Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?

Yesterday's Google I/O keynote highlighted the power of HTML 5 to match functionality long experienced in desktop applications. This morning, Google plans to announce an HTML 5-based application - still very much in the early stages of development - that represents a profound advance in the state of the art.

Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the original creators of Google Maps, will take the stage to unveil their latest project, Google Wave. As Lars describes it, "We set out to answer the question: What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?"

That is exactly the right question, and one that every developer should be asking him or herself. The world of computing has changed, profoundly, yet so many of our applications bear the burden of decades of old thinking. We need to challenge our assumptions and re-imagine the tools we take for granted. It's perhaps no accident that this project, carried out secretly at Google's Sydney office over the past two years, had the code name Walkabout. That's the Australian aboriginal tradition of going off for an extended period to retrace the songlines and learn the world anew.

In answering the question, Jens, Lars, and team re-imagined email and instant-messaging in a connected world, a world in which messages no longer need to be sent from one place to another, but could become a conversation in the cloud. Effectively, a message (a wave) is a shared communications space with elements drawn from email, instant messaging, social networking, and even wikis.

It turns out that Jens had the idea back in 2004, when Google first acquired the company that became Google Maps. As Lars tells the story:

We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps.

As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point....

We started with a set of tough questions:

• Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication — email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?
• Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?
• What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers' current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

Responding in Context

Let's say I want to communicate with someone. I start a wave, just as I might start an email message. The recipient(s) see an incoming wave, just as they see an email today. Where the magic starts is with replies. In email, you have the choice of including no context, only a portion of the message you're replying to, or the whole thing. In the first case, you need to go back to the original message for context; in the second, you have wasted copies going back and forth. Come into the middle of a long thread and you may be replying to a discussion that has already moved on or covered the point you want to express. But what if there were only one message, shared in the cloud? Now, your comment on the second paragraph is attached directly to that point in the conversation. There are no redundant copies of portions of the message, as replies are seen in context.

As you can see in the screenshot below (click to enlarge), a Wave inbox looks much like an email inbox. But look to the right, and you can see how the replies are embedded right into the middle of the original message, so Stephanie's question about what camera Jens used for his photos appears right in context.

Now, you might ask how well this works for long, complex messages rather than the short one shown in the demo. I don't know the answer, but I suspect that Wave will be even stronger in that case. Our experience with collaborative editing of book manuscripts at O'Reilly suggests that the amount and quality of participation goes up radically when comments can be interleaved at a paragraph level.

Is it a particle or a wave? It's both.

First generation email/IM integration let you see when someone was online, and opt to instant message someone rather than send them an email. Wave simply erases the distinction.

If both people are online at the same time, a wave acts just like an instant message -- except that you see each character as it is typed, just like in subethaedit. "In our experience, a lot of time in IM is spent waiting for the other person to press 'Done'," says Lars. (However, it is possible to set Wave to hold your messages till you are done.)

A key point here is that Google's relentless focus on reducing the latency of online actions is bringing the online experience closer and closer to our real world experience of face-to-face communication. When you're talking with someone, you know what someone is saying before they finish their sentence. You can respond, or even finish their sentence for them. So too with Wave.

The real-time connectedness of Wave is truly impressive. Drop photos onto a wave and see the thumbnails appear on the other person's machine before the photos are even finished uploading.

Step by step playback draws a cheer

Let's say you are added to a conversation (a wave) that has been going on for a long time? You can be added at any relevant point, not just the end. But even cooler, you can do a playback of the entire evolution of the conversation.

But wait: there's more! Let's say you want to edit your message (or even a message that was written by another participant in the wave). Yes, you can. The original author is notified, but every participant can see that the message has been modified, and if they want, can replay the changes.

This leads to a change in behavior: conversations become shared documents. The screenshot below shows a simple example, as Gregory and Casey collaborate to produce a good answer to Dan's question. As Stephanie Hannon, the product manager for Googe Wave, said to me, "In Wave, you don't have to make the choice between discussing and collaborating."

As anyone who's used version control knows, a document with lots of discussion and edits can become pretty messy. No problem. You can export an edited wave as a new wave, and start over. "One of our design principles," says Lars, "is that the product of a wave can be as important as the original wave."

Nor do you need to include everyone in every part of a conversation. Essentially, Lars, says, "waves are tree-shaped sets of messages. You can shape a subtree, or a sub-conversation and limit the set of participants in any way you like."

