What Company Will Be the eHarmony of Microblogging?

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 0

A New York Times article by David Carr rehashing common knowledge on "why Twitter will endure" got me thinking about the ways in which it will not endure, or the ways in which it may endure via which no one will really care about it.

So, what does it mean to "endure"? To stay in business? So what - Lord and Taylor is still in business, but there are so many better stores if you ask me. L&T; is in big trouble in my opinion as it is getting killed on the low end by Target and other retailers, in the middle by Macy's, and on the high end by stores like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom.

RC Cola has endured. The company has a website and everything. It's owned by an entity called the Cott Corporation, now - I can hardly contain my excitement over that. We always think of Coke and Pepsi when we think of soft drinks, and maybe now we even think of carbonated things like Perrier or some sports drinks. But, still, RC Cola endures.

Classmates.com is still enduring - but when was the last time anyone cared? I'm still somewhat of fan of MySpace for connecting people, though certainly Facebook is better in its functional capacity. And LinkedIn has the business niche going on still. But no, Classmates.com endures. I'm proud of those guys. They're connecting people, one high school classmate I don't care about at a time.

So what does it mean to say that Twitter will endure?

"Endure" has a number of definitions: to undergo without giving in, to regard with tolerance, to continue in the same state, and to remain firm under misfortune without yielding. None of those sound very positive to me. I'm trying to imagine Bill Gates in an early Microsoft meeting with some guys around a table, giving a pitch about the future of the brand: "Thanks for coming, the title of this presentation is: MICROSOFT WILL ENDURE" - inspiring!

I'm not really interested in the question of whether "Twitter will endure" or not. They have $100 million from investors - unless they're burning wads of cash building a replacement for the space shuttle, they will endure for quite a while. So, we have an answer to a question that was borderline stupid to ask in the first place, certainly in a post-Ashton Kutcher post-Oprah twitterverse.

The real question is, what will the future of the microsharing ecosystem look like? The ecosystems of department stores, soft drinks, and social networks have changed drastically over differing time periods. Some businesses still endure in various forms, but there's only room at the top for one big one, one second place, and maybe a few niche players. Will Twitter be #1 or #2? Maybe, maybe not. No one knows.

It's interesting to think about microsharing in the framework of dating websites. Some dating websites try to be a catch-all, like Match.com does; it's a good site that has barely evolved since it started, and they try to appeal to everyone while simultaneously doing nothing special for hardly anyone. Marriage? Match.com Hookups? Match.com Newly divorced? Match.com Old? Young? Match.com

Match.com has about 15 million users last I checked. They will endure. But eHarmony (how can you escape the commericals?) has about 20 million. Why? They're hitting a more marriage-minded, wholesome-dating niche. (Chemistry.com is also in that niche, at about 5 million members.)

On the raunchier side of the equation, AdultFriendFinder.com has about 32 million users, roughly the size of Match and eHarmony combined. Wow.

In principle they will all endure. But who's making money, and who are people talking about the most, and which brands do people trust? I'm not sure I can answer that question for dating websites, but those are certainly the right questions.

So how does Twitter play into this? Well, Twitter is like the Match.com of microsharing - everything to everyone and nothing to no one. But who will be the eHarmony and AdultFriendFinder of microsharing?

It strikes me that while many articles have been written about Microsoft, Google, IBM, and others thinking and plotting about buying Twitter, that that's the wrong ultimate move. The real strong move is to create your own in a big niche that Twitter's ignoring. Take Microsoft for the sake of argument. They use the open source identi.ca (or similar) as a base for creating "microsharing for serious business people" and market it that way, as a free online service. I can see the commericals: "Twitter is for kids. MicroShare is for your business." That's the kind of thing my parents would react to.

On the flip side, why doesn't some edgy youth company like Abercrombie & Fitch or Guess or Forever 21 start a "skanky" version of Twitter for teens to meet other teens and hook up for burgers, drinks, and more? Make it no holds barred, fun, engaging. Maybe you can even pretend to be a vampire or something, and "bite" people you have a crush on. I don't know, whatever's cool these days. And it should be all neon colors or something rad.

