Microsoft is reorganizing seven divisions into three, which is being widely considered as the company preparing itself for the next war, since the battle for the desktop (as in operating system) is long over, and the next battle is looming. Erick Schonfeld argues that is may be Ozzie Time:

Perhaps the biggest shift, though, comes with the announced retirement of Windows chief Jim Allchin (who will continue as co-president, with Johnson, of Platform Products and Services until Windows Vista ships later next year), and the rise of Ray Ozzie as chief technical officer for all three divisions. Allchin was always the biggest champion of Windows and, thus, PC-centric software. Ozzie is tasked with helping Microsoft shift to more of a Web-based software-as-a-service strategy.

Waiting five years between major revisions of Windows threatens to put Microsoft at a competitive disadvantage when Web-based software companies like Google and Salesforce.com can upgrade their software and add new features on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. If Ozzie can figure out a way to combine the power of Microsoft's PC-based applications (Windows and Office) with the flexibility and network effects of its Web-based applications (MSN), he can help Microsoft maintain its industry status as biggest dog on the porch.

A pointer from Om Malik led me to a piece from James Stoup on Micrososft's challenges:

Many years from now analysts will look back, draw a mark on a timeline and say, “Here it is, the beginning of the fall of Microsoft.” But don’t think for a second that MS is going to collapse in a week or two. Oh no, we couldn’t be so lucky, it’s going to take some time. You see, much like the Roman empire, MS is going to take a while to completely crumble. And even if they do fall there is no guarantee that they won’t pick themselves of up start over. Or, more likely, something different will arise from their ashes and a new company with an old name will start to compete in the market place.

But where will that mark be? When will historians peg the start of their fall? Personally, I feel it to be in about a year and a half into the future. When Longhorn comes out, and fails to be everything MS hoped it would be, that is where you can draw your line. That is where Microsoft had the chance to reassert their domination and instead they pissed their chances away. Longhorn is going to be a big disappointment to a lot of people. And when all of those people realize it’s time to upgrade, they might just look somewhere else.

I think the turning point goes back to Microsoft's inability to get people to upgrade to XP when it was first released. That was the first nail in the coffin.

But the coming Battle-Of-The-Stacks is really the war for everything: the entire application and communication stack. Microsoft has bet that they will win, everywhere, and invested strategic levels of their capital into that prospect. Can they survive is they lose any of the battlegrounds? Yes, Microsoft can survice if MSN loses to Google in search, and loses to Yahoo in online mail and instant messaging, and loses to Apple in music. But it can't survice if it loses some critical collection of these areas. If web-based app development based on open source (Linux + Java + MySQL + Apache) becomes the dominant base for future apps, and business collaboration and communication shifts to that platform instead of Microsoft's .Net and Office servers and applications, Microsoft is in deep yogurt. If Microsoft loses the battle for the living room -- the blackbox that connects PCs, game machines, and teleivisions together -- to Apple, or Sony, or any combination of other players, Microsoft would be gravely wounded. If iPod PDAs and phones become ubiquitous, then Microsoft's enormous investments in that sector implode. And so on. There are so many battlefields I don't know why the pundits think Microsoft can do it all.

The most likely scenario to me is that Microsoft will lose one, two, or more of these battles, and will then be a much diminished player: perhaps dominant in games, but not in cell phones; perhaps strong behind the firewall for large business (like IBM of old), but nearly non-existant in small and medium business (their initial beachhead in business, once upon a time); maybe strong on desktops, but not on servers.

Its possible that one central battlefield will become clear, and Microsoft may be able to concentrate all their energies to winning it. But such a Waterloo could play against the Napoleon that Microsoft seems to have become. Aggressive and schooled in the competitive tactics that have brought justice departments the world over after them, they may look like the smart bet. But I see them fighting against dozens of strong and highly motivated competitors -- Cisco, Apple, Sony, IBM, and so on -- so I am betting against Microsoft. Or at least I am betting that Microsoft can't win everywhere, and unless they take drastic actions -- basically ceding the battle in some of these areas before losing strategic rescources along the way -- they may lose in areas that could be won, if they concentrated their resources and investments. But I am betting on hubris, momentum, and short-sightedness, so that Microsoft will have a few big losses, and the hope to conquer the world will lead to them losing most everything.

At Emily Chang's eHub, I saw a link pointing to Writely. The basic concept of Writely is simple, and well-realized: a web-based repository of documents, each of which can be shared with other collaborators.

The documents themselves support various rich text elements, like styled text, tables, images, and so on. Every edit session is saved as a separate timestamped version, and you can open earlier versions, see what changes have been made by collaborators, and even revert to earlier versions. You can export the docs as RTF and Word formats. You can publish docs to make them accessible to specific users or to the public. Docs can be tagged, and each tag can then be used to select the corresponding subset of documents.

