• This site is a curation of observations about what I can best call the intersection of tech and life. Yes, give me a better term.
  
  Over and above that, it's a stream of stuff that I like.
  
  You can explore older stuff on this website, or read a random entry. I've been writing since 2004. You can also read it in your RSS reader.
  
  Comments or interesting links? Email me.
  
  


•   About me
•   I'm on Twitter
•   What I'm reading on the web
•   RSS Feed for this website




Get RahulGaitonde.org via email:  

Yesterday and today
The Web has been through two major evolutionary stages, and we are seeing some major activity in the third evolutionary stage.

The first was the “early web” – through most of the 90s and until the dot-com bust. People accessed content through directories and portals, and the content itself was static web pages.

The second was what was dubbed (retrospectively) “Web 1.0” [1] Search went mainstream, and we also began to see a lot of dynamic content (think classifieds on craigslist and books on Amazon).

The third stage is what we’ve called “Web 2.0” in its early forms and “social media” as focus has shifted from a loose set of open standards and technologies (RSS, OPML, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS, HTML5, Webkit, Flash, SyncML, OAuth) to the services that have been built with them.

Within this latest stage of evolution, developments in the last three years or so have been about putting together the guts of what Tim O’Reilly called the “Internet Operating System” to truly integrate the Internet into our daily lives. We’re reaching a stage of maturity with these internals (that is, growth/focus/interest is slowing), and are seeing an acceleration in the activity around applications and services built on top of them.

Tomorrow and beyond
But I think there’s still tremendous competition for some platforms that will form the guts of the Internet Operating System. Fred Wilson talks about aspiring to be a platform:

I think, that if you don’t want to be [an Internet] platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be.

The search system is pretty much Google and the location system is Google Maps. The iTunes Music Store and YouTube are the digital entertainment system, and Twitter makes an extremely strong case for the messaging system. But there’s still no dominant payment system for the web. There’s still no dominant scheduling/calendaring system yet, no dominant remote storage system and most critically, no identity system. And this is nowhere close to being a complete list.

As a parent, can you subscribe to your child’s school’s football coaching team calendar with the playground location embedded, sign up for it by paying the fees through your mobile phone and have your car’s GPS give you turn-by-turn directions to the ground on practice days following the least-congested route based on real-time crowdsourced information? Not yet.

Until these systems are in place, there is an upper limit on what we can make applications do, how deeply we can integrate these applications into our physical world. The “next Google/Twitter/Facebook” is going to be a company that creates a credible missing platform.

The top-level applications that build upon existing platforms will be either be single-purpose applications (Evernote is one example) or “glue” companies, those that tie platforms together. Don’t expect to see a billion-dollar company out of them in their current form. [2]

[1] The analogy with the World Wars is hard to miss. Until WW2, the First World War was known just as the Great War. Until sometime in 2005, “Web 1.0″ was just the Web.

[2] That’s not to say that they’re not worth investing in. I’m saying that next-generation services can only become mainstream once the plumbing is in place – and to take advantage of new platforms, these top-level applications will need to evolve significantly.

Related stuff around the web you ought to read:

Techcrunch announced PubSubHubbub, a protocol to speed up delivery of RSS and Atom feeds (5 August 2009)

Dare Obasanjo on Google’s possible stab at an identity solution, the WebFinger protocol (15 August 2009)

Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson was interviewed by John Battelle as part of the Conversational Marketing Summit. Some bits from Fred truly stood out, mostly about the state of social media. Here they are, grouped by topic (so they’re not necessarily in the order they appear in the interview) [1]

On the disruption caused by the Internet:
The Internet is… one of these… once every hundred years kinds of things that it goes all the way through pretty much all industries. Certainly, the Internet is going to do this to every industry that is end-to-end digital. The media industry I think was the first because it is probably the most end-to-end digital, but there are many more industries.

[How Fred would fix the NY Times] I would get rid of the paper. I would shut down the paper… I would stop covering stuff that is covered better elsewhere. I’d stop covering business, The [Wall Street] Journal does it better. I would stop covering sports, The [Washington] Post does it better, and I would focus on what they do uniquely well, their opinion, their national political news, their world political news.

