NHIN Direct: Open Healthcare Records and Government as a Platform

In my advocacy around Government 2.0, I've been focused on the idea that government should act like a platform provider rather than a complete solution provider. That is, government should lay down rules of the road, create core functionality that others can build on, and then let the private sector compete to flesh out the offerings.

You'd never think it from the right-wing media hysteria around the administration's health care initiatives, but some of the best thinking about minimal government intervention is happening right now in healthcare. I met yesterday morning with Dr. David Blumenthal, the National Coordinator for healthcare policy, and I was struck by how he is focused on the idea of the least possible government intervention in the market. "We have to do as little as we have to do in order to have a strong probability to succeed," he told me.

You might ask, "What is it that you have to do?" That is laid out in the 2009 Stimulus bill. Among many other things, the Stimulus allocates a large pot of money (some $20 billion) in direct payments to hospitals, medical practices, and other health care delivery organizations if they implement "meaningful use" of electronic health records. The idea is to jumpstart the adoption of electronic medical records, which have been demonstrated to have a big impact on lowering cost and improving patient care. (Here's a Markle Foundation report (pdf) that gives more detail on Meaningful Use.) No specific systems are mandated to achieve that meaningful use; that is left for the market to supply.

There is also substantial funding for Blumenthal's office, the Office of the National Coordinator, or ONC. (This office was created by the Bush administration, but didn't receive substantial funding prior to the Recovery Act.) But rather than building a massive, centralized system for electronic health records, ONC's goal is to define the rules of the road for interchange of patient records. In internet-style, the expectation is that common protocols and file formats will allow vendors to compete on a level playing field to build the actual applications. But they aren't just writing paper standards; they are creating building blocks that actually implement those standards. (The internet analogy would be software like Bind, which implements the DNS protocol, and the root domain name servers, which for many years were funded by the US government.)

I was swept from my meeting with Dr. Blumenthal into a planning meeting for NHIN Direct, an open system for interchange of patient records between physicians (and ultimately patients themselves), where I heard much the same message, which was summarized so eloquently by Dr. John Halamka on his blog yesterday morning:

The NHIN Direct effort philosophy is expressed in design rules

The golden standards rule of "rough consensus, working code" will be applied to this effort.

Discuss disagreements in terms of goals and outcomes, not in terms of specific technical implementations.

The NHIN Direct project will adhere to the following design principles agreed to by the HIT Standards Committee from the feedback provided to the Implementation Workgroup

Keep it simple; think big, but start small; recommend standards as minimal as possible to support the business goal and then build as you go.

Don’t let “perfect” be the enemy of “good enough”; go for the 80% that everyone can agree on; get everyone to send the basics (medications, problem list, allergies, labs) before focusing on the more obscure.

Keep the implementation cost as low as possible; eliminate any royalties or other expenses associated with the use of standards.

Design for the little guy so that all participants can adopt the standard and not just the best resourced.

Do not try to create a one size fits all standard, it will be too heavy for the simple use cases.

Separate content standards from transmission standards; i.e., if CCD is the html, what is the https?

Create publicly available controlled vocabularies & code sets that are easily accessible / downloadable

Leverage the web for transport whenever possible to decrease complexity & the implementers’ learning curve (“health internet”).

Create Implementation Guides that are human readable, have working examples, and include testing tools.

NHIN Direct is only one of several projects that implement core functionality for interchange of electronic medical records. It is focused on simple use cases like exchange of medical records from a primary care physician to a specialist, or from one primary care physician to another, or from a physician to his patient. Other projects, like HHS Connect are focused on the much more complex problem of records interchange between large health providers such as the VA, the Department of Defense, and large hospital systems. This project demonstrates how interoperability can be used to reduce development costs by cooperation between agencies with overlapping missions.

This is health reform in the trenches of technology, where there are enormous opportunities for cost savings and better care. There's really good thinking going on here. So don't believe what you read in the paper.

Fellow Radar blogger Brian Ahier, who works as a health IT evangelist for a rural Oregon health cooperative, told me the following story last night, which illustrates how he counters the misunderstandings about electronic health records that he encounters in his daily work.

Trying to help rural providers in adoption of electronic health records has its own unique challenges. Many of these physicians practice in what is commonly called "fly over country." And the residents in these rural communities tend to lean conservative. Bringing up the subject of digitizing his office, the country doctor says, "I don't want all of my patients' information put into this government database. I'm not going to be part of the government takeover of our health system." I try to explain that the information is not stored in some giant government database. He certainly doesn't want to hear about a federated architecture for health information exchange or standards and protocols for secure messaging. But when asked how clinical information gets to the emergency room for a doctor who is treating one of his patients, he says, "My nurse sends it by fax."

So when I start to explain that his office can still keep the entire patient record, but sharing that data can be more securely and efficiently handled digitally, a light bulb seems to go on. When we talk about patient online access to their records and I draw the analogy to accessing your bank account over the Internet, we begin to turn a corner. We can leave the larger debate of health reform behind. It isn't long before he starts to agree that it might just be possible for health IT to improve quality, patient safety and clinical outcomes while eventually lowering costs. Overcoming some of the fears based on false assumptions is the first battle, and now we can start to look at some of the serious technical barriers ahead in this journey.

The Convergence of Advertising and E-commerce

With hundreds of millions of users paying to download music, applications and ebooks on mobile phones, with reports of Zynga generating hundreds of millions of dollars from selling virtual goods in social games, with startups like Square making mobile payment systems the hot new startup category, it's clear that e-commerce is poised to supplant advertising as the business model of choice for new startups.