(continue reading)

Four short links: 28 May 2009

Mobile Viruses, Open Data, Twitter Bookmarks, Sexy Geek Skills

1. Viral Epidemics Poised to go Mobile -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else) modelled mobile phone virus epidemiology for NSF and concluded that (in accordance with experience) no single OS has critical mass for viruses to break-out. I wonder: will Android or iPhone reach that point first? (via ACM TechNews)
2. Socrata -- formerly "Blist", the first of what will undoubtedly be many startups "refocusing" attempting to profit from the new US administration's fondness for Web 2.0. The business model, however, is "we'll offer your data to citizens in a useful form" and it seems to me that this is a responsibility that Government should embrace rather than outsource. (via Jesse)
3. Tag This -- tweet @tagthis with a link and keywords to post the link as bookmark in your Delicious/Magnolia account.
4. Three Sexy Skills of Geeks -- statistics, data munging, and visualization. I'm reading Visualizing Data right now and expect the universe to bury me in bootie before the day is out. "Processing: it's cheaper than couple's therapy and you can post pictures of it on the Internet without being fired." (via mattb on Twitter)

New Geo For Devs From Google I/O

Today at Google I/O, Google has made several announcements for geo developers. To sum:

• Google is updating (not abandoning!) its Flash API, but it still prefers the Javascript one
• Google is pushing the Maps API into mobile (and performance is a big part of the push)
• Geolocation is going to be a part of every Google product eventually
• Android is being backed by deep pockets
• Google is preparing an army of Qualified Developers to bring more them more API customers.

More details are below. I chatted with Pamela Fox of the Google Geo team about the announcements.

Flash API with 3D - This upcoming release adds the ability to add a 3D perspective to Google's existing Flash Maps API. It's not a full blown implementation of the Google Earth API PLugin which provides Google Earth level 3D in the browser. Instead this release allows you to tilt the maps and play with perspective. The screenshot above shows how you can tilt the map on its canvas. As Pamela said during the demo "we hope it's useful when you need 3D, but the Google Earth's 3D is overkill." (paraphrased - she said it much better in the session)

Qualified Developer - Google has expanded their Qualified Developer program to include Maps. Very soon the team will be releasing a semi self-serve process for getting the Google seal of approval on your Google Geo API skills. The qualification process will be a test (in the process of being written), referrals, sample code and your participation in the developer forums. Your qualification status will help you stand out in the Google Solutions Marketplace.

Map API v3 - The Maps team also chose Google I/O as the place to launch the new version of their Javascript Maps API. The key improvement is in the performance area and a reduction in initial download size. The other big push was in the mobile arena. Both Chrome and iPhone Safari mobile are supported (Chrome still has some bugs though). They've also done an overhaul of the Geocoding API (good!) and enabled the default update of the mapping controls on third-party sites.

Client Location on Google Maps - At both Google I/O and Where 2.0 Google showed the ability to locate yourself when on Google Maps. By default it geolocates you by IP, but if you have Gears it will take advantage of Gear's Geolocation API. The feature will show up in the mapping controls as a blue dot. No word on when this feature will be released. I hope this feature eventually becomes available in the Maps API.

Android Developer Challenge V2 - Google has announced V2 of its Android Developer Contest. They'll be awarding prizes across multiple categories including geo-friendly ones like Travel and Productivity. The winners will be chosen mid-November.

Of these announcements I find the Qualified Developer program to be the most significant. By certifying developers Google will be enabling developer to get more Google more API customers. The program started last year with Gadgets Ads. Once they work the kinks out I am sure that this program will extend to every API that Google has and will be quite the moneymaker for the participating devs.

FCC discusses broadband: the job is a big one

Around the time I submitted a proposal on the White House's open government dialog site for local forums to implement high-speed networks, the FCC released a 77-page report (in PDF format) that casts some light on the proposal. Their report, titled "Bringing Broadband to Rural America: Report on a Rural Broadband Strategy," covers a huge range of ground (and retells a lot of standard stories, including the reasons for universal service in broadband and a history of public infrastructure efforts). Some of the impressions I got relevant to local forums are:

• Calls for cooperation between government and "community and local advocacy groups." These seemed to be defined as coalitions representing particular populations, such as minorities and the disabled. The report did not explicitly suggest, as my proposal does, that everyone within a relevant geographic area be invited to the table.
• A recognition that conditions in different areas vary widely. The FCC report mentions such conditions as population density, weather patterns, and income levels. Although fairly long, this section came nowhere near covering the complex collection of issues that communities have to take into account (my own proposal lists a few others). I believe that expert and local residents working together can iron out the needs of the community.
• An appeal for more information, particularly mapping. The report mentions a Congressional bill providing funding for that information. (This bill has been criticized, as mentioned in a comment to my previous posting on the local forum proposal.) But the task of accumulating the information needed to make cost-efficient network decisions is huge. To my mind, the task calls again for collaboration among residents.

