Twingly is a site that Ryan spotted during a break, so he asked the developers to quickly show it to us all. It’s a real-time 3D representation of the blogosphere – a spinning globe with columns that indicate blog activity. The blog posts being published scroll by on the left, and it shows you where the blog post is from by a line which joins the post excerpt with the correct column. Go look – it’s really cool!
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(Microsoft)
Talking about IE, and browsers.
What happened in 2001? Wasn’t a lot of adoption of the web platform, there wasn’t much building of ‘Web 2.0’ type stuff, even though the tools were there. IE was then the only browser that could handle these things. Dot.com bubble burst, experiments with “Web OS” and other super-rich web apps, which ultimately failed. Hacking became lucrative around 2000/01. Whole industry hit, but MS and IE hit the hardest. Spent a lot of time retraining everyone around security. Trying to fix what wasn’t secure, produced Service Pack 2, took a lot of resources. IE in SP2 was almost a whole new browser, just didn’t look like it because it was all security-based.
2005, Ajax gets a name. “We sort of invented it in 1998, great that the industry finally picked up on it”. The pattern of Ajax serves the realisation that you need to care about the UI, and the user experience. It wasn’t that something new happened in terms of tech in 2005, because most Web 2.0 stuff could have run in IE6, which shipped in 01. But in 2006, the idea of the web being the semantic web, that RSS is hitting the mainstream, the idea that you can have microformats that bring new meaning to HTML without redefining the language, tagging.
Other browsers. Hard to get excited about adding new features to IE which people just weren’t going to use anyway. But MS always does work best when there is competition.
Late 2006, IE7 finally shipped. Focused on improving user experience; security and trustworthiness; web developer platform, including missing pieces of standards, bugs, etc.
User experience: tabs, OpenSearch, page zoom, better printing.
Integrated RSS platform: feed discovery and default feed view; common platform for feeds: feedlist, storage, parser, sync engine, used by other Windows apps, not just IE, all use same engine.
Security: protection against web fraud: integrated anti-phishing service; user experience highlights security. Put the user in control: warn of insecure settings; explicit user consent is required on the first run of ActiveX; integration of parental controls.
Web developer platform: thinking a bit differently about this than had before. Spoke to real developers, fixed bugs, fixed inconsistencies. Added standards features for CSS and HTML. Added other heavily-requested features, such as the alpha channel in PNG images. Fixed memory leaks, and a number of other things. Problem is that sites started breaking.
“I’m really concerned that we’re breaking stuff in the name of goodness and that all users and developers will walk away with is ‘stuff broke’.” – Wilson’s Boss’s Boss.
Assumption is that IE guys don’t know what they are doing, but the reality is that they have fixed things that were broken before, [and that maybe people had done kludges to deal with]. Have to be careful how we deploy IE7. Uses ‘Quirks Mode’, so all the oddness that people had done before still worked, and most of the improvements only work in ‘Strict Mode’. Half the web actually uses Strict Mode, it’s increasingly popular, and developers expect behaviour not to change, except when they tell it to.
Multiple IE versions on one machine. Just not technically possible to put different versions of IE on one machine and have them work properly. It’s not designed to do this. There are some hacks that sort of work, but they don’t replace everything. So released a virtual PC image that contained Windows Xp SP2 and IE6, so you can have both IE6 and IE7 on the same machine for free.
Other tools
Visual Web Developer Express, developer tool supporting HTML, CSS, XML etc.
Microsoft Expression Web: a professional tool for creating standards-based web sites.
ASP.net Ajax: client-side JavaScript framework for creating reusable components and libraries.
WPF/E: for adding vector graphics, imaging, text, audio and video. Cross-platform and cross-browser.
Future of IE
Compatibility and standards are important. Must not break the web. Evolution, not revolution.
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(Digg)
How Digg got to where they are today
Lots of new start -ups that want to get the community involved, but are they creating the right motivation for their apps? Why should the crowd care? How do you get people involved and using the system? How are people using the site?
Wanted to create incentives for users at every level, maybe just to read, to Digg, to clear out spam.
