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Apple released Safari 3.1 today, and has claimed that it is “the world’s fastest browser”.

“Safari loads web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Safari also runs JavaScript up to six times faster than other browsers…”

Having used  it since it was first released last year on Windows, I think this is more than just twisted statistics. Forget those measurements (down to decimal points, for god’s sake), but Safari definitely feels faster than either Firefox or Opera. Safari’s UI needs a post to itself, but it puts both IE and Firefox to shame.

Apple could put more muscle behind promoting Safari on Windows (for reasons I outlined last June), but I don’t see it giving either Firefox or IE a serious run for their money. My prediction is that Safari’ll be locked in an inconsequential battle for third place with Opera (also a fast, snappy alternative).

IE will always be number 1 because it’s pre-installed with Windows (and is un-installable). The vast majority of the installed base won’t switch to anything else (both home and business users). IE’s good enough. ‘Nuff said.

Firefox is the poster boy of the power-user crowd because it’s so customizable. But there’s an upper cap to the market share it can gain (see IE above).

Safari’s USP is speed and simplicity. Speed isn’t enough for the IE crowd to switch. And Safari’s simplicity (which implies non-extensibility) is a deal-killer for the Firefox crowd. Opera faces the exact same problems.

Between these massive masses of users, both of whom have diametrically opposite views on what a browser should be, are the miniscule 4-5% who use either of Safari or Opera, regardless of how good/fast/simple/snappy they are. Pity.

Footnote: Hark back to my June 2007 article about why Apple wants Safari on Windows – it’s got to do with the iPhone. Opera, with its large mobile push, probably has the same strategy too.

So I moved from Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird this weekend. Though I’d been looking for an Outlook replacement for a while, the Nokia Synchronizer app (which I use heavily) worked only with Outlook, so that kept me from moving.

Things came to a head Saturday morning, though, when Outlook 2007 took 15 minutes to download 45 pure-text messages, keeping my (admittedly puny 4200rpm) hard drive spinning all the while. Yes, I auto-archive to a separate archive PST every month and de-fragment my hard drive every couple of months, but performance has been terrible from day one. This could not go on.

Moving to Thunderbird is not an easy task. You need to export all your PST to Outlook Express (which takes forever) and then import all of that into Thunderbird (which doesn’t take all that long). I’m pleased with the results, though.

What’s improved?
* Performance has been very good indeed (and we’re talking well over 10000 emails, most of which are in one massive “Archive” folder).
* Spam filtering is much, much better (Outlook had too many false positives and *yet* spam occasionally landed up in my inbox).
* Less UI clutter. Thunderbird’s interface is far more customizable than Outlook’s. The new Ribbon UI in Office 12 is very useful on Word, PowerPoint and Excel, but is just clutter on Outlook. I longed for the Outlook 2003 look all the time – far less clunky.
* Extensibility. I added the GmailUI, Lightning, Nokia Synchronizer and Duplicate Contact Manager extensions immediately.

What have I had to give up?
* Interoperability with Nokia’s PC Suite! That was the *only* reason I stuck with Outlook for so long. Thunderbird’s Nokia Synchronizer can only sync contacts. I need ToDo lists, Calendar events and Notes.
* The Today, Yesterday, Last Week list views. They were incredibly useful, and I hope Thunderbird 3 incorporates that.
* Flagging messages as tasks.
* The ToDo pane, which listed upcoming calendar events and ToDo tasks.

Will post updates in the weeks to come whether the move’s been successful.

Just finished watching an episode of the GigaOM show with Dan’l Lewin.

When OM asked Dan’l why Vista was “everybody’s favorite whipping boy” and “what happened”, Lewin’s reply was that “the blogophere happened”.

Which is probably hitting the nail on the head. In 2007, everyone who had an issue with just about anything with Vista could blog about it – and the blogosphere would take it up and amplify it, via Digg or del.icio.us, among others. As is human nature, far fewer people blogged about things that they had liked about Vista. As a result, the perception of Vista quickly became that of a buggy, bloated animal.

Things were very very different back in 2001 when XP was released. There were far fewer blogs and viewers. Technology websites (the only ones who did any sort of rational evaluation of Vista) got far more readers as a percentage of Internet content than in 2007.

