Rohan Jayasekera's Thoughts on Web 2.0

How Microsoft is quietly leaving its past behind

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:53:00 +0000

Since starting my new job over three months ago, I’ve been too busy to write anything here. I’m not complaining; I’m really happy to have this job and the opportunity it gives me to make “computing” better for people at large. Thanks to Canada Day’s being on a Tuesday this year, I and many of my colleagues are taking Monday as a vacation day to create a four-day weekend, so here I am, writing again.

I put “computing” in quotes because these days it’s harder than ever to know what to call it. I like that people often use phrases like “being on the Internet” and “going online”. Sure, you can use a computer without being connected to anything or anyone else, but the range of what you can do is so much more limited.

I sometimes talk about “personal computing” as a period of temporary insanity. (Apparently I haven’t written that in a blog post before now, although I did write it a couple of years ago in reply to a comment here.) We’re recovering from it now, and I find Microsoft’s way of dealing with the shift to be quite fascinating. Microsoft stands to lose more than anyone else, but isn’t silly enough to pretend that that things aren’t changing. Its response, Live Mesh, takes Microsoft into the new era, but in an old-fashioned way. Let me explain what I mean...

There doesn’t seem to be a generally accepted term for the emerging new way of using computers. Out there in “the cloud” of the Internet there are servers that have all kinds of applications, data, storage space, you name it. Meanwhile people use various devices, such as PCs and cellphones, that can connect to the Internet and therefore to all those services as well as to each other. What is now available to us is the powerful combination of all of these elements working together.

The advent of PCs is why Microsoft was founded, and selling software to run on those PCs is still how it largely makes its money. As things evolve, however, the need for that software is disappearing: using a PC operating system other than Windows no longer causes much difficulty to the user (I now use Mac OS at work, and not long ago I wouldn’t have been willing to), and even though I have Microsoft Office at both home and work I rarely use it any more since I’d rather use server-based systems such as wikis. To me, a device is just a way of getting at my “stuff” – which I really don’t want to be stored on a device that might get lost or stolen, or whose hard drive might (will, someday) fail, or might get screwed up by the actions of its owner (me) or by all those software updates that I don’t understand and just hope will work as they’re supposed to.

UPDATE: Somehow I forgot to mention this when I wrote this post yesterday: the other problem with being device-centric is that a lot of things aren’t generated by you on your devices. Like all the emails that people send you! And the instant messages, and all the news you read on the Web, etc., etc.

Well, the way that Microsoft describes Live Mesh is very device-centric, and the word “mesh” seems that way to me as well, even though as far as I can tell it is a comprehensive system that could be a solid platform for the future. “Devices are how we interact in this new ‘web connected’ world”, says the Introducing Live Mesh blog post; “however, ... it becomes increasingly difficult to keep the people, information and applications we depend on in sync”. The result is a focus on synchronizing devices with each other. But how is this actually done? By synchronizing them with “folders” – that happen to be stored on a server, not on any of your devices. In fact, “Live Desktop enables you to easily access your mesh anytime, anywhere, using only a Web browser.” You don’t actually need to use any of your own devices; any Web browser anywhere will do.

Even at Microsoft, the device is becoming just an access point to where things really live, out there in the cloud. It’s just that Microsoft doesn’t want to admit it.

Putting my income where my mouth is

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:38:00 +0000

As I blogged a few months ago, I recommend that you store your email not on your own desktop/laptop computer, but rather on a server that you can access over the Internet, and that if you prefer to do your email using an email program (like Outlook Express or Apple Mail or Thunderbird) rather than through a Web browser, you should use IMAP on an email service that supports it.

Well, on Monday I started working at Tucows as Director, Tucows Email Service.

Some of you may remember Tucows as the original software download site on the Internet; I used it as far back as 1994. Today, Tucows the company still runs that site but also does a number of other things. Its largest business is now to provide services for resale by over 7,000 ISPs and web hosting companies. The largest reseller service is domain registration; Tucows is actually one of the world’s largest domain registrars! Also in the area of domains is SSL certificates: your website will need one of those if it’s going to provide https:// access, e.g. if people can buy things by giving a credit-card number.

Then there’s the Tucows Email Service, which is my main focus. ISPs and web hosting companies need to provide email to their customers, but doing it themselves means having to keep an email system working reliably around the clock, with spam filtering and antivirus protection. The most recent Email Metrics Report from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, of which Tucows is a supporting member, showed 86.7% of all email as “abusive”, meaning spam. You may think that the spam that’s directed at you largely gets diverted to your spam folder, but you’re not even seeing the additional email that is so obviously junk that it doesn’t even get put in your spam folder! The spammers are always coming up with new tricks, and the total challenge of running an email service well means that it’s an activity best left to those who specialize in it. Even Bell Sympatico, Canada’s largest ISP (I co-founded Sympatico back in 1995), which had a perfectly decent email system, upon forming a partnership agreement with Microsoft chose to migrate to a Microsoft-hosted email system for the future. So the Tucows Email Service is an excellent way for ISPs and web hosting companies to provide quality email to their customers, complete with 99.99% uptime guarantee. So far it has resellers on three continents; I’d aim for all seven except that I don’t think Antarctica has an Internet industry.

