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The Washington Generals
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by Steve Gillmor on September 25, 2008
The Gphone launched in the middle of one of the most terrifying weeks in memory, and yet it somehow succeeded in sending a powerful message of change of the most opportune kind. Even as McCain threatened to scuttle the debates with Obama and Bush arranged a White House tea party to win acceptance of his lame duck plan, the Google wave of innovation continues to exceed expectations.
The Gphone doesn’t out-Jesus the iPhone, but it brings the inevitability of leapfrogging competition to the carrier space where Jobs has already uncorked the bottle and unleashed the genie. Within hours of announcing a 1 GB data cap on the service, TMobile was recanting like McCain after an over-the-shoulder whisper from Lieberman. The Android Market seems unlikely to roll back podcasting apps, and even if they do, MySpace Music’s rollout of a streaming iTunes suggests a tie-up app will be a no-brainer in short order.
But just like Chrome, the Gphone is not about competition with Apple but rather a radical approach to fast following as a strategic weapon. The Gphone is the Washington Generals to the iPhone’s Harlem Globetrotters, the almost-as-talented team that rides the same bus and always loses to the A Team. In fact, the Generals is the test bed for new plays, the vaudeville circuit for the new troops and aging veterans, the farm club that has to do what Ginger Rogers had to do with Fred Estaire, namely do all the steps while dancing backwards.
Chrome serves the same role with the browser, Gmail with email, and GApps with Office. They’re not meant to win, just raise the game play across the board. The Gphone will put a minimal pressure on the iPhone, but Microsoft has to make some big decisions to handle the Android platform. In fact, Google’s open source strategy may make it deliciously enticing for Ray Ozzie to integrate with the open premise of Live Mesh. With Apple already bringing push email to the iPhone via Exchange, the Gphone could serve as a kind of mobile Slingbox for streaming enterprise apps on the other carrier platforms.
The virtualization of the smart phone market would in turn create the opportunity for the explosion of cloud computing metrics that promises to turn the enterprise into a massive in-memory arbitrage engine. One where auctions are held in real time for every kind of information transaction, a transactional Tw*tter uber network where pricing is determined by a combination of supply, demand, and the marketing value of the user’s social cloud and how it can be leveraged to adjust the price of the acquisition.
That’s why we shudder at the events on Wall Street and the campaign trail, but pause to drink in the promise of the New Wave and the underlying message that what we don’t know will hurt us, and conversely that these elastic devices can keep us informed at the rate of speed that change requires for survival. Is that Sweet Georgia Brown I hear whistling in the background?
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Oracle’s Slightly More OpenWorld
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by Steve Gillmor on September 23, 2008
Went down last evening to the Oracle installation blanketing downtown San Francisco. Every Oracle OpenWorld, the company takes over Howard Street between 3rd and 4th and bivouacs in a block-ling series of tents. The gardens surrounding Moscone Center are deployed for lunch and dinner parties, and the bars at the top of the park offer press meet and greets.
This year marks the detente between what Oracle PR calls press and what they call bloggers. Each of us media types was given a large badge with either press or blogger written in enormous red letters. I think the theory was to allow Oracle and third-party vendors to tell at 100 fet what type you were and suggest management procedures based on that triage.
The basic problem is that there is actually no difference between the two designations. Indeed, when I was invited to register a month or so ago, I was provided two links. I asked which I should register with, pointing out that in addition to being editor of TechCrunch IT, I most likely am still a contributing editor for a series of publications including ZDNet and Ziff Davis Enterprise. The PR person thought about it for a minute and then suggested I register as a blogger, all things being equal.
I took that to mean that Oracle PR and perhaps Oracle itself are beginning to focus on the influence side of the media game rather than the news side of the trade press. Backing up this theory is a decided shift in recent weeks toward the incorporation of social media constructs into enterprise platforms and services. The second stop on the party circuit last night featured something called Social CRM. From the overview:
Oracle Social CRM Applications harness the latest Web 2.0 technologies, empowering sales users to be more effective and productive by leveraging the knowledge and experience of the broader community. These highly intuitive and focused applications work the way sales people do, helping them identify qualified leads, develop sales campaigns, and collaborate with colleagues to close more deals. With Oracle Social CRM Applications, sales users reap instant benefits with no data entry required.
