance if they thought those 100 million users wouldn't ditch them for Facebook in a heartbeat. Anyone can read trend reports and see which way the wind is blowing.

I mean, Google Video's attempts to trump YouTube also underestimated the power of the YouTube community. Google cried uncle first.]

The developers of some of the most popular Facebook applications, including iLike and RockYou, are expected to be present at a party Thursday evening when they will announce that they will tailor their programs to run on the Open Social sites.

The effort faces several hurdles. Developers may not see the advantage to writing programs that run across such remarkably different networks as, for example, LinkedIn, which caters to business professionals, and hi5, which is popular in Central America.

[...]

Google has not been able to establish itself as a force in social networking, and it clearly wants to. “One of the things to say, very clearly, is that social networks as a phenomenon are very real,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said in a recent interview. “If you are of a certain age, you sort of dismiss this as college kids or teenagers. But it is very real.”

Google said it has advertising relationships with several social networks, including a $900 million partnership to sell ads on MySpace, which the company said is performing well. Google is also making some money on Facebook, through ads that run inside applications that are used on that network.

A person familiar with Google’s efforts said that those applications have been far more effective for advertisers on social networks than users’ personal pages. “It is early, but those ads work very well, whereas the ads in overall social media platforms have shown less performance,” the person said.

[...]

[This is the New York Times and all, but I really hope the article above was not based on that single unnamed source, because that person is clearly a PR spinner releasing a trial balloon in advance of a more official announcement.

The New York Times wouldn't hinge this entire story on a single source, would it? I know it's pitiful, but there are a few things in this era of declining journalistic standards that I'd like to be able to trust, even if I do know better than to trust anything (except bloggers!).

One, two! One, two! And through and through
  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
  He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
  He chortled in his joy.

 

Is Facebook like crack for applications developers?

Marc Andreessen makes the point in his blog post below that Facebook platform application success (the Holy Grail) is either a very steep high-velocity on-ramp to the fast lane, OR like jumping from cocaine to crack (both metaphors mine, not Andreessen's... I dunno if he would agree with me or not).

I do know one thing. Facebook appeals to me in a way that MySpace NEVER did. You couldn't pay me to go on MySpace, ever. These days, I may not check in on Facebook as often as email (which is ubiquitous, for me, fairly like breathing), but I am starting to FEEL toward my Facebook connections the same way I used to feel toward email (as something to look forward to, rather than a backed-up workload to dread).

Here's some key pithy bits from Andreessen:

Link: blog.pmarca.com: Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in.

Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in

On May 24, Facebook launched the newest version of the Facebook Platform, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and services that allow outside developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook user experience.

In this post, I provide an overview and analysis of the Facebook Plaform and what we have learned about it in the three weeks since it launched.

To start, my personal opinion is that the new Facebook Platform is a dramatic leap forward for the Internet industry.

Here's why:

Veterans of the software industry have, hardcoded into their DNA, the assumption that in any fight between a platform and an application, the platform will always win.

Definitionally, a "platform" is a system that can be reprogrammed and therefore customized by outside developers -- users -- and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform's original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.

In contrast, an "application" is a system that cannot be reprogrammed by outside developers. It is a closed environment that does whatever its original developers intended it to do, and nothing more.

The classic example of an application being vanquished by a platform was the Wang word processor versus Microsoft DOS-based personal computers.

Wang word processors -- the application, in this case -- were highly evolved, fantastically successful dedicated word processing systems that owned their market, until the general-purpose PC came along. While the PC at first was inferior at word processing, within a few years of its launch the fact that outside developers had built thousands of applications for it -- like spreadsheets -- that closed Wang word processors could not match, coupled with steadily improving PC-based word processing software like Wordstar, had all but killed the Wang word processor. Wang -- one of the most succcessful technology companies of the 1970's -- went bankrupt not long after.

This is a story whose moral has historically not been embraced by the web industry to nearly the extent one would have thought.

[...]

[What's interesting to me, in reflecting on the ancient history of word processors as remembered by Andreessen, was some advice given to me by a brilliant friend years ago, advice I did not take. There isn't a day that goes by that I am not OVERJOYED to have discarded that advice, which, as delivered by my brilliant friend, was  so emphatic as to be obvious and brook no argument whatsoever.

Wang word processors were the hot tech tool to have, back in those days, but I couldn't afford one anyway. My brilliant friend was a high school classmate who had taken an eighth grade punch card programming class with me, an after school enrichment thing that was fun, even if we did have to punch out the holes one at a time for this great clacketing monster of a punch card computer at the junior high.

That friend was far better at it than I was. Both of my best friends were. I pretty much sucked at thinking about binary code, math, and programming languages. By high school, another friend and I started playing with a Radio Shack TRS80, laboriously typing in that funny Basic program ELIZA, the computer shrink. Both the punch cards and the Basic typing brought out the dyslexic monster in me, however.

Meanwhile, as my brilliant friend was finishing college with a 4.0 science degree in just three years, I was deeply in lust with the new Macintosh computer, announced for the first time in that historic Super Bowl ad in 1984. I wanted one. I wanted one badly. I talked about it all the time, even to my brilliant friend.

I really didn't need the validation. Both of my parents were deep into Apple II culture, my mom teaching her third graders to program on those machines. I just needed the money. But my friend pooh-poohed me. She said it would be a total waste of time for someone like me to blow my hard-earned money on an expensive computer, when I was was just a writer and photographer anyway. I didn't do REAL stuff on the computer, she meant. Get one of those Wang word processors and be happy for what you have, she said. She basically called me frivolous and said I was falling for a silly marketing campaign. She was so absolute and certain. And she was absolutely wrong.