Predictions? My guess (1) is that people would rather participate in large niche sites. And my guess (2) is that advertisers would rather advertise there because they know the audience a little better. And my guess (3) is that these niche microsharing sites would provide more relevant information when linked up with Google and Bing search results, and would provide more relevant trending topics and other features to users.

Twitter will probably endure. The question is, will you care?

The Google Android Rollout: Windows or Waterloo?

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 6

Watching Google's rollout of Android to date, including this week's announcements about the Google-branded, HTC-built Nexus One phone, I am left with two conflicting thoughts.

The first is that everyone I talk to within Google is supremely confident that the data they are looking at suggests that they are poised to win in the market.

The second is that I am confused. Relative to the 'battle' and 'war' analogy, what is the battle that Google is fighting, and what is the war that they expect to win?

After all, at this stage Android is not in the same league to WIN the potential iPhone buyer because, relative to iPhone, Android lacks on hardware design, developer tools, media libraries, apps momentum, and marketplace functionality.

Yet, based upon RIM's last quarter earnings report, it's not as though Android is taking market share from the Blackberry, either.

My best guess is that Google is REALLY going after the Nokia and Symbian ecosystem, which is fine and logical, as it represents a comparable structure in supporting a broad variety of device form-factors and a multi-carrier approach. Plus, it offers (relatively) easy pickings, as Nokia/Symbian has a dispirited developer base, making it low-hanging fruit.

The only paradox is that to win that audience you can't be competing with the handset guys (i.e., Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG) in either hard or soft form - i.e., by anointing a preferred device/partner or formally branding and marketing a Google device.

Why? Because a successful platform play demands clear delineation points between the areas where the platform creator is looking to the ecosystem to fill the gap (and, thus the platform provider won't compete with them); where they consider something proprietary to themselves, and thus won't allow a third-party to augment/swap out; and where it's more akin to 'co-opetition' (the platform creator will cooperate, but reserves the right to compete as well).

When You See the Fork in the Road, Take It

In Google's case, they have positioned themselves as the more open alternative to iPhone, and have been very vocal from the get-go (i.e., during the two years that they have been courting handset makers) that they are not getting into the hardware game.

In fact, just two months ago, Andy Rubin, VP of Engineering for Android at Google, scoffed at the notion that Google would "compete with its customers" by releasing its own phone.

"We're not making hardware," Rubin said. "We're enabling other people to build hardware."

Yet here we are, and it appears that Google is indeed materially changing the rules of the game by rolling out a Google-branded phone.

History suggests that when ecosystem partners conclude that the platform creator is competing with its own constituency or using built-in advantages unfairly, they will become less loyal and less dedicated to the platform.

In the Android market, the most likely way this manifests is handset makers more freely making product decisions that are at odds with the 'greater good' of a unified Android platform, thus accelerating the rate of Android platform fragmentation.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Apple has been a saint in how they've managed their relationships with developers. They haven't, and have been rightfully pilloried for their deafening silence and sometimes-capricious handling of the App Store approval process (in terms of their interaction with third-party developers).

The difference is that with Apple, the ecosystem is making real money, the universality of iPhone/iPod Touch App and Media distribution is compelling, and the monetization workflow is straightforward and just works, so Apple developers cope and deal. Besides, as a developer, you always prefer a unified platform to a more heterogeneous one, right?

Hence, the argument here is that Google watched the rate that the iPhone Platform is evolving and how rapidly consumer and developer mindshare continues to grow, and concluded that 'staying the course' was unpalatable, and decided to do something dramatic about it.

In other words, this move was dictated by what Apple is making happen in the market rather than any pure failing of Android. Nonetheless, it's a telling statement on what Google now believes is the quickest way to get the best possible Android phone out, a statement they appear willing to make even if it results in collateral damage to the Android ecosystem.

Call me a naysayer, as it's certainly contrary to conventional wisdom, but I believe that this move is an indication that Google has misread the market, and now faces a choice between a fragmented Android marketplace or abandoning the core precepts of Android (as an open, hardware vendor-neutral software platform play) in order to go toe-to-toe with Apple in areas that, I would note, Google hasn't proven to be strong at; namely, hardware design, user experience, and developer tools.

