Public Clouds : An Unregulated Utility

What is a utility? It’s a little like art or pornography – we know it when we see it.

Public cloud services such as backup services, photograph storage like Flickr, and email like Gmail are quickly becoming completely ingrained in the fabric of modern life. The Internet offers a host of free or low-cost services that we come to rely on for managing, storing, and sharing our data. In fact we have become as dependent on these services almost as much as phone, electricity, and energy services. To me that makes them data utilities but unregulated ones.  And that’s dangerous.

In the past one of the defining elements of a utility was a sanctioned monopoly. There was only one gas company, only one phone company, and only one water company. If you didn’t like their service or their prices then tough! Back in the day, when our US Presidents were manly men who acted manly and had manly mustaches (such as Teddy Roosevelt), it was decided that this was a bad thing. These monopolies had the people by the… throat and that would not do. However, these were not just manly politicians. They were reasonably intelligent ones (and a few may have been receiving perfectly legal contributions from the utilities) who understood the importance of monopolies to early business development. So they struck a bargain. You get to keep your monopoly Mr. Phone Company President and we will regulate you and tell you what you can charge, what your service (i.e. product) will be like, and everyone will be happy. The people won’t get a royal screwing (we being Americans and not liking royal anything one bit) and the monopoly/utility will get unreasonable amounts of money. Bully for us!

Then, in an era of still manly Presidents (Yes sir Mr. Reagan sir!) but less manly politicians in general, things changed. Competition was the byword and deregulation become the way to do business like an American. Let the market, not big government, decide. However, deregulation does not mean no regulation. You see Mr. Cable Company CEO, you still need to pull wire through OUR towns. So we can tell you what to do. You still have a market share that is monopolistic? That means we can still regulate you so that we have no royal anything going on here in America. And this is why the cable company can’t raise rates when it wants to. What could be more un-American than making 500 channels of television unaffordable! Wars have been fought for less.

So what does this have to do with Public Cloud services. Even if you are enjoying the spirited economic history lesson (bully for you!) it is a reasonable question. You see, as we become more and more dependent on cloud services for functions that are important to our lives, they have us by the throats again. Do you want to see your photos disappear suddenly? Could you really live without Facebook? Not if you’re a 17 year old girl. Take away Facebook and their phones and you have a mental health crisis on your hands. Worse, if you are a small business that is using an online backup service or email from Google, Yahoo, etc. you rely on it to make your living. Don’t want that living to dry up so that you have to live in a cardboard box? Pay up! Mr. Roosevelt would not be amused.

This is only getting worse as smaller companies embrace cloud services for IT. Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and a host of other companies provide services that are critical to business. Worse, moving from one service to another is not trivial. Go ahead, try and change your email account, the one that all of your customers already have in their address books. It would become a symphony of missed opportunities.

Let’s take Mozy as an example. When they recently announced changes to their service plans, they did so as if it was just any old product – they just did it. Sure they risk losing customers especially amongst the geeky crowd. Clearly that isn’t bothering them too much. Why? Because changing is a pain and quite difficult for people who don’t know much about technology. For geeks like me, switching to another service isn’t all that hard. [Note: It was real easy for me personally because I didn’t use Mozy. Tried it years ago and didn’t much like it.] For the average American who got Mozy bundled with their new laptop, has no home infrastructure, and is scared stupid of losing their latest podcast about hipster living in New York City, switching is beyond them.

So Mozy, like lots of other cloud services, has nearly unlimited pricing power. They have their customers by the throat. For them, pouring costs into gaining new customers makes perfect sense. Worrying about losing them doesn’t. These people can’t really leave even if they want to. This is the modern definition of a utility. This is not to pick on Mozy (okay maybe a little) because there are lots of similar cloud services that have the same model. Herd in the cattle, pen them up, and do what you want to them.

Here’s what I think will happen. Nothing.

We do not live in an era of government officials with marvelous mustaches. They lack the moxie to stand up to a banking industry capable of bringing the entire world economy to its knees. Why would we expect them to even care about unregulated data utilities? That is, until they are forced to choose between losing their pictures of themselves with celebrities or paying through the nose to people who don’t contribute to their campaigns.

As consumers, what can we do. Be careful. Know the technology that you rely on enough to switch to a competitor. Build you own infrastructure and make the cloud secondary. All good ideas that enhance good ole American competition. It still won’t help when Facebook decides to start charging. Then you will have to man up and do without. Bully for you!

If I was a cloud service, I would starting looking at lobbyists and handing out contributions. You never know when a a member of the House Committee on  Committee on Science, Space, and Technology will suddenly be faced with paying to share pictures of their grandkids. Then you will see just how manly our government can be.

Fun U.S. History fact: The last U.S. President to sport a fantastic mustache in office was President Taft. Mr. Obama, it’s time!

Taking a WikiLeak

I am fed up with otherwise responsible blogs and Internet news sites making a hero out of WikiLeaks. They are nothing more than irresponsible gossipers. What they do is is unethical, perhaps even illegal.

Let’s get three points out of the way first. One, while I think of myself as a a moderate, others would disagree. Yes, I’ve been called the “L” word. That’s Liberal for those of you who watch too much Showtime. I am a firm believer in the freedoms ensconced in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution. So, this is not some neo-con, constitutional revisionist screed. Second, I’m a firm believer in personal responsibility. This is a core ethical principle. If you take a moral stand on something you have to take the consequences of that stand. All the great moral leaders have done this (think Gandhi or Martin Luther King). Finally, if you plan to do something that might be harmful to people, there had better be a great good. Otherwise, it’s just harm.

These last two points are central if you are to be a protester or whistle-blower. You have to accept that some bad things will happen to you. You could lose your job. You might get arrested. You might get beaten up. You might get killed. These are the risks that an agent of social change takes. Just ask Aung San Suu Kyi who has spent a big chunk of her adult life under house arrest for protesting the military government of Myanmar (previously Burma).

The second major aspect of legitimate protest is that its goal is something more than money or even individual good. There needs to be a greater good involved. You protest to restore or establish democracy, stop government abuses, end an unjust war, or make sure that schools teach all children equally. The goal of embarrassing a government or corporation through protest is not simply to embarrass them. Getting Union Carbide to take responsibility for the Bhopal disaster is a valid reason to take them into the court of public opinion. Obtaining equal civil rights for all of our citizens is a reason to break the law and ride at the front of the bus. Tweaking the government or a company just because you can is not reason enough to put people (including yourself) in danger or to subject them to ridicule.

And there lies my problem with WikiLeaks. They have been transformed into folk heroes for releasing classified documents from U.S. Embassies around the world. Some of what was said was indeed embarrassing. They depict the honest (as opposed to public) opinions of diplomats throughout the world. That communication back to Washington is part of their jobs. They need to let the State Department, intelligence agencies, and the President know what is really going on even when to say so publicly would be bad for diplomacy.

Determining whether releasing these documents is illegal is something I’ll leave up to the lawyers. What I am certain of, is that it is unethical. There is no greater good here. Do they hope to create a change in US foreign policy by embarrassing the United States government? If so, what policy? By distributing a broad array of documents, as opposed to a targeted set, it is unclear what policy they would want different. That dilution of purpose alone makes this ineffectual as an method for change. So, I don’t believe policy change is the goal. What I do believe WikiLeaks’ goal to be is simple publicity. Grandstanding. Poke the government in the eye and prove that you are important and powerful.

Which brings me to back my first criteria for ethical protest – taking responsibility. Has the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, stood up and said “I’ll go to jail to protect our right to know?” Nope. All we hear is whining about how they have sustained DDOS attacks or how Amazon doesn’t want to sully their servers with their bile. He has even avoided the European Arrest Warrant issued in the wake of  accusations of rape and sexual harassment in Sweden. So much for taking responsibility.

What is sad is that WikiLeaks has done good in the past by acting in accordance with basic ethical principles. Yes, their releases on the conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were damaging to the reputation of the U.S. military but they served a higher purpose. They exposed the types of abuses by our forces that can eat away at the heart of military units. It is okay to expose random killings of civilians, covered up friendly fire incidents, or other unethical conduct by military leaders. That’s how we keep our professional military from becoming brutal conquerors. That’s how we hold military leaders accountable to their own soldiers and the nation as whole. It’s what the military themselves should have done. In the end, it’s good for the military to have the bad apples exposed. It’s as if the folks at WikiLeaks have gotten so caught up in their own celebrity that they forgot what their original mission was.

