Web Services

Read/Write Web hypothesises that email is in trouble over here:

Email is fundamentally great at substantial person-to-person communication. The following diagram illustrates why email is facing competition. It cannot effectively support broadcast (except for spam) and it's still poor at helping with tasks and projects.

Tools like Basecamp and Highrise from 37Signals are showing there's a way to better project management and CRM while leveraging information in emails. If the Twitter service stabilises it's likely to win over people permanently because of its simplicity and playfulness.

Social networks incorporate direct messaging and chats, making it easy for people to talk directly, bypassing email. These communications are easier than email; they're integrated into the flow and more accessible. To be fair, they're aimed for brief messages.

The increasing speed of our lives and global connectivity reduces the need for lengthy emails. If we're in touch more often, then we reveal less every time we talk. Shorter, more frequent exchanges are replacing the lengthier communication of the past.

There is a 2x2 matrix used to bolster the argument that appears to have no axes and in my view is wrong, and thus leads to the (in my opinion) incorrect conclusions above. To compare email with project management software is not comparing like with like, but the others are worth examining. Here is my matrix to (hopefully) explain things better:



Once we used email to do nearly all these roles, then along came the Web and took over the broadcasting role, IM took over 1-1 fast conversation, Wikis were better highly modifiable collaborative ware and latterly microblogs have started to do the low grade broadcast role.

These other approaches in the diagram are most effective at their outer corners - the main issue as I see it is that email can do most of the tasks that the other approaches do, but is not optimised for any one of them. Thus what we see as the "failure" is more the rolling back of a an early technology from places it was at best a "make do".

Also, because of its age it is more spammed than the later systems - as they become ubiquitous they too will attract spam, but most people don't realise that.

The problem all the other systems have is as they move off their outer corners they too start to look less useful than email in its home turf of the middle ground, and as they become more spammed they will feel the same frictions. Also, email browsers have not really had many "web 2.0" upgrades - no picture avatars etc - and I am sure these revamps will make it "feel" more modern. In fact it amuses me to note that as Twitter, IM etc add more manipulable functions they start looking more like email systems, and as blogs and broadcast websites become more interactive they start to look more like email groupware.

The other thing that is important about email, that is not yet hitting the headlines, is that the directory is yours and its private, whereas in many of these other systems, someone else owns the social network. This we believe will become a bigger and bigger issue as privacy abuse and spam through these more "social" media increases.

Update - nice graphic by Zoli Erdos looking at the various comms techs from the synch / asynch and functionality point of view - same conclusion.

Went to see Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones do a double act on Dopplr (Dopplgangers?) last night at the Design Museum. Dopplr has always interested me for 3 key reasons:

(i) Its a location based service - We've looked at these for clients (especially mobile clients) a number of times over the years, and by and large they have all underperformed hugely. Reason vary - lousy economics, intrusiveness, clunkiness. Thus its interesting to see how they are faring in this endeavour.

(ii) The social network they are building is for people who actually do want to meet - we have also done work on tracking services of various kinds, and again these have underperformed historically - ( I recall with wry amusement one focus group some years ago when parental enthusiasm for child tracking rapidly fell when it became apparent that any family adopting these would also have spouse tracking capability). Ditto, my experience of most SocNets is I don't mind friending some long-lost acquaintances, on the express understanding that I don't have to actually meet them.

(iii) Web 2.0 Design Disciplines - to me Dopplr are one of the poster children of the WebZen 2.0 design school, and its always interesting to get snippets of real life experience vs "the dogma"

Thus it is always interesting to study a company that is attempting both these service areas. Very interesting talk overall, some thoughts from the talk and chatting to the DopplMatts afterwards:

Is Dopplr a feature or a business? - Matt J noted that a few years ago it would undoubtedly have been a feature in someone else's portal, but the nature of the web now is that the whole web is an open portal in away, Dopplr is now a feature on this "metaportal" (my term). My take - I foresee the collation of these services with others such as Twitter to provide more vectors for the "social graph" to provide value.

On Scale and Scalability - the guys had made the point that Dopplr is aimed at the large scale - bouncing round the world - and not at the small scale (within cities etc) which they would hand off to others. My take - I get "getting what you do right" but if I were a funder and looking to scale it up over time, there must be a scale benefit from going small scale

Design of the Social Net - they have been very diligent with going from strong links out, and ensuring that unwanted links do not occur when exporting the Dopplr social graph outside. On this, Matt Jones pointed me to this slideset he had done earlier with Tom Coates which deals with the social net design thoughts - well worth a read.