Framing this dilemma, MG Siegler of TechCrunch nicely captures one bit of fallout from the imminent Nexus One launch in his excellent piece, 'With Nexus One, Is Google Eating Its Own Dogfood or Its Own Children?':

Google is unveiling the Nexus One just two months (nearly to the day) after the Verizon Droid was released. The Droid, of course, was seen as the Android platform's Messiah by some, and the one phone that could maybe hold a candle to the iPhone. Sales have been good, and the general consensus is that the phone is a winner. But now, just two months later, we have a new Android phone that by just about every account is better than it. In fact, the only real upsides for the Droid over the Nexus One is that it runs on Verizon's network, and that it has a physical keyboard. The Verizon point is certainly a fair one - there's a reason why everyone is clamoring for a Verizon iPhone. But the physical keyboard argument seems moot, as the consensus is that the Droid keyboard is a pretty poor one.

I don't know about you, but I'd be pretty annoyed if I just shelled out my money for a Droid, and locked myself into a 2-year contract (even one with Verizon). It reminds me of when Apple first unveiled the iPhone for $599 then slashed the price just a few months later, leaving all the early-adopters bitter. Apple eventually gave a partial rebate to those buyers, but it still was a curious move. And Google's is arguably worse here, as it's not just about the money, but about the unveiling of a superior piece of hardware so quickly after it put a lot of its own marketing muscle behind the Droid, trying to convince customers that it was the Android phone to buy.

Mind you, this is the same company whose credo is "Do No Evil," and just a week ago delivered a somewhat sanctimonious, self-serving and much-derided manifesto on the Google definition of openness. Daring Fireball's John Gruber commentary was by far the richest: proclaiming, "It's the biggest pile of horseshit I've ever seen from Google."

Fair or unfair, when you emblazon yourself as being more open and less evil than everyone else, as Google has, you put a bit of a target on your back.

Somewhat paradoxically, Apple gets a free pass here, because with Apple, product positioning is all about the products and the user experience, and not about morals and openness.

Everything Old is New Again

The prevailing meme in assessing the battle between Google's Android and Apple's iPhone is that it's a redux of Microsoft Windows v. Apple Macintosh, with the premise being that the company with the broadest base of hardware OEM support will inevitably outflank and usurp the market position of the integrated and more proprietary hardware, software solution provider (read: Apple then and Apple now).

That chapter has yet to be written but I would submit that there is another chapter from tech history that bears re-reading: Novell v. Microsoft.

In 1994, Microsoft was rapidly moving into the driver's seat as the de facto leader of desktop/personal computing, yet many forget how utterly dominant Novell was.

In fact, at one point, 90% of the market for PC-based servers was under its control via its NetWare Network Operating System and surrounding ecosystem of hardware, software, integration and education/training partners.

At that point in time, it was not apocryphal to wonder whether the Network was poised to swallow up the Desktop, or vice versa, in much the same way we ruminate today on whether 'The Cloud' will swallow up Edge-Based computing.

But then something interesting happened. Novell's Ray Noorda, believing that its strategic position gave it a secure foothold from which to establish a beachhead in the desktop environment, opted to take Novell head-on into Microsoft's Office stronghold by rolling out a product suite that included WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, a one-time Excel competitor that had been acquired by Novell from Borland.

When the dust settled, not only had Novell lost the desktop battle badly, but in the process of focusing its forces to fight Microsoft on its home turf, Novell missed the disruptive power of the TCP/IP-based Internet (NetWare was built on a protocol stack known as IPX/SPX), and now, relatively speaking, nobody uses NetWare anymore.

Netting it out: rather than seeing this as a Microsoft v. Apple analog, maybe Google should view this as a Microsoft v. Novell analog, with Google sitting in the Novell position. Either way, the Mobile Wars are shaping up as the juiciest industry battle in years.

