A Day in Paradise

Earning season is in full swing and with a couple days before MSFT is scheduled to report earnings, Steve Ballmer lets out that Microsoft will not be creating products which are “much more successful than Vista.”

I am not a huge fan of Vista, but I was one of quite a few people I know who skipped XP all together. Moving straight from Windows 2000 to Windows Vista (disclaimer, I used XP on a laptop – this strengthened my resolve not to use XP on my development machine).

Paul McDougal rants on the failures of Vista, and cites other well sourced articles (also written by him) about states which think Vista sucks so hard, that they are going to use XP until Microsoft pushes out the glorious Windows 7.

Ballmer may have been providing cushioning for an inevitable poor earning report, or may just be reflecting the fact that Microsoft has fundamentally changed the way they create operating systems, and will never again release as big a platform as Windows Vista.

I’ll agree with Paul that Windows 7 will not be as big a platform change as a conceptual change. Windows 7 and the rumored Windows Stratos will focus on the “Cloud” much more than the specific hardware.

Everything is pointing to Microsoft moving away from making their money as a Hardware OS platform and moving towards an internet services model, building a cloud computing platform which will surpass hardware and OS platform.

I am watching this PDC more closely than ever, and my money says that MSFT will do just fine.

Not sure if what I clicked through told me not to tell anyone about anything, but I just got my beta invite to Xcerion.

Xcerion is yet another OS-in-a-browser, although they prefer to call it “Cloud Computing” or “XML Internet OS”. I assume they say XML since that is probably the data transfer layer, as well as the file save format, regardless advertising an “XML OS” is totally 1997.

The interface only works in IE (Cross Browser compatibility is coming soon) and is pretty slow until everything loads up (see it’s just like a real OS). Once everything is going it seems to be pretty snappy.

I’m getting back to work

Oh yes, did I mention it was very pretty?

I played with picnik for a few minutes this morning. It was fairly interesting, a but slow and laggy, but not bad. Was a bit disappointed that as a pro member of flickr I don’t get the premium functionality of picnik.

… of getting bought up by google?

If 100% of your revenue is through google adsense, and google is making 100% (or more) on your 100%, then wouldn’t your worth to google be cut by 50%?

This is disregarding my “community in a box” article.

Don Dodge coined Web2.0 as “Web App + 2 Founders + 0 Revenue”. Funny, and not too far off the money.

Don goes into detail about the various ways that Web2.0 firms are funding their efforts. This goes from Freemium (free basic membership with paid premium package) to Subscriptions to simple Advertising.

One thing that he doesn’t mention is the “community-in-a-box” business model. A community in a box is not about selling any specific product, it’s simply about creating an exciting product creating a buzz around it, and then delivering eyeballs and mindshare to a larger company.

Let’s face it, despite their best efforts Netscape’s Digg clone failed miserably. Google couldn’t do nearly as good as YouTube despite of the grotesque amount of money at their disposal. Yahoo’s Image Gallery could never do what Flickr does. Nokia could have never attracted a userbase the size of Twango. And whoever pays $x Billion for flixster (or the next social media site) is not going to care about monetizing the site they are going to care about the community they are getting.

One of the main differences between this boom and the first technology boom, is that, like Dan states, Web2.0 can survive as an idea + 2 young enthusiastic founders. All we need to build a community-in-a-box is a good idea, and a couple beat up servers somewhere and a couple hours a night spent cranking out some slick PHP or Ruby code.

This is in response to Cal’s post on SEO experts.

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It really depends on the framework… Zend Framework is very SEO framework. Others that rely on a lot of ajax or javascript POST callbacks to facilitate basic navigational tasks will stop a search engine dead in its tracks.

I have also seen frameworks which use strange http redirects as part as the controller, this has the habit of killing search engines as well.

Speed is also important in SEO, being able to output the correct http cache tags. You should have complete control over the output HTML, the ability to create descriptive css styles and have full control over the structure of your html output.

Clean URL support is good in ZF, but the default front controller still needs some modification to be truely SEO friendly.

When it comes to SEO experts I totally agree that they are the scum of the earth… but they are also just playing a game that Google set up for them to play.

The monetary value of being #1 on Google is just too much to pass up.