I encountered a small number of annoyances in the user interface -- the folks behind Writely didn't test on a Mac with Firefox, apparently -- so various elements that were highlighted wound up being impossible to see. They say they are working on a fix. Doesn't work at all on Safari. A "note" capability -- more or less a post-it that gets placed on the doc -- is in alpha, and really needs to be rejiggered to be more like a Word comment. I also can't get the RSS feed from my account to be accepted by NetVibes as valid. But otherwise the features form a great starting point for what is likely to become an instant success.

What I like about Writely is the web-centric model: the docs reside in the system, and (aside from the occasional exported doc) everything is off the desktop. The endless problems of passing docs around as email attachments are completely avoided. And the ability to push docs from a private, collaborative development to a published version for a larger group, and the then fully public. This is the usual lifecycle of many documents, like press releases, for example.

What is missing? I would like to be able to save comments with doc versions, so that collaborators could summarize changes. Other, more sophisticated capabilities -- like document templates, page headers and footers, and other page layout -- would really round out the document capabilities.

But I have switched over. I intend to use Writely aggressively -- partially to get away from the document clutter on my desktop, and partially to make all the Corante corporate docs I manage accessible to my partners.

I have actively started using a bunch of specialized web apps that provide the means to publish writing or other information. For example, I wrote recently about the reasons why Last.fm's journal is a cool place to write about music: the integration with Last.fm's music database is really great. Likewise, the integation of 43Places' geographic database with posts there is equally cool. I anticipate that dozens more of these domain-specific solutions will be rolled out, similarly integrated with specialized domain-specific databases.

So, my online life has recently fragmented. For the past few years, I have divided my writing between Get Real and my personal blog, A Working Model, where I have been writing on topics like politics, karate, travel, and music. My rapid migration to these other services has led to me trying to duct tape things together in some way, using RSS feeds. Today, my A Working Model blog includes feeds rendered in the right margin from Get Real, 43Places, Last.fm, my del.icio.us bookmarks, and a travel schedule. But the contraption that I have created to make this work is rickety. I have been using Feeddigest to manage these feeds, for example, and for no reason that I can understand, sometimes javascript calls to the Feeddigest service time out.

Just as I was getting fed up with this mess, someone introduced me to Netvibes, which is a new Ajax web app, that attempts to provide a perhaps better MyWeb. The idea is a way to pull together your favorite RSS feeds -- like an RSS reader -- but a format more like a portal.

What I would like, though, is something different: to be able to define a Netvibes portal, pulling together all these threads of my online life, and publish it so that it is accessible to others. They don't support that yet, but I intend to start the begging and whining.

I noticed that David Weinberger had Many-to-Many: reviewed RawSugar, which is prompting me to add a few comments.

I spoke recently with the founder, Ofer Ben-Schachar, who suggests that we are going to drown in the flat tagspace that we are creating, and that one obvious solution is to create hierarchical aggregations of tags. He points out that we have grown used to this idea in e-commerce sites, where the class of "cameras" is broken into various makes, price ranges, or types.

I argued with him, suggesting that these domain schemas -- like the way discussions about wine naturally fall into vintage, region, country of origin, and grape -- are a general case, but that there is no way that a system like RawSugar, or a group of people, can develop such schemas for all sorts of things. Or to agree, in many cases, how these classifications work. Consider the difficulties in classifying music: what the hell do you say Broken Social Scene is? And most of the things that people fiddle around with on the web are not clearly about just one thing, or only linked to one schema.

He showed me an example of how RawSugar could provide a means to decomplexify a universe of discourse for one reasonably well-defined group: those interested in bicycling in the San Francisco area. He worked with several groups and developed a taxonomy for this universe of discourse, including tags and a hierarchical ordering of them, so that information about trails would be tagged consistently with "rides for kids," "gentle rides," "difficult rides," and so on.

My argument remains the same: I believe that that the approximation and fuzziness of tags is their true value: we don't have to be dead on, but over time, order emerges. I don't buy the idea that we need to have order imposed.

At the same time, there are hundreds, if not thousands of realms where clear-cut natural domain schemas exist: restaurants, wine, and many other examples come to mind. Even music -- leaving aside the fuzziness of music genres -- naturally has artists, labels, albums, tracks, and so on. So there may be a way that RawSugar can worm its way into the tagosphere, and provide value.

I'm not in the beta program (ahem!) yet but I would love to see what the Flockers are up to. Roland Tanglao is was raving about it back in August. An open source browser that lives and breathes social architecture.