Related Posts:

1. Google Android: Inevitability, the Dawn of Mobile and the Missing Leg


2. Open "ish": The meaning of open, according to Google


3. iPhone, the 'Personal' Computer: The Future of the Mobile Web

Four short links: 5 January 2010

Computational Advertising, Timing Attacks, Climate Visualized, and Context Assembly

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Introduction to Computational Advertising -- slides to a Stanford class on a new "scientific discipline" whose central challenge is to find the best ad to present to a user engaged in a given context, such as querying a search engine ("sponsored search"), reading a web page ("content match"), watching a movie, and IM-ing. "Scientific discipline" makes me gag. You could devise algorithms, measure performance, and write papers about the best way to put carrots up your bottom or the best way to pick pockets, but those still aren't complex enough activities to be trumpeted as "new scientific disciplines". (Although I do look forward to reading Stanford's CBUM126, "Introduction to Carrot Stuffing" lecture notes online). (via Greg Linden)
2. Timing Attack in Google KeyCzar Library -- if you compare strings in the naive way, attackers can figure out whether the first bytes they gave you are correct based on the time the comparison takes. When they get the first bytes correct, then they can work on the next, and so on. This is a common mode of information leakage, and reminds me of my revelation when I began to edit security books: "this stuff is hard". New programmers are not taught to think like attackers, and the only trope of secure programming that they're taught is "avoid buffer overflows". (via Simon Willison)
3. Climate Wizard -- explore historical temperature data as well as the various climate models and see what their predictions look like across the United States. (via Sciblogs)
4. Contextual Clothing for Naked Transparency (Jon Udell) -- notable for this: The Net can be an engine for context assembly, a wonderful phrase I picked up years ago from Jack Ozzie. We used to think that the challenge of social software was to amass as many users as quickly as possible, but the far harder problem to solve is how to help those people contribute to something positive. YouTube comments shows that simply having a lot of users doesn't make something virtuous.

Working Together to Create a National Learning Community

by Linda Stone | comments: 5

When Jack Hidary told me about National Lab Day, I got chills. The tag line for National Lab Day is: A National Barn-Raising for Hands-On Learning. Using the internet and social computing technologies, with the support of the White House and the business and scientific communities, National Lab Day reaches out to the education community, providing a tool set that brings context, community, and passion to education, and that has the potential to transform our educational system into a true learning community.

How does this work exactly?

1. Teachers, scientists, organizations, and individual volunteers are invited to go to: National Lab Day 2. From there, follow the track that best identifies how you would like to contribute. Or, you can simply browse existing projects.

As you browse, you might come across the teacher in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, wanting to build a working model of a river watershed. Or, the Levittown, New York, teacher wanting help with a project on Superconductivity. You’ll find a teacher in Chicago, Illinois, working with students to design, build and test bridges, and seeking engineers and Department of Transportation contacts.

On the National Lab Day website, educators enter hands-on learning projects, listing the resources needed, both human and otherwise, that can bring these projects to life. Matchmaking services are available on the site to support these hands-on learning projects. The Radar and Make communities are a match made in heaven.

As National Lab Day scales, a national hands-on learning curriculum will begin to take shape.

Research shows that hands-on learning is powerful and effective. In the well-meaning efforts to create standards in education, context, creativity, and our natural inclinations to explore and play, have been replaced with mountains of homework and a curriculum that is unlikely to effectively prepare youth for the 21st century.

In schools, failure is stigmatized, emotionally disabling, and has become a label and a measure rather than part of a feedback system supporting iteration and exploration. The most productive scientists and inventors will tell you that they fail constantly, all day long. Each failure informs them, guides them toward a new direction, a new hunch, a new possibility. With hands-on learning, failure is iteration, in the spirit of how the most accomplished scientists and inventors work.

In the somewhat misguided efforts to “teacher proof” the educational system, we have lost what good teachers bring to the system: passion, curiosity, love of learning, and an ability to create a learning ecosystem in a classroom, a school and a community. Think about what touched you most in school. At a dinner discussing education with a number of Silicon Valley CEO’s, to a person, the most significant memories were those of passionate teachers as role models.

We don’t find our passions. They find us. Not through hours of homework and standardized tests; rather, through engagement, exploration and in context learning. According to Stuart Brown, MD, author of Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, highly successful people have a rich play life. Brown further suggests that play is a “biological necessity, contributing to the learning of emotional control, social competency, personal resiliency and continuing curiosity….(many) other life benefits accrue largely through rich developmentally appropriate play experiences.

An adult who has “lost” what was a playful youth and doesn’t play will demonstrate social, emotional and cognitive narrowing, be less able to handle stress, and often experience a smoldering depression.”

Brown talks about the value of recalling your play history. You can take time to do that here.

National Lab Day has the potential to revitalize a national learning community by offering an infrastructure to facilitate the spirit of play and exploration in our classrooms, schools and communities.