My other focus is the fairly new Personal Names Service, a unique offering that’s built on top of the Tucows Email Service and also makes use of Tucows’ specialty in domains. Suppose your name is Yvonne Desjardins and you have a typical email address like (slightly misspelled to foil spammers) yvonne.desiardins@sympatico.ca or yvonned@hotnail.com. What if your ISP contacts you and tells you that you can have yvonne@desjardins.net for a small fee per year? You might well be interested. That’s what the Personal Names Service does, via its collection of about 40,000 domains such as desjardins.net. (It doesn’t own anything for the surname Jayasekera – I guess my surname isn’t all that popular in certain countries!)

One of the interesting opportunities here is to make Web-based email access even better than using an email program installed on your computer. Webmail always used to be the ghetto version of email; you’d use it only because your email service was free and accessible only though webmail (and not very nice webmail either), or because you didn’t have your computer with you. Gmail was the first large-scale email system that aimed to provide a high-quality web interface, but as much as I admire what they’ve done, the fact is that I’ve never used my Gmail account very much. As I wrote in that earlier post, I’ve always preferred to use an email program, so if even I can be converted to preferring webmail that will be a good sign.

I’m very excited about this new job. When I first used email about 35 years ago, it was much better than it is now: if I sent an email, I could be sure that it would reach its recipients (unless they were avoiding their email of course!), and there was nothing annoying about email either. Plus I could retract emails that I had already sent. Now, email is more important than ever, but it’s deteriorated. I will do what I can to help make email great again.

Mozilla Prism

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:10:00 +0000

In my last post I talked about how you can now properly access Gmail not only through its Web interface but also through a PC-based email program like Outlook Express or Thunderbird.

That’s an example of where a server-based application is accessed other than through a Web page. In this vein I’d like to mention Prism, which was announced a few days ago by Mozilla Labs and works with the Firefox browser. Prism (formerly WebRunner) makes Web-based applications behave more like PC applications and less like Web pages. Here’s an example:

I use a Web-based to-do list system called Vitalist, and I use it frequently throughout the day. But with lots of browser windows/tabs open at the same time, I may have to hunt a bit to find the one that has Vitalist. Not any more. A few days ago I installed Prism and told it to create an application with name “Vitalist” and URL “http://my.vitalist.com/”. Now I have what seems to be a regular Windows application: there’s an icon on my desktop labelled Vitalist (I could also put it into the Windows Start menu if I wanted to, or the Quick Launch bar), and when I run it the taskbar shows “Vitalist” in the same way that it would show a traditional application like Outlook Express, completely separately from any regular browser windows I may have. I can navigate to it in the same way I would any other Windows application. Furthermore, the window doesn’t waste space with browser buttons like Back and Forward, nor with a location bar, because with Prism those are optional: it gave me checkboxes for them and I didn’t check those off. Although the window is actually a browser window, you’d never know it.

I’ve used Prism for a few days and although it’s an “early prototype” it works fine for me, and I love it. If you use any web-based applications a lot, like Gmail or Facebook, you may like it too.

So far it’s available only for Windows, but Mac OS and GNU/Linux versions should be available soon. More information, and a link to download it are at mozilla.com, specifically here.

One fewer reason to store data on your computer

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 05:07:00 +0000

In my post Online storage I wrote about why you shouldn’t store your data on your desktop/laptop computer, but instead store it on servers that you can access over the Internet.

That includes your email. Web-based email is popular, but what if (like me) you prefer to do your email through an email program (like Outlook Express or Thunderbird) than through a Web browser? Up to now you’ve usually had to download your email to your local computer, while (optionally) leaving your original copies on the server. While that works, unfortunately the communication goes only one way: when you read an email message through your email program it gets marked as “read” locally, but not on the server. Same for deleting messages and other things. And properly organizing the messages you send is usually a hassle.

There is a solution: it’s called IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) and is one way that an email program and a mail server can communicate. With IMAP everything is synchronized: whatever happens at one end gets reflected on the other. And the mail server is the “primary residence” of your email; you may have copies of various messages locally, for speed and for availability when you have no Internet connection, but IMAP meets my objective of storing your data on servers intended for that purpose.

IMAP isn’t new; in fact it’s older than the public Internet. But the popular free email services such as Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail and Gmail haven’t supported it, unfortunately.

This has now changed. Gmail has just added IMAP access as a new feature (though Google says it will take a few days to be rolled out to all Gmail users).

Since Gmail is so popular, its addition of IMAP means that a lot more people will no longer have any good reason to store their data on their local computer. The effect will be magnified if Gmail's competitors try to keep up by also adding IMAP.

Facebook as portal

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:13:00 +0000

I haven't posted for a while; too busy with work and things like InteractionCampToronto and the great mesh conference here in Toronto last week.

About three months ago I wrote about my experience with Facebook. My admiration has only grown with the addition of the Facebook Platform, and enormously so. It's been less than two weeks since it launched, yet my Facebook friends are busy finding apps to add. And when Facebook lets me know that a friend has added an app I haven't yet heard about, I always check it out to see whether it's of interest to me too. This is only the beginning of this new platform, a platform that while "new" is built on top of existing social networks, giving apps a better shot at viral spread and often eliminating critical-mass challenges.

I highly recommend a really great guest post on Techcrunch: The New Portals: It's the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter by David Sacks. It's about portals, and in particular talks a lot about Facebook as a new kind of portal. Even though I myself co-founded Canada's most popular portal, I largely lost interest in it a long time ago when the portal sphere started to stagnate, and later the advent of Web 2.0 massively changed the environment within which the very concept of a portal is applied. A good Web 2.0 portal doesn't have that much in common with a good Web 1.0 portal, and perhaps it's time to introduce a new term. "Portal 2.0" has been used to refer to personalized home pages like Netvibes and iGoogle, but to me that is too limiting: a portal is something that people use as a main jumping-off point to the Web, and Facebook now falls in that category. I invite suggestions for a new term in the comments.

