Futurile

Consumers, technologists and start-ups have taken heavily to running hosted applications. Squash reminded us a while back that a lot of the basics still need to be covered. Still, it’s interesting to consider whether this is a trend that consumers, medium business and enterprises will take-up with a vengeance.

The rise of Gmail really kicked the trend off and the Google team have done a great job expanding the capabilities. The buzz around Web 2.0 doesn’t do any hard either to getting people excited and experimenting. However, it’s worth remembering that lots of “trends” seen by the digerati don’t take-off. For example, while I couldn’t live without RSS it’s not used by most users (according to Yahoo, only 4% of surveyed users are RSS users). While I assume that this figure has changed since that survey I don’t think it’s the majority!

The main hosted applications I use are:

Gmail
E-mail is intrinsic to how people use the Web, and Google changed the game with it. They’ve done everything possible to make it feel like you’re not locked in, while locking you in with all the features!

LinkedIn
I’m not a big social networking user, but I do use Linkedin to stay in touch with business contacts and look for job candidates.

Del.icio.us
The oldest of social networking sites. Perhaps not the prettiest but I have all my bookmarks there and there hasn’t been anything more compelling.

So far, every other application I use is on the desktop. File storage is the one that I’d really like to solve but there doesn’t seem to be a clear winner that is cross-platform. Which hot hosted applications do you find indispensable?

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is an interesting technologist and strategist, whose blog is worth reading if you have spare cycles for good quality input. He’s known for having been deeply involved in many of IBM’s technical strategy decisions, for example he was a key actor in their Linux strategy. He officially retired this year and Eweek did a wide-ranging interview that finally made it to the top of my reading list. A key quote that struck me as true is when he’s asked where he got his vision from:

“The answer is easy: Find where the smart people are and hang out with them. I’m serious. The smart people have a lot of ideas …”

IBM has resources both money and brain-power that are far beyond those of most organisations. But it strikes me as true that if you find smart people with a range of views and get into an exchange of ideas then you’ve got a much better chance of doing something amazing. That’s definitely true of Open Source, but it applies generally. He continues,

“But the way I looked at it a new idea was whether it was something we should do, and then how we should do it in IBM. Because just because it’s something we should do, doesn’t mean we have to do it like everybody else is doing.”

This second point is really important to me, although it’s often difficult to practise. Sometimes, the accepted way of meeting a need is the right way to do it. Sometimes people want a better mousetrap, not an entirely new mouse removal system. Perhaps the problem is well understood, and there are no better approaches, or at least none worth the effort for the benefit.

But generally, if something is worth doing, it’s worth examining it from the underlying principles and wondering whether it can be done with a different approach. It’s really the only way to develop something really innovative and different.

The rub seems to be when do you do the former, and when the latter, perhaps there are ways to combine the two.

I really enjoyed Ubucon NY which happened on the Friday after LinuxWorld New York. Ubucon’s are informal gatherings where Ubuntu users get together to learn and socialise. The New York one was set up as an unconference so the attendees decided what the activities and talks would be. They’re organised by active members of the user community. John Mark did a great job organising it, and kept the day clicking along. Leslie and the rest of the Google team deserve thanks for providing the facilities and their overall enthusiasm. I of course returned the favour by making sure that no food on the buffet went
to waste!

It was interesting to see the wide variety of people who are active and interested enough to come along to a community event. The range was amazing, from professional business users who wanted to learn more about Ubuntu, to some of the seasoned Free Software activists.

Fabian did a great talk about our commercial support services for Ubuntu and what it’s like to work at Canonical. I learnt a few things myself! I was supposed to do a talk on the Ubuntu roadmap but there wasn’t enough time at the end of the day. So as people were getting tired I did a quick Q&A session on Canonical and Ubuntu instead. It got picked up in eWeek which was very surprising as it really was short: I think I managed to answer most people’s questions with a reasonable level of clarity!

If you’d like to be notified about upcoming Ubucon’s then you can subscribe to the Wiki page. The plan is for the next one to be in Sevilla, Spain on Saturday May 5th and is being organised by Jono Bacon. We’re also having our first formal user and business conference called Ubuntu Live. It’s in Portland, USA and comes right in front of OSCON July 22nd to 24th – make it a date in your diary!