While there have been efforts in the past to encourage hands-on learning, the sheer scale of the consortium gathering around National Lab Day gives it the potential to have a profound transformational impact on education and learning. Respected scientific communities and organizations, including: ACS, IEEE, AAAS and 100+ other scientific societies will be promoting this effort to their members.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation have kicked in the capital to get the project going.

In addition to the White House, other key federal agencies have joined in, including: NASA, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

The National Science Teachers Association and the National Education Association are supporting this effort as are a growing number of companies, including Microsoft and Texas Instruments. O’Reilly and MAKE have contributed project guides to National Lab Day.

Please join in! Click on the links, join the movement, and lend your energy, skills, or resources to renew education and learning for the 21st century.

Skinner Box? There's an App for That

by Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill | comments: 11

If you are reading this post it means that after countless misfires, I finally kept my attention focused long enough to finish it. That may seem like no big deal, a mere trifling effort, but I'm basking in the moment. In fact, I'll probably tweet it.

It didn't start out to be about digital Skinner boxes. It was a Radar backchannel email about the infamous Web 2.0 Expo Twitterfall incident. I got all curmudgeonly and ranted about continuous partial attention, Twitter as a snark amplifier, and the "Ignite'ification" of conferences (with apologies to Brady). In short, I demonstrated myself unfit to contribute to a blog called Radar.

I swear I'm not a Luddite. I'm not moving to Florida to bitch about the government full time and I'm not in some remote shack banging this out on an ancient Underwood. However, I guess I count myself among the skeptics when it comes to the unmitigated goodness of progress. Or at least its distant cousin, trendiness.

Anyway, I sent the email, inexplicably Jesse said "post!", and I tried reworking it. I still am. This piece has been grinding away like sand in my cerebral gears since, and along the way it has become about something else.

In The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker describes writing poetry as the process of starting with a story and building a poem around it. I try to do that with photography and build pictures around narrative and metaphor. After the work takes shape the story is carved back out and what remains hints at the story's existence, like a smoke ring without the mouth.

He says it better: "If you listen to them, the stories and fragments of your stories you hear can sometimes slide right into your poem and twirl around in it. Then later you cut out the story and the poem has a mysterious feeling of charged emptiness, like the dog after the operation." Don't worry about the dog, it lived and it isn't relevant. My point is that this post isn't about the Twitterfall fail story, that was just a catalyst. The inchoate uneasiness still twirling around in here is what's left of it.

This all began with these lingering questions: "Why are we conference attendees paying good money, traveling long distances, and sitting for hours in chairs narrower than our shoulders only to stare at our laptops? Why do we go to all that trouble and then spend the time Twittering and wall posting on the overwhelmed conference wifi? Or, more specifically, why are we so fascinated with our own 140 character banalities pouring down the stage curtain that we ignore, or worse, mob up on, the speakers that drew us there in the first place?"

As I kept working away on what has become this overlong post, the question eventually turned into, "why the hell can't I finish this?" This has become the post about distraction that I've been too distracted to complete. It's also about ADHD and the digital skinner box that makes it worse, narcissism's mirror, network collectivism and the opt-in borg, and an entropic counter-argument for plugging in anyway. So, here goes...

(continue reading)

Four short links: 4 January 2010

Code for Speed, Wooden Locks, Font Design, and a Java Distributed Data Store

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Why Git Is So Fast -- interesting mailing list post about the problems that the JGit folks had when they tried to make their Java version of Git go faster. Higher level languages hide enough of the machine that we can't make all of these optimizations. A reminder that you must know and control the systems you're running on if you want to get great performance. (via Hacker News)
2. Wooden Combination Lock -- you'll easily understand how combination locks work with this find piece of crafty construction work.
3. From Moleskine to Market -- how a leading font designer designs fonts. Fascinating, and beautiful, and it makes me covet his skills.
4. Terrastore -- open source distributed document store, HTTP accessible, data and queries are distributed, built on Terracotta which is built on ehcache. A NoSQL database built on Java tools that serious Java developers respect, the first such one that I've noticed. Notice that all the interesting work going on in the NoSQL arena is happening in open source projects.