Posted by mobile phone:
I am watching cnbc while on the excersize bike while blogging (multitasking++). They had a very.short piece about how yahoo customer satisfaction has grown 3 percent to pass google who has dropped 3 percent.

When I look at the two platforms, I have very little loyalty to google products.

Google search: I use it, but basically hate it. As soon as there is a viable alternative I am going to drop it.

Gmail: don’t really do the whole webmail thing. Gmail has some nice features, but hasn’t done much new in the last few years.

Google IG: pretty awesome, but for some reason I am not using it as much as I used to.

Google docs: Sweet, I love it. I wish they would add the concept of page breaks.

Adsense: a scam, I hate it.

Analytics: I use it but its not that great.

Youtube: great product, one of the only google acquisitions that has a community. We’ll see how google manages it.

And now some yahoo properties I use:

Flickr: premium member since they started. I love it.

Yahoo mail: great technology, by far the best webmail platform available.

Mybloglog: cool blogging community tool. Unique tool, nothing else like it available.

Stumbleupon: another awesome Y! buy a community based around what everyone does best: websurfing.

Yahoo finance: great product, far more features and more usable than the google counterpart.

Yahoo technologies: we use YUI heavily as well as other webservices provided by yahoo.

So you may have noticed that I hardly mentioned any products which were actually created by yahoo, and only a couple original google products.

Maybe the problem with google is that they merge the communities of their acquisitions with the general google brand. Yahoo does as much as they can to keep the communities intact.

We’ll see how google manages to break youtube and how the communities manage once the next big thig movie sharing site comes around.

I have had an active account at backpackit for the last 2 years, I used it for a lot of different collaborative writing I was doing until Google Docs started kicking ass google style and I decided to move to that.

Now that I have several hundred documents in google docs, I am wondering how I can get my old stuff off of backpackit, and preferably into google docs. Backpackit advertises an XML exports, but it only gets a handful of titles and none of the several hundred articles that I have up there.

I found this, a bit crude but I guess it will do the trick.

Yesterday I read the an article on Network Neutrality on CNN.com. The article was written by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and was VERY wrong.

Here’s part of what bothered me:

Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.

That is a VERY misleading analogy on many levels. Here is my counter-analogy.

Steve runs a Pizza delivery service. When his service started he used to charge per-pizza he delivered. The prices weren’t that high, and since I’m too lazy to go out and get my own pizzas I appreciated the service. I didn’t eat as much pizza as I would like to, because Steve’s surcharge was always in the back of my mind.

Once Steve got enough clients, he expanded his business and realized that he could offer a better service by charging a flat-fee. Using this new business model everyone paid a flat monthly fee, and the cost of people who ate a pizza every night (like me) were subsidized by the people who only ate 1 pizza a month.

Everyone had hot pizzas, everyone was happy.

A couple months ago Gpizza opened, they offer all the regular pizzas, but also offer the GSuper 4-course MegaPizza. This pizza comes in 4 parts which are served by midgets waiters. The midgets waiters need to be transported with the pizzas and then brought back to the Gpizza store.

For the first couple months Steve is happy to provide his loyal clients with Gpizzas, even though it did require substantially more resources for Steve to transport the Gpizzas and midgets. As Gpizzas become more and more famous, people start to complain that their Gpizzas are arriving cold, the midgets were tired from the slow ride and weren’t as enthusiastic with their serving the pizzas.

Ypizza, which has been using Steve for 10 years, sees how much money Gpizza is making and decides to make the Ysuper 4-course MegaPizza and one-ups Gpizza by providing a dancing leprechaun along side the 3 midget servers.

Steve sees that he will not be able to provide any service if more Pizza places start offering MegaPizzas. He has two options:

1.Revert to a Per-pizza business model and charge his clients for the delivery of MegaPizzas
2.Charge pizza places for the delivery of MegaPizzas

Gpizza catches wind of this and prepares the “Pizza Delivery Guy Neutrality” bill which mandates that Pizza delivery guys are unable to charge pizza shops extra for delivering MegaPizzas.

Now with silly analogies out of the way, a bit of mythbusting:

The Network is NOT Neutral
Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, but will restrict the ISPs in the service they can provide.