And for those WikiLeaks apologists who talk about freedom of the press and speech, learn what that means. The founders of this great country knew that these were not absolute rights. They are meant to be exercised responsibly. That’s why we have valid defamation and libel laws. It’s why you can’t yell fire in a crowded movie theater. Again, even if what they did was legal, that doesn’t make it right.

This latest round of exposés doesn’t meet the most basic criteria for ethical protest. It only hurts but does not help. Embarrassment for the sake of itself is a vice not a virtue. This is nothing less than the worst form of internet-based tabloid journalism. So, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange should stop whining that people are angry with them. They should stop complaining that they might be in legal trouble. It’s what happens when you put money ahead of ethics. Take you medicine and learn from it.

Quick Comments on Comments

For quite some time, a great number of people have told me that I should turn commenting back on for this blog. Some made it sound like I needed to turn commenting on. That the world would be destroyed in 2012 and it would be my fault for not turning on commenting. And the Mayans. Don't forget the Mayans and their stupid calendar.

But seriously, I listened and I responded. I turned the comments back on and guess what happened?

Nothing.

That’s right. Almost no comments. Talk about feeling unloved. Worse yet, many people didn’t even realize they were back on. What’s horrible about that is that I wrote a blog entry on it. That probably means that no one is reading my blog. Sigh…

It’s like having to come to terms with your mortality. It leaves you with a sense of your insignificance in the universe. This is the problem I see with commenting. You either are inundated with flaming chaff or deadening silence. The great democratic community of rational thought that Internet commenting was supposed to create has never really materialized. It didn’t happen when the action was on forums and news lists. It didn’t happen in AOL chat rooms. Other action happened in AOL chat rooms but we don’t need to go there.

I have a theory as to why this is. It has three parts.

1. People only want to have in depth conversations with people in person. Over the phone or even through IM, but not in an anonymous forum or comment page. It’s too impersonal.
   
2. Humans are social creatures who need real interactions with people they know. You want to know the people you interact with. We want to talk with Joe Smith not weirdtechguy25. A Twitter feed or a blog is a form of publishing. The one talking to the many. When it’s one to one or a small group like commenting is supposed to emulate, you want to know the people you are dealing with. Otherwise how can you judge what they are saying. The context is wrong.
3. The jerks, flamers, spammers, and other social misfits do not follow the rules of polite society. They are the Internet equivalent of the guy standing in the middle of Times Square shouting gibberish at his hand. We instinctively move away. When this happens in comment pages and forums, the rest of the population moves away from them and they are all that’s left. Yelling gibberish at their virtual hand. Not pretty. The meek may inherit the Earth but the weird will inherit the comment page.

This, by the way, shows the genius of Facebook. Whether Zuckerman and crew realized it at the time they had hit upon the real way we want to interact with people in cyberspace – just like we do in real life. We only want to converse and share pictures with people that we know and like. Not anonymous strangers but folks we know on some level. In that environment, not unlike in person, social pressures keep people from acting like asses. We don’t mind inviting a friend of a friend either. But someone has to vouch for them and their behavior.

So there you have the problem with comments and forums. Once you remove the need to adhere to social norms, once you eliminate the need to act like a civilized person, some number of people will revert back to animals. It’s like pulling the control rods out of the reactor. Soon or later, things get out of control and BOOM!

Here’s my solution (listening Blogger?) – let bloggers have to “friend” people before they can comment. Let us toss them if they act out of line. Don’t moderate the comments, moderate the people. Only let people into the party if they have an invitation.

With that in place, comments will be something worth having. Of course, that assumes that anyone is reading the blog in the first place. I can dream.

One quick note to my international readers. If you want to post comments, please do it in English. I know that is terribly provincial of me but if I can’t read something it is summarily dismissed. Sorry, but that’s the way it has to be. Thanks for understanding.

Comment This!

I’ve engaged in a lot of discussion about comments on websites lately. I used to allow unmoderated comments on this site until the spammers forced me to change that. Then I had moderated comments. That changed when the flamers started. It took too much time to filter out the awful, off topic, and just plain stupid comments that people left. There was not enough spirited discussion and too much mean spiritedness.

Part of the problem is with Blogger. I’ve used Blogger for as long as I have had Tom’s Technology Take. I like a great many things about it. Most of all, I have tools for composing and uploading my writing to the platform. For example, I have a plugin for OpenOffice.org’s Writer that uploads directly to my blog. Lately, I’ve been using Microsoft Live Writer and really like it. It too can interface with Blogger.

Where Blogger really falls down is in comment moderation. There is no good way to verify that people who comment are who they say they are. You can leave comments using only the flimsiest and false information. There is no attempt to verify more than an email address which can be fake too. Subsequently, I saw a lot of comments from spammers and flamers that traced back to nobody. Without accountability for their remarks, some rotten people feel that they can be as nasty as they like. I’m sorry folks but I believe in basic civility.

This has come up recently at my hometown newspaper, The Buffalo News. They have had rather loose commenting rules ever since they introduced comments, about a year ago. This has resulted in comments that were:

• from political operatives not real people;
• really nasty;
• racist, sexist, and every other type of “ist” you can think of;
• full of unverified claims that bordered on defamation and some that crossed the border.

This has led to a change in their commenting policy. They are not eliminating comments but now require a login with a real name and phone number. They have my support. The Buffalo News doesn’t want to cut off discussion or even criticism. They just want people to be civil and accountable. What cracks me up is the number of people who got all up in arms about not being able to anonymously flame people. Makes you wonder at the health of our civilization.

Margaret Sullivan, Managing Editor, in her article about the policy change makes a compelling case for commenting. She wrote:

“The aim of publishing reader comments, all along, has been to have a free-flowing discussion of stimulating and worthwhile ideas — something of a virtual village square. “

This is what is missing when you turn off commenting - the exchange of worthwhile ideas. It is sad that good discussion has been drowned out by the buzz of virtual mosquitoes who only want to suck the lifeblood from civil discourse.

So, I’m going to try an experiment. I will turn commenting back on. It will be moderated. It will require a Google account since the Registered Users option didn’t do the trick the first time. Comments that are nasty, off topic, or plain counterproductive will be summarily eliminated. Comments will not be axed because they are critical or because I disagree with them. I will, however, kill anything that is not civil.

It is time to stand up for proper behavior. The Internet does not give people a pass on decency or allow them to be awful. Even if, as the old New Yorker cartoon said, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog” you still have to act like a human being.

Author’s Note: I never publish two blogs in one day. I like to spread them out a bit. This was written but slated for publishing a week later. Wouldn’t you know it, someone asked again why I didn’t allow comments. It’s a sign maybe. Anyway, I have accelerated my schedule and am publishing this now as well as changing the commenting.

Broadcasters Throwing Away 70 Years Of Practice

It amazes me that an entire industry, when faced with something a little bit new, can suddenly forget everything they have ever learned. TV broadcasters (who started as radio broadcasters) and their advertising agencies seem hell bent on tossing out every lesson from the past 70 years as they branch out into Internet media.

Case in point – CBS. CBS doesn’t participate in Hulu unlike every other major and quite a few minor networks. Instead, they go it alone. To me that just means cutting off an avenue of distribution. That’s like refusing to put out your old programs on VCR and then DVD.

That, however, is not where they really drop the ball. Their worst mistake is when they forget decades of advertising wisdom on CBS.com. What do they do? They run the same commercial at every break in the online program. Every time. Over and over and over again. That flies in the face of all that we know about how to advertise in a broadcast medium. After the first run, no one is paying attention. By the fourth run you’ve actually annoyed your potential customer into no longer being a potential customer. It is not enough that you remember an ad. You have to not hate it too. Otherwise, that irritation translates to the product. You remember the product alright but not in a good way. There is a reason that one spreads ads out over time. It guards against desensitization of the message.

CBS.com goes a step further and will play multiple instances of a commercials in a row. The same commercial. It’s not enough for them to blast the same ad at you three times during the course of a program. They have to give it to you three at a time. That takes you from irritated to numb. Numb to their message, numb to their value proposition and numb to the product. In other words, completely desensitized.