Airline Security and Proportional Response

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 13

I am flying to London this coming week on business. I have no idea if I will be able to use my laptop, emerge from my seat during the last hour of flight or be required to wear my underwear inside-out during the security check-in. Do I believe that any of these measures will contribute to passenger safety? No.

After the recent foiled airline bomb incident one thing seems clear; we are constantly retrofitting our security measures to defend ourselves against the last attack. Often these measures seem like what Bruce Schneier in a great CNN article calls "Security Theater".

"Security theater" refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.

What seems equally true is that the media has ginned up a national hysteria over the incident that leads much of the senseless government action. In the wake of blanket coverage officials are pushed to show a proportional response... the more hand-wringing the more actions need to be taken regardless of whether those actions have any salutary effect. Most of the criticism that I have seen has been leveled at politicians lacking leadership. Schneier concludes

The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we -- and our leaders -- need to react with indomitability, the kind of strength shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

Amen. And yet it isn't people around me that I see freaking out. It is the media, followed in lock-step by politicians. One has to wonder if the United States of 2010 is capable of the kind of leadership Schneier is asking for. Are our politicians capable of leading when they can obtain personal advantage in either fear-mongering or finger-pointing? Is the media capable of leading without the histrionics that sell ratings? I am flying to London this coming week but I won't feel any more secure - just a lot more inconvenienced.

Four short links: 1 January 2010

Fonty Inkness, Machine Learning, Time-Series Indexes, and Graph Analysis

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Measuring Type -- clever way to measure which font uses more ink.
2. Vowpal Wabbit -- fast learning software from Yahoo! Research and Hunch. Code available in git. (via zecharia on Delicious)
3. Literature Review on Indexing Time-Series Data -- a graduate student's research work included this literature review of papers on indexing time-series data. (via jpatanooga on Delicious)
4. igraph -- programming library for manipulating graph data, with the usual algorithms (minimum spanning tree, network flow, cliques, etc.) available in R, Python, and C.

Commerce and the Wealth of Nations

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 19

I was struck the other day by an article in the New York Times that describes the different approaches of the US and China to Afghanistan, in which the US shoulders the burden of war, while China reaps the benefits of commerce. Quoting from the article, I tweeted: "American troops help make Afghanistan safe for Chinese commerce."

In response, @kamalram wrote: "During WW1 and the early days of WW2, the United States focused on commerce when much of Europe was at war. History gets repeatd"

Pundits have long proclaimed the 21st century "the Chinese century", and @kamalram may well be right that America's wars against terrorism are a turning point. But the lesson is broader than that China is securing rights to rare-earth minerals in Afghanistan while the US gets mired in a messy war. The question is who creates the industries of the 21st century, which system of government is best at encouraging innovation, and which citizens have the drive to tackle hard problems and turn them into great opportunities.

This line of thought in turn put me in mind of Thomas Friedman's recent column, Off to the races, in which he argued:

I’ve long believed there are two basic strategies for dealing with climate change — the “Earth Day” strategy and the “Earth Race” strategy. This Copenhagen climate summit was based on the Earth Day strategy. It was not very impressive. This conference produced a series of limited, conditional, messy compromises, which it is not at all clear will get us any closer to mitigating climate change at the speed and scale we need....

I am an Earth Race guy. I believe that averting catastrophic climate change is a huge scale issue. The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed: the Market. Only a market, shaped by regulations and incentives to stimulate massive innovation in clean, emission-free power sources can make a dent in global warming. And no market can do that better than America’s....

In the cold war, we had the space race: who could be the first to put a man on the moon. Only two countries competed, and there could be only one winner. Today, we need the Earth Race....

Whether you're a "warmist" or a "denier," you should have no doubt that green technology is going to be one of the biggest business opportunities of the 21st century. As Friedman continues:

Even if the world never warms another degree, population is projected to rise from 6.7 billion to 9 billion between now and 2050, and more and more of those people will want to live like Americans. In this world, demand for clean power and energy efficient cars and buildings will go through the roof.