The Oxford Internet Institute has videos of guest speakers who address the research group. The files are very large (200MB+) but they’re in a format that you should be able to view in Linux, Windows or Mac OS X. The sites worth browsing around as there’s lots of interesting content. The one I’m linking is by David Isenberg from The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, his talk is wide-ranging and focuses on how he sees the Internet developing.

This is a total cheat of a post as I wrote it ages ago and forgot to publish it. As I’m back from the US today and barely functioning enough to read I thought wandering through my post queue would suit my available brain power!

Applications you can use through the browser, hosted applications, have been popping up faster than moles on a freshly mowed lawn recently. It's such a fast moving area in Internet technology that it's got it's own moniker, Web 2.0. Aside from the hype and the odd names there are some genuinely useful applications. But finding the good ones can be a nightmare. A good place to start is Philip Bradley's page that lists Web 2.0 applications by how they are used: found on Karen Blakeman's blog.

The TechCrunch site is the best way to track the Web 2.0 space, through there's a host of alternative Web 2.0 blogs. But before you decide that you're going to use Writely over Jotspot check out Alex Bosworth's Web 2.0 application races to see which is the most popular.

What do you think, is Web 2.0 a new frontier or just hype? And are you using any of these applications?

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The French parliament is proposing a new law to free consumers from DRM lock-in. Essentially, a media system that operated a format lock-in would have to provide information so that other technical systems could interoperate. There’s more coverage on the BBC and Business Week.

It’s widely seen as an attack on Apple’s iTunes/iPod system as it represents 70% of the digital music market. The impact of the law would be that Apple would have to provide interoperability information to other music player manufacturers such as Sony. Consumers would be able to play content they had bought through the iTunes store on any player. At the moment iTunes music will only play on an iPod due to encryption.

The FT is scathing of this idea, probably because it would have a significant impact on Apple’s share value. The main report, France seeks to fragment Apple’s core, by Waters, Allison and Braithwaire suggests that:

“According to the industry’s received wisdom, these closed systems are characteristic of new technology markets in their infancy”

Odd received wisdom, because as far as I know there’s no proof that closed/proprietary systems open up due to market maturity. And DRM is just the latest extension to the proprietary system tool-box.

Two obvious examples, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Word aren’t infant technologies but their both proprietary and difficult to interoperate, damaging consumers. The rise of interoperable systems has mostly been caused because a technology is a challenger (ethernet versus token ring), or was part of public development (TCP/IP and UNIX). Can anyone think of a technology that has opened up due to market maturity? And does anyone think this will change, particularly considering that reverse engineering is increasingly difficult?

In a point in the main comment piece the FT states “Politicians have no business legislating for interoperability”. On the basis that the market should prevail and that it’s for monopoly authorities to protect consumers. It seems bizarre that consumers should have to accept being locked out from playing content that they’ve legally bought. Proprietary DRM systems secrets are a red-herring, if it’s that important to the content industry they should come up with an open standard.

Actually, consumer protection should go further. Forget Apple and iTunes for a moment. Much of our lives and communications are going online and it’s only going to increase. If we can’t guarantee interoperability between formats then we face the prospect of losing whole chunks of our records and history. For a sane digital age, users must have the ability to interoperate between formats. It’s a basic requirement that is for the good of all.

The Internet proves the long-term benefits of open systems, protocols and formats for all. Consumers and businesses have benefited from the creativity possible with an ecology of open systems. Companies such as Apple will still be able to win through superior products.

What do you think, should formats be open? Has the French legislature gone mad or is this ground breaking law? And, would the proposed law damage Apple?

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Video podcasts (aka vodcast, aka video blog) are the latest outgrowth of the podcast concept: the difference is the content is video rather than audio. Democracy Player (formerly DTV) is a new program that lets you watch video, subscribe to shows so you get the latest ones automatically and it provides a channel guide. Just like Sky+ or Tivo you can watch TV shows when it suits your schedule. The client is available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and it’s pretty slick looking:

Democracy Player’s been created by a not-for-profit organisation called the Participatory Culture Foundation who want to open up media production and collaboration. Consequently, the client is Open Source and uses free software such as BitTorrent, Python and Mozilla.

