Updated: Hint - I posted this one day early for effect. Read some of the comments in that light - verrrry funny :)
The future is here.
We're not quite ready to release it widely yet, but I've VERY excited about a breakthrough in our use and understanding of browser embedded applications. Its not AJAX, but it is AJAX-y.
While many companies and start-ups are struggling with basic online applications like weak Word Processors and pokey productivity tools and lame web page editors that Desktop applications already dealt with much better in the last century - WE are going to leap frog them with the ultimate Mash-up-able Web 2.0 AJAX-y JSON-based content runtime.
This new technology will finally and forever end the debates about Firefox vs Internet Explorer vs Opera vs Safari, in the same way the original browser conclusively eliminated the debate about which Operating System was better - it just didn't matter anymore.
As my grandmother's Podiatrist used to always say:
You can't nail the problems of the future with hammers from the past.
I'm pleased to announce the alpha release of the first portable Browser Based Browser: B-Three!
- B3! runs RIGHT in your browser - no install required.
- B3! is 100% compatible with your existing browser, and never requires any updating - features stream in just as you need them/use them.
- B3! has NO requirements and requires nothing to be installed (except a Browser)
- Its only an alpha, so be gentle - MANY more exciting features will be coming soon (automagically).
The future is now (er... plus the three minutes it took you to read this post).
Go check it out.
Once you B3!, you won't remember before.
(beFOUR- get it?)
March 31, 2006
March 30, 2006
Web 3.0: Dot-com-umentary Movie Script redux
Enough pontificating. Time for something fun :)
All of this Web 2.0, AJAX, etc. hype sent me on a nostalgic stroll down memory lane. At one point (I want to say 2001? 2002?) I had this idea for a movie - a pseudo-documentary about the dot-com world.
[yeah, yeah - I worked in Manhattan at the time *and* was working in Marketing - gimme a break :)]
In any case, I only ever wrote the first scene, though I had an outline for the whole movie.
The basic plot was about these two guys who have a "business" plan, raise money, start a company, hire employees, have a launch party, realize the folly of their path, switch business models completely, try to sell the company, and go out of business ALL IN ONE DAY.
And their business model was pure Internet visionary GENIUS!!! The idea was to... - well, you'll have to read it for yourself.
I called it: Dot-com-umentary.
Enjoy!
(That means you can read the opening scene here as written a few years ago - unedited except for some formatting)
Maybe I'll finish it - its still pretty relevant :P
And thanks to a friend for digging it up so promptly - I couldn't find it! :)
Creepy similarities, hunh? The silliness is BACK, baby!
All of this Web 2.0, AJAX, etc. hype sent me on a nostalgic stroll down memory lane. At one point (I want to say 2001? 2002?) I had this idea for a movie - a pseudo-documentary about the dot-com world.
[yeah, yeah - I worked in Manhattan at the time *and* was working in Marketing - gimme a break :)]
In any case, I only ever wrote the first scene, though I had an outline for the whole movie.
The basic plot was about these two guys who have a "business" plan, raise money, start a company, hire employees, have a launch party, realize the folly of their path, switch business models completely, try to sell the company, and go out of business ALL IN ONE DAY.
And their business model was pure Internet visionary GENIUS!!! The idea was to... - well, you'll have to read it for yourself.
I called it: Dot-com-umentary.
Enjoy!
(That means you can read the opening scene here as written a few years ago - unedited except for some formatting)
Maybe I'll finish it - its still pretty relevant :P
And thanks to a friend for digging it up so promptly - I couldn't find it! :)
Creepy similarities, hunh? The silliness is BACK, baby!
March 29, 2006
Provably Better, pt 2: Web 2.0, Syndication
and the Interpersonal Internet
[Continued from Part 1]
The truly successful, disruptive initiatives (and companies: Google, Amazon, E-Bay, ec.) on the Internet have been successful not only in syndicating their content, and in syndicating their technologies - they've successfully syndicated their very business models.