Mapstats is one of a bunch of Ajax web apps I found through Emily Chang's eHub (and I have more of them to talk about, coming soon, like Writely). Mapstats provides a website stats capability, and displays the last 25 visitors on a Googlemap.

Very lightweight, easy to use, provides basic capabilities -- unique visitor count, page hits -- and plots that data on a graph. I love the map (go here to zoom in on where Get Real's visitors are from and what they are looking at).

I am truly amazed at the innovation that seems to be spinning out of the Ajax movement. Dozens of web apps are being conceived and spun out: people are having parties where the purpose is to dream up and then implement (in real-time) an app as a group activity. Wild stuff. There are a number of these apps that fall short (like NumSum, which I really wanted to use as a replacement for Excel, but it is too limited at the moment), but a larger and growing number of truly useful apps that have been spawned recently that are truly revolutionary, like Basecamp, and the new Last.fm release.

I saw that Om Malik mentioned a new web based (Ajax) instant messaging client called meebo. Pretty neat, if you need to login on some locked down machine or one that isn't yours. But I have the same heartburn with this as I do with the other multi-headed clients -- they only support the lowest common denominator -- 1:1 text messaging -- and so you have to throw away all the better stuff to use them.

And it doesn't support Jabber, so I can't use it for the whole world.

What I hope is that these guys read the Nerdvana series I wrote, and try implementing that.

So it wasn't just me.

[from Google Talk: Help Center]

Please note:
There are currently connection issues with the iChat client. We are aware of the problem and are working on it. Please expect a fix in the next few days. Thanks for your patience during our beta period.

In a story with few real surprises, Steve Ballmer is alledged to have thrown a chair across a room and shouted about wanting to "f***ing bury" Eric Schmidt, of Google, after yet another senior engineer quit the company to work at Google, according toBusiness Telegrapgh:

The issue of its [Microsoft's] competitive tactics is a hot one because only a week ago Ballmer was the subject of some embarrassing publicity that speaks of the depth of rivalry between Microsoft and Google, the internet search engine giant.

According to a sworn statement, Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room when a former Microsoft engineer met him in November to discuss his intention to defect to Google.

Small wonder there were a few giggles in conference when Ballmer welcoming the competitive environment created by the open-source movement which gave birth to Linux, the free alternative operating system that nibbles at the edge of Microsoft's empires. So did he really throw a chair? He's clearly powerful enough. Ballmer insists: "I've never thrown a chair in my life."

So what about the colourful language? The engineer's affidavit alleges that Ballmer shouted: "F***ing Eric Schmidt [Google's chief executive] is a f***ing p****. I'm going to f***ing bury that guy. I have done it before, I will do it again. I'm going to f****ing kill Google."

Suddenly the body language is that of a chastened schoolboy. In the morning session, Ballmer was making points about Microsoft's persistence and tenacity at maximum decibels ("If we didn't get it right we'd keep working it and working it and working it") while punching the air.

That animation has gone now: "Did I want to keep that fellow at the company? Yes. Did I say I wanted to compete with Google? I don't know what words . . . Did he write down the exact words? I don't know. By and large I made a commitment nine years ago that I was not going to curse. I know I've had one or two transgressions in nine years, but I made that commitment to myself. Is that one of them? I don't recall."

If your user name at Last.fm is "stoweboyd" (and mine is, your Journal's RSS feed is http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/stoweboyd/journals.rss, although it doesn't appear anywhere on the Journal pages, or the user profile info, yet.

Other information, like recently played tracks are also accessible, in various formats. Here's my recent journal entries (formatted by Feeddigest):

Mercora announced a swarm approach to getting an artist or group sent to the LA Music Awards. They will aggregate the choice of listeners... (Windows users only at the moment)... using the Mercora IM Radio application.

"It's not what you know, it's who you know." That maxim is probably at work in the recent investment of Minnesota's "largest public radio network" in Gather.com, a social networking service targeting public radio listeners. The service, to be launched in December, is meant to be a clone of the socially architected hit, MySpace:

Deborah Caulfield Rybak, Star Tribune

[from MPR parent invests in networking website]

However, Gather may be different. MySpace caters to teens and young adults and has been described as having the personality of a teenager's poster-papered, music-filled bedroom. Gather, designed for public radio's older, more sober audience, might more resemble the parents' book-lined study.

Well, we'll see. Do you really want to network with people because they listen to the same radio shows as you?

MySpace benefitted from stumbling across a real-world community with unmet needs: indie musicians and their fans. While I am an advocate for social architecture -- in fact, I believe that all ecommerce will be socialized in the future -- that doesn't mean that every marketer's segment, like public radio listeners -- are in fact a community. It's just as likely that they are a collection of unintegrated groups. My hunch is that this is a hammer looking for a nail, but I am willing to be surprised.