See, I got my classic Mac, once I could afford it, and my dyslexic brain exploded. Whole new activities and careers unfolded in front of me, aptitudes I didn't know I had. I plunged in and never looked back. Years later, I'd even find myself hanging out with engineers, and loving it.

That silly Wang word processor, glorified typewriter that it was, would have kept me in Vonnegut-imagined (Player Piano) writer/photographer ghetto with all the other mushy thinkers my scientific friend evidently didn't think were deserving of computing power.

So there, Wang. Good riddance. Let's get back to Andreessen.

In a nutshell, the Facebook API enables outside web developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook environment.

After signing up for a developer account on Facebook, the developer writes a web application (in the simplest case, a piece of web content; in the most advanced case, a full fledge web application with deep functionality) and hosts it on her own servers. The developer then registers her application with Facebook, and then users can add that application to their Facebook user experience in several different ways, including within their Facebook profile pages.

Viewed simply, this is a variant on the "embedding" phenomenon that swept MySpace over the last two years, and which Facebook prohibited.

However, what Facebook is now doing is a lot more sophisticated than simply MySpace-style embedding: Facebook is providing a full suite of APIs -- including a network protocol, a database query language, and a text markup language -- that allow third party applications to integrate tightly with the Facebook user experience and database of user and activity information.

And then, on top of that, Facebook is providing a highly viral distribution engine for applications that plug into its platform. As a user, you get notified when your friends start using an application; you can then start using that same application with one click. At which point, all of your friends become aware that you have started using that application, and the cycle continues. The result is that a successful application on Facebook can grow to a million users or more within a couple of weeks of creation.

[...]

Metaphorically, Facebook is providing the ease and user attraction of MySpace-style embedding, coupled with the kind of integration you see with Firefox extensions, with the added rocket fuel of automated viral distribution to a huge number of potential users, and the prospect of keeping 100% of any revenue your application can generate.

The leadership that the Facebook team is showing here rivals anything that the large and established software and web companies have done in this decade.

You may also notice the irony of Facebook leapfrogging MySpace on embedding at the same time that MySpace seems to be getting substantially more restrictive, in some cases even shutting down third-party widgets.

[...]

[Here's the bit I want to think about the most, how the Facebook Platform creates crack cocaine for developers used to more ambulatory on-ramps to success.]

Fourth, and perhaps most significantly, when your application takes off on Facebook, you are very happy because you have lots of users, and you are very sad because your servers blow up.

Let me explain.

I already described Facebook's viral distribution mechanism by which users became instantly aware of which applications their friends are using, can with one click start using those applications, and automatically spread them to their friends.

This is happening in an environment with 24 million active users -- active users defined as users active on the site in the last 30 days. 50% of active users return to the site daily. 100,000 new users join per day. 45 billion page views per month and growing. 50 million users, and a lot more page views, predicted by the end of 2007.

An application that takes off on Facebook is very quickly adopted by hundreds of thousands, and then millions -- in days! -- and then ultimately tens of millions of users.

Unless you're already operating your own systems at Facebook levels of scale, your servers will promptly explode from all the traffic and you will shortly be sending out an email like this.

ILike was the first third-party application to get serious lift-off on Facebook.  Quoting from ILike's blog shortly after their launch:

"In our first 20 hours of opening doors we had 50,000 users sign up, and it is only accelerating. (10,000 users joined in the first 12 hrs. 10,000 more users in the next 3 hrs. 30,000 more users in the next 5 hrs!!)

We started the system not knowing what to expect, with only 2 servers, but ready with backup. Facebook's rabid userbase chewed up our 2 servers almost instantly. We doubled our capacity to catch up. And then we doubled it again. And again. And again. Oh crap - we ran out of servers!! Although iLike.com has a very healthy level of Web traffic, and even though about half of all the servers in our datacenter were sitting unused, idle, as backup capacity, we are now completely maxed out.

We just emailed everybody we know across over a dozen Bay Area startups, corporations, and venture firms in a desperate plea to find spare servers so we can triple our capacity for the continued onslaught. Tomorrow we are picking up over 100 servers from different companies to have them installed just to handle the weekend's traffic. (For those who responded to our late night pleas, thank you!)"

Yesterday, about two weeks later, ILike announced that they have passed 3 million users on Facebook and are still growing -- at a rate of 300,000 users per day.

They didn't say how many servers they're running, but if you do the math, it has to be in the hundreds and heading into the thousands.

Translation: unless you already have, or are prepared to quickly procure, a 100-500+ server infrastructure and everything associated with it -- networking gear, storage gear, ISP interconnetions, monitoring systems, firewalls, load balancers, provisioning systems, etc. -- and a killer operations team, launching a successful Facebook application may well be a self-defeating proposition.

This is a "success kills" scenario -- the good news is you're successful, the bad news is you're flat on your back from what amounts to a self-inflicted denial of service attack, unless you have the money and time and knowledge to tackle the resulting scale challenges.

Will every Facebook application go through this?

No, of course not.  The ones that nobody uses will not have this problem.

But the successful ones all will.

[...]

InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on Jared Spool

I must meditate on this quotation by Jared Spool today...

Link: InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on Jared Spool.

"We ignore the evidence that, in the last 10 years, there has been no
discernable relationship between corporate investment in user-centered
design practices and the regular production of usable products from
those corporations. The companies that spend the most on UCD, such as
Microsoft and IBM, are notorious for regularly producing unusable
products, while companies that are wowing us, such as Amazon, Dell and
eBay have very small UCD investments. To put things in perspective,
Microsoft has more than 120 UCD professionals on staff, IBM has more
than 200, Amazon has five and Dell has two, last we checked. One of
Amazon's UCD people just went on maternity leave, so they are actually
running at 20% less than normal for now."