Blend that with Oracle Beehive, a direct attack on Microsoft Sharepoint and the Lotus offerings - and you have a mashup of enterprise Twitter/Facebook/Flickr packaged and sold to the new social media channel of Enterprise 2.0. This is pretty tame compared to the full frontal attack on the bloggosphere by SAP over the past year, but it’s Oracle this time. As one old hand said in passing, Oracle is three months behind the wave, but when they jump the fat lady has sung.
What’s rapidly becoming evident is the rapid compression of time between social media disruption at the “consumer” level and its broad adoption at the platform level. The enterprise startup action in Tw*tterville not only has broken out earlier than expected, but the major vendor shrinkwrapping of the constructs within CRM, ERP, and other enterprise application spaces has already shown adoption characteristics far more dramatic than the vendors’ ability to sell it to their customers.
Key to the rush to incorporate Web technologies into the sales process is the realization that IT-dominated top-down buying is being replaced by collaborative relationship building from the Net up. Establishing community (social) relationships and mining them for the deeper signals that come from willing gesturers is trumping the needle in the haystack filtering and lead gen models that have informed the current generation of business communications tools. The enterprise guys understand Track is the key to uncovering these rich relationships.
That’s why the Oracle PR folks are trying hard to blend the old and new medias. But the parties being thrown this week at OpenWorld will look quaint very soon now, like bell bottoms and porno sideburns, when people mining fully intersects with corporate communications. Right now the notion of an enterprise social connection is held tightly behind the firewall, but the social media practitioners know better, that the valuable signals are out in the public wild ready to be understood and acted upon. The first cloud vendor to make friends with the community will be the first big winner.
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The Ice Cream Truck
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by Steve Gillmor on September 21, 2008
If we look at the impact on technology investment in the aftermath (we think) of the Wall Street Meltdown, it would seem to be good news for Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel. Silicon Valley, although certainly impacted by big customers such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch melting away or sold under duress, seems in better shape than many other sectors. With its own personal bubble having collapsed and been absorbed earlier, the chances of the nuclear winter of 2000 repeating itself are only high relative to the possibility of a system-wide collapse.
More striking in the backwash of the presidential race is the lack of tech leadership emerging from the new dynamics of the post-Microsoft realignment. Carly Fiorina’s benching for what may well be a case of telling the truth at the wrong time served more to highlight the failures that led to her firing than to put any tech skin in the game on a national level. Obama’s economic war council on Friday was bereft of tech heavyweights, and McCain is too busy running from Phil Gramm publicly while staying up late with the guy on the phone doing a global search and replace to change “de” to “the” regulation we need.
Perhaps the reason tech leaders are on the sidelines is because the major platform owners are so caught up in succession politics that they can’t apply the new wave of technologies to the problem at hand. Gates, Jobs, Ellison, and Chambers are fighting the last war with Google rather than leveraging the new real time tools. Even as Twitter’s growth as the premier information delivery platform continues unabated, none of the big players has a visible or even secret strategy for pushing the new architecture out at scale.
It’s not a technology problem, either, but a political one. This week saw the rumblings of a Windows 7 unveiling at the PDC a month from now, but where is the leak of micromessaging features inside a new service pack for Office or even Windows itself for that matter? The New York Times and Mike Arrington joust over whether the Google/Yahoo ad deal is good or bad for competition, but where is the debate over what form of media is most efficient at harvesting the most engaged and intentional crowds that have moved into swarming environments?
It’s a lot like the global warming data being debated while the ice caps melt before our eyes. Or the readiness of Palin to take over the free world if McCain gets sick or more confused than the networks can rationalize as a way of hedging their bets. Is social media a technology that can transform information routing or is it just a hippie mirage? Put it another way: what else is important if this isn’t?
Despite the Left’s insistence that this election should be about issues, every time economic catastrophe looms as a real possibility, we seem to fall back on faith to pull us through. Better we believe in 6 thousand year old dinosaurs than organize our information systems to reflect the extraordinary economic power of harvesting our actual signals of what we want and what we’re willing to reveal to get it.