Make no mistake – online programming is still broadcast media. It’s delivered through the Internet but is no different from TV on-demand broadcasting in every other way. On-line broadcasters seem to forget this. They treat the Internet delivered program as something alien and deliver advertising in ways that they never would over the airways or cable. On TV, if you see a commercial run twice during one show, you assume it’s a mistake. Oops! For shows delivered via the Internet, it is the norm.

Broadcasters forget this again when they try to add false interactivity into the show. They don’t allow you to do obvious Internet actions like mouse over a character and have his or her bio popup. You can’t pause a show that has a product placement in it and get information about a product that interests you right there and then. Nope. Instead, they give a choice of what silly commercials (they call it an “experience”) you want to see again and again. Unfortunately, there is no “None” option available. Why not vary the product placements from showing to showing. For digital media that’s not that hard to do. TV Sports does it all the time. Next time you watch baseball on TV look behind the batter. The little sign changes and is localized. You could do that on a TV program with a billboard in the background for instance or change what’s playing on a TV set.

The behavior of CBS.com is probably the most egregious of the broadcasters but you see the same advertising patterns in all of them and on Hulu. They constantly run ads in ways that they never would on TV. Instead, they let opportunities go by for more interesting interactive behavior. Broadcasters don’t seem to know how to embrace the potential of Internet delivered shows while forgetting everything they know from 70 years of TV and radio broadcasting.

Broadcasters have to get this right and soon. The Internet is quickly becoming a major form of delivery for their products. Advertising is advertising. A commercial is a commercial. That doesn’t change because it’s delivered in packets instead of electromagnetic radiation. Sorry but the Internet did not change everything.

Mozilla Thunders Ahead

Warning: This is long. I'm in a gabby mood. But when you write about something so basic to everyday life as email, it's easy to get a bit verbose. As my friends will tell, I find it easier than most...

One of the problems with modern software applications is that they tend to be incredibly feature laden. That's a problem you say? Yes it is. Feature overload leads to a great many features never being used because you don't know what to do with them, don't know they exist, or are only useful to about 5% of the target market. Mozilla seems to have avoided that trap with the latest release of it's fabulous email client, Thunderbird. Most features are infinitely useful to a great many people.

At first blush, things don't appear to have changed much. For the most part, Thunderbird looks and acts pretty much the same. For an email program, thats a good thing. Productivity applications that you use all the time should not have major interface changes. No one wants to spend a week learning how to do something that was fine before. Just ask the legions of people who positively hate the Office 2007 interface. It doesn't matter if it's better. It is radically different enough to get in the way of getting the job done.

Instead, useful features should be added that enhance the usual experience. This exactly what Mozilla has done in all releases of Thunderbird. No jarring, radical changes to the user interface. Just enhancements that make things work a little bit better. Many of the UI changes are immediately recognizable since they are adapted from either Firefox or web-based email sites like Gmail. With email clients, usual and recognizable is what you want.

The GUI Got Better

For example, Thunderbird now supports tabs. A simple thing, putting tabs across the top, but really useful. Your calendar (assuming you have the Lightening extension, which of course you do because it only makes good sense) and tasks can live in their own tabs making navigation to them simple. Messages can also be opened in tabs allowing you to have multiple emails open in a neat space. No more having a dozen windows spewed all over your desktop. Everything is nice and neat.

In typical Mozilla fashion, you can turn off tabs and use Thunderbird in the old fashion way. This is important since it doesn't force a change in behavior. Users can choose to continue working the way the always have or easy in slowly. This is not a trivial matter when training budgets are under constant pressure. The ability to expose features slowly or only to power users is a great help.

Another useful GUI enhancement is the action buttons on the email itself. In the past (and in most email programs) when viewing email from the message pane, actions on an email such as Reply or Delete are initiated from a toolbar on the top of the window. While you can still do this in Thunderbird 3, you also have the most common action buttons right on the email message pane itself. This allows you to quickly review, read, and take action without your mouse flailing about like its rodent namesake stuck in a trap. You can choose a more minimalist toolbar at the top or keep the old one and the message pane buttons. It's the best of both worlds.

Organize, Search, See

The new T-Bird goes all out to bring better ways to find and view emails and RSS feeds. My favorite new feature is the summary list. If you select a group of email or RSS messages, a search engine type list is displayed in the message pane. It shows you the title and a snippet from the beginning of the message for each message selected. This gives you a Google-like view which helps you to skim through a big batch of messages.

This also works with the new global search capabilities. Searching for emails in earlier versions was a decidedly local affair. You could search through a folder from the search bar but had to go into the advanced search for anything else. Thunderbird now sports a global search bar similar to the Firefox one, including auto complete. It helps to search through the gobs of emails that pack rats like me accumulate. You can apply filters of various sorts after the fact, narrowing your results in much the way as a you would with an Internet search engine. This is a very powerful feature.

In Thunderbird 2, Mozilla introduced tags but they typically were underutilized. Most people still moved messages to complex folder structures. Tags allowed for better organization since you could dump messages into one folder and perform multi dimensional searches on them. I create virtual folders of saved search results that allow me to find messages based on a number of tags. Mozilla kicks it up a notch in this release by making it obvious what you are supposed to do. They have added an Archive button and matching folder. Now, when you want to save a message, you hit archive and it puts it in a folder based on the year. Combined with tags and the new search, looking through dozens of layers of folders is instantly as old fashioned as a rotary phone.

It's Like Having A Big Brother To Look Up To

A lot of great ideas besides tabs and search features have migrated over from Firefox. My two favorites are Weave and Personas. Weave synchronizes information between different instances of Firefox and now Thunderbird. If you have multiple computers, say a desktop and a netbook (or are like me and have more than two) this is a valuable feature indeed. Though there have been a number extensions that do this sort of thing, it is much better as a Mozilla project that gets updated regularly. I wasn't able to get it to work in Thunderbird 3 RC1 but if it works like it does in Firefox, I can't wait. My hope is that some day it becomes a core feature and not an extension.

Personas is also a neat feature from Firefox. It provides a way of skinning the GUI without going all out and writing XML and designing buttons. Pretty much anyone with the ability to create a JPEG can do this. Personas are kept in an online repository making it easy to share and change them. I think this signals the death knell for themes. Personas are more lightweight and portable. And now my browser and email can look the same. Sweeeeet!

Changes Under the Hood

There are also a number of changes to the core code. Like with the Firefox 3.0 upgrade, the memory footprint for Thunderbird has shrunk a bit. This is very good when you are dealing with a low memory devices like a netbook or an old PC. Or an old PC used as a netbook...

A lot of effort also went into IMAP improvements. For many Thunderbird users, that's not that important since they get their email from a POP server. More and more ISPs, however, are moving toward IMAP because it allows for better synchronization amongst different email clients on different machines. Gmail has an IMAP option and AOL requires it. It is also the best way (at the moment) for Thunderbird to interact with an Exchange server.

One somewhat geeky new feature that I'm not sure I like is the Activity Manager. It keeps a log of all the things you did on Thunderbird. On the one hand I can see it's potential for debugging and answering the question “Oh no! Did I delete that email? The one with the time for my job interview?” On the other hand, there is also the potential for eDiscovery problems since it can explicitly tell you that someone suddenly nuked 25 emails when there was a preservation order. Sometimes metadata and logging are not wanted.

And Yet All Is Not Perfect

There are a number of strange, ugly, and just plain wrong things about this new release. Hey! Nobody is perfect and Mozilla proves that in spades. First, the elephant in the room – no Microsoft Exchange support. I get that Mozilla and Microsoft don't get along. I also get that Mozilla may think they are not that interested in the big, bad corporate market (though I don't believe that for a second). But Exchange is so ubiquitous that you have to wonder why, after all this time, there is no support for it. Heck, my ISP offers it for five bucks a month! If Microsoft is the problem then they should remember that the real enemies are Google and Oracle and get over it. If Mozilla is the problem then they need to remember that email is serious business and get over it. In any event, when anyone puts together a list of why Thunderbird is not a real email contender, Exchange support is at the top of the list. They need to add it just to shut those people up.

Oddities abound, especially in the GUI. Some are inconsistencies that had to have come up during testing. For example, there is now an Outbox. Unsent emails used to sit in the Drafts folder. Perhaps this is another way to support offline work but it needlessly confuses the process of sending emails.