[pointer from PaidContent]

The folks at Technorati have introduced a new service into their mix, the Technorati Blog Finder, which is intended to help people find authoritative blogs on various topics.

Hold on a minute... isn't that what Technorati was already doing? Well, sort of. But existing services from Technorati aren't based on a persistent profile of blogs. Search just finds recent posts that include a given search term, and the Tags service finds recent posts that are tagged with the search term. The point of the Blogs service is to find blogs that are tagged -- using a different tag syntax -- as matching the search term. This is intended to be a tag-based declaration of the topics that the blog touches upon.

The Blogs service using the same algorithm for authority used to order results in Search and Tags services. In the graphic above, I searched for blogs tagged with "social media". Note the ad real estate all around.

First of all, I feel that this is a much more useful tool -- right off the bat -- than the monolithic Technorati 100 list, the Feedster 500 list, or any other all encompassing list. Finding the top 10 blogs on "social media" -- if that's what you are researching -- is much more helpful than looping through the top 100 blogs and hoping that the two lists overlap somewhere.

What I don't understand is why Technorati can't distill these lists out of Search and Tags -- why do we have to have yet another form of tag, and yet another sort of declaration?

In this case, I had to create a series of tags, like this --

<a href="technorati.com/blogs/social+media" rel="tag">social+media</a>

-- and place it somewhere on the blog that is accessible to Technorati: in my case, on the bottom of the right margin.

Still, a useful service, so long as the Technorati servers can keep up with demand -- which apparently they cannot. When I clicked this morning on Mary Hodder's Napsterization "412 links from 295 sites" to see who had been linking to her recently, I got the now-usual Technorati runaround: "Sorry, we couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation."

I like the fact that the authority ranking emerges from the social gestures of many other people, but I would like to concoct a way for that to reside locally -- at each blog -- the way that comments and trackbacks do, now. It's great to be able to assert "this blog is about X, Y, and Z" in some way that allows people to find what they are looking for, but I remain concerned that all the raw data is contained within databases owned and operated by aggregators, such as Technorati. On the whole, though, I like the idea of being able to declare these assertions, and this service (if Technorati can ever solve its server load issues) looks very useful for the blogosphere.

I spoke with Lee Holz of the LA Times last week, and he wrote a story -- Camera Phones Give Flashers Unexpected Exposure -- about the Thao Nguyen subway wanker. Good summary of the whole affair to date. [tags: sousveillance, friendly_chic407, thao+nguyen], lee+holz, swarms, moblogging

I have been using the ClustrMaps application for just over a month, and I find that the distribution of readership for Get Real (see here) fascinating. I guess I expect to see North America and Europe -- because I personally know readers there -- but seeing the traces of people from Africa, Asia, and South America always surprises me, and reminds me what a global village we are part of. I am also amazed at what I think must be a local spike -- 60K+ readers since 24 August.

I got the chance to see what the Feedburner pro account yeilds in the way of stats. I am happy to see that Get Real's RSS subscriptions are growing, slowly, now about 612. But perhaps more interesting is finding out exactly what people are reading, and clicking through to.

It is no surprise that recent posts on Google Talk take top honors, but the level of interest around the Podcast Hotel mess was surprising. I would have imagined that longer, in depth posts -- like the one on Jeteye -- would be more widely read, but I don't know exactly what the thinking process is. Over time, I am looking to gaining a better understanding of reader behavior from monitoring the Feedburner stats.

I also learned about the beta of Mint -- a new blog stat tool -- that is ongoing. Sounds like a very interesting project:

Mike Davidson

Repeat referrers — the single most useful web stat

As a previous user of both Shortstat and Refer 2.0, I get great value from perusing my list of referring URLs. For the uninitiated, this is a list of all the URLs on the web which people are clicking on to get to your site. Did MSNBC just link to a blog post of yours? Bam, it’s in the referrer list. Is Metafilter sending over morons to your latest iPod contest only to have them suggest “Google.com” as a potential “greatest site you’ve never seen”? It’s in the referrer list. Or is some 16 year old kid spouting off about something he knows nothing about and then referencing you as an example? Again, it’s in the referrer list.

Anyone who can hook me up with access to the beta? Anyone know Mint's developer, Shaun Inman?

Tom Coates at Plasticbag.org has a great post describing how the BBC are "reinventing" radio. In a nutshell, the idea is to let people "bookmark" (timestamp, in fact) music using SMS on their cell phones as they hear it on the radio, perhaps adding tags to the bookmark, and subsequently login to a website to rate it.