Again, I highly recommend the post I linked to in the preceding paragraph.

Welcome to Web 2.0; wanna be my friend?

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sat, 05 May 2007 07:10:00 +0000

Unless you’re a complete hermit, you occasionally have to deal with strangers who want to befriend you for one reason only: so they can make money. Multi-level marketing is one source of that, but it’s been going on so long that you’ve likely developed an “is this multi-level marketing?” analyzer in your brain that starts up at the slightest hint and won’t stop until the question’s been answered to its satisfaction.

“Networking” is a more recent one, and unfortunately deciding between the good and the bad is often not so easy. In modern societies connections are much more fluid than in the past, and now that the era of the “permanent job” is ending, networking becomes an essential requirement for making a living. So networking isn’t so easily tuned out. (I’ve been a huge fan of Tom Peters for over 20 years, and it shook me to the core when I heard him say that everyone needed two skills and one of them was networking. I don’t even remember what the other one was, because it was something I decided I had and consequently didn’t need to worry about — but I knew that networking wasn’t my strong suit.)

Enter Web 2.0 and its “social networking”. In any social network, whether it’s a small interest group of people who like to knit scarves in the shape of a brontosaurus (“all brontosauruses are thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end”), or a huge ocean of pseudo-friendship like MySpace, the cost of reaching out to a fellow member is low. There have always been “joiners” who join every club they can find so they can meet more potential customers for insurance policies or whatever, but when meeting people requires actually going to a meeting it limits the amount of such activity. Online, reaching out promiscuously has little cost, and doing it in some quantity, perhaps even with a bit of personalization, is a trivial matter. Interest in email, a medium that’s largely meant to be person-to-person, is declining thanks partly to all the spam, and social networks similarly risk pollution levels that make the environment inhospitable. Women are at the forefront of this because of all the friend requests from men.

(I realize that there are many people who want as many online “friends” as they can get (“thanks for the add”). I’m not talking about them. I also think that their interest is a temporary phenomenon that will largely disappear once the novelty wears off and people realize that collecting 2000 “friends” is too easy to be worth any bragging rights.)

This post was prompted by a friend request I received from a fellow member of a social network who was looking to promote his new Web 2.0 venture. Not intrinsically a bad thing, but:
- he provided almost no information about what the product will do (“it has to be experienced”);
- all I can do now is to sign up to be included when the “alpha” starts up in future;
- he’s almost certainly never launched a product before (for instance, I’d be joining a beta, not an alpha); and
- it’s called Hypesphere. When hype is considered a good thing, count me out.

He’s not trying to get at my money, but he is trying to get at my time, and I only have so much. Request deleted.

Getting wikis filled in

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 23:53:00 +0000

“The Wiki field of dreams bothers me just because you build it doesn’t mean that people will do your boring content entry”
-Bryce Johnson (on Twitter)

I think you can build a wiki and get it populated, as long as you satisfy the following conditions:

Your wiki fills a need, one that’s not already filled. According to people who are in the wiki’s intended audience — not according to you or “management”.

The people who would use it include a high percentage of what I call analytical-retentive people, like computer geeks, librarians (hi, Connie), or policy wonks (hi, Mark).

You seed the wiki the way I’m about to talk about.

If you’re like most people, if you’re given a blank slate and are asked to put something on it, you’ll have a much harder time than if someone gives you a starting point that you can modify. Even an example of the kind of thing that’s desired constitutes such a starting point, e.g. if you’re asking someone for a description of a table and you want to know its height, materials, etc. you can give as an example a description of a bookcase that includes similar attributes. (Highly creative people do thrive on blank slates, but most people aren’t that creative, and furthermore the people you want populating your wiki are the ones who are more interested in knowing boring old facts than in being creative.)

If you just create a blank wiki, or have just minimal content in it, chances are high that nobody else will contribute anything. So you need to get the wiki started by creating a bunch of pages and putting something on each page.

That’s advice you’ll get from other people too, but I would add this: make those pages annoying. Annoying to people who are interested in the subject and are bothered by seeing it treated poorly, enough so that they’ll fix the problem. Analytical-retentive people are more bothered by flaws than other people, and furthermore are usually good at fixing them.

You can’t just create garbage as your starting point: you need to create something that’s going in the right direction, but is flawed. The better you know key people in your audience, the better a job you can do on this: ask yourself what kind of flaws would get those key people riled up and anxious to fix them. For example, if a wiki page is about how to use a Macintosh computer, you could seed it with some “information” that is obviously about Windows and is completely wrong for a Mac. This is where creativity can really come in handy: for seeding the wiki, not for populating it.

Misinformation is not the only way to seed with flawed content, but it can be an effective one. If you use misinformation, I recommend that your wiki be in a clearly stated beta mode until all the misinformation has been removed by users. (There is always the possibility that someone just removes misinformation without replacing it with something accurate, but it’s less likely to happen if you do your job well. There is an art to this.)

I’ve never seeded a new wiki by putting in provocative content, but I’ve successfully used the technique to seed individual pages in an existing wiki, and I find it powerful.