But that's only the beginning. A few weeks ago it occurred to me that there's a very real possibility that the next breakthrough in advertising itself is its convergence with e-commerce. Buying an app from the Android Market, I realized how those of us with smartphones have become accustomed to seamless purchases on our phone. That is, we search for an app, and then we buy it, directly from our search vendor.

Isn't that after all the goal of advertising? To cause a transaction. So why not do away with the intermediate step of sending someone to a website for more information? Especially with the limited screen real estate on the phone, there isn't really room for the contextual text advertising that made Google its billions. Interstitial or popup ads are intrusive and unwelcome. But how much search activity on the phone is tied to commerce already? Find a restaurant nearby and make a reservation? Why not pay as well? Point Google Goggles at a bottle of wine you enjoyed at that restaurant, and have a few bottles more show up on your doorstep?

This line of thought led me to the conclusion that Google, Apple, Microsoft, will soon be announcing e-commerce programs akin to Adsense, in which retailers will register with "app stores" to allow physical goods and services to be bought as easily as apps. We can also expect announcements of partnerships between phone providers and Amazon or Wal-Mart or other big retailers who can fulfill e-commerce requests from the phone. I have no inside information to support this contention, just the logic of the marketplace.

Interestingly enough, it was only a few days after I had this thought that I met with the folks at Siri, which bills itself as "Your virtual personal assistant." Siri does pretty much what I was imagining for Google or Apple: it searches, and then does something. In our conversation, one of the founders referred to it as a "do engine" rather than a search engine. Right now, Siri mainly interfaces with services that provide APIs for reservations, like OpenTable or TicketMaster. It isn't a general purpose e-commerce engine. But that is clearly in the future, if not from Siri, then from some other startup, and then, inevitably, from the big guys.

E-commerce is the killer app of the phone world. Anyone whose business is now based on advertising had better be prepared to link payment and fulfillment directly to search, making buying anything in the world into a one-click purchase. Real time payment from the phone is in your future.

A Dream About Augmented Reality Fiction

Last night I dreamed that one of my authors (no name or face that I can recall - one of the phantasms created by the half-waking imagination) had sold me rights to a novel he'd written, and was eager for me to publish it as an ebook. It turned out that the "ebook" we were developing was actually a movie that took place in an augmented reality overlay projected directly onto the mind's eye, mixing what the author had imagined with what the viewer was actually seeing and experiencing at the time. Every version of the movie was different, because the story had to be overlaid on what the viewer was encountering in the real world. At one point in the dream, Eric Schmidt of Google was particularly excited because a sailing scene in the story warned him about a hidden reef that his boat had to avoid.

I don't often share dreams on this blog (at least not sleeping dreams), but this one seemed worth putting out there, because I do think that augmented reality could be an important component of a new kind of storytelling, making today's 3D entertainments as dated as silent films. Elan Lee's Fourth Wall Studios is already chipping away at the barrier between storytelling and daily life. The first augmented reality entertainments may be text based rather than video; eventually, though, they will likely be as immersive as my dream.

Many years ago, I saw a play in LA called Tamara, a story set in the mansion where WWI hero and author Gabrielle D'Annunzio was held under house arrest by Mussolini. A fascinating experiment in theater, Tamara took place in many different rooms of the house. As an audience member, whenever a scene ended, you had an opportunity to follow the character of your choice to another room. No audience member could see the entire play. My wife and I went with her parents (who were back for the third or fourth time, seeing parts of the play they'd missed on previous visits), and afterwards, we all compared notes for hours about what we'd seen, and what we'd missed.

I share this dream as a reminder that the fiction and entertainments of the future may have a very different form than the fiction of today. The first metamorphosis is just to change the medium, in the way that the paper map or atlas morphed first into online mapping sites. But eventually, we'll get much deeper, as mapping is today morphing into augmented reality layers (from Yelp reviews or Foursquare check-ins to Google Street View) superimposed on walking or driving directions delivered on a phone.

This is the kind of world we're exploring at the Where 2.0 Conference next month. I don't believe there are any talks on augmented reality fiction (@brady, correct me if I'm wrong), but there might as well be. The world we're entering is going to be as rich and strange as last night's dream.

Google Buzz re-invents Gmail

When I first heard about Google Buzz, I was worried that I might be seeing the birth of another "me too" product. After all, everyone wants a piece of the Twitter halo. But with the release of Buzz today, you can see how Google has taken the social media lessons of Twitter and applied them to their own core products.

I'm especially fond of Gmail Buzz, which adds the power of asymmetric following to email.

AWESOME idea. There are many of us for whom email is still our core information console, and our most powerful and reliable vehicle for sharing ideas, links, pictures, and conversations with the people who constitute our real social network. But up till now, we could only share with explicitly specified individuals or groups. Now, we can post messages to be read by anyone. Sergey Brin said that Buzz gives the ability "to post a message without a 'to' line." That's exactly right - something that in retrospect is so brilliantly obvious that it will soon no doubt be emulated by every other cloud-based email system.

Buzz items can be shared directly in Gmail, but are also pulled in from other social sharing sites, including Twitter, Picasa, YouTube, and Flickr.

What's particularly cool is that the people you "follow" are auto-generated for you out of your email-based social network. If you communicate with them, they are the seed for your buzz cloud. Over time, as you like or dislike buzz entries from that network, the buzz cloud adapts.