Luckily, there will be a real debate this Friday, where we will be able to use television to measure our fears and hopes against these two or four candidates. It’s fun to talk back to the TV set, perhaps most because we know they can’t really hear us. We’d rather trust in things just working out than admit to our complicity in letting things careen. Twitter may be a toy, but it challenges our notion that we are powerless. Facebook may be a weakly-typed harvester of our individual social networks, but the aggregate activity stream of our personal clouds turns out to be a superior indicator of who we are and what we will do.
These two realities are in collision: belief in the rational world and evidence to the contrary. We look for leaders to represent us, while social media lets us do it ourselves. We blame the media for not getting it right, forgetting we are the media. No wonder the titans of technology are sitting this one out - it’ll be too easy to blame whoever bets on the wrong side. Instead, we dither while Rome melts.
Every afternoon around 5 or so, the familiar sound of the ice cream truck echoes down the hill where we live. I always look up in excitement, shouting for my daughter to come running. I always pretend that my joy is for my child, but the truth is it’s for me, for a simpler time when things seemed safer and in order. That’s why we look for leaders, not so much to take care of things for us, but to give us a clue how to do it for ourselves.
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Connect the dots
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by Steve Gillmor on September 19, 2008
Fred Wilson posts about inserting advertising into feeds via open API’s. In the comments, Gnip’s Eric Marcoullier doubles down on the idea. At BearHug Camp, Twitter tells us that Gnip is the gating factor in returning access to the full XMPP feed. Cisco buys Jabber. Let me know when you see a pattern developing.
For years (particularly since Google Reader blew out the feed aggregator market) the marketers have been looking at feeds with smacking lips. Indeed, so have publishers, who have vacillated between the market integrity of full text feeds and the page view games of partial feeds. More recently, the noise around full text feeds quieted. Why?
Because Twitter now dominates the marketplace for feed item notification. Nobody who understands the XMPP real time paradigm uses feeds anymore. Feeds are dead, and have been for a while. No simpler reason for the panic and withdrawal symptoms when track was withdrawn on May 23rd, and no more fundamental reason why we need to start paying close attention to what marketers want to do with our data and who controls that data.
Certainly not those who enter the data - that much is clear. If the high value target of such data is the real time conversation, the actionable envelope in which real business gets done, then as of now Twitter and its partners own that data lock stock and barrel. At BearHug Camp, Twitter executives made clear that the only impediments to returning track over IM and XMPP were business-releated, not technical. Of course, the company wants to bulletproof scalability issues that will arise as track usage ramps back up, but legal work and business relationships with partners and developers are the immediate hurdle.
Since BearHug Camp we’ve heard nothing further about developer attempts to regain a measure of functionality for access to real time track. The suggestions regarding white listing API calls at 5 second intervals or workarounds to a 1 second cache of the public feed have proven unworkable, which leaves getting the data from a third party partner such as Gnip when that company is ready to offer that service.
Let’s say that happens in the next weeks, not months, as Marcoullier told me a few days ago, validating Twitter executives’ comments at BearHug Camp that the holdup was with Gnip. If feeds are dead, or rolled up with XMPP and activity streams as Fred does in his post, then Gnip now is positioned as the owner of our data. How much they extract from us (or rather independent developers as our proxy) becomes an exercise in accounting. If today’s proposed bailout of the US finanicial infrastructure will cost us an estimated $3600 per citizen, then how we read Gnip’s lips will make for interesting conjecture over the next week(s).
Cisco’s purchase price of Jabber and its implications for influence if not control of XMPP remains undisclosed, as (so far) does the relationship between Gnip and Twitter. It’s tempting to view these moves as bigco jockeying for position in the battle for control of the real time network, but that’s not the whole story. Fred Wilson:
I hope (and pray) that this time around we don’t end up with one dominant provider of ad inventory (like adwords has become in keyword based cpc text ads). I hope that the services that provide the feeds to the audience will be able to work with a host of services that provide the feed targeting and execution to the marketers. In effect, an open exchange based on apis and data sharing.
I agree with Fred, but an open exchange based on apis and data sharing would logically include open access not just to the apis but also the underlying business relationships of vendors such as Gnip. Twitter has effectively handed off the burden of transparency to its partner, and with it the responsibility for expressing the rationale for the cost of access to the public data we contribute. Open source and other open coalitions of micromessaging services may find the answers to these questions will provide an economic framework in which their services can achieve some semblance of parity in the marketplace for our content.