Net Neutrality

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:03:00 +0000

Most of the people advocating “Net Neutrality” seem to view high-speed Internet access as some kind of fundamental human right. I think such an ideological view is blinding them to the fact that Net Neutrality is not that simple an issue. I note also that most of them are pretty clueless about how the Internet actually operates, but like most politicians they feel perfectly capable of setting policy about something they know nothing about. There are different kinds of Net Neutrality, and my own position is that one kind is good while another is bad. I don’t propose to do a complete analysis here, but only to show a particular distinction that I think is very important.

The side of Net Neutrality I like is the one about not discriminating among destinations. If I place a VoIP call, my ISP should not be able to prevent my using Vonage (or to permit it only if I pay more) just because it has its own VoIP product. Such discrimination allows a carrier to take advantage of its near-monopoly situation in order to boost its other non-monopoly business, and should be prohibited. A non-Internet example: I subscribe to cable TV, and when the cable company, which also has media interests, bought a sports channel from another media company it decided to make it a “basic cable” offering that every cable customer would have to pay for, including people like me who never watch it. The cable company had never forced on its subscribers a longer established and much more popular sports channel that it did not own; this action was taken only when it benefitted the cable company’s media division. This is the kind of discrimination I would like to see prevented. If a carrier offers value-added services like VoIP, that’s fine with me, but it should not be permitted to discriminate between its own services and those of others.

The side of Net Neutrality that I’m not so keen on is the one relating to “traffic shaping”. Here the ISP gives lower priority to certain types of packets in order to keep the rest of the packets moving smartly. In particular, it gives lower priority to BitTorrent packets. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer system for distributing large files, and is very good at that: GNU/Linux distributions have been spread this way, for instance. Unfortunately, the vast majority of BitTorrent traffic consists of audio and video distributed illegally, such as movies recorded by a video camera smuggled into a movie theatre. Movie files are huge, and BitTorrent traffic now constitutes a large percentage of all Internet traffic. Net Neutrality advocates say that this traffic should get equal priority. I don’t agree. If my ISP uses traffic shaping to slow down BitTorrent, that’s just fine with me. Yes, that unfortunately slows down “legitimate” torrents as well, but I’d rather pay that price than have the entire Internet slow to a crawl.

Consider this: if we applied full Net Neutrality to email, everyone relaying email would be required to give spam as good treatment as other email. Now there’s a cause worth supporting!

Those of you who have been around for a while may remember Usenet newsgroups. They were very useful, until the flood of “newbies” in the late 90s swamped almost every newsgroup with entries from people who had little or no idea what they were doing. The result was that newsgroups were abandoned; I haven’t looked at them in years and my ISP doesn’t even carry them any more (though it’s arranged for free access via a third party for those few customers who still have any interest). A situation like this is called “the tragedy of the commons”, and if the Net Neutrality advocates get everything they’re asking for, that’s what we risk happening to the entire Internet. Any “commons” needs to be policed to prevent abuse, and right now only the ISPs can do that. If we were to take away that ability, the Net Neutrality advocates might achieve a Pyrrhic victory.

How dependent are you on Internet access?

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 05:27:00 +0000

A recent post by David Heinemeier Hansson in the 37signals blog complained that “the idea of offline web applications is getting an undue amount of attention”. (You can see the post here, but be warned that the title uses language that is “not used in polite society”.) That there are 203 comments, most disagreeing with DHH, shows that being able to use computers without having good Internet access is something many people consider important. 37signals makes products for people who have reliable and fast Internet connections and don’t necessarily need access when travelling, and many of the commenters accused the company of being out of touch with those who aren’t that lucky.

I think the situation is that the lucky ones constitute enough of a market that 37signals can be a viable company without having to worry about building applications that will run offline, something that would dramatically increase application complexity and cost. 37signals also knows that the connectivity situation will continue to improve. If it were a public company the shareholders might well have demanded that it make more money by building products for the markets it’s not currently addressing, but it’s not a public company. It can stick to what it does well, knowing that the future is on its side. For other software companies, building offline Web applications may well make sense.

If you’re one of those lucky ones, and if you’re reading this blog you probably are, I recommend that you stay that way: before you become dependent on any online-only applications, have some form of backup Internet access in place. In my case, for instance, if my DSL connection at home ever failed for any length of time I could use dialup instead (my Sympatico High Speed subscription includes dialup, with the first 10 hours/month free and additional hours cheap), and if the entire phone line ever failed I could go to a local Internet café. For businesses whose staff need to stay in one place, one option now available in many Canadian cities is wireless Internet service that uses pre-WiMax technology. For only $25/month, plus $100 to buy the modem, you can have a backup 128 kb/s Internet connection (or faster if you pay more monthly, up to 3 Mb/s for $60/month) that will still work even if neither phone line nor cable works. For most businesses that’s affordable insurance. Preferably, get your backup connection from a different carrier than your usual connection.

Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 20:46:00 +0000

So many companies are trying to be innovative, but they don’t seem to understand that reading a book about innovation and then copying the practices of the companies written about is not innovation. Copying is the opposite of innovation.

Marvin Minsky, pioneer in artificial intelligence, has said that AI is whatever hasn’t been invented yet. Maybe innovation is whatever hasn’t been written about yet.

How do you name yourself online?

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:55:00 +0000

On Wednesday I participated in a panels-in-the-round discussion entitled “New Social Formations in the Age of the NextWeb”, part of an event called CODE: Building the New Agora organized by Project Open Source | Open Access at the University of Toronto (unfortunately I hadn’t been able to make it to the other part, a lecture by Prof. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of Brown University). The discussion was very good; this post springs from one particular comment that was made.