And why when you compose an email does it still open in a separate window? Other email messages open in a tab. Same goes for the address book. Inconsistencies like that confuse regular users and annoy the power users. Maybe that gets fixed in a later release.

Speaking of unusual behavior, why does the reply button on the message pane have a little selection arrow but only one selection, yet the reply all has one that shows reply all and reply? A bit redundant isn't it? What I do like is that the reply all button only shows up when there is more than one person to reply to. Nice touch.

Finally, whereas the search features are so much better than before, the page that is generated to show them is ugly as sin. We are talking about a page that looks like an amateur web site from 1994. Lots of functionality but no aesthetics.

Thunderbird 3 is still a release candidate but is really close to production grade. The GUI enhancements and search features make it a worthwhile upgrade. There are still a few unusual issues but those might be ironed out over time or someone will come up with extensions to deal with them. The enhancements are great and the complaints small. My kind of software!

Disclaimer: Like everyone else, I get Thunderbird for free. So while technically not a paid endorsement, it's best to mention it anyway. I don't want the FCC giving me grief. And it give me an excuse to be silly.

Take Your Hands Off My Hard Drive You Damn Filthy Ape!

If this is the future of computing, then I want out now.

Not something that I would typically say is it? I've had just about enough of the run to the cloud. The latest shove out the door is the announcement of Google Chrome OS. The name says it all. The entire OS will act like – basically be – a browser. No local applications. No local storage. While I'm confident that they will figure out how to cache data when you are disconnected (they do it now with Google Gears) it will still be completely dependent on the on-line applications and storage.

Am I the only one who gets what's wrong with this. Let's start with complete dependence on a service provider. We finally can choose broadband services from the cable people or the phone people or the cell phone people. Yet now we are supposed to become drones to Google. What happens if I don't like Google applications or have a problem with them holding on to my data? It's not like moving the data will be easy, if even possible.

And how comfortable are you with Google having sensitive data like a trade secret or the name of your doctor. That's what we are talking about here. Handing your personal or critical data to another company. Are we all confident that they are up to the task.

Can we talk availability? How many times in the last year has Gmail been out for some reason? Too many for anyone that isn't a casual user. So this probably isn't about the corporate folks but more on that later.

Do you mind tossing out all of your applications? That's what Chrome OS is all about. With Chrome OS, Google may well be able to control who you can get applications from. Like Google or their partners. So many people whine about how Microsoft dominates their lives. Okay. There are alternatives that don't require that you hand over your precious data to some company. Free ones at that. The proper reaction is not to hand over the keys to the kingdom to Google. Microsoft may own the application space but they don't own your data.

What worries me most is their approach to rolling out the software. So far, they are only releasing source code that is optimized for solid state devices. That reveals their strategy. Make this an OS that predominantly comes with consumer products. That way the great masses don't realize what they are buying into. Ooh. Look grandma! Cheap netbook/phone/blender doo hickeys. Sorry, but the “no local, persistent storage” aspect of this gives me the willies. Google wants our data and I'm not sure for what purpose.

So, call me a Luddite but I don't like what I see so far. Blindly handing over your data in exchange for a cheap device seems like a bad trade off for me. I'm not against cloud applications – in a controlled corporate data center. I am against people unwittingly handing over data to a faceless corporation with no guarantees. It's the dependency I despise.

The other night I envisioned a new Mac commercial in 2011. The first character is the slacker Mac guy (who never appears to have a job – just saying). The second is the boring PC guy who at least looks dependable. Finally, the Google Chrome guy who is a shadowy figure, dark, mysterious, and somewhat unsettling. As soon as the Mac guy starts to say something about the Chrome guy, the shadow reaches out and engulfs him. The last sound from slacker Mac is his muffled scream. The PC guy cries and wets himself.

And in the distance there is disembodied laughter. An eerie voice intones “Don't be evil” followed by maniacal cackling. Dissolve to black.

FTC Is Okay By Me

I'm fired up about the new FTC rules regarding bloggers. I didn't say I was mad or annoyed about it. Actually, I'm happy and excited. For those who don't pay attention to what goes on in the blog world (and yet you're reading this... whatever.) there are new rules in the U.S. regarding how you present certain information about products in blogs.

The U.S.Federal Trade Commission, commonly called the FTC, is charged with insuring fair trade in the United States. Part of their mission, I would argue the most important part, is consumer protection. These are the federal watchdogs that make sure that business doesn't take advantage of the average consumer. That is precisely what they are doing with the new rules for bloggers. In a nutshell, if you get paid to write good things about products, you have to reveal that. If you talk about the results of a test or a consumer experience that you know are not typical, you have to say what is typical. If a company comps you with free products, services, or tickets to a Buffalo Bills game, you have to reveal that too. Okay maybe not the Bills tickets this season. (I live in Buffalo, NY so no hate mail please. You know it's true.)

Basically, if you are being paid to say nice things, it is a paid endorsement and that has to be disclosed. It doesn't matter if the payment is money or in-kind. You have to let people know that you may be influenced by that compensation. This is not a privacy issue, it's a commercial one. It is important that someone reading a blog know what conflicts of interest may exist that could effect what the blogger says. This is not about free speech. It is about commercial speech which can have restrictions not applicable to individuals.

Frankly, these rules are no different from what you see on TV or in newspapers. When a celebrity endorses a product on TV, at the bottom of the screen are tiny letters that say “Paid Endorsement”. This is because it is really an advertisement, placed by an agency or company, and using the actor as a spokesperson. The only real difference is when they tell you that you can make millions with no money down, they have to let you know that that only applies to those at the top of the pyramid. Getting rich without risking your own money has not been typical since the dot com crash. Unless you are a Wall Street banker of course.

And while the rules don't address Twitter and Facebook specifically, the same should apply in those media as well. While we're at it, white papers should also denote when something is done for pay. When I was in the analyst game, I insisted that any white paper I put my name on be only what I wanted to write. Otherwise, the company could have the paper but leave my name off of it. Even with creative control, I still told the audience that it was a sponsored paper. Despite my best efforts, I still couldn't be sure that my client didn't exert some influence that created a conflict of interest. Not in a nefarious manner mind you. It's just that relying on someone for your livelihood can change your perspective even if you are not aware of it.

So, I'm glad for the new rules. It's sad that we need the government to remind us of our ethical duty. It's unfortunate that we can't trust what we read. Too bad. But until the day comes that all people are perfect, I'm glad to see my government taking a stand and insisting on good behavior for our citizens. Thanks FTC.

eyeSpy With My Eye My Desktop In The Sky

I've been intrigued with the idea of server-based desktops for awhile. In the past I have toyed around with Desktop Two and the recently deceased Jooce. While interesting, they all suffered from the same set of problems. They were usually:

• slow;

• lacking in useful applications, and;

• had significant security problems.

The last item is significant. Despite what the folks at Google would tell you, most companies don't want to keep sensitive files on someone else's server. The most standout issue with virtual, online desktops (which, heaven help me, they are calling Cloud Desktops) is that there didn't seem to be enough need for them. Until now. I'll get to that later.

eyeOS overcomes the majority of cloud desktop problems. Written in PHP5, you can install it on your own internal server or even a web hosting server. It's open source to boot! This is important since it makes it easy (or even possible) to create your own web-based applications to run in the virtual desktops. The suite of applications that comes with eyeOS is pretty good but the ability to create your own makes it a much more useful platform for business.

Being able to install eyeOS on the server of your choice also goes a long way to removing security objections as well. IT can now control the security environment and does not have to rely on blind faith in a service provider. The same goes for performance. You can use your own magic and hardware to up performance levels to where you want them to be. Even installed on a web hosting platform, eyeOS had a decent response time, granted for a small number of users. That it worked at all in anything resembling a useful manner was pretty startling.

The big question that is still unanswered is “who cares?” That's the acid test for all products. Why should I spend any time at all, let alone money, on this product. As little as two years ago, I would have to have answered “ I don't care.” Today, the world is a different place. We now have a proliferation of small, Internet enabled devices including smartphones and netbooks. Many of these are too underpowered to have a full range of desktop applications – or do they?

