Martin Wells

Facebook have launched an API, effectively making all their user’s information accessible to external applications. It’s a great step that shows clear leadership in the space. The important thing to observe here is not that they like programmers, it’s what they’re saying about their service.

Opening up their data to the world is a big leap; something that plays against classic business practice. It’s about time social networks (and media in general) realize that the data contributed by users isn’t theirs, and never was. It’s something that should be accessible from anywhere, and like the walled gardens of yesteryear, over time you’ll see a grassroots rejection of sites that horde their user’s information as a ‘corporate asset’.

Now that rant isn’t really the point about the Facebook API, it’s that Murdoch missed (and is still missing) a glaring opportunity to setup MySpace as the standard for social networks across the entire web. A standard for social network information content and access. Imagine embedding MySpace widgets in your blog, hooking it into Google Maps, using some cute analysis system to mine data, instant messaging using a MySpace to Jabber gateway. How many tools, how many opportunities, have been lost. And it’s only going to get much worse as the API-powered playthings of today turn into the core facilities of tomorrow.

Instead, MySpace, and most other social networks keep everything internal and close to their chest. They think of their user’s data as an asset that should be closely maintained. They secretly see openness and transparency as a path to the erosion of their value. It’s a shame the opposite is true. By keeping things closed they are leaving a wide open door to be trounced by a strong competitor. Facebook just said thanks and walked in.

The resulting affects are not something MySpace will see immediately, it’ll take time. The opportunity missed was to become the standard. Now they’ve let Facebook have its merry way, it has a real shot at being the standard and MySpace’s finally-dawned-on-us-oh-god-alexa-is-falling-openess-epiphany will struggle to gain acceptance, and certainly never dominate like how it could now. If MySpace launched an API and opened their network they would stamp themselves as the unassailable leader for a long time to come.

Things have changed again. Web 2.0 is a reflection of a change that started years ago, it’s about a more interactive web where users contribute the information. Another change started a year or so ago and is a direct consequence of this interactive web: users want access to *their* data. It’s the open web, where information is shared, services are mashed up, and infrastructure (including APIs and microformats) is the critical ingredient of success. It’s an inevitable progression, and there are companies that have realized this and they are becoming the standard (Flickr, delicious and now Facebook).

To really win at this new game you need to be both a leader (at least top 3 in your space) and have the guts and belief to give users back their data. If you want to pick the future successes look beyond the user numbers.

Wow, what a night. Must have been 700-800 people, including just about every blogger and startup in the valley. I felt like I was wallowing in a sea of technology 2.0 - fantastic. Even met a whole bunch of aussies.

Now if only I could have heard anything Mike said.

Following on from my Hamachi “cool tool” post, here’s another one: Audabble. This little flash app lets you listen to music (from your own machine) whilst also hearing interstitial news “broadcasts” read out every 15 or 30 minutes. It’s a nice way to stay in touch with the world during those long coding periods — you know, when the world fades into a hazy background and there only exists you and the beauty of endlessly streaming lines of… I need to get out more.

Anyway, the Audabble news is read out by computer, but rather than the Brief-History-of-Time announcer style I was expecting, I got a pretty smooth male voice who actually made sense (most of the time). The news sources include CNN, BBC, Digg and TechCrunch.

So now whilst I think Audabble is cool at the moment, I have to say it could be a lot better. Notably:

• You have to add links to your songs manually, and recreate your playlists. For anybody with a large song library this is a show stopper.
• There’s no integration with iTunes or Media Player.
• The news reader is great, but it can be hard to understand sometimes, especially when reading technically focused headlines like “AMD Considering Outsourcing ATI Drivers” — you can guess how this sounded.
• There are some other little annoyances (like restarting the current song when you refresh the playlist) but those you can live with.

Audabble’s opportunity is unique though, and assuming they can jump around the copyright issues, the idea of inserting interstitial computer-generated audio is a solid one. They just need to get it to work with existing players. If done right, Audabble could change the way we listen to news.

At Tangler, we’ve been using a great little tool called Hamachi internally for a while now. It provides stunningly simple solution to a common problem — remote access to machines. Once you install Hamachi on a machine it can join a secure “virtual lan” that can extend across anywhere on the internet. Using Hamachi, you no longer think in terms of local networks — all the machines are just there.

Great things about it:

• Hamachi installs as a network adapter, so it appears to the operating system as an actual network (you can ping it).
• It’s highly secure using an open architecture.
• It using a reverse connection server to negotiate around firewalls (just like Skype or Zapr).
• It works on Windows, Linux and the HeatMaster3000 (Mac).
• It has a fully functioning free version.
• It works.

Hamachi has been recently bought by LogMeIn, Inc, which I hope will keep things running along the same track. Whilst I congratulate the Hamachi creators, I think they got out too early. This product is brilliant and had a long way to go before realising it’s incredible potential. I blame the VC community for not finding/investing sooner.

37signals did a recent survey of their BaseCamp users, slipping in the question ‘What is Web 2.0?’

500 of the answers are posted on their site. It’s fun to read through and see the varying levels of answers, including:

“I’m assuming this is Internet 2?”

“The pendulum has swung back to the little guy for now. Now the big guys like Murduch have to buy the little guys like MySpace. Curious to see how the big guys will actually regain the upper hand technically beyond aquisitions. What moves does Microsoft have left to try to kill web 2.0? Is the public finally too smart to fall for trojan programs from Microsoft whose ultimate goal is the payment of high license fees down the road.”