Google has also done a neat hack on the Twitter @name syntax, allowing you to prefix @ to an email address to have a message show up for sure in that user's Gmail Inbox. Saying @foo@gmail.com (or @foo@bar.com) will put a message into foo's Buzz cloud in the same way as saying @foo does on Twitter, but it will also show up in their Gmail Inbox, to make sure they see it. You can also make messages private to only named recipients or groups. (I love this - right now, I have two Twitter accounts, one for public sharing, and another for private sharing.)

I've always found it perplexing that vendors who manage pieces of our communications network for us - our email, IM, and phone - have failed to build social networking features into their products. Google is clearly now tackling that job, increasingly making its communication products into a powerful social media platform. Gmail already includes IM and some automatic social learning in the address book; adding Buzz makes it that much more powerful. And the fact that whatever you buzz is added to your Google profile (and immediately picked up in Google search) will turn those seemingly vestigial Google profiles into something that might just become the next generation personal home page.

You can begin to see where all this is going: the integration of Gmail, Buzz, Reader, Voice, Geo, Blogger, YouTube, Calendar, Contacts... Buzz is a game-changing first step, but when you think about where Google will take this over the next year it gets exciting...

There's a real lesson here for anyone who wants to enter a crowded market: play to your strengths. Think through what job that hot new startup does for its users. Don't copy what they look like. Apply what they've taught you to your own business.

There are real benefits to using email as a social media platform. Just about everyone knows how to use it. (Despite claims that young millenials look down on email, it's just too useful to go away anytime soon.) It's incredibly flexible - you can share anything you want, and comment on it at any length, from 140 characters to as many as it takes to get your point across. It has a global address space that allows you to find almost anyone, an address space that links people to content. It's multi-platform, and accessible from anywhere.

In some ways, Gmail Buzz brings many of the benefits of Google Wave to Gmail. Every Buzz item can be turned into a conversation (much as in Wave or Friendfeed.) People can comment on your Buzz, comment on your comments, or @ reply you. Sure, it lacks the hyper-cool wiki-style shared editing features (though those perhaps could be added in a future release), but it also lacks the critical flaw that made Wave into more of a "concept car" than a real product: I don't have to adopt a new tool or build a new social network. It just adds rich new capabilities into the tool and network that I already use.

Google has also done a terrific job of giving inline preview to links you share. This is especially awesome for photos and videos. The inline slideshows are terrific - actually better than you get in most native photo or video sharing apps. And I love that you can share a Flickr link as easily as you can share one from Picasa (bucking the trend of vendors to try to lock you in to their own services.) Google says it's committed to Buzz being "the poster child for what it means to build an open, standards-compliant social product that serves the interests of users..." I'm looking forward to seeing more signs of this commitment as Buzz (and other Google products) evolve.

You can read more about the functionality behind Buzz at O'Reilly Answers: "Google Buzz: 5 Things You Need to Know."

P.P.S. Buzz will be rolled out starting at 11 pm today. Apparently, it will take 2-3 days to show up in every Gmail account; if you don't have it right away, be patient.

Ignite, Syndicated Events, and Social Media Marketing

As we approach Global Ignite Week, a collection of Ignite events around the world during the first week of March, I can't help but think about the future of conferences, one of O'Reilly's major businesses. Here are some of the things we're learning from Ignite.

1. People love the rapid-fire format. Steven Levy once said that Foo Camp is the wiki of conferences, an unstructured space where the attendees make things happen. Well, by that measure, Ignite is the Twitter of conferences, a way to quickly share information and spark enthusiasm. The Ignite slogan: "Enlighten us, but make it quick." is a great way to force speakers to focus on the essentials. It's amazing how much you can pack into five minutes when you're on the clock.

   We're increasingly using the Ignite format at our traditional conferences as a way to highlight lots of great ideas that people can dig down into later. We've had 5 minute "Lightning Talks" at the Open Source Convention since 2003, but Ignite has a social environment halfway between structured sessions on stage and the "hallway track" that is so exciting at many conferences. As a result we're now holding Ignites in conjunction with many of our conferences, both as part of the program and as a social event in addition to the regular conference content. We've also organized Ignites at other events, such as Google I/O and Adobe Max, and upcoming at SMX West.

2. Self-organization enables amazing scale. Since Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis launched the first Ignite event in Seattle in December 2006, there have been over 180 Ignites held around the world, with over 80 of those held in the past six months. Each Ignite has the same format: an evening event, often in a bar or other informal meeting place, starting out with a Make: contest, followed by a series of short talks, with 10-15 speakers given five minutes to speak on the subject of their choice, each with 20 slides auto-advancing every 15 seconds. Organizers invite speakers and, like any event organizer, pick people who will engage the audience. Events usually draw at least 100 attendees, and the largest Ignite to date has had 800 attendees. 2-300 is the average.

   We learned a lesson when Foo Camp led to Bar Camp, and hundreds of other "camps" (City Camp and Crisis Camp being two fabulous recent incarnations), and so, with Ignite, we set out from the first to make it a self-organized event, providing instructions and a mailing list for Ignite organizers.

3. Syndication allows a decentralized event to gain some of the benefits of aggregation. Accordingly, we provide a central calendar listing of upcoming events, a video portal, and other opportunities for organizers and participants to share what happens at their local event.

   We're working to develop additional mechanisms to support local Ignites, including social networking tools, and a much improved video portal (to be released in time for Global Ignite Week). Each Ignite provides its own factory for innovation, so we're looking for the best ideas from local organizers and working to spread them more widely.