You make money making money for them.
While there's been all this discussion of B2B and B2C and clicks-and-mortar businesses, the real Internet has been subtly altering the business landscape by cracking the C2B (consumer-to-business) code: enhancing consumer behaviours and values through a positive reinforcement of traffic and, ultimately, dollars.
E-Bay (including PayPal) is only the most obvious and literal form of this. As people have known for some time, its not just about the direct benefit, but also about the ancillary traffic and goodwill they don't have to work to generate.
And because of this positive spiral they've spun up, these are not just the successful endeavors of today: they are poised to capture ongoing opportunities in the marketplace.
This is the new network effort - and I'd argue that its provably better.
But my key point is this - its NOT, nor will it EVER be, an insurmountable lead (in principle :P); the rapid rise of Skype, MySpace, and even Google itself prove that the real value of this Interpersonal Internet is still PEOPLE.
Humans are the node leaves of the network, and we're a fickle bunch :) As trust metric attack pathology demonstrates, this network can be attack resistant, but only for as long as you do good.
Perhaps "Do No Evil" is a cannier mission than we think.
Perhaps it recognizes a substantial truth, that this Interpersonal Internet (I2?) is enabled through people as the endpoints: the "last mile" is always about us - if that's not too very old media.
The truly successful, disruptive initiatives (and companies: Google, Amazon, E-Bay, ec.) on the Internet have been successful not only in syndicating their content, and in syndicating their technologies - they've successfully syndicated their very business models.
You make money making money for them.
While there's been all this discussion of B2B and B2C and clicks-and-mortar businesses, the real Internet has been subtly altering the business landscape by cracking the C2B (consumer-to-business) code: enhancing consumer behaviours and values through a positive reinforcement of traffic and, ultimately, dollars.
E-Bay (including PayPal) is only the most obvious and literal form of this. As people have known for some time, its not just about the direct benefit, but also about the ancillary traffic and goodwill they don't have to work to generate.
And because of this positive spiral they've spun up, these are not just the successful endeavors of today: they are poised to capture ongoing opportunities in the marketplace.
This is the new network effort - and I'd argue that its provably better.
But my key point is this - its NOT, nor will it EVER be, an insurmountable lead (in principle :P); the rapid rise of Skype, MySpace, and even Google itself prove that the real value of this Interpersonal Internet is still PEOPLE.
Humans are the node leaves of the network, and we're a fickle bunch :) As trust metric attack pathology demonstrates, this network can be attack resistant, but only for as long as you do good.
Perhaps "Do No Evil" is a cannier mission than we think.
Perhaps it recognizes a substantial truth, that this Interpersonal Internet (I2?) is enabled through people as the endpoints: the "last mile" is always about us - if that's not too very old media.
March 28, 2006
Provably Better, pt 1: Web 2.0, Syndication
and the Interpersonal Internet
People tend to overlook one of the real divides between the old order and the new - New Media, the New New Thing, etc. - what is the cycle the drives commerce and monetization?
Web 2.0 tries to capture some of that delta with its notion of a "Participatory Web" or "Web as Platform". And from an end user and developer perspective, respectively, I think that indeed gets at some of the core elements.
However, from a business and cultural perspective, I think its at once simpler than that and deeper than that. One of the foundational promises of the Internet was in enabling many-to-many communication: arbitrary people connection graphs, if you will - and in large measure, its done that. Websites, homepages, e-mail, IM, message boards, blogs, etc. CONNECT people - IP address and physical location are among the least interesting ways that we address anymore (voice/cel is still key and I think tandem addresses will enable yet another layer of services - more on that another time).
Further, I'd argue that at the core of that networking is Syndication. And yes, I mean syndication in every sense of the word - even social networking is about trust metric driven, loosely coupled, syndication networks, where tagging, rating and social connections drive trust (and therefore traffic). As always though, this works best when greased with the fiscal incentives syndication can drive at scale.