Similarly, Vista’s development was also very public. So when features that were originally slated to ship with Vista (WinFS, for one) were subsequently dropped, there was tremendous coverage and criticism from the blogosphere. Contrast that with the days of Windows 2000 (and XP), when very few ordinary users knew (or cared) about the development of the operating system. It’s insights like these that periodically wake you up to the power of the democratic web.

I’m also amazed at how good Apple is at keeping its development efforts secret. At the same time, Apple’s products don’t have to have interoperability with the sheer number of devices and software that Windows does.

One of those negatives of popularity, I suppose.

In my previous post, I looked at how a social network “picks up” an application and “spreads” it to reach the audience that would be interested in using it. And I said that was because social networks make it easy to propagate information, but primarily because people with similar interests have numerous ways of “hooking up” – either via communities or interacting on these in-network applications.

That last point makes social networks a lot of like the communities of old – BBNs, chat rooms, IRC, forums. But since they’re the *new* craze, well, they’ve got to be different somehow. How?

One, profiles. Even as a new member of a group, find out a lot about the people you’re interacting with by looking at their profile pages – where they’re from, who they know, what they do, how they look like, what they like, what they’re up to lately, and a dozen other things. Because of this, interactions on social networks become richer sooner.

Two, you can, with a single profile page, be a member of multiple communities/groups/hangout spots. You don’t have to replicate your profile. With Facebook’s “mini-feed” (a summary of what your friends have been up to recently on FB), you can discover people who share several interests/lifestyle attributes with you. Also, because you *can’t* make different profiles for different communities, you’re the ‘real you’ throughout. Interactions are therefore more genuine, more real, and perhaps more trustworthy.

Three, marketers can build up impressively detailed profiles of users individually (via their communities and behavior), and communities themselves (via profiles of their users in aggregate). That enables far better, more granular targeting of ads than would be possible on forums, benefiting both users and advertisers.

Four, applications! Interactions between members are no longer limited to text-based discussions about action that happens elsewhere. Forum-like conversation and the actual application exist side-by-side.

Five (and this is mostly because of FB), communities are no longer silos but are deeply influenced by (and in turn influence) the rest of the Internet. For instance, the Digg.com application shows your friends your five most recently Dugg stories. Think of the added (and focused) traffic to Facebook from Digg and then from Facebook to Digg.

Social networks need to open their walled gardens to the rest of the Internet, instead of attempting to monetize only interactions within. As we’ve seen above, those very interactions will become richer as data flows into the network from outside (of course, at the cost of profile data flowing outwards in the short term). I think a network’s success will now depend on how much it is willing to open itself up.

Seth Godin quotes Gavin Potter about the 21st century being about ’sorting out demand’. “When your messages reach the right people at the right time in the right way, magic happens”, Seth says.

Social networks are changing that. In fact, Facebook and its ilk are obviating the very need for traditional STP (segmentation, targeting, positioning).

Why? Because one, Facebook has made it easy for developers to create applications that run inside of the social network itself. Think the ever-popular Scrabulous. Two, there is a massive swarm of people on Facebook that represent every possible demographic, spanning all sorts of likes, dislikes and tastes. Last, the viral nature of communication makes it easy for information to spread through the network.

This means that marketers can now stop thinking of how to segment and reach out to their audience. Once an application’s been created, simply “drop” it into the network; the swarm will pick it up. The network will figure out the target segment by itself. It’ll definitely reach the segment the marketer had in mind; chances are it’ll also reach several other audiences that the marketer didn’t anticipate.

The flip side is, of course, the utter lack of control. Apart from the application, both positive and negative feedback could spread alarmingly fast too. The latter could prove fatal in the early stages of distribution.

In a sense, this is similar to viral marketing campaigns carried out over email (Yahoo!’s and Hotmail’s campaigns about their own service by tagging on a small line at the end of every message) and other channels. However, back in those days, all a marketer could do was spread a message to “pull” the audience to the advertised service. Today it is the application/service itself that’s being spread.

There’s no Pull, no Push, only Release into the Wild.