If not, the time may come when open services will use licensing or other strategies to brand content with requirements for those data marts that restrict XMPP access to public streams. BearHug Camp 2.0 will focus on this issue as a high order of priority.
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The Social Enterprise
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by Steve Gillmor on September 17, 2008
There continues to be a misunderstanding of the enormous transitions enterprise software and IT are going through. While Web 2.0 technologies have substantial holes related to security, standards, and IT buyin, even those simple metrics are yielding data about accelerating adoption. According to Awareness, Inc. surveys, business acceptance of social media applications doubled from 37 % in 2007 to 69% in 2008.
The bleeding edge of social media applications is certainly epitomized by Twitter, yet enterprise clones of the platform are starting to go public with more in the pipeline. Future platform plays including Mesh and Google Chrome seem targeted at mining social graph dynamics, and more “traditional” social networks such as LinkedIn are adopting more consumerish features from Facebook and its ilk. Particularly significant is the increasing use of social networks as gated email platforms to reach out via socially vetted lists for lead gen and event marketing.
But perhaps the most obvious sign of the transformation of the enterprise is the very hostility emanating from some quarters about the resiliency and efficiency of social networks for business purposes. Companies such as Salesforce have always understood that virtualizing the middle layer of IT would produce efficiencies of scale and cross-selling opportunities for add-on modules to allow the company to start at the workgroup level and spread horizontally. The spread of the Force.com application framework takes social media into the developer space, an updating of Microsoft’s tools strategy as the glue for .Net.
With 75% of employees in the Awareness report allowed to use Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, the not so subtle message to IT is adapt or continue to be absorbed at the on-demand layer. Already security players are shifting their strategies off the desktop and LAN and into social site monitoring, where much of the vulnerabilities have concentrated. Chrome’s impact will be substantial, not just in its own right but also from its impact on the architecture of Firefox and most imprtantly the mobile space.
What many traditional enterprise practitioners miss in the wave of social media adoption is its impact on the business alliances made possible by aggregating social connections outside the firewall. By establishing a self-service quality to what is in effect cross-domain portal management, social networks enhance the ability to transition and migrate employees as companies acquire and are merged into streamlined business units. The recent wave of bank and insurance collapses will only serve to accelerate the migration of business process and personnel management to cloud solutions.
No wonder the reaction is fear and denial; the saving grace is that a new wave of middle management will not tolerate the arrogance of earlier times, when IT was the implementor of corporate policies designed to prevent employees from wasting time on the job. With the growing ubiquity of lightweight information channels typified by Twitter, job descriptions are broadening to value experience in social media strategies and facility with customer-facing help desks, marketing programs, and employee retention efforts. The sooner IT embraces those parts of the new platform that can be integrated with existing infrastructure, the more likely those who excel will keep and even extend their positions up the corporate ladder.
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Conventional wisdom for the loss
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by Steve Gillmor on September 15, 2008
In the presidential race the pundits are going crazy offering advice for the Obama campaign. Much of it is to ignore Palin and concentrate on McCain. The conventional wisdom is that attacking her would drive independents and women to the Republican ticket, thereby ensuring McCain’s victory.
What if Google had taken such advice about its assault on Microsoft’s domination of the computer industry? Conventional wisdom was that Office was impregnable, that an on-demand version with minimal functionality could not stand up to the suite’s IT stranglehold in the corporate environment. And conventional wisdom is right from a conventional perspective: Office continues to own more than 90% of Windows desktops and a healthy share of the Mac.
But the next generation of users that’s coming on line, namely my 7 and 14 year olds, know from nothing about Windows or Office. Even though their grandparents bought the older daughter a PC, she borrowed my old MacBook and never went back. The other night she thought she briefly lost some homework she was typing into Blogger, and I walked her through reopening the post which was tucked safely away through the program’s auto-save function. Her generation feels more comfortable knowing the data is stored in the cloud than on the hard drive where she’s already lost 100 iTunes downloads when it crashed.
And that’s just Office. Next up is Windows, which Google is undermining first with Firefox, next with Chrome, and finally with Gears on top of browser apps like Wordpress. When that works - and it makes no difference whether it’s Chrome, Safari, or Firefox the plug-in edition - then the browser becomes a read/write system and Office is really dead. Remember that Ajax was Microsoft’s last-ditch ploy to dumb down the browser and cripple the IE ActiveX control to reject text entry.