  As an example of what residents could do, consider companies that provide data to web sites about response time and availability. To obtain this data, the companies have to visit the sites from many locations around the world; some companies have even contracted with ordinary Internet users to run these tests. Crowdsourcing can make everyone with an Internet connection a data provider.

The report suggests a number of policy changes that will facilitate network development. But it's clear that this country is very far from a plan that brings broadband to everyone. The job's too big; that's why I say communities have to take things into their own hands.

So check my proposal again. A few relevant paragraphs from the FCC report follow.

(pp. 29-31)

67 ...in order to be successful in coordinating existing federal programs concerning rural broadband or rural initiatives, it is critical that the federal government collaborate and coordinate with community and advocacy organizations in rural areas.

68 We know that community and local advocacy groups are an essential component to the success of deploying broadband in rural areas. Further, public-private partnerships can play a critical role in bringing broadband to rural areas. Community and advocacy groups and public-private partnerships can function as valuable information sources for local communities, businesses, and consumers in rural areas, and various groups have developed guidance on how to deploy broadband in those areas. For example, the Commonwealth of Virginia has produced an online "Community Broadband Tool-Kit" that provides step-by-step guidance on how a community can deploy broadband services. This tool-kit has information on broadband applications and case-studies from Virginia localities that have successfully deployed broadband facilities. Another group, called Connecting Rural Communities, publishes a guidebook that explains in detail how to bring broadband services to rural communities. The Michigan Department of Information Technology has released its own "Action Plan for Deploying Broadband Internet to Michigan Local Governments," which similarly details how developing goals is essential for building a broadband network.

69 The federal government should collaborate with these organizations and ones like them to fully understand the challenges in deploying broadband in rural areas and develop solutions that overcome those challenges. We suggest that the federal government continue to take a leadership role alongside individuals, groups, businesses and other governmental organizations seeking to fit together all the pieces needed to bring state-of-the-art broadband services to rural areas.

Google I/O keynote, day 1

Just one very quick note:

When Apple released the iPhone, I said that they had changed the game. Not because they had created the coolest, prettiest phone in history, but because had a phone with a real browser that suppported real HTML with real JavaScript. You can write cool apps in Cocoa, sure. But what's more important is that you can write cool web apps that really, really work; and when you can do that, you have apps that are accessible from any platform, including any phone that also has a real browser. Now you've moved a light-year ahead. Cool as native iPhone apps are, it's still very hard for me to get really excited about applications that only work on one on one particular platform--whether that's the iPhone, Windows, IE, Firefox, or whatever.

Google clearly gets this; they demo'd it, with apps running in browsers (including iPhone and Android browsers) that you'd never expect to see outside of a full-fledged desktop application. HTML 5 and JavaScript are enabling technologies. I'm still a little wary of GWT, though the idea of JavaScript as the web's assembly language (my term, not theirs) is appealing. But whether you write your JavaScript by hand or via GWT, being able to embed 2- and 3-d graphics, geolocation, databases, and threading directly into a web application--that's the end of one ballgame, and the start of a whole new one.

Google Web Elements and Google's Iceberg Strategy (Google I/O)

At Google I/O this morning, DeWitt Clinton announed Google Web Elements, a new simple interface layer to Google Ajax APIs. The goal is to make bringing Google features to other sites as easy as cut and paste. And indeed, the cut and paste functionality is impressive: Add news, custom search, conversations, maps and more to your site with only a few clicks. If the earlier HTML 5 announcements were for developers, these announcements are for everyone else. Any blogger can easily incorporate Google services.

No need to show this via screen shots. I can easily embed live widgets.

Here's a News widget, searching for news on Google I/O: There are two standard sizes, the one shown to the right (350x250), and one in "leaderboard" size (728x90). It would be nice to see user-configurable sizes. Though you can edit the provided HTML, Google does not do automatic size detection.