You can think of this as a poor mans IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) because content producers don’t have to set-up streaming infrastructure. But, video is a bandwidth monster – the TWiT’s (The Week in Tech) video I downloaded was over 459 MB. So if your show is popular you’re going to chew through your web sites bandwidth allowance very quickly. Democracy Player solves this problem by including Bit Torrent, so at some points when you are using the program you are also a (peer-to-peer) server for other users to download video from. There’s nothing obvious on the site that says when this happens but there is some bandwidth limiting capability in the Preferences.

I’ve been using it for a few days on the Mac and while there are bugs it’s very impressive and definitely worth giving a whirl. There’s also some general buzz in the blogosphere: For background The Ponderings of Woodrow posts about the IPTV competitors, Digital Dojo posts about his experiences, and macobserver has some coverage. Democracy Player isn’t the only option, there is also Fireant and ITunes, here’s a post on using iTunes.

Do video blogs sounds like the future of TV? Will you be part of the creative revolution? Post your thoughts.

Del.icio.us Tags: Democracy Player

Greasemonkey lets you run scripts when you visit a web site. Using a DHTML script stored on your computer it can change how a web site looks or functions to fit your preferences. Think of it as configuring a web site to your needs.

There are lots of uses for this functionality. For example, if you think that the text size on your favourite news site is too small you could make a script to magnify the text – every time you visited greasemonkey would automatically change the site for you. For a more visual overview watch this four minute video.

There is some concern about the impact of userscripts changing websites in ways that content publishers didn’t envisage. This could have a commercial and technical angle if their use becomes wide-spread. For me the wider their use becomes the better: greater user interaction (mash-ups) will benefit site creators, and having control over sites behaviour in the browser is great for users.

The first step to using Greasemonkey is to install the extension. When you restart Firefox you’ll see a cool monkey button in the bottom status bar. The best place to find greasemonkey scripts is the userscripts directory.

To install a script in Firefox take the link to the script so that it’s displayed as text in the browser window. Then in your browser click on the Tools menu and the Install this User Script… menu item.

The scripts I find indispensable are below, and as you can tell I use Google Gmail a lot!

Gmail delete button
The Gmail delete button script places an easily accessible delete key on the main bar. It may be passe but I don’t want a persistent archive of shopping lists and movie ticket confirmations so delete is my friend!

Gmail Secure
This script makes sure that all Gmail traffic is encrypted over SSL so that no-one can read your gmail. I decided to use the CustomiseGoogle extension instead as it has a swathe of google functionality.

Gmail Macros
Gmail already has some keyboard shortcuts but gmail macros extends it. Useful additions are “t” to trash a message, “p” to purge a message (mark it as read and archive). If you press “g” (for go perhaps) you can type the label name and it will take you there (works with inbox and trash as labels). Alternatively, if you click “l” and type a label name it will mark the message with that label.

Add to Delicious Focus 2.0
If you installed the Del.icio.us extension I discussed in my post yesterday then you can use this userscript to make it more usable. When the pop-up window shows this extension focuses input in the Description box, so you don’t have to click your mouse to start typing. It’s available from userscripts.

That should be enough to get started and I’ve only scratched the surface. If you find a really killer user script, or something that I should have mentioned please comment or trackback!

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Greasemonkey
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The last six months have seen the Mozilla Foundations Firefox browser achieve momentum among users. It’s share of users has gone over 10%, and it’s reaching 20% in Europe. A double figure share of the market makes it a realistic competitor to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and sites have started to react accordingly. Aside from security a key factor in it’s success is that Mozilla is very configurable. If you’re going to spend most of your day using a single application then you want it to closely match your needs: Firefox lets you add extensions to provide specific capabilities for your requirements.

Here’s a collection of extensions that I use every day. To install one visit the link and click on the filename for the extension. Mozilla may pop up a security box, if it does follow the instructions to permit that site to install files. After you’ve installed an extension you have to restart Mozilla so that the extension loads.

Avoid annoying adverts with Adblock
Adblock lets you block out those annoying adverts that make some webpages useless. By default Mozilla will block pop-up adverts but this extension goes even further. It does take some effort to configure properly but is well worth it. It’s also worth mentioning that blocking adverts is controversial – adverts are how sites pay for the content, so if enough people block adverts sites may not be able to pay their bills and could shutdown. I tend to block really annoying flashing adverts and leave context-sensitive or small and static ones alone. The Adblock site has more.