GM’s going bankrupt and there’s all this innovation going on in the technology space at the same time. And you just think about that for a second. What we’re witnessing is sort of the – or The [New York] Times is another good example, we’re witnessing sort of the dwindling of the industrial era and the rise of the information era.

On platforms on the Internet:
Tim O’Reilly has this thing about the internet-operating system. And if you look at what the internet-operating system is, it’s the internet and a bunch of functions that come with it. Your search function is Google and your purchase function is Amazon and your list-something-for-sale function is craigslist or eBay and you could go on and on and on. And I think Twitter has the opportunity to be the function, which is tell the world what you’re thinking, right? If you have something that you just want to say now, you do that by posting it to Twitter and then the internet takes it from there. So, it’s a short message input function.

I think of, sort of the four big channels in social media as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and blog comments.

… in order to continue to be a piece of the internet-operating system, you need to be an independent company because if you sell delicious or you sell Flickr or you sell whatever else it may be, it gets sucked into something that’s not part of the internet-operating system.

Twitter and Facebook are growing at like 40 percent month over month, the number of incoming visits. And those visits are coming from what I called passed links – links that are passed from me to you. And of course, with the re-tweet function in Twitter in particular, that can get amplified very, very quickly. And so I think that, you know, email is another form of passed link. It’s the original form of passed link, but emails can get passed around virally but most emails don’t have that kind of amplification factor that social media does.

AOL, Yahoo and MySpace are all very good examples of it, that don’t have deep technology innovation in their DNA. And, you know, it seems to me that that is an absolute requirement if you want to be a platform and I think, that if you don’t want to be a platform, then I don’t know what you should be aspiring to be. I mean, I don’t know that there is anything else that you would want to be [2].

On the social graph:
… the problem that Facebook has and they know it, is that there are a lot of people out there who are not friends, who are really powerful social recommenders and you’re not just going to have them in your social graph in the original instantiation of the way Facebook was setup… I think, blogging to me is the proper model and I think that the people who started Twitter launched Twitter with the blogging model, which is I can follow you and you don’t have to read me. And we don’t have to be friends, but you can be influential…

[1] In fact, I highly recommend watching the full video/reading the transcript.

[2] Fred also says that he doesn’t think “there is going to be one magic bullet that solves the problem in terms of monetizing social media” unlike the banner ads model of the early days and the PPC model of the search-dominated era.

The New York Times is considering charging for content delivered via the iPhone and other mobile platforms. According to the head of NYT’s digital operations,

“For publishers to offer their content for free in the mobile platform forever without getting paid very much money, I don’t think it’s going to be tenable”

This is a bad idea. It’s the tragic love child of Mr. Head-in-the-sand and Ms. Bite-the-hand-that-feeds.

To begin with, this idea is remarkably short-sighted. It seeks to squeeze the maximum juice from the lowest-hanging fruit without a thought to what this will do to the tree itself.

Also, it’s contemptuous of an crucial audience: mobile-based readers will be a larger audience than desktop-based ones, are also likely to access the site throughout the day, as opposed to only in the morning and at lunchtime, and because they will likely view a mobile-optimized site, will require less bandwidth per person than “normal” users will.

Then, it’s stupid: the NYT offers no reason for charging mobile-based readers of the NYT other than that they are, well, mobile. It is the same as the inexplicable extra charge levied by Indian Railways for bookings made over the Internet. The Indian Railways gets away with it because it is a Government monopoly. The NYT will not be that lucky.

Finally, it’s also lazy. Right now, the “mobile edition” of the NYT is no more than a trimmed-down version of the main NYT website. No more. If it went truly mobile – breaking news pushed to subscribers’ smartphones, live scores, full page customization – it will be worth charging for. It can also monetize the mobile website through display advertising, in the same manner it monetizes the main website.

The NYT has a wonderful opportunity to engage a massive audience with its high-quality content, but it doesn’t seem to have the people in place than can seize it.

Update 10th July 2009: The NYT digs its head further into the sand, considers $5/month subscription for online access. That might be fine by Americans, but it’s Rs. 250 for me. Too much.

Small and medium businesses can’t afford splashy advertising campaigns on TV and billboards that large corporations can, so their marketing strategies need to be smarter.

