Octavianworld

Predicting the Future of the Web: The Abstraction Vector

I recently posted on Edgeio, an interesting new service that parses listings of items for sale out of appropriately-tagged blog posts in The Long Tail.  Then I speculated about other types of information that might lend themselves to similar services, like events. 

When software engineers foresee that they will have to do the same thing several times, they try to automate the process they would otherwise have to do manually.  In order to accomodate variations in the tasks, they create "abstractions" that generalize elements of these variations that are held in common.

Once more via TechCrunch (which has become the de facto chronicler of the Web 2.0 landscape), I learned today about Vast via Nik Cubrilovic's post.  Vast does what Edgeio does, but across multiple different kinds of information, including listings, but also user profiles for example.

It will be interesting to see how the search engines respond to this.  Parsing the web and aggregating popular kinds of information in semi-structured data formats seems like a very important capability, one that leads us from "search" through "parametric search" and perhaps ultimately to SQL-like queries of The Giant Database In The Sky.   It's interesting to think about the business possibilities this suggests.

Rob Curley IMA Keynote Podcast

From IT Conversations, this podcast of Rob Curley's (formerly editor of LJWorld.com) talk on how they are responding to aggregators' inroads into "local" by going "hyperlocal" online.  Yet again the recurring theme is imagination and not cost as the constraint.

http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-550.mp3

Feral Open-Source Robot Dogs Podcast

I've been listening to IT Conversations podcasts for some time now.  This project, led by Doug Kaye, is a true gem.  I'm finally getting around to posting some of my favorites.  Here's one that I think illustrates the idea that the real barrier today is imagination, not cost.  Release the hounds!

http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-473.mp3

January 3, 2008 update:  first dogs, now flies -- plus ca change, plus c'est la meme robotic chose

This Gives Self-Respecting Eastern Elitist Liberal Snobs A Bad Name

Can't help but offer a reaction to Nick Carr on "The New Narcissism":

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/02/the_new_narciss.php

The flip side for me:

1. Posting on a blog forces me to think, in a way that just reading a piece and forwarding it under "thought you might find this interesting" didn't.
2. Personalization is a boon when your time is limited.
3. The Web allows me to personalize from a much broader selection, rather than push a more generic range of mush down my gullet from a narrower range of sources.  Good example: StumbleUpon
4. Democratization actually raises the bar.  I'm only as good as what I have to offer right now.  No cruising on degrees, affiliations, etc. -- see back to #1

Besides, the Net's out of the bottle.  Complaining does nothing.  Question is how to help people find the best stuff in a world awash in less-than-best stuff.  Prediction:  good criticism is a growth industry.  Maybe there's hope for liberal arts majors after all?

Web 2.0 Calendaring: Squash is good, but misses the point

Via my friend Bill Ives, read this bearish post on Phil Sim's Squash about calendaring, given Google's presumed intentions (I imagine there's some "shadowcasting" going on here -- hint at your intentions to rob an otherwise fertile field of sunlight -- aka investment).  It's quite thoughtful.  But I think it misses an important point, namely it presumes that VC-funding-headed-toward-major-acquisition-or-IPO is the objective.

My interest in "Web 2.0"-style calendaring, and for that matter in web technology in general, is not so focused on such naive hopes.  Rather, I see them as inexpensive experiments that can either be done or bought, pre-VC or at most not long after an angel round, by larger firms. 

I think Phil is right, in that what matters in the Web 2.0 world isn't so much technology anymore (in fact, the explosion is driven by the relative simplicity of building these applications), but liquidity -- users.  And, unless you're really clever, first-mover advantage is gone in Web 2.0 applications by now, just as the landscape in the blogosphere (Technorati Top 100 vs. Long Tail) is largely established. 

That is, unless you already have a large user base you can drive to these new capabilities one way or another, as major online publishers, portals, etc. do.