1. Why submit content to Digg? Couple of systems he looked at were Slashdot and Delicious. Slashdot had around 500 newly submitted stories each day. Asked why people submit as its editors who decide what goes on the front page. Answer: people want to share with the community what they think is important. Want to see their name in lights, see their username or icon on the front page.
So that’s pretty easy. If there’s enough people visiting the front page there’s motivation to get your name in lights.
Del.icio.us. Joshua originally saw the site as where you store your most important information, it’s now about sharing and pushing bookmarks to friends, using the for:name tag to push to someone’s inbox. So there’s an incentive to see your link on Del.icio.us popular page.
So Digg, built friends functionality and made this sort of stuff easy. There are people who find it important to Digg stories before anyone else.
Wanted to empower the individual, need to give the user a vote.
False circle, as people Digg a story, if it ends up on the front page, and stuff gets re-Dugg and its stays on the front page. Crazy combinations of stories.
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If your Mum changes her phone number and emails you a .vcf file, you have to add it to your address book, connect your phone to Bluetooth… but you have to pair it first, so end up using a cable… and then fire up iSync to get your contacts on your phone.
That’s how it is today.
But everyone has different devices, and each device has its own address book, so we end up with contact pools. It’s difficult to sync. If someone changes their number, you have to input it several times, which is made worse because the interface is awful. Input methods, like T9, can get in the way for names.
Soocial.com creates one contact pool, and distribute them to devices when you need it.
So, your Mum changes her number, you double click, it’s automatically distributed to all your devices. It doesn’t spam your friends asking them to update their contacts. If you update your number, it automatically updates on everyone else’s address books.
Desktop apps like Address Book, Office, and MS Outlook will have a plug-in. Developing an open API, because it needs to work in your apps. There will also be a web app to help you manage your contact information.
Soocial.com, alpha on invitation.
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(Yahoo!)
‘User’ is a bit of a derogatory term, and have to move away from using the term and turn ‘users’ into ‘people’. Came up with a pyramid:
1% – creators
10% – synthesisers
100% – consumers
Web 2.0 tries to make everyone a creator
100% – creators
100% synthesisers
100% – consumers
Try to make it easier for everyone to participate in all roles.
Anyone with an X is now a Y
keyboard –> author
camera –> photographer
iPod –> DJ
browser –> publisher
There is a dark side. If you factor out all the pirated content on YouTube you have chimps doing karate. Democratising publishing and the best they can come up with is this. Lots of UGC can be a sad experience.
But when you look at some of the most interesting photos in Flickr they are amazing. These are ‘user generated content’, all taken by ordinary people, not professional photographers. It’s amazing in quality, it’s emotionally moving, some of it’s funny.
Flickr’s ‘interestingness’ is an algorithm, done implicitly. The concept is stuff that is interesting to everyone, not just those who know the person involved. Look at how many times the photos was commented on, viewed, blogged about, linked to, etc. All that organic activity allows us to distil ‘interestingness’. When they launched it, there was no gaming of the system, no spam. Could use retroactive techniques to go back into the archives and see what the most interesting photo on the day they launched was.
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(Amazon)
Doug Kaye, building GigaVox Audio Lite. Lots of annoying things that you have to do to get a podcast sound professional, so GigaVox is an app where you drop in your MP3, and it’s converted and published. You can, if you want, put ads in and publish it.
Doug hardly did anything when he developed this – he used Amazon’s S3 Storage at the centre of it, and the EC2 service to do much of the processing. EC2 means that you can just use processors when you need it, and when you aren’t using it you don’t pay for it.
What if
– launching a new business on the web was simple?
– you only had to focus on the business
– You could manage growth more easily
What if you only had to compete on idea?
– That’s now how the world is right now, it’s a hassle to get things going.
John Hagel and John Seely Brown wrote a paper called From Push to Pull – Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources.
What we are seeing online with the way that resources are used, these trends are happening in all sectors.
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Gold Sponsor
Browser-based writing, calculator and spreadsheet. Seamless compatibility with MS Office. Created a bridge, can send documents back and forth. Anywhere, any time access, 1 gb of online storage, collaboration support. Simple document management. Free. May put ads in future versions, using contextual ads but without invading privacy.
Mashup API, take Office documents, and want to show them to readers of your blog, e.g. you want to show an Excel spreadsheet to people on your blog, currently you have to either download Excel spreadsheet or convert to an image. So can instead use ThinkFree API.