The best way to describe it is to start off with some Principles for Effective Social Software that we developed as a result of working on the project. I'm not going to pretend that they cover everything, but they've proven very useful for us. We believe that for a piece of Social Software to be useful:

• Every individual should derive value from their contributions
• Every contribution should provide value to their peers as well
• The site or organisation that hosts the service should be able to derive value from the aggregate of the data and should be able to expose that value back to individuals

So this is how it works. Phonetags is about bookmarking songs you hear on the radio using your mobile phone. The way you use it is very simple. If you're listening to a radio network (initially BBC 6 Music) and you hear a song you'd like to make a note of, you pull out your mobile phone, type an 'X' into an SMS (remember: X marks the song) and send the text to a BBC short-code. Later when you come to the site, you type in your mobile number into the search box to see a list of all the songs that you've bookmarked...

Tom provides great screenshots, and discusses operational tags, which he calls "magic tags" (a term that I hope does not catch on), which *do something* as opposed to being just an assertion. For example, "*four" represents assigning the value of four stars to the tagged song in your personal profile, not just associating it with other songs tagged "*four."

Note: this is much like the example I outlined in Open Tags: Made For A Distributed World, where I denote a restaurant as being "4 out of 5". Because I was making an argument for an open tagging system -- one in which the author does not know what hypothetical or real taggregator services might be taking advantage of the tags at some point in the future, the "4 out of 5" model of rating is better, since it does not presume what the the rating scale is:

I believe, in the long run, the services will have to become smart enough to look at the tags and decide whether an entry is relevant. A restaurant review service like the idealized Dinnerbuzz could simply look for the "restaurant" tag, and rely on elements from the restaurant review domain -- cities, states, cuisines, "4 out of 5", and the like -- as markers. It might be smart enough to ignore the other tags -- "Cohiba Churchill" and "Gruet" for example -- that other services might pick up on.

In the case where a service has a 10 point ot 100 point scale, the "4 out of 5" can be normalized, where "*four" is hanging in space. The BBC system is yet another fascinating example of a closed tagging model for music -- like Last.fm -- and so "*four" is only meaningful there, where you know its a five star scale.

In the long run, the BBC project is a glimpse into the future of a socialized model of radio participation, leveraging cell phone mobility (don't tag music while driving, folks!). But, although Tom offers Priciples of Effective Social Software, he and the BBC are not dealing with the issue of who owns the metadata.

Tom Coates

We're getting in incredible metadata on music that we simply didn't have before - metadata and descriptive (emotive!) keywords that we can analyse and chop up and use as the basis for all kinds of other navigational systems. This is metadata that is often sorely lacking and could help us enormously in the future.

Yeah, well... except the metadata should be understood to be the property of the listeners, perhaps made open to the BBC, but actually should be held in trust. There is going to be a tug-of-war between media companies at their "audiences" which increasingly are going to become active participants in the crafting of media experience. As user's attention and social gestures increasingly form the social architecture that forms media experience users will want to control -- to own -- the elements of their social profiles that contribute to the greater good.

Tom makes the case as to why BBC and other media firms will want to tap into the social aquifer, the wellsprings of this future experience, but they don't really make the case for us handing over all that information to the BBC. I agree that radio needs to be reinvented, to be socialized (a la the personal radio station at Last.fm), but this is not that.

As the first comment states at Tom's post:

What do i get again? :) Sorry to be obtuse, but as a user what's the benefit to me? [posted by Stewart at August 30, 2005 01:05 AM]

In the final analysis, I agree that radio will need to be socialized, but I am not sure that a broadcast medium like conventional radio can make that jump. Certainly, the BBC or other broadcast media would like us to provide all those tags and ratings, but why would we hand over all that metadata to them, since it may not actually change our personal experience of the radio a bit? They can't fracture the broadcast into a gazillion streams, with those tagged "downtempo" finding their way to me. It just provides a "tagalicious" means for the BBC to profile their market, as opposed to a way to have a many-to-many communication setup.

I have upgraded my Last.fm account (last discussed here), so that various extended options are available for me, and you, to play with.

The baseline account includes the new journal -- blog -- posting capability, that I discussed last week. But now I have enabled the personal radio station capability, so you can tune into an Internet radio station playing what I listen to: lastfm://user/stoweboyd/personal. Note that this requires downloading the Last.fm player.

By the way, the folks at Last.fm tell me that RSS feeds are only a few weeks away. That means I will be able to pull my last.fm musings and other info and use them to paper the walls at other blogs. Nice!

A Flickr user, "friendly_chic407", posted a cell pic of a guy exposing himself on a NY subway car (see pervert081805 on Flickr - Photo Sharing! -- beware: shows his penis), and the story was picked up by Boing Boing, and then hit the papers.