This is why eyeOS really makes sense now. Virtual desktops have been primarily concerned with giving users a consistent and controlled desktop experience throughout an Enterprise network. That's fine except that it doesn't carry on to other devices. With eyeOS, you can set up your own cloud desktop service, that meets your standards for security, and make it available on anything with a browser.

With eyeOS in hand, you can outfit your sales force with cheap netbooks and still give them a full range of office and corporate applications. In other words, the whole desktop experience. For an added bonus, if users stick with cloud desktop for everything, you don't lose or expose your data even if they lose their PDA, smartphone, or netbook. It's not on those devices, it's on the server.

The best part is that they users don't have to do anything special to make this work. They sign into the eyeOS server and away they go. Users don't have to remember to copy files to encrypted drives or anything like that. They just do what they normally would do on a desktop computer. In terms of data security, this is a great leap forward. And the fact that only administrators can install applications is sure to please corporate security types. Fewer rogue applications in the corporate network is a good thing indeed.

eyeOS is not perfect by any means. Many of the critical applications, email especially, are nowhere near what a decent corporate application should be. However, it is clear from the Zoho widgets (downloaded separately) that you can integrate other online applications into eyeOS. With more and more companies going to web-enabled applications anyway, lack of sophisticated, standalone desktop applications is really not a problem.

Cloud desktops and eyeOS in particular, are not quite there yet. However, they are rapidly getting there. An organization that is committed to cloud desktops could make eyeOS into what it needed. Not out of the box of course but with a relatively small amount of effort.

The old fashioned, fat desktop will never go away. There are too many applications that will never port to a platform like this. I don't see programmers writing serious code on a cloud desktop. For the average wage slave, however, this would be an improvement and IT will love it.

The Incredible Shrinking Communication

It seems that we are constantly inventing shorter ways to communicate. Note that I didn't say faster or more efficient, just shorter. The Internet especially seems to want to help us shorten the length of what we read. In the age of print, books and pamphlets dominated alongside newspaper and magazine articles. While radio and television started the process of condensing communication, it has accelerated dramatically since the Internet became more ubiquitous. Our attention spans shrink and so does what we read.

Of course, the perceived attention span shrinkage may be a symptom not a cause. As we have less time to devote solely to reading, we crave shorter forms that give us what we need most in the smallest amount of time possible. We still want longer form writing when we have the time. Reading a book on the beach is the ultimate summer pleasure. Other times, we barely have time to check Facebook. Subsequently, we now have a hierarchy of written communication. It starts off long and detailed and ends in microblogging which is incredibly short – haiku short – and lacking entirely in details.

Books provide deep understanding. If you want to become expert at something, books are a good place to start. Articles don't go as deep as books but the longer format allows you to become knowledgeable about a great many things in a short amount of time.

Unfortunately for the magazines and newspapers that typically publish articles, blogs are superseding them. Blogs have a two key advantages – instant distribution and easy publishing. Instead of waiting hours or even months to get something in print, a blog gets your “article” out there right away. And anyone can publish a blog. No wrangling with editors and publishers. No pesky fact checkers. That, of course, is the weakness of the blog. As a reader you don't always know if you are getting facts, opinion, spin, or outright falsehood. Blogs are killing newspapers and magazines and I worry that the truth will die with them. Disclosure: I always present this blog as opinion and nothing more. Don't believe everything you read. Fight the power!

Microblogging and status messages on services like Facebook are quickly becoming the way that many people broadcast information. Short, instantaneous bursts of information, microblogging leaves little room for understanding or explanation. In terms of depth of knowledge they are at the shallow end of the pool. But this is what we want or need. We want to know a little something about everything but don't have the time to read hundreds of books, newspapers, or articles. It's kind of like an information buffet. You take a taste of this and that so that you can see what you like.

As recent events in Iran have shown, microblogging is a very powerful media. Anyone can crank out a Tweet from a cell phone and have it be published before authorities even know it's there. It's hard to censor in those circumstances. Once again - Fight the power!

Perhaps in the future communication will get so short that no one will say anything at all. I could live with that. It would certainly cut down on the information overload if there was no information. I doubt very much that's where we will end up. But every time I predict we are at the floor, we push right through it.

Still, with SMS limited to 160 characters and Twitter limited to 140, I can't imagine how much smaller we could go. Perhaps we will need to write in glyph based languages like Chinese or Ancient Egyptian where more information is contained in each character.

Of course, many times there is beauty in simplicity and in an economy of words. In that vein I offer you this haiku:

Like the bird in spring

Sitting in the tallest tree

I must Tweet today

Ba Da Bing!

Microsoft has recently launched it's new search engine, called Bing, with a massive advertising campaign. Excuse me. It's not a search engine. It's “the worlds first decision engine.” Whatever that means.

Okay, I know what that means. At least what Microsoft wants you to think it is. The thrust of the marketing campaign is that you get better tools for deciding which sites to bother. Of course, that's not the real purpose of Bing. At its heart, Bing is about sticking Google in the eye with a pointed stick. Not unlike the purpose of Google Chrome which is to kick Internet Explorer in the groin. As good as they are, neither delivers the knockout that these companies would like to deliver. And so it goes.

Being the hopeless tech geek that I am, I couldn't help messing around with Bing and found a few interesting surprises. The unique features that Microsoft has created have led me to use Bing pretty much the way I approach Chrome – it is more useful in certain circumstance but won't change my everyday habits.

Google is still my go-to search engine for most everyday uses in the much the same way Firefox is my everyday browser. When I want something quick and dirty, Google is my engine of choice. That's not going to change. It excels at finding the usual stuff quickly. If what I'm looking for will pop up in the first three entries, Google is great. Its clean interface helps, providing users the basics like the site name and summary, so that it is easy to identify a site quickly.

Bing is different. It is really good at organizing result sets. Like Google, you can toggle between different types of searches, such as Images, Video or News, using links at the top of the page. Unlike Google, the information on the page is arranged into logical categories, specific to the search, with the best hits displayed in each category. You can see more of the them if you like but that's usually pointless. If what you want is not in the top five hits, its not anywhere in the results.

For example, in searching for Helen Kane (a singer from the 1930s that was the model for Betty Boop), I get general results, then categories such as Songs and Albums. Even better, on the left side are similar searches. In this case, actors and musicians from the late 1920's and early 1930's are featured. Makes sense.

Together, these two features make it easier for me to drill into just what I want without complicated queries. For more obscure information, Bing makes it easier to find what I need by guessing some structure and organizing the results accordingly.

Another feature that Microsoft is touting is the little popup on the side of each entry that gives a more intelligent summary of the site. It's fine for what it does but is more of an amusement than a useful tool. You don't get enough to avoid clicking through to the site and the simple summary on the page is usually enough to decide if you want to click through in the first place. Cool technology in search of meaning.

There is yet another advantage to Bing, though the same could be said for Yahoo, Ask, and any other search engine – different results. The dirty little secret of all search engines is that the same query often returns different result sets. The search algorithms are based on statistical equations that can return different sets even when run on the same data. You can sometimes get different results from the same data set by rerunning the same queries on the same engine. Since the search is kind of fuzzy, the result set is not absolute. This has long been one of the reasons that professional researchers will often use more than one commercial database provider even when the underlying data is the same. I saw this a lot in the patent search game.

All that is to say that using multiple engines for particularly difficult searches is a good strategy in any event. When the quick Google search fails to get me what I want, I can now turn to Bing. I get some different results and some better organization.

Technology-wise, Microsoft has come up with excellent search software. Unfortunately, that is not enough to move people toward abandoning Google and using Bing as the search engine of first choice. Instead, it will be where you go when Google doesn't cut it. Good technology but bad business. Bad business because Bing needs advertising and lower hits translates to lower revenue. Bing is not a Google killer. More of a Google annoyer.

Let me put it another way. It's not going to go Ba Da Bing on Google.

Twitter is Doomed

Twitter is doomed.

You have to admit. As far as opening statements go, that one is pretty provocative. Granted, it's an overstatement for dramatic effect. To be fair, it should only read “Twitter may be doomed.”

Social networks are different from other forms of Internet-based communication or content. Most media rely on the entire Internet not one service. Email down? Use a different account. It's exactly the same. Same for IM. As long as everyone has access it doesn't matter which you use. Web content in general is usually available in more than one place. If Hulu is ill today, you can still watch your shows on CBS.com. MSNBC out of commission? Try CNN.com, NYTIMES.com or any of thousands of news outlets. And so on. There is a lot of redundancy in content and service and one is as good as another.