Conventional wisdom was that rich internet applications required offline support before they would be free of the Windows stranglehold, but the iPhone proved that always-on trumped rich and streaming beats DRM. The conventional wisdom is now shifting from moving files around to moving pointers to the location in the file that needs to be displayed around. When Gears develops caching smarts and tools for adding that functionality to third party applications like Twitter and other activity streams, the concept of web site is flipped on its head to a series of pointers to media that is predictively streamed ahead based on social graph behavioral data.
Conventional wisdom is nonetheless valuable, especially in its utility as a predictive indicator of the real trend it hides from. Google knew there was no clock to run out in the battle with Microsoft, so instead Brin and Page went into a 2 minute offense at the start of the game. Microsoft has plenty of strength on the bench, but it needs to understand the conventional wisdom and then call the audible at the line of scrimmage. Obama should appoint Ray Ozzie as Secretary of Swarming before it’s too late.
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Micromessaging at the crossroads
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by Steve Gillmor on September 14, 2008
BearHug Camp proved successful at bringing together a wide swath of what is known as the open micro blogging community. With companies including Twitter, Laconica/Identi.ca, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, bit.ly, and Seesmic/Twhirl, some 1700 of those who couldn’t make it in person followed over Leo Laporte’s TWiT-TV Live streamcast. While most media folks took their leads from Twitter execs Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone’s comments on the return of Track in the morning session, the work done in the afternoon may prove more significant in the long run.
The Twitter conversation took the form of a press conference, with BearHuggers firing increasingly detailed questions about Track functionality and its attendant XMPP transport. In a nutshell, Twitter execs flatly stated Track would return, but also committed to allowing third-party developers such as Dustin Sallings (TwitterSpy/IdentiSpy) to be whitelisted for 5-second interval access on an unlimited basis to the API. The mechanism for that permission involves an email to Twitter developer Alex Payne, who promised a 48 hour turnaround.
Although there was less definitive discussion about restoration of XMPP services, the release of terms and conditions for such access, and the business discussions required for use of the firehose stream of all status messages, the API whitelist gateway should prove sufficient in the short term to restore Track services to Twitter users in time for the first presidential debate on September 26. It was the the early primary dates and election night coverage that triggered Twitter’s earlier demise and subsequent loss of Track and IM.
Even those who see Twitter and similar services as the cornerstone of what they call the Now Web depend on the assumption that such real time services will have to achieve a context similar to that of email in order for the technology to prove its value at scale. Although IM has proven itself a powerful attractor of eyeballs and stickiness, it has failed to be directly monetized like messaging’s Microsoft and IBM juggernauts. By contrast, even open source browser projects such as Firefox have become powerful revenue engines in relatively short time.
BearHuggers seemed uneasy at the driveby status of the Twitter floks, a bemused combination of surprise that they showed up at all and irritation that they didn’t stay to hear from the rest of the community. Jack Dorsey had in fact made it clear privately that he could only stay for a brief time, and bringing Payne and Stone went beyond a mere photo opp. Perhaps more interesting than the public conversation were a series of casual huddles after the segment, as Dave Winer and other independant developers chatted casually with the trio. Winer played an important role in arranging the visit, and seemed engaged with the group.
I’ll leave a more detailed report to Jack Moffitt’s excellent notes, but even those observations carry with them the underlying sense that the heavy lifting will have to be done not by Twitter but the open community. The afternoon session drew out Evan Prodromou’s snapshot and roadmap of the Laconica effort, as well as Seesmic founder Loic Lemeur’s efforts to turn Twhirl from a client side to a server side hub.
But there was an odd ambiguity about much of what Prodromou committed to in sketching forward from the recent XMPP bandaiding he’s been doing to a more stable unified framework. Moffitt announced he was building an aggregation service using XMPP pubsub “for the OMB community” and layering Track on top of it. Prodromou continues to insist he will build Track into Laconica in spite of calls to leave that to an independent middle layer of developers, though he appeared to push it down the stack when challenged. And Sallings, Lemeur, and less visible players continue to work in groups of one or two on virtually the same strategies.