   We're particularly interested in developing mechanisms for syndicated sponsorship. Up till now, there has been some local sponsorship of Ignite events. Local sponsors might provide beer in exchange for a banner, or give away product from the stage. Ignite Portland began showing short sponsor videos during the socializing breaks. Here's an example:

   With Global Ignite Week, we realized that we've reached the scale where we can engage major sponsors. Global Ignite Week will have the reach of a large trade show, with 15-20,000 participants. Across all Ignite events this year, there may well be significantly more than 50,000 participants.

   We've come up with a sponsorship model in which major sponsors can contribute a video to be shown across all participating events. If sponsors understand the format and deliver entertaining, informative video rather than traditional marketing spam, this can be a huge opportunity to engage passionate, interesting (and often highly technical) audiences. (In the future, we hope to have these video sponsorships in the form of actual syndicated Ignite sessions.)

   There's a particularly interesting aspect to Ignite that we've come to realize. It's a social event, and so sponsorship at Ignite is fundamentally social media marketing. In addition to the people who attend each Ignite event, millions more are exposed to the event via Twitter and Facebook. We've been working with PeopleBrowsr Analytics and O'Reilly Research to understand the social media impact of Ignite events.

   We compared the tweet count and reach from the Web 2.0 Expo NY and Web 2.0 Summit events last fall with the tweet count and reach from the Ignite events happening in the same timeframe. (For purposes of comparison, we decided to use a date range from 10 days before the Web 2.0 Expo till 20 days after the Web 2.0 Summit.) For the Web 2.0 Expo, we counted tweets using the #w2e and #w2expo hashtags; for the Web 2.0 Summit, we counted tweets using #w2s and #web2summit; for the various Ignite events, we counted tweets using either #ignite and the individual hashtags recommended by the organizers of the Ignite events held between 12 October to 24 November. As you can see from the figure below, the Web 2.0 events each generated a huge, concentrated spike, while the Ignite events provided a repetitive series of spikes, each much smaller, but important in the aggregate.

   

   The Web 2.0 Summit generated 8,723 tweets from 2,356 individual users with a combined reach (aggregate of all followers of unique tweeters using one or more of the hashtags) of over 11 million, with 74 million potential tweet impressions (aggregate of all tweets seen by all followers.) The Web 2.0 Expo NY generated 11,950 tweets from 2,953 users with a combined reach of 6.4 million and nearly 42 million potential tweet impressions. Meanwhile, the 26 Ignite events held around the world during October and November generated 8,026 tweets from 2,585 with a combined reach of 3.5 million and over 11 million potential tweet impressions.

   Clearly, the numbers were stronger for the traditional events - especially the Web 2.0 Summit, whose tweeters included a much higher proportion of "influentials" with high follower counts. But the Ignite movement is gaining steam. While the numbers for the sample period were smaller than those for the traditional events, when you use the Ignite data to project the expected tweet count from Global Ignite Week, the numbers are quite comparable. The sample period included 26 Ignite events spread over two months, and a total of perhaps 6000 participants. With more than 79 events currently scheduled (and perhaps as many as a hundred, as more are added each day) over a period of a week, Global Ignite Week (#giw) should generate more than 3 times the attendance and the tweet traffic that we saw during the sample period - as many as 25,000 tweets with a combined reach of 10 million followers and 35 million potential tweet impressions. Over the course of a year, several hundred Ignite events will have an attendance and a social media impact that exceeds that of even large traditional events.

   We're still working out how to manage the syndicated sponsorship opportunity. Challenges include finding sponsors (prospectus pdf here) who understand the opportunity, making sure that those sponsors understand the Ignite culture and provide valuable content, developing mechanisms for sharing sponsorship benefits with local organizers (for example, we're talking with Facebook about providing in-kind advertising that organizers can use to bring attendees to their events), and working to understand the demographics and interests of the attendees. With tools like PeopleBrowsr analytics, it's increasingly possible to measure these things (and much more, including attendee sentiment) via the twitter "data exhaust."

   There's an important twist to this story. A recent study showed that 70% of companies plan to spend more on Twitter & Facebook marketing rather than traditional marketing channels. Given the new social media marketing disclosure rules put forward by the Federal Trade Commission, you've either got to do explicit ads, or sponsor content that will spread on its own. Ignite is a great way to do social media marketing right.

A Few Thoughts on the Nexus One

There will be many posts focusing on the look, feel, and features of the Nexus One, so I'm going to focus on what Android's latest incarnation says about the competitive landscape - what I've elsewhere called the war for the web. Android vs. iPhone is one important front in that "war."

News from the front: a possible turning point for Android. I've been a huge iPhone fan, but after using the Nexus One for a few weeks, I find so much to like that I'm close to the point where Android might be my first choice. While I may yet go back to my iPhone, I'm conflicted.

The key to the turning point is not how slick the phone is - even though it's thin, fast, bright, and beautiful, with amazing sensor-based capabilities including noise-canceling headphones, automated brightness adjustment based on external light levels, voice-activated search, navigation and data-entry, different "home" screens based on whether it's in your pocket or sitting in car-dock. Nor is it the fact that you can buy unlocked phones without any plan directly from Google, or that you will soon be able to choose plans from Verizon and Vodaphone as well as T-Mobile. The real turning point is Google's commitment to making the Nexus One a web-native device. As Google VP of Product Management Mario Queiroz said in today's press conference, a nexus is a place where multiple worlds meet. "The Nexus One is where the phone meets the web." It's a connected device in a way that is more fundamental than any previous phone.