The story could be just another day in the life, since life in the metropolis is full of annoying bullshit like this, but find the outpouring of emotions in the comments at the Flickr post amazing: ranging from outright skeptisicm of the validity of the picture, to those actively promoting this sort of odd (if not sick) sexual behavior, to feminist-tinged support for friendly_chic, to those clamoring for mob violence if and when the prep is ever found.

One of the real social impacts of sousveillance -- when we, as individuals, are actively monitoring what is going on around us -- is pushback: those who stand up will be smacked down. I am not taking a side on this specific case -- I don't have the chops to determine if the photo is real or not, or whether friendly_girl is just another victim of the insane crap going on or some sort of attention-starved phoney -- but I know that even if she is just a plain vanilla victim, all of these cultural archetypes will be dragged out of mothballs immediately. All the litany will be mustered -- "she must have sent the wrong signals", "she's a lesbian", "how do we know that it's not faked", and so on -- attempting to discredit the person making the claim.

[Update: In a New York Daily News story, friendly_chick reveals herself to be Thao Nguyen, a 22 year-old New Yorker, who said "I saw him massaging himself and then he unzipped and pulled it out. I thought, 'I can't believe he's doing this in the middle of the day!' " -- but it really wouldn't make a difference if it was after midnight, would it?]

[Update: The perp may have been found.]

I got the chance to demo a new take on search two weeks ago. Jeteye has released a solution that actually makes search results persistent shared spaces, called Jetpaks. Jetpaks are hosted by the company, and can be shared with the world or with a specific group of people.

When you enter a search term into Jeteye, it uses any of various search engines (like Google, Yahoo, and so on), but also searches against Jetpaks that you have access to. You can also create new Jetpaks based on these searches.

New links, tags, and commentary can be added over time by people with access to the Jetpak. So we can imagine -- given a bit more sophistication in the sorts of elements that can be added -- that a Jetpak can be a shared space, one element in distributed collaboration.

People can be 'invited' to the Jetpak via an integrated email invitation approach. Public access seems to also be implemented via simple URLs, as well as searching across public Jetpaks. Try searching for "stoweboyd" and you'll find several Jetpaks that Jeteye folks and I have created while fiddling with the technology.

Jeteye represents the fusion of search and bookmarking, providing a single toolset for adding links to existing Jetpaks (a browser plugin) as well as a search capability (albeit piggybacked on the other search engines) to find new stuff. This fusion is inevitable -- which is why Technorati, del.icio.us, and other search-related applications will be sucked up by search engine companies. Likely end game for Jeteye, too, I expect.

In practice, I have encountered the usual beta glitches, and barriers to practical use. For example, I created a jetpak just for sharing with a small group of colleagues, and I wanted to include a link to a Basecamp project. Basecamp encodes URLs with 'https' -- secure HTTP -- and Jeteye barfed on the link. But even if it hadn't, Jeteye would need to then store the login and password for the Basecamp instance, for this to work. A likely scenario for effective sharing, but a snag at the moment. Also, I have trouble updating existing Jetpaks -- little things like editing tags -- and while it may be operator editor ("read the manual, dummy") the user interface is not all that intuitive at times.

Interesting to bump into technology that is directly implementing metaphors I have been using, like "tags define a shared space". Here, the metaphor is search as a shared space. In practice, we very commonly tell people to look something up on Google, then to do something once found. Now, we can collate a single web location with commentary, or collate a number of unintegrated bits of information together into a portfolio or dossier.

Once some more capabilities are added and the rough edges are smoothed off, Jeteye could potentially represent a radical alternative to conventional notions of collaboration. I could use a collection of very specialized tools for various things -- calendars here, spreadsheets here, project blog there -- and collate these along with web links, comments, and the like. Jeteye could become a meta-collaborative tool, sitting above more specialized systems, pulling the bits and pieces together, and creating a context for sharing those bits. Very cool stuff.

I have played with Google Talk a bit more, since first getting onto it yesterday, including downloading the PC native client on Virtual PC. Given my laptop set-up today -- no head mike, not even my iSight -- on the road, working out of hotel room, it's hard to judge sound quality on the push-to-talk feature, but it is clear that this is meant to be a direct competitor of Skype, the upstart that has roiled the instant messaging world with its meteoric growth in the past year.

I was also surprised that Talk is not integrated into Google Desktop, at least not on the current released version. This is the future, however. The plug-in architecture they've developed should make that a snap. A little more ambitious to tightly integrate instant messsaging -- presence, for example -- into other apps, like gmail. And that would make the gmail solution competitive on the enterprise front with Microsoft and IBM offerings, although they do need to create a small client for offline email. management.

What about Talk capabilities integrated into Orkut, and Blogger? Many, many integration opportunities. Nerdvana is on the way?

Obviously, I expect to see video in Talk before you can catch a breath.