You can also embed Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. (Of course, you can do the same with slideshare and scribd - embedding is the new black.)

The search widget is shown below. It automatically knows to search the site it's placed on. No configuration needed. If you're an Adsense for search customer, you can include advertising. The widget below is live. Type in Google I/O to search radar.oreilly.com for posts relating to Google I/O.

Here's a "conversation element" - you can comment right here on the page rather than in the normal comments. And as a special bonus, I'm told that if you comment in another language, Google's automatic machine translation comes into play.

Elements like these embedded on other pages around the web are the underwater portion of what you might call Google's iceberg strategy: a great deal of their usage is not on their own site, and so not measured by Comscore and others who measure search market share. In his keynote, Vic Gundotra mentioned that Google is now supporting more than 4 BILLION API calls daily across more than 60 different APIs.

A backchannel conversation with one attendee suggests that search API traffic alone might well be larger than the next biggest search destination on the web. Another tidbit from the backchannel: the aforementioned Google language translation API is a sleeper hit, used worldwide for translation of user generated content.

Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O

"Never underestimate the web," says Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra in his keynote at Google I/O this morning. He goes on to tell the story of a meeting he remembers when he was VP of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft five years ago. "We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. There was this small company called Keyhole, which made this most fantastic geo-visualization software for Windows. This was the kind of software we always used to prove to ourselves that there were things that could never be done on the web." A few months later, Google acquired Keyhole, and shortly thereafter released Google Maps with satellite view.

"We knew then that the web had won," he said. "What was once thought impossible is now commonplace."

Google doesn't want to repeat that mistake, and as a result, he said, "we're betting big on HTML 5."

Vic pointed out that the rate of browser innovation is accelerating, with new browser releases nearly every other month. The slide below, from early in Vic's talk, shows the progress towards the level of UI functionality found in desktop apps through adoption of HTML 5 features in browsers. This looks like one of Clayton Christensen's classic "disruptive innovation vs sustaining innovation" graphs. It's also fascinating to see how mobile browsers are in the forefront of the innovation.

While the entire HTML 5 standard is years or more from adoption, there are many powerful features available in browsers today. In fact, five key next-generation features are already available in the latest (sometimes experimental) browser builds from Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Google Chrome. (Microsoft has announced that it will support HTML 5, and as Vic noted, "We eagerly await evidence of that.") Here's Vic's HTML 5 scorecard:

1. The canvas element provides a straightforward and powerful way to draw arbitrary graphics on a web page using Javascript. Sample applications demoed at the show include a simple drawing area and a simple game. But to see the real power of the Canvas element, take a look at Mozilla's BeSpin. Bespin is an extensible code editor with an interface so rich that it's hard to believe it was written entirely in Javascript and HTML.
2. The video element aims to make it as easy to embed video on a web page as it is to embed images today. No plugins, no mismatched codecs. See for example, this simple video editor running in Safari. And check out the page source for this YouTube demo. (As a special bonus, the video is demonstrating the power of O3D, an open source 3D rendering API for the browser.)

3. The geolocation APIs make location, whether generated via GPS, cell-tower triangulation or wi-fi databases (what Skyhook calls hybrid positioning) available to any HTML 5-compatible browser-based app. At the conference, Google shows off your current location to any Google map, and announces the availability of Google Latitude for the iPhone. (It will be available shortly after Apple releases OS 3.) What's really impressive about Latitude on the phone is that it's a web app, with all the platform independence that implies, not a platform-dependent phone application.

4. AppCache and Database make it easy to build offline apps. The killer demo is one that Vic first showed at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco a few months ago: offline gmail on an Android phone. But Vic also shows off a simple "stickies" app running in Safari.

   (I love the language that Vic uses: "You can even store the application itself offline and rehydrate it on demand.")

5. Web workers is a mechanism for spinning off background threads to do processing that would otherwise slow the browser to a crawl. For a convincing demo, take a look at a web page calculating primes without web workers. As the demo says, "Click 'Go!' to hose your browser." Then check out the version with web workers. Primes start appearing, with no hit to browser performance. Even more impressive is a demo of video motion tracking, using Javascript in the browser.