With social networks, the value is in the network. Not what it does but who it does. Facebook matters because of your Facebook Friends. If Facebook is down, then you can't update your network. You don't care if you update the world. It's the Facebook crowd that matters. Twitter is like this too.

Which brings us to why it is likely doomed. It's down all the time. As in several times a week. Stuff you want to Tweet (as posting to Twitter is called) is meant to go to your Twitter followers and they are waiting for it. There is no alternative since each social network is different. If all the networks was the same, folks would choose only one since you'd see the same content all the time. Even if you post the same thing on different social networks you are addressing different networks of people. Sure there is overlap but not complete and total. Everything else is interchangeable on the Internet since the Internet has 100% overlap. You can always find a substitute. With social networks it is unlikely that you will achieve anywhere that amount of overlap.

The final nail in the coffin comes about because, at some point in time, Twitter has to make money. If enough people get annoyed at the constant outages the value of Twitter over other social media will diminish to the point that the critical mass they need to attract advertisers will evaporate. No money means no Twitter. Twitter is (maybe) doomed.

In fact, the first to go will be the corporate types most likely to want to tie ads to their tweets. Once it reverts back to a handful of teenagers talking about what they had for lunch, no one (not even people who make lunch meat for teenagers) will be there to advertise.

The microblog format is clearly something people want. It just doesn't have to be Twitter. It could just as easily be Facebook, Google, or Microsoft. Which is exactly what it will be if Twitter doesn't deal with the downtime. Maybe Twitter is a victim of its own success. Could be that it is collapsing under the weight of the number of people who like it. None of that matters. People are not that forgiving. Either it gets fixed or Twitter is toast.

Get Off Of My Cloud

With Oracle's recent acquisitions of VirtualIron and Sun Microsystems, it would appear that they are positioning themselves as a player in the emerging area of cloud computing. Last year when I was buying IT resources, the concept of purchasing virtualized resources sounded really good. No more tying up money in data centers. No more hiring people to babysit hardware and software systems. Instead, investment and attention would all be focused on developing applications that created revenue for the company. Why not just buy hunks of processor, memory, disk and bandwidth from someone whose job it was to provide infrastructure? They make money and I don't have to tie up precious capital in hardware that goes obsolete. The nice thing about applications is that they are forever. Hardware, on the other hand, is like a car – it starts to depreciate the minute it leaves the showroom.

A funny thing happen on the way to the cloud though. I began to worry about privacy and long term viability. Some data is so valuable that you don't want anyone taking a peak at it. Intellectual property records, social security numbers, patient data, and the like can't be trusted to anyone but yourself. This is not the same as Saleforce.com type data. If my data was sitting on someone's SAN, how could I be sure no one messed with it? When I rented a server that was pretty easy. I could look at the server, check out the storage, and see what the logs told me myself. Fairly basic protections could go a long way towards making me feel secure.

The public cloud however provides none of that. You know practically nothing about the security of the systems. Amazon S3 is a great idea until you realize that you are handing your data over to Amazon with only their reassurances that everything will be alright. You can't see or touch their gear because it's in the cloud somewhere. Given the proclivity of large companies to misuse data and ignore privacy, it seems foolish to give it over to a faceless cloud.

Even if you assume the best, a public cloud requires a level of trust in the provider that is unknown in recent memory and perhaps unprecedented. Do you really trust Google with your data? Do you think they will always make decisions that are in your interest and not there's? Of course not.

And what happens when the cloud evaporates one day? We've seen large numbers of online applications disappear in the recession. What makes us think that you cloud provider, especially the smaller ones, won't join them. Remember the Storage Service Provider fiasco when SSP when boom in the Internet bust? What will you do if your cloud providers goes belly up? Replacing an ISP or even a rented server is fairly easy. You find another one. Can you find another cloud to sit on quickly? And can you adapt your applications to the new cloud in time?

Note that I said “public cloud”. Building your own cloud is fundamentally different. It's just another form of cost effective architecture. That's where I think Oracle will go with all this. Given Sun's ability to deliver a data center in a cargo container, coupled with VirtualIron's software and Oracle applications, they will be able to deploy an entire private cloud to your doorstep. I envision a tractor trailer pulling up and leaving a cargo container with a data center in my back yard. One can dream can't one.

Cloud technology has a lot of advantages. That's been talked about ad nausem. You get many of those advantages even if you own it. A private cloud allows you to have the benefits of a virtualized environment without the privacy and security problems. Public clouds are risky. They might be inevitable but don't get your heads into the clouds lightly.

Absolut Disgust

Sometimes something is so wrong, so monumentally deplorable, so incredibly in bad taste, that you struggle to find words to describe just how wrong it is. It is the crossing of a boundary into the dark place. That place where we cease to be fully human and forget that we are members of a community, of a society.

I just found such a place and I am not pleased.

The trigger for this rant came from a recent experience with Hulu. Now, I absolutely love Hulu and other on-line video services. The ability to watch a show or movie whenever I want is a huge attraction. Because I see value in the ability to have ultimate choice in viewing I am willing to watch the commercials. Honestly, the 15 second ads are no burden and I am aware that it pays for the experience.

However, when those ads are insensitive or downright awful, you lose me and my loyalty. I am almost there with Hulu. I am on the verge of blocking it at my firewall altogether though this will gain me the ire of my 16 year old son. It is because of my teenagers that I might just block Hulu.

I was watching the final ER episode on Hulu. This particular episode has a story line about a teenage girl who is in a coma from drinking. Drinking vodka. The doctor, played by John Stamos, is highly disturbed by this since he has a teenage daughter himself. While a bit preachy at times, overall it was moving and thought provoking. I hope teenagers see this and it helps them avoid this kind of destructive behavior.

Right in the middle of the story about a girl who might die from alcohol poisoning pops up an ad for Absolut Vodka. Vodka! And what do you think these kids were drinking in the show. What puts the teenage girl in a coma? Vodka. The ad was not just for the usual nasty tasting stuff. Nope. Absolut chose this moment to advertise Mango Vodka. The kind of stuff teenage girls might go for.

Now, they couldn't have done this during the actual broadcast. TV dumped hard alcohol ads long ago. If you want to cheapen the message from the show, this is a great way to do it. It is so cynical, in such poor taste, and such bad community relations that I can only assume that somebody terribly callous or stupid arranged for this spot. Didn't they bother to see what the show was about before buying the ad? Doesn't Hulu have a “ no booze on this show” filter? Did it occur to anyone that it might be inappropriate to advertise vodka during a show about the negative effects of teenage drinking? Apparently not.

So, Absolut. You are now a bunch of unfeeling corporate tools. I hope you are happy with yourself. You disgust me and I hope the MADD people climb all over you and smack you around. You deserve it. I also won't buy your products. I won't drink your products. And Hulu, don't hide behind the “we only display them, we don't make them” argument. You should have told your client that this was a bad idea. I suppose the money mattered more.

Just because it is on the Internet, doesn't mean it is right.

Living in the Browser Age

I'm one of the people who practically lives in his web browser. The company I work for makes browser delivered software. I have a small netbook-like laptop that is pretty much only used for on-line applications, social networking, and messaging. So, the browser is important.

I've been messing around with a variety of browsers, though Mozilla Firefox is my favorite. Several experimental Mozilla extensions point to the way to the way we will use our browsers and personal computers in the future. I especially like Snowl (pronounced snow owl – like the bird) and Prism.

Snowl is pretty neat. It is an experiment in messaging within a browser. The idea is to integrate different types of messages feeds, such as Twitter and RSS, in a browser based interface. It would appear that the goal is to include other forms of messaging such as email and newsgroups. I would guess that social networking feeds from the likes of Facebook are also on the list. If this is realized, a complete view of all the communications a person engages in can be head right in a browser page. What is fascinating is how, if successful, the need for a separate email client will finally disappear. Messaging is slowly being integrated into browsing but this takes it a leap forward.

Prism is also a recognition that the world of the browser has changed. It allows you to create desktop shortcuts to web sites and format the browser window to make it look more like a desktop application. Google Chrome does this too. If you access web-based applications such as e-mail, or social networking, this helps create the look and feel of a desktop application, rather than a web page. I use it for Internet messaging applications as well as on-line, SaaS office applications such as Zoho Writer.

