From the ReadWriteWeb a decent article explaining why, as email systems get more complicated, the original killer application will die. The summary here is that it has to co-exist with other technologies and if we use it properly (most don’t) and keep it simple then it will flourish and grow.
I note with interest that the release of Firefox 3 set a new Guinness World Record of the highest number of recorded downloads in a day at just over 8 million taking their browser share in Europe to over 28% and 16% in the US. What surprised me was the range of uptake and usage, for example in Germany Firefox has reached nearly 40% whilst other countries show much lower penetration. It seems clear that Firefox will dominate the voluntary download browser market for some years to come but there are others in the wings, such as Flock. I’ve been using and evangelising about Firefox for some years and it’s nice to see it start to dominate and Firefox 3 is certainly a step forward.
Back after the summer (what summer!) break, it’s a great time to be around - the world’s financial markets are crashing, bad advice is coming home to roost and solid thinking is back in fashion. Ace.
I registered my I-name (=dower) today to simplify my OpenId world and it got me thinking back to the future of the web. We are living more and more in an information age but we are limited by our human ability to sift and transfer information and this seems crazy. My PC and the various places (pods) that I inhabit on the net has lots of information about me, letting potential suppliers (retailers, insurance companies) see this information makes a huge amount of sense; they could better tailor their offers and even (on a mass scale) create products and services just for people like me. So why don’t they?
TRUST. No-one seems to trust anyone. So lets go create a framework for a trust network? It seems to work well enough in the social networking world so why not across all web-platforms? OpenID and I-name seem to be part of the solution, a form of machines trusting machines to share the right data at the right time, I’m sure it will evolve once the in-fighting within the various technical steering committees is resolved.
Ignoring (for the moment) the nay-sayers fears about abuse, privacy and control it would certainly make my life a good deal simpler if my (common and public) information was available to every web-resource I visit so it could tailor my experience. Better still, if the i-brokers could provide real secure trust in the same way that credit-card companies do online then you as a i-surfer could choose your provider based on personal preferences. In this world of mass-collaboration it seems a shame that machines cannot yet collaborate in the same way us humans are starting to.
A world where every web-resource knows exactly what it needs to know from you to give you exactly what you want. Sounds like nirvana to me 
Is old news the new “new news”? Cuil has been live for a couple of weeks, it’s not going too well but…maybe old ideas get recycled, maybe old ideas (from monoliths) are indeed truly ground-breaking? Not sure yet but our friends at Avenue A/Razorfish have punted an old (4 yrs to be pedantic) idea as a new idea. What do you think? IBM WebFountain
Worth a second look? Or a dead horse that is past flogging?
I think we all realise that software systems are getting more and more complex as time goes on. Microsoft (Vista), Adobe (PDF Reader, Photoshop) et al are all building more and more features into their applications. is this good? Well, the folks at 37signals seem to think this is wrong.
I’m inclined to agree with them and as we are avid users and evangelists of their Basecamp project collaboration tool we might just see if we can speed up our own software development using some of these tricks.
An internal post on our extranet got me thinking about the argument that quality is a function of quantity. In the post (Coding Horror: Quantity Always Trumps Quality ) the idea was that better quality is the outcome if you iteratively do things over and over again - is this not just an application of Trial & Error Economics? The argument also holds true only if the creator learns from the early mistake and this means that there has be be intermediate measurement (or review) of the progress so far and also assumes that there is either a) a target to achieve or b) a reference point (teacher?) that can judge progress.
The theory of a million monkeys with a million typewriters does hold true but that evolutionary approach seems to lack learning outside of the project being worked on. Experience can be brought to bear to speed-up the process.
Since the start of the year we (Connected) have been slowly starting to adopt collaboration as a means of operating the company. This came out of the realisation that traditional project management techniques of timed-tasks, set-in-stone milestones and rigid development specifications were hampering what we delivered to our clients when any methodology we use should enhance it. Yes, it makes life *simpler* but at the cost of *mechanising* the process which we felt stifled creativity and brought undue and wholly inappropriate pressure on our operational delivery arm.
It has been a rough ride so far, milestones have slipped and tasks occasionally are left undone but, and it’s a big but, the quality of output has gone through the roof and we also seem to have a far better *team* understanding of what we have to do. This sea-change in approach started off with the selection of Basecamp as our project tool and very quickly we found our client buying into the approach and collaborating much closer and far more effectively.
Which brings me to a lovely definition I read recently that covers collaboration, posted by Mark Elliot (who wrote a thesis on the subject) I thought it was worth repeating
*coordination* is required for all collective activities (bringing the parts together in a way that yields synergy)
* cooperation* employs linear procedures to leverage collective potential (if each participant does exactly ‘x’, then a predictable ‘y’ is the result)
*collaboration* is different in that through nonlinear creative processes (no one knows exactly what they have to do until they do it, and even then the outcome is unknown) a shared understanding is created amongst the participants – one unique to those participants and that collaboration.
By way of example;
coordination = a web search: bringing together parts of the web in a way that creates meaning, i.e. synergy.
cooperation = social bookmarking: if many people tag their webpages using a particular platform, and a particular procedure, a resource much larger than any individual could develop may be generated
collaboration = Wikipedia editing: read an entry, contribute in any number of modes (form, content, discussion, etc) and from an infinite number of perspectives (the multiplicity of opinion and creative volition) one becomes part of a highly complex negotiation of a shared understanding (no one owns or comprehends the whole but contributes a part of it).
Thank you Mark, it was very illuminating
Tags: collaboration, coordination, cooperation
This week sees the launch of Cuil amid a blaze of statistics (3 times the index size of Google) and a strong side-swipe at Google’s complex popularity index. I’m going to give it a try for a while and the initial thoughts are good. It works well and despite heavy loading on the servers initially it performs pretty well and certainly looks a lot more up to date, making Google look a little outdated in terms of feel.
The usual issue of a lack of a region (UK) specific search is a little annoying but if it takes off (and one VC has just dumped $30m into it) then we’ll see UK versions in due course. It didn’t start well for them, on Sunday when the service went live it fell over almost immediately but that was, according to internal sources, due to the unexpected load on the server. Surely that is a great thing and not a failure? Buying hardware to provide more computing power is cheap.
So far so good, I like it
Tags: cuil, google, searchengine
There seems to be a great deal of excitement and confusion over (another) emerging buzzword: Social Media. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the importance of this “new” field it’s just that it is not new, nor should it be labeled automatically. Unless the old-world, flat-web society (see here) needs these buzzwords and phrases to be able to create product around them and sell it to corporates clamouring to get a piece of the action?
The new social media is simply plain-old friend’s networks neatly and easily gathered together in simple e-communication streams. It suits you, your friends and your friends friends. It doesn’t suit mass-market, control-freak PLC though, does it? Will McInnes (The Age of Snark) sums it up nicely, illustrating using some overly flowery language (he is PR after all) that the world is changing. Shame that the old guard are still living in the past.
Tags: socialmedia, flat-web, snark, will mcinnes
I note with interest that Facebook has a new profile coming next week. I realise that sites do periodically need to be freshened up but any kind of change on this scale has to generate problems; users have to learn the new layout, programmers have to test and maybe change their applications etc. Is this wise? Unless there is a substantial benefit to the new layout (and I can’t see that) then it risks alienating lots and lots of people.