Is Great Design more a UE thing or a Marketing thing? - answers have I none here, others have noted that great taste and Digerati acclaim historically is no guarantee of crossing the chasm ( Dopplr is like a software Apple, aesthetically beautiful ) but I also noted the guys talked about differentiation by getting many small details right - and that's the Japanese philosophy of Toyota et al

Great Design + Getting Little Things Right - is that the start of Zen and the Art of Software Maintenance

Incidentally, one topic that did come up over beer etc later on was the hardy perennial of "who owns my data" - ie why must Twitter, Dopplr, Flickr etc all have separate social graphs of their own. Prediction - big issue of 2009, along with how to program social nuance into social nets.

Michael Arrington rails against Twitter and praises Friendfeed over here, arguing that there has been a less infuriated response to the switchoff of the replies feature:

So why aren’t people screaming about the feature being gone? Because this time, they’re just heading

over to Friendfeed to have those very same conversations. Friendfeed for most users was just a place to bookmarks all their activities on other social networks. Now, more and more, it’s a place that people start conversations. The early adopters got that a while ago. Now, the not so early adopters are using it as a Twitter replacement, too.

He's wrong of course - the reason there is no sturm und drang is because its another opportunity to enjoy viewing the iconic Fail Whale:



Its on T shirts, posters, coffee cups - without a Fail Whale, Friendfeed cannot succeed

The thing about Twitter is it also has a huge user base, go elsewhere like Friendfeed and you have far fewer people to talk to. The A-List Broadcasters clearly want this to happen methinks (listen to ME, not each other) but thats not by and large what most people want - or are doing. As a number of commentators noted on the TechCrunch article in fact, using a simple service to increase Twitter persistence, such as Summize, is a far better option.

(Also, I don't understand why people think that a system with the same properties plus bigger messages will scale any differently? Twitter at least has $15m now to build out the new systems)

Sharp observation from HipMojo re the investment by Amazon in Twitter:

Anyway, I think this is the first step towards Amazon.com buying Twitter… it just makes more sense to use something like Twitter in a commercial capacity than a communications capacity, which is odd because Twitter now bills itself as a “communications utility”. Whatever floats their boat…

Today, the vanity crowd uses Twitter in the way that they do, in 5 years - if Twitter is around - it will be used as a commercial platform. Mark my words.

Marked.

I also think it will incorporate elements of Seesmic, Dopplr and a number of other web 2.0 plays because it will have the end customer relationships, and its easier to just add functionality.

But, Twitter can only be bought by someone who brings useful synergies, and ideally makes money in some offset way, as Twitter itself has no direct revenue model yet - Amazon's infrastructure goes some way towards that, especially if the money paid to Twitter comes back as rental for their infrastructure

But what they really need is a network, or else it will be more akin to eBay buying Skype. This isn't a commerce play in my opinion, it is a comms one - Twitter is the embryo UC system Telcos have been trying to build for decades, and you don't really need your own comms network to flog retail goods online.

Ask eBay.......

The thought occurred after reading a microblog by Suw Charman re walking up a mountain top as a way of "turning off" from digital media. The obvious thought was that one need not turn off from blogging while hiking up Kilimanjaro, which naturally led to the thought of starting the sport of Extreme Blogging, based on Extreme Ironing:

Extreme Ironing (or EI) is an extreme sport and a performance art in which people take an ironing board to a remote location and iron a few items of clothing. According to the official website, extreme ironing is:

“ the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well-pressed shirt. ”

Part of the attraction and interest the media has towards extreme ironing seems to centre on the issue of whether it is really a sport or not. It is widely considered to be tongue-in-cheek.[1]

Some locations where such performances have taken place include a mountainside of a difficult climb; a forest; in a canoe; while skiing or snowboarding; on top of large bronze statues; in the middle of a street; underwater; whilst parachuting;[2] under the ice cover of a lake; and in warzones. The performances have been conducted solo or by groups. The Guardian said of extreme ironing that it carries on a tradition of British eccentricity

Such as this for example:



So - anyone up for Extreme Blogging....and none of those poncy Mac Airs or EeePC's need apply

Just saw this re the ex Yahoos on the Grauniad - this is the ideal way for them to pass that time - finding yourself while losing your dongle on a mountaintop rather than angst ridden posts on Techmeme

Nick Carr having a go at Twitter et al:

Twitter is often referred to as a "micro-blogging platform," but twittering seems more like antiblogging, or at least an escape - retreat? - from blogging. Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique. You can easily see why it's compelling, but you can just as easily see its essential creepiness. (At least it's up-front about its creepiness, using the term "follower" in place of the popular euphemism "friend.")