These extensions point to one view of the future of computing. In this world, little to nothing is happening on the desktop computer. File storage and certain high intensity applications (like games) will be local but applications themselves will be on-line. Functionality might be split between on-line and local resources. Google's Picasa is a good example of this type of software. Cataloging (storage) and editing happen in a desktop application while viewing and sharing are on-line.

The iGoogle homepage takes this idea even further. Nothing really happens in the browser itself. It's all put together on the server and the browser only displays it for you. You can arrange a bunch of widgets that do all kinds of cool things like display your Twitter feed, access your Gmail messages, and show Calendar entries.

Is this the future of computing? All of our applications and messaging needs contained in a complex browser tool? Maybe it will all reside on a server somewhere, accessible from a very simple browser. The two things these views have in common is that a personal computer will be little more than a home for the browser and broadband networking is ubiquitous. Or maybe all this will happen on my phone...

Some More Whining about Values of N

I have been in a terribly whiny mood lately. I've been whining at work, whining at home, whining just about everywhere. At least now I have something real to whine about. Values of N has been acquired by Twitter and they are shutting down all the services that the company provided. That would be two of more favorite services, I Want Sandy and Stikkit. I won't go into why I think they are great (just look at the previous posts on these awesome services) but it is suffice to say, they will be missed.


Now, it is unusual for a company to buy another company and shut everything down almost immediately. Most of the time it takes a couple of years before management realized they have screwed up and should never have bought this dog. Not in this case. First, Values of N is not a dog. They have some of the most interesting and inventive software anywhere. Second, they did it right away. They finished the acquisition today (November 25) and are shutting everything off on December 8th. Even in Internet time that's fast.


I'll grant you that I never saw how Values of N was even attempting to make money. I always assumed that the Internet services were meant as a proving ground for software and they would simply license it to other software vendors. Bottom feeding is not, however, the reason that Twitter bought them. They did not buy them for their technology (though hopefully some of the best stuff will make its way into Twitter). Nope none of that conventional stuff.


Instead, they wanted the founder on their team. That's right, they bought a whole company and shut it down to get one guy, Rael Dornfest. Okay, he's a brilliant guy and all but still. Did they have to kill the whole company just to get one brilliant guy. Like I said, Twitter doesn't go for the conventional way of doing things.


There is a serious issue that the shutdown highlights. As more and more apps migrate to the Web, we have to worry about our data sitting on someone else's machine and what happens if that machine gets turned off. I don't mean temporarily but for good. Like Values of N. Needless to say, getting all my Stikkit notes converted to other bookmark managers and note programs was a pain, especially since there was no wholesale download facility.


Now imagine that Google turned off Google Apps. All the people who rely on it would find themselves having to find a new application plus migrate their data. Just as I was warming to online apps, I get slapped in the face with the cold hard reality of having my data in someone else's hands. Not pretty.


So, I bid a fond farewell to Stikkit, I Want Sandy, and all the promise of Values of N. I hope Twitter gave you a great deal Rael since the rest of us got a raw one. I'll stop whining now.

Woot! Crack for Gadget Freaks.

I love Woot. Woot is my master and I am its slave. I must look at Woot everyday and, if there is a Woot Off, must constantly check it. I buy really cool stuff I don't need but find myself desperately wanting. I crave what Woot offers. My family is considering an intervention. It's not like I haven't tried to stop myself. I just can't.

While that overstates the effect of Woot just a wee bit, it is the only on-line store that has approached obsession with me and many of the folks I know in the tech world. For those of you lucky enough to have avoided Woot over the years here's the run down. Woot is a website that sells just one item each day. That's it. They start selling something at midnight and keep going until it is all gone or the day ends. And what they sell! It is a geek's dream! Woot has everything from the big (wide screen TV) to the small (Micro SD Flash Memory cards). Shipping is also the same no matter what the item - $5. That's $5 to ship a pair of headphones or $5 to ship a PC.

Woot started as a way for an electronics dealer to get rid of excess inventory and it shows in its offerings. There are a lot of high volume products such as USB flash drives. Many of the bigger ticket items like PCs are refurbished or restocked items. But each day brings new goodies to drool over.

For many Internet retailers, shoppers go to them when they already know they want something. You have made the buying decision and all you need is a good price and someone to ship it to you. Amazon has done great business this way. The same is generally true of auction sites. People go to eBay because they are looking for something or an item in some class of items. They choose the auction because the perceive they can get something cheaper this way or because that is the only way to get certain things like collectibles. Even when you are buying a gift and want to browse the site for an idea, you have already decided to buy something.

Woot is different. By only offering one thing at a time, it draws you back every day to see what is on sale. That makes Woot king of the impulse buy. You don't go to Woot looking for anything in particular. You go to see what they have. It is totally addictive.

Incredible Marketing

The marketing on Woot is outstanding, some of the best around. Each item has a description that is incredibly funny. It's worth going to the site each day just to read the copy. The title for the product description for the Elf-1 night vision monocular reads “The Elvish Mounted Policemen’s Union”. The humor is definitely twisted. It's very funny in a Monty Python manner. It shows that they really understand their customers. The daily podcasts are also hysterical.

They also have interesting promotions. Tuesdays are Two-For-Tuesday... um... Tuesdays. They sell a two pack of something. It might be a set of headphones (Got that once for me and my son) or something similar. Now, you might say “Why do I need two of them?” Why not? Given what things cost on Woot, you are basically getting one free. Do you have friends? Then give one away. Or keep a spare as a sort of belt-and-suspenders strategy for electronic do-dads.

Another innovative piece of marketing is the Woot Off. Every once in awhile, they sell a whole bunch of items in one day. Not all at once, like a conventional store, but one after another in true Woot style. They sell a limited number of items until they are gone then rapidly fire up another item. This is truly addictive (there's that word again). It is easy to waste an entire day looking at all the pretty toys go by and occasionally buy one. Woot Offs are more exciting than Vegas. The Woot Off is only one of the many other promotions on Woot. The launch event is another but read about it in the FAQ. It's pretty funny.

The single best promotion that Woot puts on is the Bag O Crap. For $1 plus the usual shipping you get a bag of three items. You don't know what those items are but, hey, it's only a dollar (90 cents to my Canadian friends and practically free to those whose lives are denominated in Euros). Folks I know who have bought the Bag O Crap claim that it is not crap at all but really good stuff. Problem is, they go so fast I can never get one. You have to decide ahead of time to just buy it when you see it, without thinking about it.

The Site Design is Spectacular

The Woot site is one of the best e-Commerce sites I have ever encountered. It is so easy to use, anyone can figure it out. If you see something you like you click on an enormous orange button that says “I want one!” No mistaking what that's about. Once you decide to buy something using the huge button, you fill in your information (unless it's stored from a previous purchase) and click on another giant orange button that says “Buy this now!” The label above the button tells you to click on this “ridiculously large button” just in case “Buy this now!” doesn't get the message across.

Woot is one of the greatest ideas I've ever seen for marketing and selling products. The Woot people have extended the concept to T-Shirts and Wine. For a wine aficionado like me, Wine.Woot is truly dangerous to the wallet. Thank goodness they don't have Cigar.Woot. That would push me over the edge into bankruptcy for sure. Like classic Woot and Wine.Woot, it would be too easy to get sucked in and just buy on impulse.

Now, let me see that 26inch monitor again. Oh man. That feels good. So good.

New and (sort of) Improved

As Bob Dylan said “the times they are a' changin' “ So what does that have to do with technology? Everything! Lately, we have been inundated by new updates to old friends. It began a few months ago with the Firefox 3.0 launch (which is now up to 3.03 and they are talking about 3.1 soon). Since then we have seen a rapid succession of new versions of Twitter, Jott, Internet Explorer, Skype, and now a UI upgrade for LinkedIn and the long awaited release of OpenOffice 3. In all fairness, IE 8 and Skype 4 are technically beta releases but that's meaningless. Heck, some software has been in “Beta” for so long I'm beginning to think it is just a euphemism for Version 1 (Plaxo Pulse anyone?).

So let's look at two new releases and what they do for us.

Nice, Not Thrilling, but Nice.