“Nothing.”

“It means a renewal of the web industry, a mature streamlining of previously hodge-podge technologies under a single slick monicker, associated with stuff like AJAX.”

“Collaboration, folksonomy, mashups.”

“Survivors of the dot com boom. As well as old world ISP’s and telco’s that want to charge for access to so called “premium site content”.

And of course the wonderfully written comment:

“asdf“

I’m helping out a friend who is publishing a list on who is doing Web 2.0 things in Australia. If you’re doing something and want to be included, please drop me a line/add a comment.

Bloglines issued a proposal today to provide some limited control over whether search engines will index RSS feeds.

This would give users/sites control over what feed content is indexed by search engines, in much the same way as the robots.txt file has been used for since the mid-90’s for web sites. This is something we’ve needed for a while now and it’s great to see bloglines leading the charge. [More]

What’s interesting to me though is this is another sign of the micro formatting of content on a mass scale. From a programmer’s perspective HTML is tough to handle. Extracting content from it (and all its embedded subcomponents) is a nightmare. And if the content wasn’t bad enough, think about the problem a search engine would have trying to determine what’s new on any given page. When you visit a web page you have to go “pull” the content down to see if it’s new, a search engine has to basically go do the same thing. Now times that by a billion or so web sites. That’s a lot of checking for new content, and 99.999% of the time the content isn’t new.

But now enter RSS and the micro formatting (structuring) of content. Suddenly a search engine’s job is significantly easier. It still has to go pull the content, but instead of having to trawl through every page on a site it can simply check a feed — vastly easier job. And when it does get content it can access the search-engine-relevant pure text content much faster.

RSS isn’t dominant enough yet to be the primary source of information for search engines, but that time is naturally coming (regardless of the acceptance of RSS in the user/mainstream, it will become a mandatory function for web site content deployment and management). The benefits to a search engine will be significant: significantly faster uptake of content (freshness) — to the point of near real-time, better results through more refined indexing of complete content (rather than snippet matching), and new found powers of matching streams of content, relationships between feeds and users’ activity. The search engine that takes advantage of this new power could well find themselves with enough use-case-grunt to take on Google for pure value, and they can do so with a fraction of the infrastructure. Will RSS erode Google’s infrastructure dominance by making it irrelevant?

The trick will be matching RSS reliance/result/development with its acceptance in the market. Will that be an RSS based system — such as Technorati — or an existing search engine playing catch up when the light goes on in 2 or 3 years.

And on a related note, I wonder how long before we see the emergence of a notification standard for content (such as today’s feed pings) as a way of getting around the “pull” problem of determining new content. If things were 10 times easier for a search engine using RSS, it’s a 100 times easier if you don’t have to go track it down. The problem search will be solving then will be organizing and presenting information, not finding it.

In a recent chat with Markus he was debating buying more than one 30″ screen — hey you have to spend all that adsense money on something — but then I came across this little number (the screen that is). A 49″ transparent projection panel that uses a coating of liquid crystal material that only reflects the light from the projector.

Now I have to have one… just not sure what I’ll do with it. Best suggestion wins a mystery prize.

Active monitoring of Tangler user count? Maybe Tangler VC dollars left in bank? Or revolving catalogues of the latest fashion in Pink “hostess-ware”.

In my ongoing research into buying a Mac Book Pro (including whether Tangler looks good in Safari), and its supposed heat issues, I heard about the amazing story of “Mathew from Boston”.

Mathew had recently purchased a Mac Book Pro and was taking it on a flight with him. Before boarding he put the notebook into sleep mode and stored it in his backpack. As the flight was taking off though, he noticed the distinct smell of burning plastic, which to his horror was coming from the backpack under his feet. His Mac Book Pro had failed to shutdown properly and was now so overheated in the confined space that it had begun to melt the bag and emit acrid smoke.

Now Mathew is of “Iranian heritage”, on a US domestic flight, in the middle of a War On Terror ™, with a burning backpack under his seat. Things were not going well, and the passengers sitting around him started getting nervous, very nervous.

Fearing action from his fellow passengers Mathew borders on panic as he tries to turn the machine off. After fumbling in vain for a while, he considers calling in a hostess and asking to be taken to the cockpit, until he realizes that will likely come out as “Hi, I’m Iranian, have a burning bag and would like to see the captain”, which would be interpreted by the middle-American hostess as “Hi! Bomb! You Die! Allah! Captain.”

After minutes of anxiety Mathew is finally able to disassemble the notebook by pulling it apart and forcing the power to shutdown. Nevertheless, the remainder of the flight was an uncomfortable experience.

So just do it… buy a Mac, then hijack a plane – just threaten the hostess whilst wildly waving your Mac Book in her face. “Don’t try to stop me or I’ll put this thing in sleep mode!”

And on a lighter note (not that you can get much lighter).

I’m thinking of buying a mac! Please… somebody help me. I’m caught in a whirlwind of marketing hype, sexy products and a power to run windows. I don’t want to be the nerd in the suit, I wanna be the cool guy played by that dorky actor from somewhere I can’t remember. Must… stop… thinking about silver hardware…glowing keyboards… shops without cash registers.
But seriously, if someone is running a macbookpro with windows tell me straight. Is it working for you? (And how hot does she really get?) Is it time for me to embrace my destiny…

[Update: here’s a nice article on the switch]