He then comes over a Bit Philosophical:

Yet if Nietzsche's typewriter pushed him further into the aphoristic mode and set the stage for some of his greatest works, might not Twitter be an empty cage awaiting its resident genius? It's worth remembering, in any case, one of Nietzsche's aphorisms: "Talking about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself." That's a tweet worth twittering.

It must be said that the term "microblog" somewhat overeggs the pudding here - "chatgroup with pictures" is more like it. One of these days it'll have threading, sorting and persistence and then it'll be email with pictures. One thing is different on Twitter though - talking about yourself will in no way obscure you, that digital footprint is with us forever and easily scrape-able, mine-able and collate-able.

Not so much ambient intimacy but prurient interest then. But then again, where is the (dis)ambiguity?

It must be quite a shock for Web 2.0 'tards to realise that not only is email not dying, its actually quite a lot more useful than a lot of the shiny new things they all hearts. These 3 comments today:

From Dave Winer:

We're adding a 7th way to get your fix of NewsJunk politics -- email. Yeah, it's old and boring, but lots of people still use it! ;->

Of course we'd like to use someone else's service to do the actual distribution, at least at first while we're bootstrapping. In the old days I'd go with Yahoo Groups and not worry about it, but I wonder if there isn't a better Web 2.0 solution out there for email distribution, or if Google Groups is more popular now?

From Stephanie Booth re her experience of getting her recent conference off the ground:

Back to basics: e-mail. E-mail, be it under the shape of a newsletter, a discussion list, or simple personal messages, has a huge advantage over other forms of online communication: you’re sure people know how to use it. It’s the basic, level 0 tool that anybody online has and understands.

When such people start to edge back to email, you can hear the sounds of the Web 2.0 foundations - or the shiny new comms part any way - starting to crack.....

Today was a frustrating day, with many small things going wrong and some major issues with doing a big piece of work in the urgent, necessary and totally dull category - online. This of course required frequent bouts of coffee and other distractions, of which one such had me reading this article on Techmeme about distraction and attention. Sez Biz Week:

Roughly once every three minutes, typical cubicle dwellers set aside whatever they're doing and start something else—anything else. It could be answering the phone, checking e-mail, responding to an instant message, clicking over to YouTube (GOOG), or posting something amusing on Facebook. Constant interruptions are the Achilles' heel of the information economy in the U.S. These distractions consume as much as 28% of the average U.S. worker's day, including recovery time, and sap productivity to the tune of $650 billion a year, according to Basex, a business research company in New York City.

Many years ago, we did some work on White Collar Productivity (it was all the rage in the 90's) and found - no surprise - the same stuff as written above, as I'm sure did people 10 years before us when PC's first invaded the workplace. And so on...... However, I do know that with the always-on nature of broadband it is far worse, what with IM, email, various macro and micro blogs etc being added to the mix. Ambient Intimacy rapidly degrades to Ambient Distraction

However, help is at hand apparently:

Soon, however, the same kinds of social networking software and communications technologies that make it deliciously easy to lose concentration may start steering us back to the tasks at hand. Scientists at U.S. research labs are developing tools to help people prioritize the flood of information they face and fend off irrelevant info-bytes.

Not only that, but the Big Boys are learning how to filter their own Kool Aid:

Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.

Not just them - 101 outfits are working on filtering - Dave Winer may love his River of News, but time starved people would rather have a thinner Stream of Relevance. I too have fulminated on the subject profoundly!

And so I thought, until today. Today I was doing something profoundly dull, the sort of Admin that everyone running a company needs to do, the sort you put off, the sort that mounts up after 2 days at a conference, the sort that is frustrating because you are the sap dealing with klutzy Web 1.0 style interfaces etc.