That comment was that one characteristic of Web 1.0 was anonymity (“on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog”), while in Web 2.0 people tend to publicize all kinds of information about themselves. (I can’t remember who made this comment — it was in the corner of the room containing David Crow and Tom Purves among others — and I’d appreciate hearing from anyone else who was there so I can give proper credit. UPDATE: Michael Dila remembered that it was Tom Purves, and Tom has confirmed it in a comment below.)

So an increasingly important issue is this: how do you name yourself? There is “Identity 2.0”, but that’s for identifying yourself to a computer, which is not what I’m talking about. What name do you use so that people will know that the person being referred to is you?

If the context is clear, e.g. within a small group I’m part of, it’s usually sufficient for me to use the name “Rohan”, or in a larger group “Rohan Jayasekera” should be enough. And even across the entire Web I’ve made my mark sufficiently that I dominate search results. But there are two other people named Rohan Jayasekera who are far better known than I am globally, and even on the Web they have entries in Wikipedia and I don’t. I could call myself Rohan S. Jayasekera which would distinguish myself from them (because their middle initials don’t match mine), but even if that works now it may not in future — and I find it silly to call myself Rohan S. Jayasekera given that to pretty much everyone I deal with “Rohan Jayasekera” is perfectly adequate.

Some people use a nickname online, but getting one that’s unique in all contexts, yet reasonably memorable (e.g. the probably unique britneyfan8640hx538u isn’t memorable), is very difficult, since anything memorable across a population is likely to be used by other people too. I do pretty well with “felicopter” (feli- as in feline +helicopter = flying cat) and have claimed it in all popular places (felicopter.com/.net/.org, Yahoo ID, Gmail address, etc.) but I haven’t been fully successful: someone in France registered it on eBay, and it appears that someone (perhaps the same person) has it on Hotmail. A nickname can be useful if you use it consistently online and offline, especially if your name is something like John Smith.

If the human-rights activist Rohan Jayasekera, who writes a lot in print, decides to start blogging, that could be a problem for me.

"This time it's different"

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 20:40:00 +0000

“This time it’s different” is a phrase commonly used by financial conservatives and contrarians to mock those optimists who believe that the traditional rules of financial markets no longer apply. So what if certain patterns have held for centuries; “this time it’s different” because (insert reason here). For instance, we are told that deflation is now impossible in the USA because the Federal Reserve has learned from its mistakes of the 1930s. (People who I think are more astute on this issue believe that the Fed did not make any “mistakes” in the 1930s: it just did what was expected of it, and will continue to do so. After Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was roundly criticized for daring to raise concern about “irrational exuberance” in 1996, he backed off and never uttered the phrase again.)

“This time it’s different” has a much better chance of being true when it’s said with respect to something technologically driven, because technological change is permanent, unlike changes of government, of the latest thinking in business management, etc. The Industrial Revolution led to the advent of the “permanent job”, and the Information Revolution is leading to its demise.

But that doesn’t mean that a particular technological change will necessarily cause any particular result. During the dot-com boom, in my job as a “strategist” I disagreed with the company’s Chief Strategist in that he believed in the “New Economy” while I believed only in new businesses in an existing economy. (I told you so.)

Now I’m concerned about the number of people I know who again think that the old rules don’t apply any more. I’m pretty surprised by this because it hasn’t been all that long since the dot-com bubble burst. I do think that Web 2.0 is causing quantitative changes than lead to qualitative ones, e.g. when the barriers to entry for being a columnist on a particular subject are lowered by the advent of blogging, it may no longer be possible to make a living doing it. That does not mean that we are entering a Golden Age where human potential is fulfilled because we all work together on everything; it means dislocation and the survival of the fittest. And that’s nothing “different”.

Five things that make me part of Toronto's tech community

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 07:49:00 +0000

I’ve been tagged by Sandy Kemsley for five things that make me part of Toronto’s tech community. I’m only part of the info tech community, not biotech or anything else.

1. I’ve been working in technology in Toronto since 1984 (when I moved here). At first I worked for I.P. Sharp Associates (later acquired by Reuters), an online services company which had its own global Internet-like network. (As co-op students there in 1978, Doug Keenan and I developed a code library over email, IM and chat, since he was in Toronto and I was in Montréal; we never once spoke to each other because long-distance phone wasn’t cheap then. IM and chat are not recent concepts! And in 1979 I started tagging my emails; that's not a recent concept either.) Later, in 1989-1990 I worked with the first cellular data network available in Toronto. (It was the Mobitex system developed by Ericsson and operated in Canada by Rogers Wireless; I was an employee of their joint-venture company.) Later still, in 1995 I co-founded Sympatico, probably the world’s first easy-to-use Internet service. And later I was part of the dot-com boom and crash. I’ve done various other things too, but this is getting long and I’m still on Point 1.

2. I’m part of the TorCamp community that supports local info tech ventures.

3. I write this blog which helps in a (very) small way to link the Toronto info tech community with its counterparts elsewhere.

4. I’m always pushing to make technology usable by, and useful to, the masses. One way in which I do that is to build “products” that are easy to use, work reliably and predictably, etc. (I don’t build products for geeks.)

5. “There is no number 5”, which is the kind of joke that some tech people like.

Oh yeah, now I’m supposed to tag five others: Joey deVilla, Jay Goldman, Tom Purves, Matthew Burpee and Mira Jelic.