Bandwidth / Latency costs Money!
High Bandwidth/Latency applications cost money to transfer. The money has to come from somewhere. Creating laws that stop ISPs from charging the Googles, YouTubes and Skypes of the world mean that YOU and I will be paying for it instead.

YouTube/Google/Skype and Craigslist are making money
They can allocate a bit of money to provide good pipes.

When Google rules most of the Cable in the US
How neutral do you think that will be?

Reuters writes story about guy who films himself skiing down an escalator and then posts it on Youtube.

At T-4 you would think I would have better things to do… well, I pulled an all nighter last night and am about to take apart my desk.

Today is moving out day…

During my early morning browsing session I noticed the truth behind FF2’s choice in abbreviating the title from Jeremy’s latest blog entry “Google as our Culture“.

My name is Aaron Wormus, and I’ve been a card-carrying member of the Google Cult for 3 years. I grovel when my ranks are dumped, and squeal with joy when I get back on (yes, I am listed again!), and track every change in my ranking for the term “aaron“. I grovel for invitations to every google product, and rejoice when I have the honor of being an early adopter.

Oh great google, where would we be without you?

The first version of this post was eaten when Y! Pipes decided to take down firefox (seemed to happen a lot when I was hovering over the sources waiting for the tooltip top pop up – FF1.5.0.9)

Y! Pipes is a cool toy. There is a lot of interesting functionality, but a lot that could still be added. My problem is the scalabilty aspects of it. It looks fairly resource intensive on the part of Y! and with every additional feature that’s added more resources would be needed. In the half hour I spent playing with my pipe, I already created a monstor that takes 4.86 seconds to generate. And if I were to do any serious (and add specific tools) then I would need even more generating power.

There are a couple extra things I would like to see right off:

1. It needs an exclusion gate, possibly as an option of the union operator, where I can select all items from feeds a-y which do not exist in feed z.
2. I had some trouble parsing some old google RSS feeds I had. I was about to yell conspiracy but I re-generated the google urls and everything worked
3. I couldn’t see how to extract/interact with information directly from a feed. I want to embed a flickr image into the description of my news article, but couldn’t figure out how that was done.

If anyone wants to clone my pipe and fix it, feel free. Anyway, I loved it… reminded me of ning, but without the code

Hiro Nakamura from heroes is actually a code warrior in real life. His profile can be found at this great wired article.

“I’ve been programming computers since elementary school, where they taught us, and I stuck with computer science through high school and college,” said Oka. “ILM offered me an entry-level position at its Marin, California, headquarters, but they refused to fly me out for the job interview. Fortunately, Microsoft also was interested in hiring me and they flew me out to Seattle, then down to San Francisco and back to Providence.”

Oka ended up taking the job with ILM and remains with the company to this day, despite his hectic TV production schedule. He said ILM was a great place to start in the industry because he learned a lot about the pipeline and how the company worked.

If you haven’t watched Heroes get started now, we’re only half way into the first season. Hiro Nakamura and his very broken engrish is definitely the hero!

A lot of the software Oka wrote became applicable to other shows. For example, the computational fluid dynamics he worked on in Terminator 3, which allowed liquid metal to take shape, handled the drool in Dreamcatcher. His surface-cracking technology from Star Wars: Episode II worked well for Pirates of the Caribbean.

In other geek news the IT Crowd is coming back on Jan 5th. The DVD is also out (with L33T subtitles), just incase you’re wondering what to buy me for Christmas. If you’re wondering what the php connection is… IT Crowd consultant Yoz frequents #phpc and is rockstar programmer at ning PHP coders are also geeks and enjoy geeky shows like Heroes and IT Crowd.

Happy Holidays!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I’ve stopped using Backpackit completely. It was cool at first but then when we get past a certain number of articles, the system breaks down.

Plus google has spell checking, tagging, and a ton of other goodness. The only thing that I have to get used to is the “organisation-by-tagging” system that google uses. I have a TON of stuff going by me, so it might make it slightly more difficult to use than just a simple “folder” metaphor.

What more can I say, why pay for something when you can get something better for google for free.

I’ve finally gotten around to testing this new google docs and spreadsheet thing they have. It’s pretty nice. Like with all things google I’m impressed with the speed and simplicity of the interface.

It looks like I’ll be dumping backpackit soon

Now I need to see how I can publish this to my blog.