Tag Archives: Web 2.0

Internet Tech Web

Opera Unite – another step in the right direction?

June 16, 2009 – 10:25 am

operatuniteI’ve harped on many times about how I think centrally controlled services like Facebook are the antithesis of what the Internet was supposed to be about – a distributed, decentralised place with authority controlled at the leaves by those with most interest in maintaining it, rather than some corporate hub holding all the cards.

Well, it seems like a small bunch of companies are starting to latch on to this idea too, a welcome respite from the huge number of ventures that just want to be the new singular nexus of your internet life. Google Wave certainly ‘gets it’, if the reality reflects the stated vision where the open-source software can be run anywhere, not just on Google’s servers. And Opera Unite is making the right kind of noises for me too, even if right now the service is embryonic.

In essence, it’s a semantically richer, more secure version of BitTorrent – the ability to share files, photos and media within interfaces dedicated to that purpose, serve web pages, and chat, but by making direct connections with your peers rather than going through a centralised hosting service. Opera Unite provides the software to perform the hosting from your own devices, and provides the discovery and network trust systems to allow people to hook up.

There are lots of issues with this approach of course – such as whether you trust the hosting software not to punch holes in your local security, whether you really want to have the bandwidth issues of self-hosting, what happens when your machine is off, etc. Right now, I don’t think it’s that workable as a replacement for centralised systems, but that’s not the point – the point is that the principle of entrusting all your unencrypted data to a single online entity is eventually not going to be good enough anymore, and we need to be developing alternative approaches. If the future is truly in the cloud, we need far more than what the cloud offers right now – which is to say services that while user-friendly, require you to give up far more control over your data than is feasible for anything remotely important. Sure, you’re happy to put photos on Facebook, and Twitter about all those things that you don’t mind the world knowing, but that’s a very specific, non-critical subset of the data we all increasingly need to hold. Would you be happy to scan your bank statements and put them on Facebook, even if you set them to private? Of course not – but if the cloud is to realise its potential, these are the kinds of harder applications we need to try to address.

I’m not saying Opera Unite addresses that – not even close. But the fact that people are exploring alternative approaches to the 100% centralised model is a positive sign to me. We need to start tackling how we use entirely public transport & repository systems (ie the cloud) to securely store and exchange important and sensitive data, and I say that’s impossible to address with an entirely centralisd model, because a centralised model focusses control in too few hands. Encryption gives us the ability to store and transport secure information in plain sight, but it’s traditionally a very tricky thing to make easy to use for the general public, particularly when multiple parties and ‘controlled’ sharing is required. Thus, one approach is to focus on securing the transport instead (which is easier, and why SSL is ubiquitous) and lock down access to the leaves more tightly. Opera Unite is an experiment in the leaf model and may well inform the process, leading to more innovation in this area down the road.

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Internet Web

Who cares about #fixreplies?

May 13, 2009 – 5:08 pm

So, the intertubes are awash today with people venting their spleens about Twitter’s decision to stop sending replies by people you do follow, but to people you don’t follow, to your main Twitter feed. Previously you had the option either way, and now some people are getting their panties in a bunch about it.

There are two things to say about this issue:

  1. Personally, I don’t want to see all the random replies to other people I don’t follow. I already deliberately only follow a small number of people, beacuse frankly I don’t have time to sift through a huge list of tweets every day. I have absolutely no idea how anyone copes with following more than about 10 people who tweet regularly, and still get something done in the day, nevermind seeing all the secondary replies. Am I just inefficient at processing large numbers of posts, or do I just have a staggeringly lower level of patience than the average Twitter user? The way I have things right now, I read every one of the posts from people I follow, because I consider them interesting, and that takes little time. I couldn’t do that if I was following 100 people and their replies to other contacts too, so I’d either have to lie (ie stick to etiquette and follow them, but then filter out most of what they say on the client), or just spend all day reading Twitter. So personally, this seems a sensible choice – you can always use the Twitter web if you really have nothing better to do but surf Twitter, or browse your friends ‘following’ list if you’re desperate to mine the system for new contacts.
  2. Twitter is free. If you paid nothing for a service, you are entitled to offer your constructive feedback which the providers may choose to listen to, but you are not entitled to have a major tantrum about it. As Matt Asay suggests, if you care about the service that much, then you should probably be paying for it – and God knows, Twitter needs a business model other than the typical Web 2.0 “Attract viewers …….  profit!” fantasy right now. On the whole, the Internet needs a slap to wake up its users from the bloated sense of entitlement they’ve developed over the years, fueled by a huge number of startups that delude people into thinking they can expect everything for nothing. 100% free models don’t work (yes, I know, I’m an open source advocate, but that doesn’t mean I believe that you can give everything away) – they are a complimentary aspect, or a stop-gap until you can develop a real model or pursuade some sucker to acquire you before the hype train grinds to a halt. Eventually, these cycles of pretending that you can get premium service for free will end, and everyone will have to face up to the reality that ‘freeloaders’ have a place (building momentum, awareness etc), but ultimately they’re at the bottom of the food chain. Plankton are vital to the oceanic ecosystem, but no-one asks them for their opinion. ;)
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Business Internet

GeoCities demise should be a warning

April 29, 2009 – 4:56 pm

A few days ago, Yahoo! announced that they would be shuttering the venerable GeoCities this year. “So what?” you might well ask – GeoCities is after all an ageing service from a bygone era, and apart from some nostalgia and perhaps some data that some people might have had parked there for a while, most people won’t really notice it’s passing.