Michael showed how Palm's WebOS relies on HTML 5. "You as a developer don't need to leave your prior knowledge at the door to develop for the phone." He demonstrates the power of CSS transformations to provide UI effects; he shows how the calendar app is drawn with Canvas, how bookmarks and history are kept in an HTML 5 database. Michael emphasized the importance of standardization, but also suggested that we need new extensions to HTML 5, for example, to support events from the accelerometer in the phone. Palm has had to run out ahead of the standards in this area.

If you're like me, you had no idea there was so much HTML 5 already in play. When I checked in with my editors at O'Reilly, the general consensus was that HTML 5 isn't going to be ready till 2010. Sitepoint, another leading publisher on web technology, recently sent out a poll to their experts and came to the same conclusion. Yet Google, Mozilla, and Palm gave us all a big whack upside the head this morning. As Shakespeare said, "The hot blood leaps over the cold decree." The technology is here even if the standards committees haven't caught up. Developers are taking notice of these new features, and aren't waiting for formal approval. That's as it should be. As Dave Clark described the philosophy of the IETF with regard to internet standardization, "We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code."

Support by four major browsers adds up to "rough consensus" in my book. We're seeing running code at Google I/O, and I'd imagine the 4000 developers in attendance will soon be producing a lot more. So I think we're off to the races. As Vic said to me in an interview yesterday morning, "The web has not seen this level of transformation, this level of acceleration, in the past ten years."

Vic ends the HTML 5 portion of his keynote with hints of an announcement tomorrow: "Don't be late for the keynote tomorrow morning."

Additional Resources

Here is a convenient list of the HTML 5 demo apps shown in the keynote this morning. Be sure to look at the page source for each of the applications.

New developer features in Firefox 3.5

To learn more about these HTML 5 features, check out these tutorials from the Opera, Mozilla, Palm, and Google teams (plus a few others):

Canvas: HTML 5 Canvas: The Basics
Painting with HTML 5 Canvas

Video: A Call for Video on the Web
HTML 5 Video Examples

Geolocation: Track User Geolocation with Javascript

Web cache and database: Palm WebOS HTML 5 DataBase Storage
HTML 5 Features in Latest iPhone Applications
Gmail for Mobile: Using AppCache to Launch Offline

Web workers: Using DOM Workers

Four short links: 27 May 2009

Hacker Browser, Design and Engineering, Twitter Data, Fire Eagle Updater for OS X

1. uzbl -- lightweight WebKit-based web browser controlled with vim-like keystrokes, controllable through a FIFO for scripting, and all the "features" (bookmarking, history, changing URL) happen through external scripts. For the hardcore. (via joshua on delicious)
2. A Conversation With Eric Rodenbeck About Usefully Cool Design and Engineering (Jon Udell) -- if we could only distil Stamen down to their barest essence, we could make a fortune selling it on the black market ...
3. Twitter Data -- using Twitter as a conduit for messages that have semantic markup. My gut reaction is that I'd prefer pure JSON in the data tweets, because a hybrid gives you poor use of the limited bandwidth and there seems no strong reason to care about human readability. (via Ted Leung)
4. Clarke -- elegant OS X updater for Fire Eagle that uses Skyhook to determine your location.

Geeks Invade Government With Audacious Goals

Guest blogger Mark Drapeau is the Co-Chair of the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in Sept 2009 and the Gov 2.0 Expo in May 2010, both in Washington, DC. He holds the title of Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University, a professional military educational school run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mark is also co-founder of Government 2.0 Club, an international platform for sharing knowledge about the intersection between technology and governance.

When one thinks about important problems facing the United States, and indeed people all over the world, it is difficult to not come up with the laundry list that every talking head seemingly has on the tip of their tongue: jobs, education, health care, national security, poverty. There are so many problems to solve, with so many constraints on spending money, and such a short supply of manhours to get the job done. Many government employees spend a lot of time working on the issue or crisis of the day (or the hour) rather than thinking about long range planning and strategy.

This might be Alexander Hamilton's fault. One of the first things I was indoctrinated with after moving to Washington, D.C. was that the U.S. system of federal government was not designed to make good decisions; rather, it was designed to not make horrible ones. This is counterintuitive, perhaps, but mainly true. And this flies in the face of ideas about using technology to make government more efficient, mainly because the purpose and organization of government is quite different from that of business.