The new OpenOffice, version 3, just came out and I have to say that I like it. Of course, I liked version 2. That explains a lot. It is faster loading, but I don't see many new features. The new quickstart menu perhaps? Looks great on a Linux netbook designed for the unwashed masses but does little for everyone else. The UI is still decidedly old school and has seen only minor updates. The new Extension Manager, which looks a whole lot like the Firefox/Thunderbird extension manager, is a definite improvement. The (limited) support for DOCX formats is also very nice. It really doesn't matter since almost no one uses the DOCX format, even users of Word 2007, but it comes in handy on occasion.

Overall, the features that made OpenOffice 2 great are what makes OpenOffice 3 great. While not as pretty as the Microsoft Office suite, it gets the job done just as easily. It costs much less to buy than Office, zero being less than anything. That's a plus. The ability to extend OpenOffice is also useful, especially since major players like Sun do put out decent extensions. The PDF creation capability is a big part of why people use OpenOffice. I can't say that I notice a speed difference but it still works right and that's all I ask.

OpenOffice is still a contender. As more and more netbooks deploy Linux, the market share for OpenOffice will continue to increase. Now, if they could just clean up the UI so it doesn't look like something only a geek could love...

Not again!

Once again, I sign on to LinkedIn and find the UI changed and not for the better. They keep monkeying with the layout and each time they do, important stuff gets buried and yet, the interface gets more cluttered. Neat trick. Less good stuff and more of a mess. Kind of like my garage but I digress...

It looks like LinkedIn is trying to go all Facebook on us. That's fine for college students and teenagers. It doesn't work for businesspeople. Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the new features, especially the groups. It has come a long way from its days as an online resume. They just can't seem to stop fooling around with the interface. Perhaps the problem is trying to shoehorn too much into one piece of software. In contrast, the Plaxo Pulse idea, which is a bit like a Twitter stream, seems to work better. I get ongoing updates from people I know and can dive in further when I want to. It's a clean interface while LinkedIn's is not.

This seems to be the season for upgrades. Cool! Sort of. OpenOffice might have waited a bit longer if it meant a UI upgrade. LinkedIn should have left well enough alone. Jott completely messed up their latest version, annoying loyal users in the process. Xpenser is up next for an new release. Let's see how they do.

Who Gives a Chrome

Google just came out with the beta of its new browser called Chrome. (Note to Mozilla: You have a browser technology called Chrome too. Isn't that trademark infringement? But I digress...). Predictably, a lot of tech writers went all agog over it. "It's so fast" they said with glee. That might be, in part, because it is unencumbered by features. "Ooo. Each tab runs in it's own process" they giggled. Like that means anything to the average joe. I get that an errant Javascript program won't hang your browser, but that's a problem that even a geek encounters with low frequency.

Here is the crux of the matter: Chrome is made by geeks and ultimately for geeks. It lacks the type of basic features that most normal people want and replaces them with features that normal people don't care about. The little task manager? Nice... if you are a geek. Most people don't know what the Windows Task Manager is and that's way more useful on a regular basis.

The flaws are more obvious then the features. Where's the stupid print button? Yeah I get the "minimal interface" philosophy but regular people doing regular things need a regular old print button. If I have to look for it or remember a key combination (which is sometimes like playing Twister with your hands) it's no help.

What is readily apparent is that this is not really a browser at all. It's an advanced web application and Javascript engine. Now that I understand. There, the minimal interface makes sense since the application is going to handle all the typical application cores. That's not a browser though. It's also not unique. A very neat application called Bubbles has done this for awhile. I'm using it right now to run my Zoho Writer word processor as if it were a desktop application. Mozilla has something like it, called Prism, as well.

Which brings me to the final point. If this is ultimately meant to be a browser, then why? We already have Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Opera without even diving into the hundred or so specialty browsers. What is the point of another one? To stick it to Microsoft? That's not going to happen. Instead, Google is going to harm Mozilla, their erstwhile partner, the most. Why not, instead, contribute the technology to the Mozilla Foundation and get it into Firefox. That way you help your partner and stick it to Microsoft. If this is meant to be a next generation web application engine then "too late!" It's already been done several times over. Day late and a dollar short.

Or maybe Google's collective head has just swelled a bit too large. Perhaps, they are starting to think that anything they come up with is naturally better and should replace everything else in the world. More likely, they are callously trying to undercut their search partners so they can grab a bit more of the search revenue for themselves.

As we sit and view Google ten years after their inception, we see a company that may be losing its way. In the past year they have started to undermine their own partners, encroach on people's privacy with their obnoxious picture taking, and released ho-hum software that causes disruptions but adds little to the technology space.

Not too cool Google. Not too cool.

In the meantime, Chrome is pretty lame and its best features (from a user point of view) are already available in Firefox. If you like the interface (but with a print button!) try the Chromifox theme for Firefox. If you like the ability to peel off a tab to your desktop, you can do that already with Firefox. Get jazzed up by having a tab run as a separate process? It's called "Open in New Window". And try Bubbles or Mozilla's Prism for a Web Application engine. They are just as fast and easy.

And don't let Google screw Mozilla by undercutting the search revenue necessary to keep Mozilla alive. That's just wrong. And they call Microsoft the Evil Empire...

Once Again, The Old Beta and Switch

Okay, I love Jott! I admit it. Of course, if you read this blog, you know that already. The ability to translate voice to text from my cell phone is clearly useful. Use it to connect to on-line services like Sandy, Xpenser, or Google Calendar, and you have a truly coordinated set of services that enhances business and personal life. It is best viewed as part of a gestalt, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Now, all that is changing. Jott has come out of Beta and is charging for premium plans. That in itself doesn't bother me. Lots of Open Source projects and free Web sites do this. They have free offerings and premium offerings. That's typical and expected. Free services are supported through advertising or try to entice you to sign up for premium services. You know this going in so it doesn't bother you when it happens. If you think ads are evil (I don't) then it's up to you to decide if you want to make your pact with the Devil.

At the core of this free and premium services strategy is the idea that a basic body of functions is established in the free service and that you pay for the features that go beyond the free. Jott is clearly establishing that model. They have a free service called Jott Basic and then a couple of premium services that include additional features.

The problem is that the social contract of the Beta says that you don't take away features after the Beta and tell Beta testers to pay for them. Ultimately, We've done some work for you. We've suffered through problems that no paying customer would tolerate. The community has pumped you full of ideas for new services that could make you money. We have promoted you to friends, family, and business associates. Free testing, free ideas, and free marketing should count for something.

For the folks behind Jott, this social contract did not amount to much. The Jott Basic takes away the best and most important features - the ability to e-mail via voice and to connect to services like Xpenser and Sandy. There are still some basic links open (Twitter for example) but the most useful ones are only available from the paid subscription services.

Jott has done a Beta and switch.They have given away great features and gotten people hooked on those features. They never made it clear that these features would not stay free after the Beta. It was reasonable to assume that, like most other on-line Beta programs (ala Google or Linkedin), the feature set introduced during the Beta would be the free set. Instead, Jott has decided to break the social contract and eviscerate the free service. I'd like to see them try and get Beta testers for anything again.

What is sad is that there were so many better ways to get people signed up for premium services. For example, offering longer jotts (as they do for the highest premium service) makes sense. The Blackberry software makes sense as a part of a premium package as well. Offering new links to other services, especially paid business services, makes sense. Links to Salesforce.com or corporate e-mail gateways would have been something people would pay for. Cutting back on jotts to e-mail and links to free services comes across as a cost cutting move pushed by their accounting department. And the old fashioned desktop applications they are giving away? Sorry, totally old school and uninteresting.

I will make a prediction here. Jott usage will drop off dramatically. As good as it is, it is not tremendously useful without the e-mail and links. Rather than pay $4 a month ($48 a year) to get what we have been getting for free, current Jott users will just trail off. Oh, we'll stay signed up for the occasional use but won't be heavy users. That means that advertisers will see less value in Jott and stop using them and few people will convert to premium.

So, watch Jott over the next 12 months. Either they will be wildly successful and my crystal ball needs realignment, they will be on the verge of disaster, or they will change their offer. I'm hoping for the latter.

Jott people, if this is a Beta test of the marketing and sales program, you could have just asked first. If not, this will be as pleasant as sitting on a spike. Hope you can jump off it before you impale yourself.