This may seem to be good news for Fred Wilson and others who hope Twitter’s lead in users will translate to more control over the marketplace when it emerges. But fast-moving startups such as Yammer could easily use a solid enterprise base to leapfrog the open source players and challenge Twitter in bringing developer resources to bear in the short term while the market is still susceptible to momentum plays. It’s this threat that I believe has encouraged Twitter to begin the process of re-engaging with third party developers, much like Apple has done with iPhone developers.
But unlike Apple, who has little to fear from anger about applications clearly designed to disrupt Apple’s iTunes and carrier bearhug fundamentals, Twitter does have to harness the open micromessaging space or risk its size advantage in market share being dwarfed by either Google or Microsoft or even Salesforce. Any one of these could realize the efficiencies of giving away an open service as an attractor for next generation relationships with key affinity groups now reaching maturity as market forces.
Google Chrome could be the most obvious disruptor of Twitter’s cloud, simply by embedding open micromessaging services that do not compete or intermingle with Gmail or Google Reader, whose behavioral data they have promised not to cross-collateralize. Firefox Labs services seem experimental and immature, and Google already has the Jaiku team repositioned on top of AppEngine (just as Identi.ca is deployed on EC2.) We’ll know more about Mesh in a month at the PDC, but try as I do to get someone at Microsoft to argue with my description of Mesh as a pubsub router, not a word is said to the contrary.
But even more threatening than the eventual Borging of micromessaging by either the new or the old Microsoft is a trojan horse attack from within. If messages from and to Twitter were indistinguishable from those of other services, the open source community argues, the economies of scale and free would eventually overwhelm the proprietary play. If Twitter rolls Track out as play for pay, the price creates an incentive to undercut it or do a Google Apps in order to disrupt the incumbent’s relationship with its investors.
This scenario depends on the existence of the OMB, however. Twitter execs appeared to rule out a level playing field, using the example of guarding against a tweet that makes sense in one context appearing in another context where the information might not seem so appropriate. Proffered was the notion that people who tweet in the clear may not realize just how public this is or could be. In all of the commentary in the room and over Twitter and Identi.ca I heard not a word about how the “community” felt about this issue.
If there can be no community understanding about this most sensitive of issues - whether people realize what’s good for them or not - then how will any market standard evolve? Turn the argument around and examine it from the perspective of someone like me who is more concerned about not having my ability to send messages impeded by business model, political correctness, or any of the other gating factors that are used to intercept, control, and tax our networks of communication. What does the email community do to our messages, and can that be applied to micromessaging?
First, there’s spam, which we define not as a civil rights issue but a civic form of garbage collection. Do the political parties get treated as spammers when they use email as a sort of global franking privilege. No, they leave it up to us to define by hitting the spam button when it reaches the intrusion point. Does that spam filtering work point to point within messages from friend to friend. Not likely. But Twitter appears to be using concern about the community as validation for terms of service that validate a business model. Fair enough, if they can get away with it. So where is the so-called open community to offer alternatives?
What is Laconica’s stance on sharing of public content in inappropriate ways? How does Twhirl justify or limit undesirable content flowing over its multi-service transport? If the BearHug has pretensions to work, doesn’t it have to start with unifying standards about what the value and risks of micromessaging are, rather than arguing over the inevitability of one or another business model? And when better than to hash these issues out than at the start, before economic leverage makes real discourse more difficult.
Ironic, isn’t it, that Twitter has raised this issue first. Certainly it can be used to create a rationalization for picking partners, moating data, or any other barrier to entry. But taken at its simplest, micromessaging needs to walk before it runs, and strategically, respecting the rights of the individual at a very early stage will do more to create power than all the market force momentum that can be mustered.
Only when we recognize Twitter’s willingness to engage with the open community will we understand how much that puts the onus on the open source community and standards wonks to come to the table themselves. BearHug Camp should reconvene inside the Trojan Horse, and once aligned around real issues, emerge to inject itself among the users in the city.
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BearHug Camp is here
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by Steve Gillmor on September 11, 2008
Friday, September 12 at 9 am, BearHug Camp begins. The brainchild of Dave Winer, BearHug is based on a tactic Winer used to great effect in bootstrapping coincident work by Netscape and Winer into what we now know as RSS. Recently, we’ve seen the emergence of similar strategies in the so-called micro-blogging segment that has grown around Twitter.