Nevertheless, more and more people from the private sector are interested in playing a role in government, thanks in no small part to the excitement surrounding the Obama election and inauguration, in which social media technologies and information sharing were showcased at their best - massive fundraising from many small donors, empowering people to self-organize locally, and direct public relations that circumvented a mainstream media lens. Now, people enamoured with emergent social technologies want to know how they themselves can revolutionize not only politics, but also governance.

For those who don't follow fashion trends in Washington, D.C., allow me to present the new and increasingly popular species of talking head - The Geek. (The Geek is distinguished from The Wonk, studious, preppy, bespectacled types that run Washington policy, know exactly what intersection Brooks Brothers is on, and enjoy cocktail parties for "networking," and The Nerd, the type of scientist or other fastidious pointy-head rarely seen outside a laboratory or professorial tower, with nary an interest outside their own peculiar and narrow slice of life.)

The prototypical Geek is a different breed of talking head, one that usually lacks media training, one that often hails from Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Austin, Boston, St. Paul, or Boulder, one who likely knows more about the inside of a computer than the average person does about the inside of their fridge, a well-read introvert shy in real life but outgoing on Twitter and in the blogosphere, who is erudite enough to have always felt there was a better way to run the government but feeling entirely disconnected from the apparatus.

No longer. When I speak about Government 2.0 to audiences around D.C. I am fond of telling them about the very smart and motivated outsiders (i.e., The Geeks) who think that they can run the government better than the government can. I enjoying dropping the line, "The government can no longer afford to work at the pace of government," because people never really know what to say in response as they mull it over. That statement is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and not entirely fair to hundreds of thousands of hard-working government employees; but of course, my role as a speaker is usually to provoke thought and get a point across, not to be fair. And gradually, through my efforts and those of many other Government 2.0 enthusiasts, people inside the Beltway are understanding that new ideas and new technologies can bridge gaps between government and the citizens (and that outsiders are starting to utilize such technologies whether the government gives permission or not).

(continue reading)

Last Chance: Submit a Talk for the Web 2.0 Expo

The next Web 2.0 Expo is this November 16-19 in New York City. It's our annual East-coast gathering for the web community. As always we'll have tracks and sessions for the product team (developers, ops, designers, project managers) and the business team (marketers, business development). The topics will cover mobile, ops, social media, government, geolocation, web development, RIAs, sales, VCs - just to name a few.

The CFP (Call For Participation) for the show closes this Friday. If you have something to share then submit your talk now. Last year we had over 5,000 attendees. Let us know if you have something to share with them. We are using the CFP to find speakers for 5 tracks of 12 fifty-minute sessions and 2 three-hour workshops. We'll be looking for both single-speaker sessions and panels. We will not be using it to find keynotes.

When writing your proposal keep the following in mind:

• Think about the attendee. What will the attendee learn? Wy should they care? How useful will it be to them now and in the future? Answer these questions in your submission.
• No product pitches. The attendees are not necessarily there to learn how to use your product. Instead tell them how you made your product or service and share the lessons you learned.
• Informative first, catchy second. Make sure that your title and proposal clearly state what you will be talking about and what the attendee will gain.
• Additional Reading and/or Viewing. A good submission will have a 2-3 paragraph description. If you've written more on the topic feel free to suggest some additional reading. If you haven't spoken at one of our events consider linking to a video of yourself speaking.
• DIY Submissions. Do submit your proposal yourself. Do not have a PR person submit it. To often we find that proposals submitted on behalf of someone who is unaware of the conference. It makes us wary of them.
• Always get in the system. Every conference chair gets a lot of emails asking to be a part of the event. If you're not in the system it's very easy to get lost in a folder.
• Check Examples. Look at last year's Expo sessions. Chances are we'll look for similar types of talks (though not the same ones).
• Pick a track. The Expo has five tracks. Our system allows you to select more than one. I strongly recommend that you NOT select more than two.

My co-chair Jen Pahlka has more advice on the Web 2.0 Expo Blog. We had over a thousand submissions for the San Francisco Web 2.0 Expo 2009. Hopefully, these suggestions will help you stand out.