Harnessing the market is also key to my thinking about "government as a platform" (aka "Government 2.0). As I wrote in an as-yet-unpublished chapter for the upcoming O'Reilly book, Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice:

If you look at the history of the computer industry, the innovations that define each era are frameworks that enabled a whole ecosystem of participation from companies large and small. The personal computer was such a platform. So was the World Wide Web. This same platform dynamic is playing out right now in the recent success of the Apple iPhone. Where other phones had a limited menu of applications developed by the phone vendor and a few carefully chosen partners, Apple built a framework that allowed virtually anyone to build applications for the phone, leading to an explosion of creativity, with more than 100,000 applications appearing for the phone in little more than eighteen months, and more than 3000 new ones now appearing every week.

This is the right way to frame the question of "Government 2.0." How does government become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate? How do you design a system in which all of the outcomes aren't specified beforehand, but instead evolve through interactions between government and its citizens, as a service provider enabling its user community?

It's worth noting that the idea of government as a platform applies to every aspect of the government's role in society. For example, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which committed the United States to building an interstate highway system, was a triumph of platform thinking, a key investment in facilities that had a huge economic and social multiplier effect. Though government builds the network of roads that tie our cities together, it does not operate the factories and farms and businesses that use that network: that opportunity is afforded to "we the people." Government does set policies for the use of those roads, however, regulating interstate commerce, levying gasoline taxes as well as fees on heavy vehicles that damage the roads, setting and policing speed limits, specifying criteria for the safety of bridges and tunnels, and even for vehicles that travel on the roads, and performing many other responsibilities appropriate to a "platform provider."

While it has become common to ridicule the 1990s description of the Internet as the "information superhighway," the analogy is actually quite apt. Like the internet, the road system is a "network of networks," in which national, state, local, and private roads all interconnect, for the most part without restrictive fees. We have the same rules of the road everywhere in the country, yet anyone, down to a local landowner adding a driveway to an unimproved lot, can connect to the nation's system of roads.

The launch of weather, communications, and positioning satellites is a similar exercise of platform strategy. When you use a car navigation system to guide you to your destination, you are using an application built on the government platform, extended and enriched by massive private sector investment. When you check the weather - in the newspaper, on TV, or on the internet, you are using applications built using the National Weather Service (or equivalent services in other countries) as a platform. Until recently, the private sector had neither the resources nor the incentives to create space-based infrastructure. Government as a platform provider created capabilities that enrich the possibilities for subsequent private sector investment.

There are other areas where the appropriate role of the platform provider and the marketplace of application providers is less clear. Health care is a contentious example. Should the government be providing health care, or leaving it to the private sector? The answer is in the outcomes. If the private sector is doing a good job of providing necessary services that lead to the overall increase in the vitality of the country, government should stay out. But just as the interstate highway system increased the vitality of our transportation infrastructure, it is certainly possible that greater government involvement in health care could do the same. But it should do so, if the lesson is correctly learned, not by competing with the private sector to deliver health services, but by investing in infrastructure (and "rules of the road") that will lead to a more robust private sector ecosystem.

...platforms always require choices, and those choices must periodically be revisited. Platforms lose their power when they fail to adapt. The US investment in the highway system helped to vitiate our railroads, shaping a society of automobiles and suburbs. Today, we need to rethink the culture of sprawl and fossil fuel use that platform choice encouraged. A platform that once seemed so generative of positive outcomes can become a dead weight over time.

As we head into the second decade of the 21st century, we as a nation, we as a world need to make good choices about where we invest our time, our resources, and our ingenuity. It's the job of our leaders to make choices that give us leverage, that is, that create multiplier effects on our efforts.

The choice isn't between climate change alarmism and climate change denial, or between big government and small government. The choice is between dynamism and stagnation, between leadership that creates opportunity and leadership that protects the status quo, and, at bottom, between effective and ineffective strategies for increasing the total wealth of our society.

And of course, that wealth is more than material. Quality of life means more than quantity of stuff, and a single well designed device (or immaterial service delivered through said device) can deliver more value than a mountain of schlock. We all want to consume less and enjoy more, and it's certainly possible that there will be revolutions in which the next great innovation is itself a technology platform, a substrate of possibility on which immaterial economies grow and prosper.

I'd love to see, in this New Year, this new decade, deeper thinking about the society we want to build, and what kind of policies will encourage the market to make the right choices.

And I'd love to hear your thoughts about policy choices that might encourage 21st century industries here in America and around the world.