The most popular of the smart marketing strategies today is about building customer “stickiness”. Making your customer return to you for repeated service. Staying engaged with him/her. Online, you’d do this by creating, say, a Twitter account with updates about new deals,coupons and discounts [1]. Or staying in touch through a company blog. Or having your customers sign up for a regular newsletter (so old school). Or building an iPhone application (so hot!)

Stickiness is often held up as the best way to market a small business. But the basic assumption of stickiness is that you want your customers to return repeatedly. What if your business just isn’t like that? What if you’re a user-car evaluation service? Or an apartment broker? Regardless of how much they love you or your service, stickiness is no use with them.

Your marketing strategy then needs to focus on referability: getting existing customers refer you to other potential customers. Offline, you could offer your customer, as part of the deal close, a choice of one piece of merchandise: a t-shirt, a key-chain, a cap, a set of stickers, whatever. Online, you could build a Facebook application that your customers could display on their page. For the apartment broker business, the application could have you enter your location, size of apartment, approximate rent and display snaps of sample apartments, with directions to call you. You get the idea. If your customer is satisfied, he/she will be glad to help you with this.

Your business needs to choose between stickiness and referability. And it’s not an either/or choice. Sticky customers are also likely to refer you to their friends. Also, customers that care enough to refer you will come back to you. But the focus of your marketing strategy must be one or the other.

 

[1] Dell is doing this pretty well. It’s not a small business, but the principle remains the same.

Is [old giant] losing out to [hot upstart] over [new trend]?

Did Microsoft miss out on the big search opportunity that Google pounced on? Is Google losing the real-time communication game to Twitter?

Microsoft’s original mission was “a computer on every desk and in every home” [1]. Even with their almost total dominance of the PC industry, that mission remains far from accomplished.

Google’s mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. That’s a mouthful. But it’s also nowhere near completion.

Both companies – one over 3 decades old, the other over a decade old – have still only plucked the low-hanging fruit. Urban homes and corporations have computers, but there are still billions of potential Microsoft consumers – who might be well served with a mobile “computer”, for instance. For Google, even with its mind-boggling data center infrastructure and web-crawling, the task is just begun. Books. Space. History. Energy and resource consumption. And more. And that’s just the “organize” bit. Converting all that data to information so that it is “accessible and useful” is another thing altogether.

Companies like these are larger than the “next big thing”. Their own “thing” is so incredibly significant, so humbling. That’s why it’s unfortunate when such an organization changes its very mission to something that can mean absolutely anything (and therefore also nothing): Microsoft’s mission is now “to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential” [2].

Google isn’t about to kill Microsoft. Not if Microsoft directs all its resources towards what it set out to do. Likewise for Google; Twitter isn’t out to organize everything known to man. So ignore those predictions of doom.

 

 

[1] According to Wikipedia the exact words were “to get a workstation running our software onto every desk and eventually in every home”

[2] Although I didn’t find any evidence to suggest Microsoft changed its mission in response to any other company or threat

In 2003, John Battelle opined that Google was essentially a “database of intentions“.

The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. … a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends… this artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture.

That phrase made it into his book “The Search” and quickly became a popular way to demonstrate how enormously important and powerful Google might eventually become.

This last Saturday, the New York Times ran a piece on a possible new monetization idea that Twitter was considering: to “offer shopping advice and easy purchasing”. People already solicit their Twitter followers’ opinions, and it is also already possible to identify real-time trends related to a particular product, company or event. Put those together, and you get an extremely powerful (and, the founder hope, lucrative) tool.

Viewing this piece of news in the context of “database of intentions” you can see how the web has evolved since Battelle propounded that idea:

One, Twittter is now a database of actions, of people announcing by-the-second what they have tried, used, bought, rejected, liked and disliked. I see an attractive opportunity for an analytics firm to help companies make sense of what people are saying about them, what events caused this conversation, and the results of a company’s actions/response on the conversation and subsequent sales/signups.

Two, it is still a database of intentions, but at dizzying, real-time speeds. From the New York Times article:

“Commerce-based search businesses monetize extremely well, and if someone says, ‘What treadmill should I buy?’ you as the treadmill company want to be there,”

While it’s certain that companies can use these intentions to snap up customers before competitors, it’s unclear as yet how companies will be able to scale and respond if and when Twitter achieves Google’s adoptions levels. There is definitely an opportunity for another business here.