But nevertheless, it’s important, and people who get carried away with putting a dollar value on the current favourite websites of the day (e.g. Facebook) should take careful note. GeoCities was huge, really a sensation at the time, before many of the people raving over Facebook now were online, or perhaps even born (scary). It was easily as big culturally as Facebook at the time, which is why Yahoo bought it for almost $3 billion. I bet they regret that, because what happened was exactly what will continue to happen in this sort of space – things changed. New technology comes along, new techniques, new fashions, and the old sites are abandoned like burning ships incredibly quickly, until as happened this week (perhaps a little overdue in fact), the charred, lonely hulk sinks beneath the waves.

The issue is that these sites are not really ‘sticky’ on an individual basis. There’s really very little investment needed to use them, so getting up and moving somewhere else really isn’t much of an issue. Sure, with social networks the main ‘index of stickyness’ is your friends list, so people tend to stick where their friends are, but really, I don’t see this being a major barrier in practice, because by nature most of the stuff on there is non-critical and for fun, and these things are often follow generational ‘clusters’ – the students in the 90s were all on GeoCities, now they’re all on Facebook. Where will the next set be? I wouldn’t for a second assume they’d stay in the same place; they’ll want sites for their own generation, not the last one.

The eventual destiny of GeoCities should be a significant warning to anyone thinking of paying top-dollar for web companies that have no business model beyond casual eyeballs, and rely on fashion to drive that attention. Fashion changes, and you really don’t want to be stuck with $3bn worth of brown corduroy flares (assuming that they’re not fashionable right now – I can’t keep up! ;) )

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OGRE Web

Tweeting about Ogre dev

January 22, 2009 – 4:10 pm

I’m a bit of a grump when it comes to a lot of the Web 2.0 startups of recent years. I still dislike Facebook – originally it was just an in-principle reaction based on their rather irritating child-CEO and his ability to attract vast amounts of investment based on a business plan made entirely of arm-waving and wet tissue paper, but now having used it for a while, I dislike it on its own merits. Even with my relatively small friends list it seems dedicated to the task of swamping me with as much useless information, stupid applications, and other such nonsense as it possibly can. Occasionally there will be a nugget of something in there, but it’s drowned in so much crap it’s hardly worth the effort to filter it. Sure, it allows me to keep up with the activities of ‘friends’, but in a much more shallow and sterile way than actually meeting them or talking on the phone/skype/in-game chat. Anyone who thinks Facebook is a good way to develop actual friendships is deluded. As a supplement for real-world or voice meetings (e.g. arranging get-togethers, sharing photos etc), I can see the utility, but I attest that it’s really not even the most efficient way to do that, what with all the junk on there. So generally, pass.

LinkedIn I like, because it sticks to the point. Every business person needs their Rolodex, and that’s what LinkedIn is – a business tool. It doesn’t claim to be central to your life, or that you can build / sustain real friendships there or other such twaddle. The focussed nature of it means there’s less noise, so it’s easier and quicker to get what you need. Contacts there are not personal, they’re a reference for it you’re looking for work, a contractor, a partner etc – which is appropriate for the medium in a way that personal relationships are not. I don’t feel the need to constantly update it or prod my contacts, or keep track of all their statuses; it just does what I need and gets out of the way.

I’ve avoided Twitter because again, it just looked like a way to pour time down the toilet. It seemed like blogging without the in-built filter that says ‘is this worth blogging about’?. Besides, I already actively participate in forums, mailing lists, blogs etc – I really didn’t feel I needed yet another dimension to have online discussions in. And I don’t really want to tell the entire world what I’m doing at any one time – I strain out the small number of actually interesting things already and post them up on this blog, and the rest of the minutae rapidly decreases in value the more degrees of separation away from me you get; so in fact real-world communication works far better as a filtering mechanism for that. Clay Shirky described why information filters in the real world have historically done a much better job with these kinds of things.

However, I decided to open a Twitter account anyway, but only for a very narrow subset of ‘what I’m doing’ – that is, what I’m currently doing in core Ogre. Obviously I blog about that sometimes, and I post in the forum for things that people need to know about, and keep the roadmap on the wiki up to date, but sometimes there are low-level things that don’t warrant that, but people are still interested in. I used to use IRC for this, but over the years drifted away from it, as it was too time consuming to loiter in channels for extended periods looking for topics in real-time, and people just bombarded me with questions all the time anyway so it was a little too much like hard work. So, for things that don’t warrant a blog or forum posting, I’m going to try to keep Twitter informed. There’s also a widget on the right there.

The focus will be kept deliberately very tight – so nothing about my other work commitments, personal life etc are going on there. If any of those things merit comment, they’ll get a more considered entry in my blog. Consider this a sort of ‘pre commit log’ of sorts! If I continue with it, anyway…

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OGRE Uncategorized Web

LinkedIn OGRE Group

July 10, 2008 – 3:17 pm

I consider LinkedIn to be one of the few genuinely useful things to come out of the whole Web 2.0 gold rush, since it’s a business-oriented, generally ‘fluffless’ site (if I see one more virtual gift or stupid time-wasting Facebook application, I’ll lose all will to live) – as such I actually do use it fairly regularly. I finally got around to creating an OGRE Group – feel free to join if you’re a professional OGRE user / contributor. I use LinkedIn to remind me who I can refer OGRE-related jobs to, so it might be worth your while :)

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