Toying with Web 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 19:44:00 +0000

Toronto toymaker Ganz (teddy bears, etc.) has a line of plush toys called Webkinz, which are apparently extremely popular (I don’t have kids and don’t know these things). I mention this here because today’s Globe and Mail says that “Ganz’s product is revolutionary: It’s the first real-world toy that’s essentially just a key to an interactive website.” Each “pet” gets its own room online, and as the Ganz website says, “Earn more Kinzcash to add on more rooms and yards, so pets can play outdoors.” Doesn’t this sound like Second Life? In this case you can’t use real currency to buy virtual currency directly. Instead you use it to buy more physical products: parents buy their kids additional Webkinz over time. In February, Webkinz.com had around 3 million unique visitors, which I find pretty impressive given that during the same month Facebook had around 17 million. Click here for the full story.

coComment: my endorsement

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:12:00 +0000

I don’t normally think about “Web 2.0 applications I couldn’t live without”, but if I did, the most obvious one would be coComment.

If you leave a comment on a blog post and don’t want to keep checking back for any further comments, such as a reply to you by the post’s author, coComment is your friend. It’s certainly mine. While I have the post and its current comments on my screen, I click my coComment bookmarklet, and in the window that pops up I click “Track this conversation”. Any further comments will automatically show up in my feed reader. (Of course you can use it even when you haven’t left a comment yourself and just want to see what others are saying. I’m just focusing on what I find to be coComment’s prime benefit.)

I’ve been using coComment for around a year and I’d hate to be without it. I don’t see any obvious source of revenue, so I hope the people behind it come up with one. (Co-creator Laurent Haug wrote in My SHiFT talk: the lessons of cocomment.com that “Put the ads day one”, but I see no ads now. I rarely go to the actual site so it wouldn’t surprise me if the ads weren’t doing the job and were dropped.) I’d certainly be willing to pay for the service.

Online storage, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 08:41:00 +0000

In my post Online storage I wrote about how your PC isn’t the best place to store your data. Here’s another reason. Yahoo! has just announced that, starting in May, Yahoo! Mail “will begin offering everyone unlimited email storage”. Including on their free email service.

Are you creative? Join the club

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 05:01:00 +0000

Startup investor Jeff Clavier mentions in his latest blog post that his most recent investment, online game site Kongregate.com, includes a game called The Fancy Pants Adventures which has been played over 150,000 times. (The site claims only 57,201 “gameplays”, so there may be different definitions at work. Either way, it seems like quite a few.) According to this Reuters story, the game’s author receives about $2 a day as his share of the site’s advertising revenues.

An author also gets up to $250 if his/her game gets a high rating by users during the week it first appears, and up to $1500 for a high rating during the month it first appears. So there is up to $1750 additional to be earned, but only one person can get that much during any month.

If you’re creative and you enjoy creating things that other people like, things that can be delivered over the Internet, opportunity is knocking. Enough money to live on isn’t. To make a living you need to find things that other people can’t or won’t do — and the Internet is reducing the number of activities that fall under “can’t”.

I’ve previously written about what I’m calling Deflation 2.0, but not in nearly three months so I hope I’m not boring you. I do think this shift is gigantic and I’m very concerned about its effects on many people’s livelihoods.

Reduced barriers to entry for ... narcissism!

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 19:40:00 +0000

Almost everyone I know is talking about Twitter. I think that’s because they’re trying to justify using it.

In early January, to try to figure out what all the fuss was about, I signed up and started reading friends’ “tweets”. This month, after the fuss increased, I started issuing tweets more often myself, to get more experience of the other side. It didn’t help me appreciate Twitter.

Tara Hunt says that “it is a terribly narcissistic mistake to believe that anyone gives a flying snake about what you ate for breakfast”, and sees tweets as “A legacy, if you will, of our lifetime. Something for our grandchildren to look back at and see how we lived.”

I think it is a terribly narcissistic mistake to believe that our grandchildren will be much more interested in what we had for breakfast than our friends are. They might take that sort of look back into history a few times in an entire lifetime. After all, they’ll be busy keeping up with their own friends’ tweets. (Won’t they?)

I see the current popularity of Twitter resulting from the confluence of two things: a reduced barrier to entry for narcissism on the part of those writing (blogging got us started, but a blog post takes a lot more time than a tweet), and a fear of social isolation on the part of those reading. To stay with the pack you have to pay attention and keep up. Because if you don’t, you’ll have to rely on your real friends for connection — and hope that they still have time left over for you after their Twitter friends.

I suppose a nicer spin on it would be to say that Twitter is about feeling connected. (Not to be confused with being connected.) Back in 1995 I gained insight into television from an article in Wired Magazine by Evan I. Schwartz:

... People watch television for an entirely different reason: to feel that they are part of something larger than their own lives. Why else would so many people know so much about characters in Cicily, Alaska, and the Melrose Place apartment complex without learning the names of their real neighbors? TV watchers seek out characters and stories with which to identify. It’s a deep psychological fix that can’t be explained in economic terms. They also turn it on for company, as background noise.

Twitter sounds a lot like that, and I don’t expect such needs to go away.

But what of the production side? Currently we are in an economic bubble, and at times like this narcissism is indulged. When the social mood turns down, I expect narcissism to become uncool, and take Twitter’s popularity with it.

Blogging infrequently is a feature, not a bug, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:47:00 +0000

In my earlier post Blogging infrequently is a feature, not a bug I said that I’m more likely to read blogs that have fewer posts. Well, I learned today that my blog-reader, Google Reader, actually added support for this in mid-December! From Google Reader - Common Questions:

8. How does auto-sort work?

When viewing all items, you can click "View settings" to choose a sorting order. Auto-sort works by prioritizing subscriptions with fewer items. This means that your friend's blog with an item a month will not be drowned out by higher volume sites such as the New York Times because we'll raise it to the top.