The biggest pluses of the Nexus One are all around the simplicity and completeness of the cloud integration:

• The Android Market rocks. It's a "one click" experience compared to the iPhone App Store. Find the app, add it directly to the phone. No separate syncing step. And there's more than enough choice there, with more apps being added every day. I found myself having much more fun exploring and adding new apps than I ever had on the iPhone. Payment is also easy - I have a feeling that the Android Market is going to be a major driver for Google Checkout, growing its base and making it a real contender as a first class internet payment system. Not to mention that you buy the phone itself online using Google Checkout.

  I'm delighted by the useful security warnings (now, that's unusual!) that show what system features each app you download will have access to. I also love that the Market shows you how many times the app has been installed, so you can immediately see how popular it is.

• Gmail is so good on the phone that I can, for the first time, imagine being totally without my laptop.

• No need to sync address book and calendar. Everything's always up to date.
• Multi-tasking makes the phone feel much more like a real computer.

• Maps and turn by turn navigation are great, although the speaking voice of the turn by turn is just awful.
• In Android 2.1, Google has speech-enabled every text field on the phone, not just search and navigation. Frankly, speech recognition still doesn't work as well as I would hope, but as I've written previously, when speech recognition isn't happening on the device, but in the cloud, it gets better the more people use it.

• Google Goggles is still a bit rough, but really promising. I understand why it's not pre-loaded on the phone, but think it has real promise as a must-have app, and one that plays to Google's strengths. I believe that image recognition and speech recognition are key to future UI improvements in mobile devices, and I applaud Google's long term commitment to these areas, even though they aren't yet fully baked. And the awe factor when you see someone point a camera at you and have the app say "That's Tim O'Reilly" tells you just how much more a device can do when it is backed by big data and powerful algorithms running on a cloud platform. (Google has kept face recognition out of the production version of Goggles, but I had a full version demoed to me a few months ago, and it was truly a taste of the future.) Augmented reality is coming to the iPhone as well (Layar, the Yelp Monocle, and ShopSavvy being only a few examples), but this is Google's home turf.

• The iPhone was always intuitive for me. The gPhone is definitely a learning experience. But the more familiar I get with it, the happier I am, unlike some devices where you never get over the hurdle, and never feel comfortable or effective.

• Visual Voicemail is a killer app on the iPhone. Going back to having to dial a number to hear voicemail just seems so wrong. I'm assuming that this is our wonderful patent system at work, as otherwise, it's hard to imagine that Google wouldn't be copying this feature.

• It's hard to make a single-touch UI that's as simple and useful as a multi-touch UI. I know multi-touch is coming for Android, but not having it now is a big miss. I love the experience of zooming on the iPhone with a pinch. What's more, the sensitivity of the touch screen on the Nexus One leaves a lot to be desired. Dragging seems to work fine, but some of the button presses aren't recognized unless you press really hard.
• The notification trackball is a nice idea, but I don't think it really adds much to my experience. In fact, there are so many applications that send notifications that if the light is enabled, it's constantly flashing. Future applications may learn better how to use color in notifications.

• I really miss access to my iTunes music collection, which is also where I listen to audiobooks from audible.com. That being said, this omission pushes me back in the direction of cloud music apps like Last.FM and Pandora, though I'm wishing that Rhapsody was available, since I'm already a subscriber via my Sonos home music system. Google has added its own built-in music app, but it has a limited selection, and what's worse, pre-empts the controls on the headset. At least right now, they aren't available to other music applications - pressing the pause button while in Last.FM just starts a competing stream from the Google music app. Unless Google is REALLY serious about getting into the music business, they should give up on their own app and work with third parties to fill this hole.

• Google hasn't done as good a job as I would have expected of integrating photos and videos with Picasa and YouTube. While Google claims one-click YouTube upload, it wasn't immediately obvious to me. In any event, there's a potential liability in Google's tie to its own services. For example, I'd love to be able to auto-sync my photos to Flickr rather than Picasa - it will be interesting to see if Google's definition of open extends to the choice of competing cloud services, or if they will use the device to tie people ever more closely to their own services.

• The lack of some simple features, like the ability to take screenshots, is also annoying. Heck, even to install third-party screenshot apps, you need to root your phone.

(Henry Blodget makes this case in Hey, Apple, Wake Up -- It's Happening Again. On the other hand, Mark Sigal raises a different historical analogy, Novell vs. Microsoft, asking whether Google's release of its own anointed phone might end up blunting adoption by other vendors, while Google takes the eye off its core business. A lot depends on whether Google holds back anything from the platform available to others. At today's press conference, Google emphasized the open platform aspect of Android, so they are trying to address that fear. The model seems to be to work with individual partners to push the ball forward, but to return those innovations to the pool available to all partners.)

Overall, though, it seems to me that Google's experience in delivering cloud-based data-driven applications is aligned with long-term trends in a way that Apple's device-bound heritage is not. Apple is playing catch-up in cloud infrastructure, building its own location services, for instance, but iTunes and the App Store excepted, Apple's cloud experience is limited, especially in the area of algorithmically driven applications, which I believe is so central to the future of computing. Meanwhile, Google has so many data assets, and so much experience in algorithmic applications, that it may be difficult for Apple to compete in the long term.