Web 2.0 tries to capture some of that delta with its notion of a "Participatory Web" or "Web as Platform". And from an end user and developer perspective, respectively, I think that indeed gets at some of the core elements.
However, from a business and cultural perspective, I think its at once simpler than that and deeper than that. One of the foundational promises of the Internet was in enabling many-to-many communication: arbitrary people connection graphs, if you will - and in large measure, its done that. Websites, homepages, e-mail, IM, message boards, blogs, etc. CONNECT people - IP address and physical location are among the least interesting ways that we address anymore (voice/cel is still key and I think tandem addresses will enable yet another layer of services - more on that another time).
Further, I'd argue that at the core of that networking is Syndication. And yes, I mean syndication in every sense of the word - even social networking is about trust metric driven, loosely coupled, syndication networks, where tagging, rating and social connections drive trust (and therefore traffic). As always though, this works best when greased with the fiscal incentives syndication can drive at scale.
Let me explain (in part 2 :)).
March 27, 2006
Developers and Permissive Parsing
Don't do it. Require strictness whenever you implement a parser of ANY kind.
People always ask: why should compatibility be at odds with standards compliance? This is why.
Back in the day, when Netscape was king of the hill and the web was dawning in the consumer eye (by that I mean $ ka-ching $), permissive parsing was all the rage. Mostly, to make it easy on content creators, the browser was just supposed to “work” if it could - and this extended to mark-up as well as script.
Turns out this was remarkably wrong-headed thinking, though we (the industry royal “we” here) all fell victim to its lure - and suffer the consequences as a result.
Unfortunately, there are now very real places where compatibility and standards compliance are directly at odds - permissive parsing means its hard to tell what the "right" thing to do is, especially as technology and standards evolve. If strictness and unit testing were the rule of the day, that wouldn't be the case.
This is a classic example (to me) of experience vs. intellect. It seems better to make it easier for your users, but it actually just makes things awful for everybody, over time, every time.
Be sure you explicitly define what doesn't work as you define what does.
Or, as I'm fond of saying:
Never put off tomorrow what you can put off today.
People always ask: why should compatibility be at odds with standards compliance? This is why.
Back in the day, when Netscape was king of the hill and the web was dawning in the consumer eye (by that I mean $ ka-ching $), permissive parsing was all the rage. Mostly, to make it easy on content creators, the browser was just supposed to “work” if it could - and this extended to mark-up as well as script.
Turns out this was remarkably wrong-headed thinking, though we (the industry royal “we” here) all fell victim to its lure - and suffer the consequences as a result.
Unfortunately, there are now very real places where compatibility and standards compliance are directly at odds - permissive parsing means its hard to tell what the "right" thing to do is, especially as technology and standards evolve. If strictness and unit testing were the rule of the day, that wouldn't be the case.
This is a classic example (to me) of experience vs. intellect. It seems better to make it easier for your users, but it actually just makes things awful for everybody, over time, every time.
Be sure you explicitly define what doesn't work as you define what does.
Or, as I'm fond of saying:
Never put off tomorrow what you can put off today.
March 25, 2006
AOL: Why we will win, pt 2 (why not)
I wrote in part 1 that AOL would win because:
3) We have scale (of audience, infrastructure, and marketing)
2) We still have a highly engaged relationship with known customers
1) We have a well known, wide reaching brand
Continuing my All-Hands speech from last year:
Greatness is forged in the fire of great opportunity, and that's what the above add up to me: great opportunity.
That's why we can win. However, its not all motherhood and apple pies. We have some challenges.
And why AOL won't win...
3) Identity
What is the mission of AOL? Who ARE we? In a world where AOL inarguably helped get people connected and, more or less, saw the Company's original mission fulfilled and then ursurped - what does AOL stand for? "Revenue transformation", "More customers", and "OIBIDA targets" are not exactly rousing missions... those are vaguely Dilbertesque business goals.