Four short links: 31 December 2009

BotNets, Integration, Conference Videos, and Brain Interfaces

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Botnets and the Global Infection Rate (PDF) -- fascinating insights into botnets, control tools, and business models.
2. Atlassian Uses OpenSocial for Internal Integration -- they use it inside their firewall to build a better dashboard. OpenSocial defines two concepts--an API for defining and working with social data (profiles, attributes, relationships) and specification for gadgets. OpenSocial's fundamental promise was interoperability--write an application once and host it in multiple social networks. Sound familiar? That's what we wanted to do with our own products.
3. Professional Conference Video with Semi-Professional Equipment -- How to make a great video of yourself giving a presentation, without having a cameraman to track you on stage. (I tried to tell my wife that I had semi-professional equipment, by the way, and it took a quarter of an hour for her to stop laughing.)
4. Thoughts to Speech -- tested on a stroke victim in his 20s who was able to think but not move, electrodes and a small FM transmitter were implanted between speech and motor centres of his brain. Neurites grew into the electrodes, and the signals sent to them are broadcast by the transmitter to an external receiver. From there a desktop computer runs software to figure out which muscles were being moved, and then makes the corresponding sound. It requires training, but is an exciting breakthrough in brain-computer connection.

Being online: Conclusion--identity narratives

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 1

An honest tale speeds best being plainly told.

(This is the final post in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

After viewing in rotation the various facets of that gem that we call identity, it is time for us to polish and view them in one piece. This series has explored what identity means in an online medium, the most salient aspect of which is the digitization of information. Consider what the word digitization denotes: the fragmentation of a whole into infinitesimal, fungible, individually uncommunicative pieces. The computer digitizes everything we post about ourselves not only literally (by storing information in computer-readable formats) but metaphorically, as the computer scatters our information into a meaningless diaspora of data fields, status updates, snapshots, and moments caught on camera or in audio--as Shakespeare might say, signifying nothing.

No computer--only a person--can reassemble and breath life into these dry bones, creating from them a narrative.

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A National Scan Center: A Public Works Project

by Carl Malamud | @CarlMalamud | comments: 4

In the course of doing research for some recent testimony before Congress on the National Archives and Records Administration, I was struck by several facts about how our first National Archivist, Robert D.W. Connor, met some seemingly insurmountable challenges when he took office in the mid-1930s.

The biggest challenge was the deluge of paperwork, a situation not very different from what our national institutions face today. Instead of simply moaning the impossibility of swallowing all the records Connor would need to establish the National Archives, he thought nonlinear. The result was the invention of several key technologies: the airbrush to clean paper, the laminator to protect it, and of course, the microphotograph (now known as microfilm or microfiche), a technology so successful it reduced incoming paper needs by 95%.

The other challenge that Connor faced with the National Archives, a situation again not very different from what our national institutions face today, was a paucity of skilled labor. Lucky for Connor though, the National Archives was born in the middle of the last great depression. Connor went to Harry Hopkins, and together they went to President Roosevelt, and the result was a Works Progress Administration program that ran until 1942 to survey federal archives. The program put 3,171 people to work in 1,057 communities and created two important reference aids still in use today, the Historical Records Survey and the Inventory of Federal Archives.

Just before I testified, I read in the New York Times that the President of France had just announced a stimulus package of $50 billion. President Sarkozy pledged 2% of that stimulus package, a full $1.1 billion, towards scanning and digitizing a national archive. I didn't use the term Freedom Scans in my testimony, but the fact that the French were far ahead of the U.S. in putting paperwork into cyberspace seemed a political opportunity.

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Recent Posts

• Four short links: 30 December 2009 | by Nat Torkington on December 30, 2009
• Four short links: 29 December 2009 | by Nat Torkington on December 29, 2009
• Being online: Group identities and social network identities | by Andy Oram on December 28, 2009
• Decoding Climate Change with Perl, gnuplot and Google Earth | by John Graham-Cumming on December 28, 2009
• Four short links: 28 December 2009 | by Nat Torkington on December 28, 2009
• Being online: Forged identities and non-identities | by Andy Oram on December 26, 2009
• What Would Always-On-The-Record Government Look Like? | by Mark Drapeau on December 26, 2009
• Four short links: 25 December 2009 | by Nat Torkington on December 25, 2009
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