There's also the matter of cloud-native "killer apps." Apple's email, calendar, and address book show their PC-era roots. They live on the PC and must be synced to the phone. Google's web-native equivalents are always up to date, with syncing happening in real time.

In Apple's favor: software and design patents, which hold the competition at bay in a way that they didn't in the 1980s. Also in Apple's favor, its own killer apps, like iTunes, which is still the gold standard in music, but also the hub for podcasts, audiobooks, and ebooks. Audiobooks and ebooks might make it into the Android Market, but it's hard to imagine the Market becoming the same kind of content hub that iTunes has become.

Also in Apple's favor: Google must make some of its key assets available on the iPhone or cede the real estate to competitors. It would be a major blow, for example, if Bing search or Maps were the default on the iPhone instead of Google. It's easy to imagine an Apple-Microsoft alliance in areas like search, location services, speech recognition, image recognition, and other cutting edge areas that will be a key part of Google's competitive advantage in the future.

Meanwhile, there are key third party apps that can make or break either platform - perhaps not quite as essential as in the days when Adobe's commitment to the Mac before Windows helped give Apple an insuperable lead in the design market, but still significant.

Google needs to aggressively map out a partner ecosystem in areas like music, ebooks, and the like, to make sure that they have a compelling offering to match what's already available on the iPhone.

Meanwhile, Apple needs to either beef up its capability in the kinds of data-backed applications, or partner aggressively with companies with more expertise than they currently have. They also need to re-factor their core applications like iPhoto and iMovie to make them web-native, turning them into a base for collective intelligence. Picasa and iPhoto both sport image recognition, but Apple has to train its algorithms on sample data sets, while Google gets to train Picasa on billions of user images. As Peter Norvig, Google's chief scientist, once said to me, "We don't have better algorithms. We just have more data." Collective intelligence is the secret sauce of Web 2.0, and the future of all computing, and by locking user data into individual devices, Apple cuts itself off from this future. Rather than having MobileMe as a separate revenue add-on, Apple needs to make all of its applications web-connected by default, so that they can learn from all their users.

What we see then is a collision of paradigms, perhaps as profound as the transition between the character-based era of computing and the GUI based era of the Mac and Windows. We're moving from the era in which the device is primary and the web is an add-on, to the era in which a device and its applications are fundamentally dependent on the internet operating system that provides location, speech recognition, image recognition, social network awareness, and other fundamental data services.

We're in for an interesting ride.

P.S. Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb reminds us that new FTC guidance requires bloggers who receive free products to disclose that fact. Since the Nexus One didn't go on sale until today, and I mention that I've had it for a few weeks, it should be obvious that I did not buy the phone, but received it from Google. However, they did not ask me to review it. O'Reilly often receives early access to software and hardware products from vendors so that we can plan our publishing and conference programs, and so we can provide feedback about the product. We believe that the FTC guidance is over-broad. It is designed to protect against potentially deceptive paid endorsements, not to prevent the development of third party documentation or other services.

Commerce and the Wealth of Nations

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....

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.

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.

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.

Why Using ShopSavvy Might Not Be So Savvy

Reading this morning's New York Times story, Mobile Phones Become Essential Tools for Holiday Shopping, I was reminded again of the fundamental shortsightedness of so many of our economic decisions, that flaw in human nature that makes us seize on temporary advantage without thinking of the long-term consequences.

The article focuses on the use of applications like ShopSavvy and RedLaser to do comparison price checking while in the store. On the surface, these are great tools for consumers (and there are other applications besides price comparison.) But remember, cutthroat pursuit of the lowest price will hasten the demise of many retailers, while strengthening others (usually, the biggest and most efficient, who can make money on the slenderest margins.) But what happens once those mega-retailers are the last one standing? Prices are likely to go up.

Particularly troubling is the trend to shop in the store, but then to buy online. From the Times article:

Matthew Tractenberg, for example, was recently shopping in a Silicon Valley bookstore, where he picked out five books for a total of $80. Before taking them to the counter, he typed the titles into the Amazon app on his BlackBerry Curve. Amazon had the books for $50 and would not charge sales tax or shipping. He placed the order on the spot and left his small pile of books in the store.

A few months ago, I was talking with one of my most loyal retail customers, a specialty computer bookstore in Massachusetts. "We survived the chains, and we survived Amazon," he said, "but I don't know if we're going to survive the online discounters. People come in here all the time, browse through the books on display, and then tell me as they leave that they can get a better price online."

Now, you might say, as the Hawaiian proverb notes, no one promised us tomorrow. Businesses, like individuals and species, must adapt or die. And if the Internet is bad for small, local retailers, it's good for the online resellers and it's good for customers, right?

But think a little more deeply, and you realize that my friend wasn't complaining that people were buying books elsewhere. He was complaining that people were taking a service from him--browsing the books in his store--and then buying elsewhere. There's a world of difference between those two statements. Online shopping is terrific: you can get detailed product information, recommendations from other customers, make a choice, and have the product delivered right to your door. But if you aren't satisfied with the online shopping experience, you want to look at the physical product, for example browsing through a book in the store, you owe it to the retailer--and to yourself--to buy it there, rather than going home and saving a few dollars by ordering it online.

Think about it for a minute: the retailer pays rent, orders and stocks the product, pays salespeople. You take advantage of all those services, and then give your money to someone else who can give you a better price because they don't incur the cost of those services you just used. Not only is this unfair; it's short-sighted, because it will only be so long before that retailer closes his or her doors, and you can no longer make use of those services you enjoy.