There are also browser extensions for Firefox or IE to view any link to office document inside the browers. OS X dashboard, Google and Yahoo widgets. Also a WordPress plug-in.
Can convert, say, Powerpont into Flash. Spreadsheets are turned into HTML, and it looks almost identical to the original. Viewer.thinkfree.com
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Started off in a studio flat in Whitechapel. Matthew came over in 2005 as lead web developer.
Early Growth lessons
Don’t overextend – scale with your growth not before. Until you need the four man tent, stay with the two man tent.
Make sure revenue sources scale with increased usage, e.g. Google ads, user subscriptions
Involve users in your web application’s story, make sure that they know about your start up, know that you’re growing, and make them ivolved in the growth. If it’s a social network, growth should be a selfish aim, recruiting new users should improve their own experience. be as open as you can afford to be, it will pay off.
Late 2004, Audioscrobbler and Last.fm has separate sites. But site news was front and centre, and they talked candidly. Put development up there as part of the product. Started off with a donation model. Had server failures, followed by a flurry of people giving money to buy new servers. As soon as you pitch it as a feature set, it doesn’t really give you the opportunity to do that.
Openness and growth
In 2004, had a cool service but needed data. Rather than try to do it themselves, they created the Audioscrobbler Protocol 1.0, so that any developer could create an app that sent track data to their server. Once you had a profile, you should be able to access it via webservices For developers wanting to make a plug-in, they have to see a ’round trip’ and see their results helping users. Immediately had Winamp, iTunes, WMp, Amarok, plug-in. And dozens more.
Promote a community around your application. They had forums and news on the front page. People to hear bad news than no news. So they want to know that a disaster is happening rather than be cut out of the loop. They will be more likely to tolerate your growing pains then.
Showed their submission graphs to the users to that people could see what what happening. Users appreciated information. Appreciated transparency. When things went bad, they would parody their graphs.
People found the 404s funny, and took advice to go make a cup of tea literally and Flickr’d it.
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Sponsor slot
Commoditisation. Formal definitions is “a change from monopoly to perfect competition”
Or:
yesterdays hot stuff –> today’s boredom
how novel, exciting and new –> uninteresting, unloved and taken for granted.
EG, electricity, Exciting in 1890s. It mattered, it provided new competitive opportunities, could replace people with machines. 1930s we had the national grid.
Rare thing becomes a common thing, ubiquitous, distributed.
When something is novel and new, it provides a competitive advantage.
When it is common it becomes just the cost of doing business.
1990s, web sites were novel and new, so web designers were hot. We made a different, created a competitive advantage. Except we didn’t – all that was happening was a big IT arms race, everyone wanted bigger and better IT. And if you weren’t armed, you were history.
New thing > leading edge > standard products > utility service
Constant move towards commoditisation. IT is not a strategic choice, it is a cost of doing business.
Trends:
Software as service
Utility computing
Web 2.0 – implies there are things that are old had and commonplace
Can’t insist on oodles of cash to build what we used to build. Now people want commonplace as cheap as chips. What should be cheap? Operating environments. No competitive advantage on having your own web infrastructure. Is a phrase for this competitive market – yak shaving. Doesn’t makes sense to do things over and over, pay someone else to do it .What is needed is an environment to build and release what you want and pay for what you use, e.g. Amazon S2.
Zimki. Build what you want without ever going near a database. problem of vendor lock-in, so Zimki is open sourcing everything. Will be able to switch environment, take your app and go elsewhere, or sell resources back. More like the national grid idea. Balance supply and demand. Lots of waste in hosting, and when there is waste there is opportunity, both financial and environmental.
Commoditisation is a growing trend and if you’re not looking at it you can bet your competitors are.
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I’ve a lot of notes from yesterday still to blog, and will obviously generate yet more today, but with the wifi at the conference as good as dead, I may not get them up in real time. Sorry. We have to lay the blame for the bad wifi not at FOWA’s feet, though, as I know that they paid good money to have the same excellent level of connectivity as last year, but it seems that BT whichever provider it was, which may or may not be BT, although I was under the impression it was, has let them down.