Auto-sort is a great idea, but unfortunately doesn’t work for me because it doesn’t take into account how important I consider each blog. I subscribe to 258 blogs but only read the “high importance” ones religiously, reading the medium-importance ones when I have time and the low-importance ones only rarely. I could of course prune out the low-importance ones, as many people do, but as my interests shift the importance of a blog can change, and I don’t want to lose the information about which posts I’ve read.

Perhaps the Google Reader people could make auto-sort more sophisticated by letting the user define the priority algorithm. Suppose that I’ve defined the tags “high” (for high-importance blogs) and “medium” (for medium-importance blogs), in addition to the two built-in tags of Starred items and Shared items. I could then be given a page that looked like this:
_ points for: Infrequent
_ points for: Starred items
_ points for: Shared items
_ points for: high
_ points for: medium

and I could enter numbers like this:
5 points for: Infrequent
0 points for: Starred items
0 points for: Shared items
5 points for: high
3 points for: medium

Then with auto-sort the posts that had the most points would be shown at the top, with both infrequency and importance taken into account.

Making feeds friendly, part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:47:00 +0000

In my earlier post Making feeds friendly I talked about, well, making feeds friendly. But what about people who don’t, and won’t, use feed readers, at least not yet?

There is an alternate way for people to get new blog posts: email. This mechanism has been around longer than feed readers, with services such as FeedBlitz and more recently FeedBurner making it easy for bloggers to offer this option to readers.

But how do you indicate this option on your blog? Now that one of the ways that feeds have been made more friendly is the advent of the orange “subscribe” button , I think there should be a similar “subscribe” button to subscribe by email. So a little while ago I created one, which looks like this , and although you can see it on this blog there is a much nicer-looking example on my other blog at www.rohansrants.com. Having two white-on-orange icons near each other suggests that there is some linkage between the two: you can subscribe, and here are two ways to do it.

If you have a blog, I encourage you to add a subscribe-by-email option if you haven’t already, and feel free to adopt my signage. (Also feel free to improve the image. For instance, the orange colour isn’t quite the same, and the corners should be chopped off.)

My one "complaint" about Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 17:21:00 +0000

About two months ago, a member of the TorCamp community (I’m not sure who it was) joined Facebook and invited other members to join as well. Who then issued their own invitations. Within a week or so, almost all the active TorCampers had not only joined Facebook but had started using it with a vengeance.

I was, and continue to be, very impressed by Facebook’s design. There are hardly any products/services whose design I have few complaints about. When the PalmPilot first appeared, that was one. (Too bad it hasn’t evolved — Treo keyboards aren’t integrated nicely into the built-in applications — but I suspect that the Apple iPhone will repeat the achievement.)

My only complaint has been that the “news feed” I see on Facebook’s home page, which lists all the things that have been taking place among my friends (person X was tagged in a photo album, person Y wrote something on someone else’s “wall”, persons Z and W are now friends) only lists the most recent such events, as many as will fit within its idea of maximum reasonable page length. Although you can customize the types of events you are informed of, and mark certain friends as more important or less important, I find that to make sure that I see all the events I want to see, before they disappear off the bottom of the page, I have to check Facebook at least twice a day. And not just at any old times, since the events are concentrated during the part of the day that my friends are typically awake. Couldn’t the people behind Facebook provide the “news feed” via RSS or Atom so that I wouldn’t have to worry about missing anything? What kind of “feed” isn’t available as a feed?

Well, they could, but this “missing feature” forces me to go to Facebook often — which I imagine suits Facebook’s creators just fine. They make money from advertising on the site, and from offering me the option of giving virtual gifts to other members — at a price. And once I’m there I can engage in whatever activities Facebook has, which helps keep my friends coming back to Facebook to drive revenue.

So it’s not a bug; it’s a feature — however annoying. But I must admit that I’m no longer really annoyed. Now I’ve gotten into the habit of checking Facebook frequently, and when I have the option (e.g. when I’m not working at a client’s site) I go there even more often than I “have to”. I have been assimilated.

As in so many online communities, some Facebook users could reasonably be called “addicted”. From this TechCrunch item (via Mark Kuznicki in TorCamp’s Skype chatroom):

A Goldman Sachs trader in the UK named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent, apparently, over 500 hours on Facebook in a six month period. That works out to about 4 hours per day.

Unwisely, perhaps, Charlie posted the warning email on his Facebook account, saying “It’s a measure of how warped I’ve become that, not only am I surprisingly proud of this, but in addition, the first thing I did was to post it here, and that losing my job worries me far less than losing facebook ever could.”

Web apps need to meet high standards

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 07:28:00 +0000

As Web-based applications hit the big time (e.g. the recent launch of Google Apps), the Wild West culture of Web 2.0 becomes unacceptable. Users who aren’t early adopters, whether they pay cash or pay by looking at ads, will expect these apps to work solidly. This means, for instance:

It is no longer acceptable for Blogger.com to be down frequently, whether because of technical problems (of which there are quite a variety) or because its maintainers have the gall to schedule maintenance during the middle of a business day in North America. It’s not as though owner Google Inc. lacks money. (So I need to set aside some time to migrate to WordPress.)
Omnidrive can’t just disable file synchronization for some users without even telling them that it’s done so — that’s central functionality! That such a key issue should be treated so cavalierly has lost my confidence in Omnidrive — and without confidence there’s no way I’ll let them store my data, even though I know they’re changing their approach so that this particular problem goes away. (So I’ll be looking at alternatives, such as Amazon S3 combined with a local client such as Jungle Disk. I hadn’t actually started to use Omnidrive anyway, other than to try it out.)