Enterprise micro-blogging service Yammer’s choice as the best startup at Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis’ TC50 conference illustrates how far we’ve come in recognizing the power of Twitter-like services, and also how early this all is. BearHug Camp is designed to aggregate as many of these small and large players in one room, to identify the points of common ground and establish some rules of the road. Representatives include those from Twitter, Identi.ca, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, FriendFeed, Mozilla, Seesmic/Twhirl and a number of lesser-known but potentially disruptive engineers and entrepreneurs.
I’m especially encouraged by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s participation, coming as it does on the heels of Twitter’s stability through the conventions of both parties, a small Bay Area earthquake, and at least two major hurricanes. The firestorm over Sarah Palin’s nomination as McCain’s running mate continues unabated, and the conversation has returned to robust pre-May levels on Twitter, with the unfortunate continued loss of Track services. The apparent righting of Twitter’s ship of state, however, augurs for some interesting possibilities when Dorsey takes Twitter’s seat at the table for whatever he time he can give us.
Over on the open source Identi.ca network, Evan Prodromou has been working to solve many of the XMPP reliability problems that seemed so central to Twitter’s early meltdown. Though the scale of Identi.ca and related Laconica instances is dwarfed by the pioneering service, the conversation has become authoritative at a more engineering-focused level, around the process and politics of achieving enough scale to attract a wider, more general-focus audience. Federation services, though touted as the end game for achieving a scalable architecture without the need for massive capital investment, are immature and largely one-way at this point. But the success at building new clouds such as Leo Laporte’s TWiTArmy Laconica instance virtually overnight also augurs for some interesting dynamics at BearHug.
I hesitate to use the word “summit” in regard to this first of what I hope will be ongoing gatherings. First, Tim O’Reilly’s use of that term in organizing “summits” in a number of areas has always struck me as potentially exclusionary, much in the way that FOO Camp, although a wonderful experience for any who have been invited, also tends to make those not invited feel like they’ve been deemed not important or connected enough to have a say in the topic of the day. Also, attempts at negotiating standards are undermined when conducted behind closed doors, no matter how authoritative the guest list.
That’s why BearHug Camp is wide open and transparent. Everything will be broadcast live on the Net. I’ve even foregone using a wiki or event service (though several have been implemented by others), opting instead for using the very network we are talking about to announce confirmations and other details as they come together. The realtime nature of XMPP, track, and cross-domain bridging makes it relatively easy to find out what is going on, and the chat and live-blogging services that will spring up around the streamcast will further amplify the ripple effects of the event.
I really have no idea what to expect of this. I certainly have my own agenda, namely to encourage, cajole, and otherwise use my passion and commitment to this powerful realtime service to effect a rapid adoption of core best practices that allows all comers to participate in a level playing field. To do that, we must respect both the investment of the original creators, the power of open source community contributions, and the amazingly low barrier to entry of obtaining entrance to the party.
Who of us would have believed Bill Gates when, at the height of Microsoft’s dominance of pernsoal computing, he said that his position could be usurped at any moment by a smart, swift competitor. Yet that is exactly what happened. So too is that possible today, if in fact even more opportunistically viral than the last transition. Pull up a seat at BearHug and let’s see what happens.
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Sun’s Rich Green on Virtualization
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by Steve Gillmor on September 10, 2008
Sun’s executive vice president of Software Rich Green announced Sun’s xVM Server software and xVM Ops Center 2.0 in a broadcast from Sun’s campus TV studio. Green also announced a suite of comprehensive services and support, and launched xVMserver.org, an open source community where the the new offerings as well as xVM VirtualBox software are freely downloadable.
The Sun xVM platform targets mainstream commodity x86 and SPARC operating systems including Windows, Linux, and Solaris, allowing a broad range of companies to leverage virtualization technologies already available to Fortune 500 companies. Afterwards, Green talked about how Sun is reusing virtualization techniques and strategies first developed with Solaris and leveraging Sun’s gains with low-heat and power usage hardware with management tools designed to optimize overall performance.
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Lipstick and boxer shorts
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by Steve Gillmor on September 8, 2008
For the last few weeks, MSNBC’s election coverage has become so viscerally partisan that you could sense that the coverage was coming close to threatening the fundamental journalistic tenets of broadcast journalism. Namely, that keeping your nose clean with the FCC was paramount.