Photo: Fred Wilson on stage by Duncan Davidson

Four short links: 26 May 2009

Databases, Sensors, Visualization, and Patents

1. Flare -- dynamically partitioning and reconstructing key-value server. Currently built on Tokyo Cabinet, but backend is theoretically pluggable. (via joshua on delicious)
2. Implantable Device Offers Continuous Cancer Monitoring -- the sensor network begins to extend into our bodies. The cylindrical, 5-millimeter implant contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies specific to the target molecules. Target molecules enter the implant through a semipermeable membrane, bind to the particles and cause them to clump together. That clumping can be detected by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The device is made of a polymer called polyethylene, which is commonly used in orthopedic implants. The semipermeable membrane, which allows target molecules to enter but keeps the magnetic nanoparticles trapped inside, is made of polycarbonate, a compound used in many plastics. (via FreakLabs)
3. Visualizing Data source -- the source code to examples in Visualizing Data.
4. The First Software Patent (Wired) -- was issued on this day in 1981, for a complex full-text storage and retrieval system. Tellingly, business strategy of the owner of the first software patent was ... to become a patent lawyer. A day that will linger in irritation, if not live in infamy. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

The Myth of Macroinnovation

An idea is making the rounds and appearing in articles like this New York Times piece, and it goes roughly thus: the age of the small inventor is over because to work on stuff that matters requires the largescale coordination of people and materiel that only governments and large corporations can provide. This notion that we're entering a Golden Age of Macroinnovation is bunkum, I'm happy to report.

Scale matters, scale has always mattered, but scaling is not innovating. It's true that there are many opportunities for businesses and governments to do big things. That's always true—all my friends who worked at Yahoo! and Microsoft said one of the attractions was the ability to write code that would be used by hundreds of millions of people. However, the article basically says, "large institutions are tackling large problems." That's wonderful news, much better than large institutions ignoring large problems, but has nothing to do with innovation.

Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps scaling is a form of innovation. Innovation is characterised by disruption and the unknown. Think of those governments and large corporations and ask yourself: are these the birthplaces of radical thinking, new ways of getting things done, and risk-taking leaps into the unknown? Of course not. Governments are the most risk-averse institutions in the world, more so than medicine where lives hang in the balance—doctors at least listen to evidence, whereas the definition of bureaucracy is "we follow the rules regardless of reality". Governments exist to preserve the status quo that elected them, not disrupt it.

Don't go hoping for a change in government's risk aversion any time soon. Every penny is spent knowing that to fail means to be vilified for "squandering public money". Doing something new risks failure. Like a puppy that has been harshly house-broken, Government associates failure with pain and so responds with fear, hostility, and concealment. With that mindset you can never learn from failure, and so unless you luckily get it right first time you'll find your Government road to delivering something new to be harsh, difficult, and largely untrodden.

Do you think things are different now? Consider Obama's billions on health record rollout. KP have a model EHR system, "KP HealthConnect". It cost $4B and took five years to buy and roll it out. This is KP's second go at it: in 2002 they wrote off $770M they'd spent with IBM trying to build their own EHR system. Do you think that the Obama Administration will get a second chance if his first attempt at EHRs loses $770M?

Big businesses aren't much different: a large company is a small Government that has more flexibility on HR. The profit focus of a business is a help and a hindrance as Innovator's Dilemma so clearly showed. The NY Times piece quotes Clayton Christensen saying, "The good news is that, once they recognize the benefits of disruptive thinking, the big companies have all the resources necessary to induce change.”

My experience with large companies and governments shows me that it is not a simple or trivial matter to recognize the benefits or marshal the resources. A common failure mode is where the leadership say they want disruption and innovation, the grass roots want it, but the middle management tiers aren't incentivised to deliver it because their bonuses are tied to metrics on existing product lines. Disruption eats into existing businesses. "Maximizing Shareholder Value" is a wonderful focusing device but, without an explicit timeframe for that value, innovation risks shareholder lawsuits for sabotaging profitability.

In his delicious.com comment on the NY Times piece, Michal Migurski observed, "New New Deal is at heart a massive, all-fronts realignment—where's the role for the small and the nimble in this universe?". It is premature to declare Mission Accomplished for reinvention of Government (see the Government 1.5 meme). At its heart, this is an attempt to get Government to use the Web 2.0 tools we built in the last decade ... tools that were largely the product of one or two people. I don't see bureaucrats using decade-old tools as an "innovation" that the small and nimble have to worry about.

I love that governments, NGOs, businesses, and citizens are going to be tackling large and meaningful problems with the aid of the tools and techniques developed by researchers, entrepreneurs, and hackers around the world. But to mistake using those techniques for inventing them is to ignore that great lesson of Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

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