2) Relevance
Directly related to the previous point, but, when AOL does things, even good things, do people care anymore? Not nearly enough, I'd say - there's a trust in our future AOL has to rebuild: with users, the press, investors, and even ourselves. When people talk about Internet companies, AOL often don't even make the list.
1) Brand rejectors
On this point, most people think I mean AOL's brand perception in the market at large. Yeah, that's a problem, but as the old adage goes: there's no such thing as bad publicity. No, I'm talking about something far more insidious: there are too many people who hate AOL who work at AOL. It disappoints me to hear employees talk about "non-members" as our future (the term, not the concept, bothers me because of what it implies about our self esteem). If people are in our namespace, if they use our software, we should be inclusive in our view of them as "members" of our services. There is a deep condescension at work there. And it disappoints me to see the rejection of terms like "AOL Experience" - it ought to be something we work to be proud of, dammit, not something we want to leave behind. We have too many brand rejectors who work here, and you have to believe to succeed.
In my view, our BIGGEST problem is that because there is often this subtle self-loathing in our culture, we're too busy, as a company, copying where we should be leading. If we're not chasing a press relese, or the latest flash-in-the-pan "disruptive technology"(remember [EDITED FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION] or [EDITED FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION], anybody?), we're busy copying (read: being constrained by) our past.
We CAN compete, but we have to recognize that there is no magic; there are no silver bullets. It takes vision, commitment, and hard work.
Most importantly, AOL is best when we're defining the rules, not conforming to them.
And, like dignity, this self-definition comes from the inside out - as Eleanor Roosevelt said so well, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent".
3) We have scale (of audience, infrastructure, and marketing)
2) We still have a highly engaged relationship with known customers
1) We have a well known, wide reaching brand
Continuing my All-Hands speech from last year:
Greatness is forged in the fire of great opportunity, and that's what the above add up to me: great opportunity.
That's why we can win. However, its not all motherhood and apple pies. We have some challenges.
And why AOL won't win...
3) Identity
What is the mission of AOL? Who ARE we? In a world where AOL inarguably helped get people connected and, more or less, saw the Company's original mission fulfilled and then ursurped - what does AOL stand for? "Revenue transformation", "More customers", and "OIBIDA targets" are not exactly rousing missions... those are vaguely Dilbertesque business goals.
2) Relevance
Directly related to the previous point, but, when AOL does things, even good things, do people care anymore? Not nearly enough, I'd say - there's a trust in our future AOL has to rebuild: with users, the press, investors, and even ourselves. When people talk about Internet companies, AOL often don't even make the list.
1) Brand rejectors
On this point, most people think I mean AOL's brand perception in the market at large. Yeah, that's a problem, but as the old adage goes: there's no such thing as bad publicity. No, I'm talking about something far more insidious: there are too many people who hate AOL who work at AOL. It disappoints me to hear employees talk about "non-members" as our future (the term, not the concept, bothers me because of what it implies about our self esteem). If people are in our namespace, if they use our software, we should be inclusive in our view of them as "members" of our services. There is a deep condescension at work there. And it disappoints me to see the rejection of terms like "AOL Experience" - it ought to be something we work to be proud of, dammit, not something we want to leave behind. We have too many brand rejectors who work here, and you have to believe to succeed.
In my view, our BIGGEST problem is that because there is often this subtle self-loathing in our culture, we're too busy, as a company, copying where we should be leading. If we're not chasing a press relese, or the latest flash-in-the-pan "disruptive technology"(remember [EDITED FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION] or [EDITED FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION], anybody?), we're busy copying (read: being constrained by) our past.
We CAN compete, but we have to recognize that there is no magic; there are no silver bullets. It takes vision, commitment, and hard work.
Most importantly, AOL is best when we're defining the rules, not conforming to them.
And, like dignity, this self-definition comes from the inside out - as Eleanor Roosevelt said so well, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent".
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