I am unhappy that Google has opted to not roll out a Google Desktop app for Mac , but at least with the iChat Jabber integration, I can ride the Google Talk wave a little. I hope the Apple and Google folks figure out how to make the cross-talk work... hey, wait. It might be working already, and I just don't know. more to follow.

Since others are buzzing about the new Google instant messaging service ahead of tomorrow's planned release (like Om Malik and Niall Kennedy (who has created a how to)), I thought I would state that, yes, it is running the XMPP protocol (that is to say the Jabber protocol). I have tested it with iChat's Jabber capability. Anyone want to test, I am stowe.boyd@gmail.com on the talk.google.com server.

I have been predicting (begging?) for years that Google would come out with an instant messaging system -- although I had presumed it would be based on the Picasa Hello client they already own -- but jumping to Jabber is a really smart move. It sticks a thumb in the eye of AIM, MSN, and Yahoo -- the three market leaders with various closed networks. And it could represent exactly the sort of market destabilization necessary to end the stupid and painful fragmented world that those three have bequeathed us. I am going to get all my contacts to switch to Google Talk as soon as I can.

I have to presume they have embedded Talk functionality for the new Google Desktop tomorrow. I wonder how Nerdvana-like it is?

Although they are slugging it out in the "search" arena right now, the fight is spilling over into collaboration! Tomorrow Google will be announcing the Beta of Google Desktop 2, which takes search a bit further by recording what your interests are and having an intelligent agent that presents you with web pages, blogs, news stories, etc. that it thinks you might be interested in. This new version will have a sidebar for: e-mail, RSS, Atom news, weather, stocks, etc., a scratchpad, quick find, and integration into the Outlook toolbar. It will also extend the number of file types it can search so in can look in MSN Messenger Chats as well as networked file drives

I have always said where you have content you have interaction (collaboration).
Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Micorosoft are now set to duke it out in the IM arena. This new Google Talk application should be using both text and voice and will put Google directly in competition with Skype (as well as Microsoft and others who are going after Skypes 40 million users).

Other bloggers (Om Malik, http://gigaom.com) believe that Google is using the Jabber open-source IM engine, which would allow Google users to connect to other IM systems that currently work with Jabber (including: AOL, iChat, ICQ). At the same time Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL are all upgrading their IM systems to add VoIP features.

Google is rumored to be thinking about another $4B stock offering to help fuel this fight. It is my contention that Google should just use some of that money to buy Skype and put them in a much better place in the race against Microsoft and would add many millions of users to the cause!

What do you think about all of this?

It had to happen sooner or later… although Microsoft Project has 70+% of the market, someone had to make a Java-based version of MS Project. Well Marc O’Brien, who has had about 20 years in the project management space, and is now the CEO of Projity (Foster City) has not only done a completley new Project Management (PM) tool in Java, but has taken it a step further.

If you are familiar with the offerings from MS Project, the Standard version has fewer features and it is generally the MS Project Professional that is used a lot. Called “Project-On-Demand (POD)” this new tool will initially be offered in October as a service with a starting price tentatively set at only $39.99/month/user. Wisley, O’Brien is focused on SMBs and not the Fortune 1000, which is a better market for hosted tools anyway.

Underneath the covers POD uses Postgres, but is DB independent, as well as browser independent (just have to have a JVM running), and the demo we had was in Firefox.

Marc has known me for a long time, since back in the days when he was CEO of WebProject (which got sold about 5 years ago), and know’s of my interest in how teams can use this type of PM tool (what we call DPM – distributed project management) tools. He has promised that there will be additional collaborative functionality added to this tool by year end, so stay tuned!

In the mean time POD had very impressive PM functionality and could even do WBS (work breakdown structures) and RBS (resource breakdown structures), which MS Project can’t do directly at this point (you have to go into Visio to do this). POD can even do sophisticated earned value analysis (Cost Performance Index, and Schedule performance Index) as well as the basic functions of importing and exporting MS Project files without inserting additional errors.

In the spirit of “he who has the most connections wins!” POD, with its open architecture, is integrating with a number of On-Demand solutions, and through XML are integrating with a number or ERP vendors like Intacct. But the overall philosophy and goals for development were: to make a replacement for MS Project that ran in Java; was Hosted (monthly subscription model); was available on every OS/browser; decreased some of the complexity inherent in MS Project; and was inexpensive enough so that it was a “no brainer” to try and quickly buy such an application.

Marc and his company have been in stealth mode for the last 2.5 years with teams in France and India helping to develop the prodigious functionality of the product, which should be familiar enough to anyone who has used MS Project. So familiar in fact, that no cross training is needed. Marc claims that it just takes an hour to get it up and running and most of that time is a project manager or administrator creating groups and permissions. It is worth checking out if your company is not already indentured to Microsoft at: www.projity.com, although the web site does not say all that much, more will be revealed in the next few weeks.