You’ve got new mail with Gmail Notifier
Webmail keeps me in contact wherever I am, and Google’s Gmail with it’s extensive feature set and generous storage allowance is my favourite. But it’s so annoying having to go to the web page and login every time to check if there’s new e-mail. There are a variety of ways you can be alerted to new mail, this extension is one of the best. It places a small envelope on the bottom bar of your browser window that when clicked takes you straight to your Gmail page. When you have new e-mail the icon changes colour or it can play a sound to alert you. Get the latest version directly.

Fasterfox for lightspeed browsing
The Fasterfox extension speeds up your browsing experience by configuring Firefox’s options for speed. Think of it as a tune-up for your browser. You can either use the defaults, or configure your own settings – and the little page load timer that it places in your status bar is cool.

Del.icio.us post
The Del.icio.us site transforms how you use bookmarks. Freed from your computer you can access them from any browser, share them with others and use tagging to sort or sift for associated sites. The Del.icio.us post extension adds a button making your bookmarks a click away. I’ve always loved the idea of Del.icio.us, but this extension lets me integrate it into my normal browsing – download it now!

Easy editing with Xinha Here
From blogs to forums I’m constantly responding to sites through a text box. This extension provides an easy to use HTML editor – it gives you full access to HTML wherever you use a textbox, and you can save your posts. You access the extension when you’re in a textbox by right clicking and activating the Xinha Here menu item. I’ve only just started using it, so far it’s been very useful for posting to my blog. You can get it here.

I’m also looking at Spellbound, and will post about Greasemonkey another time. All the extensions I use are popular so should be stable, I’ve used them all on Linux and Mac OS X. Have I missed any great ones, and what’s your favourite extension?

Technorati Tags: Firefox
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There’s an insightful article called Marketing Malpractise: The Cause and the Cure in December’s Harvard Business Review. It discusses where market segmentation is failing and how purposeful products offer a solution. It’s thesis is that many segmentation strategies lead marketeers to solve the wrong problems and improve products in ways that are irrelevant to customers needs.

One of the authors, Clayton M. Christensen is the author of The Innovators Solution so developing new ways to satisfy customers is part of the fabric. Two points particularly caught my attention:

“The structure of a market, seen from the customers’ point of view, is very simple: They need to get things done … When people find themselves needing to get a job done, they essentially hire products to do that job for them. The marketer’s task is therefore to understand what jobs periodically arise in customers’ lives for which they might hire products the company could make.”

Having done this and decided what product to develop, they continue:

“With few exceptions, every job people need or want to do has a social, a functional, and an emotional dimension. If marketers understand each of these dimensions, then they can design a product that’s precisely targeted to the job. In other words, the job, not the customer, is the fundamental unit of analysis”

For technology products I don’t think you can totally exclude the customer’s capabilities from how the job will be accomplished. If the job is reading-internet-email, there’s going to be a big difference between how someone who receives one e-mail a day and someone who receives a thousand a day expects to solve the job. You could more tightly define the product but then you’d land up with a hundred reading-internet-email products.

A post by Havoc Pennington Redhats desktop technical lead ruminates on what this means for complex technology development. He applies this to the development of the GNOME Linux desktop, and to some degree the wider commercial Redhat products. I’ve a feeling that he hits the nail on the head when he talks about flexibility: the jobs that people use technology products for are often sufficently complex that a number of features will be required to satisfy them. This in turn means that the feature set will meet the needs of those trying to accomplish a number of different jobs. Jotspot is an example of this, where they have multiple mini-applications on top of their base product.

Returning to the articles criticims of common segmentation practises. In my experience small businesses’ often segment by types of customer because that’s the data that is accessible, cheap and easy to use for metrics. It’s measurable that a product has 5% penetration of the 0-250 employee sized companies in the UK mainland: good luck saying that a product has an unknown level of penetration in the reading-internet-email job and could you have more money next year?!.

The article also covers building purpose brands and how brands should be extended. There are alternative summaries of the paper at Corante, Marketing Bytes and Noise Filter. If you want some further reading then Manyworlds has an interesting system where you can find related articles.

Is Christensen right, are jobs the fundamental unit of analysis

Technorati Tags: Marketing Malpractice, innovation, technology marketing

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