With the advent of 24 hour news operations and campaign rapid response squads, the business of maintaining balanced coverage has begun to conflict directly with the irresistible force of hot ratings. As Keith Olbermann has become more and more blunt in his analysis of Republican messaging, the parent NBC News operation has struggled with growing ratings and spiraling doubts about the impartiality of the left-leaning Olbermann, and to some extent, his fellow commentator Chris Matthews.
Today, the dispute boiled over as MSNBC executives removed Olbermann and Matthews from anchor positions for the forthcoming debates and election night converage, substituting the more conservative David Gregory. The move comes after Olbermann was shifted back to New York for the Republican confab after getting into on-air tiffs with Matthews and Morning Joe anchor Joe Scarborough.
The media circus obscures the fact that no matter how much the public thinks the story is about the candidates, it’s actually about the filters through which we learn the “facts” on the ground in the campaigns. These thin-skinned primadonnas are the real candidates, sitting at their desks in their boxer shorts and waiting for the moment of inspiration where they can frame the dialogue for the next 10 segments. Tim Russert’s death has set off a mad scramble for power at all levels of the network; the race comes in a distant second.
The same framing continues in the tech space. Google’s Chrome beta has set off a similar dance, most recently proffered by Tim O’Reilly as he promotes Joe Wilcox’ analysis of Microsoft’s apparent cluelessness regarding its mobile platform. Wilcox’ premise is that Microsoft has lost search and should start a Manhattan Project to catch up in mobile. O’Reilly frames the Microsoft box as one where he bets Redmond will try and block Chrome with a lightweight Windows XP Home on so-called Internet tablets like the one TechCrunch is building. He then blasts the straw man as backward-looking defensive competition that only buys you time, and not enough of it at that.
The only problem with this scenario is that Microsoft shows no sign of doing any such thing. Everything we’ve seen actually confirmed about both Mesh and Silverlight shows a healthy regard for the changed landscape of today’s Net OS, and just because Google has done some smart stuff with open source code and Chrome doesn’t mean Microsoft can’t or won’t. What then is the goal of O’Reilly and Wilcox’ gambit - to frame the race between a gorilla caught in a squeeze between an outmoded software development model and an increasingly fragile hardware base, and a nimble competitor who can fuel continued growth by harvesting the mobile platform right out from under Microsoft’s nose?
Or is the real impetus for the story not about Microsoft v. Google, but Tim’s Internet Operating System branding v. Web 1.0? He quotes Wilcox:
Chrome is not a Web browser, it’s an application runtime. Chrome is really Google Gears with a browser facade.
Punchy and simple, like Sarah Palin’s lipstick punchline about the difference between a pit bull and a hockey mom. How about this one: Mesh is not a synchronization engine, it’s a pubsub router. Built on open source and standards. Just like Chrome.
The political debate has calcified not so much at the participant level but in the announcer booth. Conflict sells, and sound bites rule. Palin and McCain outperformed expectations with record ratings, and NBC reacted by shoring up its fair and balanced and utterly predictable license schtick. But they are playing a dicey game here, because they have only a short time to backpedal if it turns out that Obama and Biden and Hillary can triangulate the real change under way and turn the joke around.
Biden’s rejoinder recalls an older lipstick line, the one about a pig, as in Palin’s prettying up of the horrendous situation eight years of Republican mud have sunk us into. If the Democrats win, what is David Gregory’s next assignment? Certainly not his current job as White House correspondent. The liberal commentator on Fox replacing Alan Colmes?
And if Microsoft does just fine thank you with something very similar to Google’s brilliant Chrome strategy, stealing the Change mantra from under Eric Schmidt’s nose and going open 24/7/365. Firefox has been running the IE show now for about 4 years, and Google is doing nothing to slow down that momentum with Chrome. What if there are people across the aisle in both parties who recognize they have a common objective to hold each of their platforms intact?
Tim O’Reilly leaves us this thought at the bottom of his post:
What’s so ironic is that if Microsoft started thinking about the user again, instead of thinking about protecting their business, they could do great things.
What makes you think they’re not thinking about the user? And what makes you think Google isn’t protecting their business with Chrome? And Microsoft’s too? What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Not a damn thing.
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