I think there is a good chance of one or more high-profile service failures this year, which in addition to causing considerable embarrassment to the affected providers will serve as a wake-up call to those providers who don’t yet take reliability seriously enough. And will make it harder for startups to gain customers when they’re in competition with trusted (justifiably or not) names like Google and Amazon.

Such failure(s) will also have various pundits proclaiming that this reveals a serious flaw in the whole idea of Web-based applications, even though they’ll be wrong. (You read it here first.)

Why Macs are more popular now

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 03:16:00 +0000

Last May I attended the mesh conference in Toronto, where Jay Goldman pointed out that of the large number of laptops in the audience, around 90% were Macs. He also remarked that it had been the same at the Toronto BarCamp held the preceding weekend, while at an Ottawa BarCamp he’d attended it was only around 10% Macs.

The Ottawa figure is easy to understand: most computer technology people in Ottawa (not telecom people) get most / all / a lot of their business from the federal government, and being “compatible” with the feds is good for business. The federal government is a Windows shop.

Most people who use Windows are looking for compatibility not with the Canadian federal government, but with desktop applications they might want to install and run, most of which are available for Windows but often not Mac OS.

What do Web 2.0 people need to be compatible with? Mostly the Web, of course. Yes, some desktop apps are needed (like a browser!) but such necessities tend to be available for both Windows and Mac OS (not always from the same vendors). So Web-oriented people have the freedom to use either Windows or Mac OS, or GNU/Linux for that matter. And their #1 choice is the Macintosh.

(There are additional reasons for most people to prefer Windows: they need people who can help them out when they have computer problems, and most of those people are familiar with Windows and not Mac OS. Also, Windows machines are priced lower than equivalent Macs. Neither of these is an issue for the Web 2.0 elites.)

As more people become Web-based and not OS-based, there is the potential for a large shift in popularity from Windows to Mac OS. Particularly now that buying a new Windows machine means getting the excessively-featured (as usual for Microsoft) Windows Vista. I may make the switch myself when I get my next laptop.

When the only computing jobs left are named Steve

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:46:00 +0000

In the late 1970s / early 1980s I worked my way through university on a co-op program. I worked for an online services company (which served the business market, since online services were far too expensive for consumer use at the time). One day my boss Walter Keirstead and I went to visit a prospective customer. This conversation ensued:

Walter: I see that you use computers here.
Customer: Yes; how can you tell?
Walter: Because you have such large wastebaskets.

I tell this story as an example of how while the computing industry was working hard to improve productivity it was also reducing it. A project to reduce labour down the road usually increased labour for a while. And it wasn’t all about eliminating people’s jobs; there were new products and services being created that weren’t practical, or often even possible, without automation.

I wonder whether this force is now slowing. With Web 2.0, and with the increasing decentralization of organizations, the focus in software is shifting from large monolithic applications intended to do everything imaginable to less ambitious apps that come off the shelf at a low price and don’t even need installation. And on the hardware side, Web 2.0 reverses the trend of building and wasting massive amounts of computer power: as in the 1970s, centralized servers that cover a variety of users can load-balance very effectively.

Building the public Internet does continue as a large project, but in the highly industrialized countries I find it remarkable how much of the job has already been accomplished — in less than ten years. Internet television still lies ahead, though, and perhaps that will be a rare bright spot.

What will happen when the process of automating jobs has largely been accomplished? What’s left then is the creation of new products and services — which requires customers who are looking to spend money, not cut costs. And then we are at the mercy of mass social mood as expressed in such things as “consumer confidence”.

Making feeds friendly

noreply@blogger.com (Rohan Jayasekera) — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 05:47:00 +0000

As usual I am appalled by the inability of the geek world to make its wares accessible to the masses. It’s bothered me for years that the terminology around feeds is so unhelpful.

I think the concept of feeds is perfectly understandable for most Internet users. Instead of having to keep checking back on a page to see whether it’s changed, and then having to figure out what part is new, you can “subscribe” (which is free) to its “newsfeed” (or “feed” for short). Then to read what’s new you use a “feed reader”, which shows you anything that’s new and nothing that isn’t. No more wasting time checking for news that isn’t there.

So why do people keep talking about “RSS”? What does that stand for? And what’s this “syndicate” stuff I see sometimes on blogs — is it dangerous? What’s an “aggregator”? What’s XML?

Yeah, well, that’s just us geeks. Never mind us. (Really. If you doubt me, let me just point out that “RSS feeds” sometimes don’t use RSS at all, but Atom instead. There.)

All people need to know is feed, subscribe (and the orange button that means “subscribe to feed”), and that they’ll need to use a feed reader (like Google Reader — yes, Google makes one, so they can quit worrying about whether this is a safe thing to do).

One variation: blog reader is often a useful synonym for feed reader: oh, you’re reading a bunch of blogs now? You should make life easier for yourself by using a blog reader. (Today, most people use a reader for blogs only, but I expect that to change as other kinds of useful feeds gain in popularity.) Reader is fine too.

If I’ve missed any terms that need to be included in the feed terminology for the masses, please comment below. Otherwise, this is my call to action to stick to just the terms that are in boldface above.