So look for a lot of bootstrap or $1M angel efforts cashing out at ~$3-5M to strategic investors again.  Back to "$1M-per-developer" pricing for tech deals once more, like we saw in the mid-late '90's?

Google Buys Writely; Wikicalc Next?

I met Dan Bricklin at a recent MITX Fireside Chat, and have been playing with his Wikicalc (spreadsheet + wiki) application. It takes a little getting used to, but it's a neat idea.  I think of it as an extremely flexible form of the "Mad-Libs"-style templating that I think will eventually emerge to improve the ease and quality (and value -- think implicit tagging) of authoring in blogs and wikis.  For example, why can't services like Typepad create (or provide an API so others can create) templates for restaurant reviews, or trip reports, or book reviews, etc.  (implicitly tagged as such...).

All this reminds me of Wimpypoint.  This was a web-based, collaborative replacement for Powerpoint  that ran as a module of the ArsDigita Community System.  It reached its most featureful state on ACS 3.x, but hasn't yet been fully re-written for subsequent OpenACS versions.  Wimpypoint (not so wimpy, actually) had thousands of users using it off the old arsdigita.com site; I created and presented hundreds of presentations with it during my time there.  We even partnered with Oracle to syndicate it as the "ArsDigita Presentation Manager" at one point, and we understand Britain's MI-5 was using it on their internal network.  Sadly, when ArsDigita was picked up by Red Hat, the arsdigita.com server and backups were lost in transition.  Not quite as bad as burning the library at Alexandria, but painful to those who had invested so much in creating content with it.

Now, it seems Writely was built by four guys.  Dan appears to have built Wikicalc on his own.  Wimpypoint is already partially re-built for OACS.  With Google throwing money around, maybe it will live again, bigger, better, faster -- "Ultrapoint" perhaps?

Postscript:  http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/03/09/thumbstacks-ajaxflash-web-powerpoint/

Web 2.5 Application Ideas

Yesterday I posted over on Marketspace Advisor on the recent Edgeio launch.  I suggested this was an example of an application that reflected some of the principles of Structured Collaboration that I described in an earlier post.  This got me thinking about other ideas for "Web 2.5" applications, which I think of as Web 2.0 apps that apply Structured Collaboration thinking.

This morning on the drive in I listened to an IT Conversations podcast of an interview of Lisa Dusseault by Scott Mace at ApacheCon.  Lisa works on calendaring applications and standards at OSAF.  I had several impressions.  First, Lisa is very smart.  Second, she is working on a very tough problem, for which previous mooted solutions (iCal) have collapsed of their own weight. 

It's occurred to me that calendaring is an excellent example of a Structured Collaboration challenge.  Information about who will do what, when, and where, is a valuable thing for people to share.  People are more likely to share (publish and consume) this information in groups defined by affinity -- organizations, businesses, families.  And, the easier it is to share this information -- via a calendar, as opposed to via text messages -- the more sharing will happen.

A while back I posted on an RSS extension called the Event Share Framework, or ESF.  ESF is a simple, XML-based way of aggregating and syndicating calendar information.  I thought it was really cool, with some potentially interesting business ideas I described in my post, but it hasn't taken off as far as I can tell.

Now, having seen Edgeio, I got to thinking:  if a "listing" tag for a blog post enables a service like Edgeio to parse posts for items for sale, why couldn't and "event" tag be used to parse posts for calendar events?  And then, if a service like Edgeio can come up with a clean, clever interface to help people find listings, why couldn't someone do the same for a problem in which the canonical interface (day, week, month, year calendar views) already exists?  And, if a tool like Newsgator can sit in my Outlook client and aggregate blog posts, and a tool like Anagram can help me parse events out of text messages so I can post them to my Outlook calendar, why couldn't a hybrid of those two consume an RSS feed from an Edgeio-like service and get it into my Outlook calendar?

Like all the big ideas I have, this one's been thought of before.  See, for example, http://eventful.com/.  Any others?