Maybe it's all for the best, part of the creative destruction of capitalism. But as a consumer, it's wise to realize the long-term implications of your choices. Shop at the big box store for the better price, and lose the small local store that was so convenient; browse the shelves or racks in a brick and mortar store, then buy online? How long do you think you'll be able to do that?

My advice remains the same as it was in 2003: Buy where you shop. If you discover a product online, buy it there. But if you discover it in a store, buy it there. Don't save a few dollars now, and lose the opportunity to shop at a local merchant in the future.

Of course, if you're happy to lose local bricks-and-mortar merchants, that's your choice. I've never been much of a physical shopper - I do most of my shopping online, and I love the convenience. But when I do go to local stores to browse physical products, I make sure to buy there, even if there's a better price online. I'm paying a little extra for that right to walk up and touch the product before I buy it.

The War For the Web

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference: the link in the posting was no longer active.

It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday morning: Facebook Unlinks Your Twitter Links.

if you’re posting web links (Bit.ly, TinyURL) to your Twitter feed and using the Twitter Facebook app to share those updates on Facebook too, none of those links are hyperlinked. Your friends will need to copy and paste the links into a browser to make them work.

If this is a design decision on Facebook’s part, it’s an extremely odd one: we’d like to think it’s an inconvenient bug, and we have a mail in to Facebook to check. Suffice to say, the issue is site-wide: it’s not just you.

The problem was quickly fixed, with URLs in status updates automatically now linkified again. The consensus was that it was in fact a bug, but it's little surprise that people suspected otherwise, given the increasing amount of effort Facebook puts into warning people that they are leaving Facebook for the big bad unsafe Internet:

All of this is well-intentioned, I'm sure. After all, Facebook is attempting to put in place privacy controls that allow its users to manage the visibility of their information -- and the Web's expectation of universal visibility is not necessarily the best default for much of the information posted on Facebook. But let's not kid ourselves: Facebook is a new kind of web site (or an old kind redux), a world of its own, playing by different rules.

But this isn't just about Facebook.

The Apple iPhone is the hottest web access device around, and like Facebook, while it connects to the web, it plays by a different set of rules. Anyone can put up a website, or launch a new Windows or Mac OS X or Linux application, without anyone's permission. But put an app onto the iPhone? That requires Apple's blessing.

There is one glaring loophole: anyone can create a web application, which any user can save as clickable application on their phone. But these web applications have limits - there are key capabilities of the phone that are not accessible to web applications. HTML 5 can introduce all the new application-like features it wants, but they will work only for web applications, and can't access key aspects of the phone with Apple's permission. And as we saw earlier this year with Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application, Apple isn't shy about blocking applications that it considers threatening to their core business, or that of their partners.

And now, of course, we see the latest salvo in the war against the accepted rules of interoperability on the web: Rupert Murdoch's threat to take the Wall Street Journal out of the Google search index. While most people have repeated the existing wisdom that to do so would be suicide for the Journal, a few contrarian observers have noted the leverage Murdoch holds. Mark Cuban argues that Twitter now trumps search engines when it comes to breaking news. Even more provocatively, Jason Calacanis suggested, a few weeks before Murdoch's announcement, that all big media companies need to do to cut Google off at the knees would be to block Google, while cutting an exclusive deal with Bing to be found only in Microsoft's search index.

Of course, Google wouldn't take that lying down, and would likely make its own exclusive deals, leading to a showdown that would make the browser wars of the 90s seem tame.

I'm not saying that News Corp and other mainstream media publications would adopt Jason's suggested strategy, or that it would work if they did, but it is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today.

If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. (Check out the program for the first O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in 2002 (pdf).) In my talks over the years, I've argued that there are two models of operating system, which I have characterized as "One Ring to Rule Them All" and "Small Pieces Loosely Joined," with the latter represented by a routing map of the Internet.

The first is the winner-takes-all world that we saw with Microsoft Windows on the PC, a world that promises simplicity and ease of use, but ends up diminishing user and developer choice as the operating system provider.

The second is an operating system that works like the Internet itself, like the web, and like open source operating systems like Linux: a world that is admittedly less polished, less controlled, but one that is profoundly generative of new innovations because anyone can bring new ideas to the market without having to ask permission of anyone.

I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.

One of the points I've made repeatedly about Web 2.0 is that it is the design of systems that get better the more people use them, and that over time, such systems have a natural tendency towards monopoly.

And so we've grown used to a world with one dominant search engine, one dominant online encyclopedia, one dominant online retailer, one dominant auction site, one dominant online classified site, and we've been readying ourselves for one dominant social network.

But what happens when a company with one of these natural monopolies uses it to gain dominance in other, adjacent areas? I've been watching with a mixture of admiration and alarm as Google has taken their dominance in search and used it to take control of other, adjacent data-driven applications. I noted this first with speech recognition, but it's had the biggest business impact so far in location-based services.

A few weeks ago, Google offered free turn-by-turn directions for Android phones. This is awesome news for consumers, who previously could get this only in dedicated GPS devices or with high-priced iPhone apps. But it's also a sign just how competitive the web is getting, and just how powerful Google is getting, because they understand that "data is the Intel Inside" of the next generation of computer applications.

Nokia paid $8 billion for NavTeq, the leading provider of such turn-by-turn directions. GPS-maker TomTom paid $3.7 billion for TeleAtlas, the #2 provider in the market. Google quietly built an equivalent service, and is now giving it away for free -- but only to their own business partners. Everyone else still has to pay high fees to NavTeq and TeleAtlas. What's more, Google upped the ante by adding in such features as Street View.