So today I was damn glad of my newstream....I was watching the comments come in on AlertThingy - which has a popup/fade display that I think of as "whispering" as there is no noise, no need to change screen to read them - plus my emails which have a similar popup/fadeout, and it was darn pleasant to have that momentary relief, that whisper of something interesting in an otherwise humdrum time. For example, I was able to keep up on the comments from Fuel 2008 and a few other bits and pieces as I worked, and it really wasn't intrusive given the tasks I was doing.

Ti be fair though, I have already set these things up to be quite filtered, having purged my various feeds of noisy or vexing people. However, from today whispering definitely interests me as an addendum to Filtering - as, it would seem it does to the BizWeek crew:

New modes of e-mail and phone messaging can wait patiently for an opportune time to interrupt. One program allows senders to "whisper" something urgent via a pop-up on a screen.

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Would I have got the work done faster without it - possibly, but I don't know - I suspect I would have taken more breaks, it would actually be interesting to study whether a person takes longer or the same to complete various types of tasks with such systems. My suspicion is that boring tasks would not be very heavily impacted.

By the way, there was quite a bit in the article about prioritising interruptions etc:

what about the dicier judgment calls? Picture the moment when the phone has fallen silent, your in-boxes are closed, and you're lost in a creative thought. Even the smartest digital assistant is likely to conclude it's safe to interrupt, but this is dangerous territory. "If you handle the exception cases wrong, your users will stop using your tool," says IBM team leader Jennifer Lai.

She found a solution in a time-honored social convention. If you pop into a co-worker's office when he's on the phone, he may try to wave you away but will listen if you whisper some important news.

When I am doing creative work, or knowledge intensive work like report writing, these whispers can be fatal, however. Then they are total ambient distractions and I need the power to turn them off.

Music, however, is another matter......... that is usable in any situation - maybe instead of whispering, messages should interject themselves as lyrics in the stuff you are listening to at the time

Nice post from Brad Feld on the trend to inflate the state of software readiness:

With the rise of the Web 2.0 apps, beta became the new black and every app launched with a beta label, regardless of its maturity (e.g. a whole bunch of them were alphas.).... ....During this experience, many sites simply crash based on the sudden load as they weren't built to handle the scale or peak load.

Boom - a new invention occurred. This one is called "private beta" and now means "we are early and buggy and can't handle your scale, but we want you to try us anyway when we are ready for you." I've grown to hate this as it's really an alpha. For whatever reason, companies are either afraid to call an alpha an alpha or they don't know what an alpha is. For a web app, operational scale is an important part of the shift from alpha to beta, although as we've found with apps like Twitter, users can be incredibly forgiving with scale problems (noisy - but forgiving).

So - why not get rid of the "private beta" label and call all of these things alphas. Alphas can be private - or even public

Quite so - while it is understandable to want to rush the New New Thing out there and get the writeups early, there is nothing more offputting for potential early adopters than a service that isn't. Having said that, here in Broadsight Towers we've debated the issue of "out early + users" vs "perfect but late" and have come up with the Twitter Principle - ie it is far better to solve your problems with 2m users and $15m in the bank than to be near-perfect with no users and running out of runway. The trick is to get the right balance of just what falls over and what works at that shift from alpha to beta, which - in theory - alpha testing should have outlined..

I quite like Kosso's concept with his service Phreadz, which has just gone from Private Alfalfa to Beetroot modes - clearly getting to the root of this issue.

From Techmeme, a Mr Rafe Needleman writes in to complain about the service on Twitter, and even more, wants to shut it down!:

Until the Twitter team can get the service working again for good, here's what they should strongly consider: Close the site. Take it offline. Put plywood over the doors and windows, as it were, with a big "We're remodeling!" sign on the front. Ask users if they want to be e-mailed when the site reopens for business and don't send that e-mail until the thing is fixed. Really fixed. Then have a grand reopening party.

Twitter is of course a free service, and there are alternatives that he is very welcome to try.

I find it another interesting example of how fuzzy-logic Freeconomic thinking has pervaded the whole Web 2.0 sphere. There is this weird idea in the air that if something is free to user it is free to produce, and thus must still reach all those other norms we take for granted in paid-for services, like reliability, privacy etc.

I believe the term used for this level of irrational economics is called Freetardism, and to Rafe we thus offer our solution - the FreeTardis

Update - I see Mr Stowe Boyd makes a similar point.....