What do you think about a Java-based alternative to MS Project?

I finally had a chance to dig deeply into the new, dramatically enhanced Last.fm over the weekend. Jumping past the superficial -- the much improved user interface, and various software glitches of the past -- this version of Last.fm is almost a perfect example of what I have been preaching about social architecture:

1. People Are The Living, Breathing, Beating Heart Of The Universe -- the social elements of social applications are central, and the domain elements (in this case music) come second.
   
2. Artifacts Bind Us Together and Define Us -- the social "gestures" that we leave behind in our online searching -- comments, ratings, tags, and so on -- weaves the fabric that binds us together, and through which we make sense of the world.
   
3. Social Interaction Is Bottom Up, And So Is Everything Else -- successful social applications -- like Last.fm -- work because their orientation is bottom-up throughout. People's fuzzy tags, group formation, and music preferences drive the overall experience, not a single, centralized taxonomy and unified top ten hit parade model. (Big aside: exactly what is lacking in all the current top 100 or 500 blog lists, by the way.)
   
4. Social Stuff Absorbs and Trumps Domain Stuff -- it is our collective perceptions of and enjoyment of music that animates the endless catalog of artists, albums, and tracks that form the natural domain model of recorded music. It is through social interaction that we can learn something about a new artist, or new music by an old favorite. We are not on our own, wandering through the stacks: our view of the world of music, in this case, is shaped and informed by others.

The New Last.fm

The core coolness of Last.fm -- the automatic creation of a personal, virtual neighborhood of people with shared musical tastes, whose musical libraries you can browse, all based on a plug-in that pulls the sequence of tracks played from your iTunes -- is still central in the new Last.fm. But this has been extended in some very important ways:

Tagging -- Last.fm now includes a generalized tagging capability, so as you roam through the library of music -- your own and others -- you can attach arbitrary tags to artists, albums, and tracks. Given a tag, like jazzy, you can find music that others consider jazzy.

Many Flavors of Radio -- Last.fm formerly supported a variety of radio selections -- you could listen to a Stowe Boyd radio station, based on my favorites -- but now this has been extended in a variety of ways. One option, is to listen to music sharing a given tag: tag radio.

Blogging -- Last.fm now includes a well-integrated blogging capability, which provides basic blogging, but really tight integration with the natural schema of recorded music. When you want to make a post that references a specific artist, album, or track, the blog tool supports a/ checking that the thing referred to actually exists, or that you spelled it correctly, and b/ automatically creates the cross references in the social artifacts database.

Here, I have created a blog entry talking about the band Lali Puna, and specific tracks and albums they've made.

Later on, after this is posted, someone looking at the core artist information about Lali Puna will see that I have written about them.

In this way, Last.fm will support a rich, socialized experience for its users, with personal observations, listening behavior, tags, and implicit and explicit relationships with friends and those with similar musical tastes. These social elements are clearly the foreground for any serious user, after a short period of involvement. Those who wish to search through the natural, domain information can certainly do so, but that will rapidly lead the searcher to the social information: what people are writing about and thinking about the bands, music, and tracks that make up the shared space that defines Last.fm discourse.

Close

There is no doubt in my mind that Last.fm has all the lineaments of success as an advanced example of social architecture. Whether they will be a business success is a function of other factors. Clearly, the company has shifted its business model: it is trying to make money. They have partitioned a number of features -- like broadcasting a personalized radio station -- into an "upgraded" account, which costs $3/month.

And they have adopted the key mechanism of making money on social applications: integrated ecommerce. Anyone interested in Lali Puna, after reading my review, is offered the option to buy the album. However, this is only loosely coupled at the moment: you leave the context of Last.fm for the actual transaction. I feel that this will be replaced in the future by a much more integrated buying experience.

Also, aside from the status of being "upgraded", Last.fm hasn't pushed ahead into the notion of digital reputation. I can only imagine that, as soon as people start creating tags, blog posts, and comments, reputation will soon follow. Then we will see a closure in the authority and authenticity aspects of social relations.

There are some other niddling details, that I trust they will remedy quickly, like lack of RSS feed from the Last.fm blogs, and other content aggregation areas. I would like to know whenever my pal Gary Turner posts on his Last.fm blog, or when anyone posts something about Lali Puna, or whenever someone posts on the "downtempo" tag. I bet that will be coming soon.

All in all, this is a textbook example of the idea I had in mind when I posted the Starting From Scratch: Social Design Is Hard piece. Once they have built those missing bits, I have the in-depth case study I need for a comprehensive seminar on social architecture: coming soon, I hope!