Most interestingly, this move sets the stage for the future competition between Google and Apple. (Bill Gurley's analysis is an essential read.) Apple controls access to the dominant device of the mobile web; Google controls access to one of the most important mobile applications, and so far, is making it available for free only on Android. Google's prowess is not just in search, but in mapping, speech recognition, automated translation, and other applications driven by huge, intelligent databases that only a few providers can offer. Microsoft and Nokia control comparable assets, but they too are Apple competitors, and unlike Google, their business model depends on selling access to those assets, not giving them away for free.

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we'll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we've enjoyed for the past two decades. But I'm betting that things are going to get ugly. We're heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it's more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.

P.S. One prediction: Microsoft will emerge as a champion of the open web platform, supporting interoperable web services from many independent players, much as IBM emerged as the leading enterprise backer of Linux.

I'll be speaking on this topic in my keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York on Tuesday. I'll look forward to seeing many of you there.

Safari Books Online 6.0: A Cloud Library as an alternate model for ebooks

There has been a lot of attention paid to ebooks lately, and for good reason. Electronic books are portable, searchable, and more affordable than print books. The web has accustomed readers to having the latest information at their fingertips; we all ask why books should be any less available "on demand."

Amazon’s Kindle has received the most mainstream attention (with new entries like Barnes & Noble's Nook making dedicated ebook readers into the latest competitive horse-race), but ebooks are taking off even faster on the iPhone and other smart phones. Ebooks are one of the most popular classes of iPhone application. Recent releases of O'Reilly ebooks as iPhone applications have even outsold the same books in print. Direct sales of the ebook bundles we offer from oreilly.com (PDF, epub, or mobi files) also exceed our direct sales of print books from the site.

Yet our most popular ebook offering by far is often not even thought of as an ebook. Safari Books Online is an online book and video subscription service, launched in partnership with the Pearson Technology Group in 2001. It contains more than 10,000 technical and business books and videos from more than 40 publishers. It has more than 15 million users (including the number of concurrent seats available through libraries and universities); it is now the second largest reseller of O’Reilly books, exceeded only by Amazon.com, and its revenue dwarfs our sales of downloadable ebooks. It's also the most affordable of our ebook offerings for those who are regular consumers of technical content. The average Safari Books Online subscriber uses at least seven books a month, and many use dozens (or even more), yet the monthly price (depending on the subscription plan) ranges from little more than the price of a single downloadable ebook to no greater than that of two or three.

Here’s the rub: most people thinking about ebooks are focused on creating an electronic recreation of print books, complete with downloadable files and devices that look and feel like books. This is a bit like pointing a camera at a stage play and concluding that was the essence of filmmaking!

At O’Reilly, we’ve tried to focus not on the form of the book but on the job that it does for our customers. It teaches, it informs, it entertains. How might electronic publishing help us to advance those aims? How might we create a more effective tool that would help our customers get their job done?

It was by asking ourselves those questions that we realized the advantages of an online library available by subscription. One of the best things about online technical books is the ability to search the full text of a book. How much better would it be to be able to search across thousands of books? Safari Books Online was our answer.

And it just got better. Safari Books Online 6.0, released yesterday, brings a new level of ease of use. It’s a complete, bottom-to-top revamping of the original service. The old UI was, to say the least, getting long in the tooth.

The new UI is slicker and faster, with the kind of drag-and-drop goodness that people expect from a modern web application. In addition, we’ve added some long-requested features, including:

Improved Interactivity -- With 6.0 you can make inline notes, in the actual text you are reading. You can dog-ear or bookmark specific pages. You can highlight text and associate it with notes. When you are done you can print those pages with both your highlights and notes on them. You can scroll non-stop through the pages of a book without any page refresh, or scan a block of pages in thumbnail view to spot the page you are looking for.

Personalized Folders - Rather than having thousands of books and videos organized by us in a single technology topic taxonomy, you can now put together your own organization, grouping books in the categories most useful to you. You can restrict searches to only the books you’ve chosen, and can search within the results of a saved search.

Collaboration - Even better, if you’re a corporate subscriber, you can share your categorization with other members of your company or workgroup. Not only can team members share folders, they can share book reviews, notes and highlights.

Smart Folders - New books, videos and articles are being added to Safari Books Online all the time. Searches saved as "smart folders" make it easy to keep up with the latest content in your area of interest. We have also improved our search user interface to allow you to search inside the book or in other books without leaving the page you are reading. Switch pages only when you find what you want.

As you can see, many of these features take advantage of the online medium in ways that aren’t possible with standalone ebooks. To be sure, there are times you want your own offline copy, and in Safari Books Online, you can indeed download books or chapters for offline use. But especially given the rise of the smartphone as an access device, the times when we are truly "offline" are becoming few and far between. The vision with which we started Safari, that of always-on access to a library of technical content, not just to individual ebooks, is now within reach. Safari Books Online can be used on a desktop or laptop computer or in the browser on a mobile phone. Everything is always in sync because your library is in the cloud.

An ebook cloud works the same way the web itself works. It provides ubiquitous access and shared experience.

Lessons Learned from the development of Safari Books Online

As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived at that decision, as well as some of the other lessons we’ve learned over what is now 22 years of ebook publishing experience. (O’Reilly published its first ebook, Unix in a Nutshell for Hypercard, back in 1987!) With that, a few reflections on lessons learned:

(continue reading)

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